Slowing down to notice the prairies

Saskatchewan is the prairies. Its the province about which many form their opinions from the drive across it on the Trans Canada Highway. Its flat. Its boring. Its rural. Its the subject of a lot of Canadian jokes: “In Saskatchewan, the police don't need to work too hard or move too fast... they can see the bad guy running away for days.” It seems the only two things going for Saskatchewan in most Canadians' minds is its breadbasket status and the Roughriders.

Indeed, if you only stay on the main highway and drive quickly through it, Saskatchewan's reputation seems justified. But I have discovered that if you get off that main highway, slow down and notice some of the subtler corners, Saskatchewan is a lot more than the cliché allows for. It doesn't smack you in the face with the kind of magnificence that the western mountains do, but it does have its own quiet beauty.

Prairie people can be heard saying that, and up until this trip I really could only take their word for it. In the fields, if you care to look, you'll see rusty old farm machinery, apparently abandoned until you see another one just like it further up the road being driven and used by the weathered farmer behind the wheel. There are wilting stone and wooden houses, remnants of the pioneers, slowly making their way back to the soil but in the meantime dotting the landscape. The sky is enormous and extends out farther than you thought you were able to see; blue dotted with better-than-the Simpsons puffy white clouds, or in stormier skies all shades of blue-grey-purple-and-white, layered and thick with rain.

My brother, Jacob, joined me for this part of the journey, and as we left Calgary heading east, the landscape quickly fell into its prairie form. I am very familiar with the stretch of highway between Calgary and Medicine Hat as I had lived there, close to the Saskatchewan border, many years ago. The countryside dries out, forms “badlands” of soil and clay where you don't have to dig very deep to find dinosaur bones and ocean fossils.

The prairies used to be an enormous inland ocean in the time before the dinosaurs. When the ocean receded, the lush land was the perfect home to the sauruses, and Drumheller, in eastern Alberta, is home to the Royal Tyrell Museum, a fascinating look at the dinos. Jacob and I debated stopping in there, as it had been many years since we'd last visited, but decided instead to carry on to Saskatchewan.

We stayed on the Trans Canada all the way to Regina. The drive took up two long, hot days behind the wheel where the prairie stretched on and on in all directions. In Regina I was able to visit a little piece of personal history as we found our way to the little house my Dutch grandparents owned after immigrating from Holland in the 1950s. My opa and my father built a brick facade on the front of the house which is still there today and a lovely example of Dutch brickwork. I know I am a bit biased, but I think it is the prettiest house on the street.

After Regina, Jacob and I planned to get off the main highway and see something new and different in Saskatchewan. Just outside the city, we took a wrong turn down a very small back road, that made its way through fields unlike those bordering the busier route. The wrong turn, we found on a map, ended up meeting up with the road we wanted a bit further north anyway, so we stayed on it to enjoy the scenery. It turned out to be one of the most pleasant drives I've taken yet. The fields were a glorious combination of green, yellow and purple (yes, Susan, you called the colours!) They weren't totally flat, but actually quite rolling. There was the almost-always present prairie wind, which usually turns the Jamboree into a sail and challenges my abilities to follow a straight line on the road, but which also does something incredible with the wheat and grass fields. The tall grass literally carpets the land, and the wind is a hand that plays with it like when you brush over a shag carpet to change its texture and colour. But this hand ripples over the grass in waves, so that if you watch long enough, you begin to feel like mother nature is putting on a little dance just for you.

We found our way to the Qu'Appelle valley where we've camped four nights in a spot that is strikingly different from the flat and boring Saskatchewan of popular myth. The land ridges and leads down to a valley where two lakes, Echo and Pasqua, live, surrounded by the trees that are also so sorely missed on the bald prairie most people dismiss from the Trans Canada. Fort Qu'Appelle is one of the small prairie towns with a wide, straight main street lined with cute little buildings and populated by an interesting and friendly set of characters. And as we carry on tomorrow to Saskatoon, backtracking a little bit, I'll look forward to noticing the little beauties to discover along the way.