Flatlands
written by: JPK
I met a guy from Moosejaw who told me that he could get into his truck when the sun was rising on a summer morning and drive until it got dark without ever going up a hill.
“I had a truck like that once,” I told him.
He didn’t laugh. Saskatchewan folk are very literal, he was just telling the truth. The land is endless. It keeps going until you run out of gas then carries on without you, never rising, never falling. Flat, featureless green in the summer, brown in the fall, white in the winter. People say that there’s nothing to see here but they’re wrong. You can see everything here because there’s nothing to get in the way.
The horizon’s not as far as you think. I’m a bit under six feet tall. If I look out over flat ground I can see about three miles before the earth meets the sky. But if I look up I can see forever.
They call the weather ‘She’ in these parts. She’s a fickle mistress, right enough. She can burn you up on a May morning and cover the yard in snow come the afternoon. She sets the clouds chasing above you in the evening time then clears them back at night so that the lights can dance in the northern sky. She can be beautiful and cruel, bitter and gentle all in the same day.
It gets hot here when summer comes. The crops grow up so that the horizon draws in on you. Shawondasee, the south wind, stirs the air with warmth from Texas and the Gulf. The Cree say that Trickster once told him stories about a tall, slender maiden dressed all in green. Trickster spoke so beautifully that Shawondasee fell in love with the maiden without ever seeing her. Every year he comes back to search amongst the long grasses on the prairie. The grasses chatter and gossip amongst themselves as he passes by and he makes the skies weep because he is lonely for something that he can never find.
And the skies do weep. When the moisture from a hundred million acres of grass lands and sixty million more of rivers and lakes rises up into the clouds, when the wind moves them round and pushes them together into thunderheads that soak up the heat from above and below and turn it into electricity.
The clouds paint the sky black, they shut out the sun and turn the day into a starless, moonless night. Once everything is dark and the birds stop singing and the air gets so thick that you can’t suck it into your lungs, then the show starts. The lightning breaks the sky apart, the thunder shakes the ground. If the rain is falling straight down you can stay and watch the storm, but if it starts to blow crosswise then it’s time to get below. When the wind whips up like that you can see spirals of water and corn and dust whipping upwards towards the clouds and you know the twister’s on its way. We get a dozen every year without fail, more these last few. If it’s a little one we close the cellar door and come up when it’s gone to fix the shingles and put the fences back up. If it’s a big one we might not come back up at all, and if we do then we just hope and pray that the house will still be standing and that there will be enough left of the crops to be worth the harvest.
The storm season drops off by September and Shawondasee goes home disappointed. Harvest time sees the air cooler and the skies clearer. Folk work hard until the gathering is done, then they sit out on the stoop with warm shirts and cold beers and boast or complain about how good or bad the prices were this year. They take their flat beds into town and load them up until the springs creak with supplies for the winter because there’s no guarantee of going anywhere before April.
When October comes around she brings the first snows with her. The ploughs go on standby to keep the main grid clear. By the middle of November they’re not on standby any more, they’re working flat out to build canyons in the snow where the roads are supposed to be. The horizon comes in real close when you’re sat in a truck with ice white walls on either side.
But if you stand up on top you can’t tell the difference between the land and the sky until the snow stops and the freeze starts. When the sky clears and the stars come out and the Aurora kicks off in the north and throws its colours down onto the hard white ground there’s no other place on Earth that you want to be.
“Why do you come here?” The guy from MooseJaw asked me. “Ain’t nothing to see.”
Well, I guess I come here for the weather.
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