Yet when we hit the road the following summer on another of my grassland research tours, guess where we ended up? It seemed that all roads led to Eastend. When we noticed a tidy white bungalow for sale on Tamarack Street, a block north of the Stegner House—and when we bought it—we knew that we were hooked. This homely little town in its nest of wild hills had charmed us into putting down tentative roots. And all around, the bright wind whispered through the grass, speaking to us of reasons we didn’t yet understand.
{three} Digging In
This was, after all, the kind of landscape that demanded one’s attention.
BETH LADOW, The Medicine Line, 2001
By the time the house deal had gone through, it was September, and another prairie winter was drawing near. You could hear it in the metallic rattle of the cottonwoods across the alley from our new house; you could see it in the fiery red of the chokecherry bushes along the creek.
Our new house. All that fall and winter, whenever we had a free weekend, we filled our van to the gunnels with household paraphernalia, loaded up the dogs and headed for what had suddenly become our second home. In choosing a route for our travels, we were as unvarying as pilgrims. After an hour or so in the fast lane on the highway to Calgary, we left the mainstream at Rosetown to head south into a big silent country under a high blue sky. Merely to think about it now, sitting at my desk, makes my chest expand with breath, as if the only response to that light and space were to open into it.
From that moment on, the journey became easy, and we seemed to flow effortlessly downhill, first heading south to cross the impounded waters of the South Saskatchewan River, a liquid plain set among tawny slopes, and then on to the leafy valley city of Swift Current. From there it was west to Gull Lake, south to Shaunavon, and finally west again, proceeding step by diminishing step toward our destination.
From the beginning to the end of the journey—a good four hours of travel, with a few minutes added here and there as rest stops for humans and dogs—the landscape told and retold the same familiar story. The broad fields of stubble that spun by our windows represented the climax of the settlement saga, the triumphant end point of the mural in Jack’s Café, the payday of my own grandparents’ enterprise. Somewhere past Gull Lake, we passed a commemoration of the whole agricultural undertaking, painted in exact letters on the gable of a meticulously maintained barn: “Rolling View Farm,” it read, “1917.” It was as if the settlement experience marked the beginning of time.
Of the country’s longer past and its deep reservoirs of stories—memories of the Métis settlement that (unbeknownst to me on these early journeys) flourished briefly at the Saskatchewan River crossing; of the terrible battle that had taken place in the Red Ochre Hills, southwest of Swift Current, in 1866; or of the buffalo jump near Gull Lake that dates back thousands of years and once sustained hundreds of families—of these memories and so many others we did not hear a single word.
By the time we reached Shaunavon and the last, short, westward leg of our journey, the countryside had become assertively modern, with pump jacks feeding in the stubble like dazed, mechanical birds. Yet in the face of this evidence of “progress”—and who was I to knock it, whizzing along as I was in a gasoline-powered van?—I found my eyes wandering around and past these intrusions to consider the lay of the land. On the western horizon up ahead, the world was now rimmed by a blue rise of hills, which suggested that our destination was drawing close. Meanwhile, to the north of the road and to the south and then, at irregular intervals, here and there, near and farther afield, we found ourselves surrounded by a flotilla of strange landforms.
“Look,” I said to Keith, beside me in the driver’s seat, “those hills—they’re like whales, bigger than whales, stranded under the grass.”
“Eskers, drumlins, and kames,” he replied smartly. (He was an art historian: how did he know this stuff?) “That’s all I remember from A-level geography. Something to do with glaciers and the Ice Age.” Drumlins. That was it: I’d just been reading about them, as part of the research for the chapter on geological history in my prairie book.
“Hey,” I said, “I know about this. The geologists call it a swarm. We’re driving through a ten-thousand-year-old drumlin swarm.”
A year earlier, approaching Eastend from the south, we’d been ushered into town by coyotes, distorted forms caught in the headlights’ glare. Now, arriving from an approximately opposite direction, we found ourselves in the company of a troupe of Ice Age hills, their ancient energy held in suspended animation. And more strangeness was in store as we rounded the final bend and rolled down into the wide bottomlands of the Frenchman River valley. Instead of proceeding into town as we had expected, we appeared to be heading straight for an earthwork of ridges and conical, turretlike hills that blocked the view ahead. At the very last minute, the road jogged left, discovered a gap, and delivered us into town and onto the main drag. A sign announced that we had entered the Valley of Hidden Secrets.
Our new house was essentially perfect as found. Built in the early 1970s, it featured mahogany-fronted cabinets, complete with copper-trimmed knobs, and a planter-knickknack-and-book-shelf combo that was straight out of my teenage years. Even the crimson carpet in the bedroom—“This will need to be updated,” the real-estate agent who showed us the place had told us solemnly—exuded a shabby, retro charm. The real glory of the place, however, was not its stylish accoutrements but what in a more competitive market might have been written up as its “prime location, surrounded by parks.”
Our place was at the very end of the street, on the outermost edge of town. Beyond the back fence, across the alley, lay the bend of the Frenchman River where young Wallace Stegner and his friends had once congregated to swim. To the north lay a wide grassy field, really a floodplain, that was bounded by a sweeping arc of the stream and housed the town’s baseball diamonds and campground. Past these amenities and across the creek, the land rose up and away from us in a choppy sea of conical mounds, intercut by coulees and shadowed by a tangle of chokecherries and rosebushes. The wide prairie world was right there, on the other side of the wall, just begging for us to come out and continue our explorations.
Strangely, however, the house turned a blind eye to this view. Although there were openings in every other direction, east, west, and south, the entire north wall was windowless. We were loftily critical of what we saw as an aesthetic error, until someone pointed out that the previous owners might not have looked at the scene through quite the same lens as us. The Taylors—we knew their name from a decorative knocker affixed to the front door—had been ranchers who spent summers somewhere up in the hills and retreated to this house in the fall, much as the Stegners had done a generation before. (All this we gleaned from conversations with our new neighbors.) Perhaps, like coastal fishing families who face their homes away from the sea, the Taylors had preferred to turn their backs on the prairie and its lethal winter storms. Keith and I, by contrast, were mere visitors, in the country though not yet of it. Regardless of wind and weather, the prairie was calling to us and we were eager to open ourselves to its wide horizons.
In remarkably short order, we had cajoled a local contractor into ordering a picture window (four-paned to echo the four-paned knickknack shelves in the room divider) and inserting it into our living room wall. Now, with our brand new secondhand love seat positioned directly in front of the glass, we could sit side by side and gaze out at the scene: from the bare symmetry of the poplar tree in the foreground to the dense scrawl of bushes along the river and then up, layer by layer,