Pop 89: Exposed & Eroded & Getting Old
By Madonna Hamel
On every birthday, I feel a need to drive and read, not at the same time. Last week, we drove to Eastend to roam the dinosaur-boned hills and eat burgers at Jack’s Cafe. I wanted my brother to “see” the landscape, not easy after his stroke. But that steep drive down into the Frenchman River Valley, where the highway drops dramatically, and the long banking curve gives way to sky and time before it suddenly climbs again, is so big that what is not seen is definitely felt.
The best gift others can give me is the willingness to listen as I read to them from my favourite authors. So I hauled several books with me, classic Western standbys: Lorna Crozier’s “Small Beneath the Sky,” Kathleen Norris’ “Dakota,” and Wallace Stegner’s collection of essays: “Marking the Sparrow’s Fall. I wanted to bring Sharon Butala, Trevor Herriot, Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry and Candace Savage. But there’s only so much room in the car. I had to stop somewhere. And for how long should friends and family be expected to sit still and listen to me read from the voices who made Western Lit mean more than gunslinging cowboys and sassy saloon girls? Even on my birthday, loved ones should be allowed to eat before their food gets cold.
The day was a wet one. But, as we say in these parts, “we need the moisture.” While waiting for our meal to arrive, I pulled out my first reading, appropriately addressing the fact of lack of moisture. “Aridity makes all the difference,” writes Stegner. “It clarifies the air,” “electrifies the distances,” and “dictates the very landscape.” And more than that, aridity “inspired barbed wire and the windmill, altered laws and social organization, profoundly affected men, myths and moralities.” “It’s like the cold up North,” my brother observed, referring to his time building scaffolding in Fort Mac.“If you didn’t seal every possible hole in your clothing, it would seep in like water and turn you to ice.”
Kathleen Norris’ memoir “Dakota” is subtitled “A Spiritual Geography.” Her descriptions of a landscape and its folk captivated by it ring similar to our own up here in Canada, so much so that the border cannot separate our shared embodied experience of being plains people. This is a place for spiritual ecologists, the kind of folks who say: Nature is my religion. Or, the planet is my church. This land facilitates mystics, like those desert fathers and mothers and that skinny Jew Jesus who wandered off into the arid openness to empty their heads of noise and invite in the Divine. Even those who might never name themselves as such understand the “mystic” needs time alone to hear the voice of The Beloved. Once heard it becomes evident that cathedrals are not the sole domain of holiness - that all places are holy.
Not that I besmirch the church. (And, for that matter, nor does Norris, who becomes a lay Benedictine after discovering a nearby monastery.) The church is where we test our smug certainty that we are “very spiritual people.” Can we sit next to strangers in pews and pray ensemble? If not, sorry, we are “barely spiritual people.” We enter cathedrals deliberately in search of holiness. We go looking - so we’re receptive. They were created for lost souls, busy types. They are intended to make us religious in the true sense of the word “religio” - to re-link with something divine. They are not an escape the way some see the wild and the land, but a gateway.
The plains of the West made my parents and my parent’s parents. I did not know until I moved here that my predisposition to yearning and mystery came as much from the land as to their mystic Catholic aspects. The mysterious light and the immeasurable expanse of open prairie - the kind one finds in ranch and grasslands - strips us of a sense of time and space and even place. And we are left hanging.
This “left hanging” sensation will terrify some - as it did the birder I met here in Val Marie back in 2014. A native of Washington DC, he couldn’t wait to get back to the familiar noise of the city after crossing the Baird sparrow and long-billed curlew off his life list. The rest of us will be drawn in, like Wallace Stegner.
Even though he only lived in Eastend for a handful of years, Stegner insists the place defined him. He writes with a touching certainty as - to paraphrase - an American who is uncertain who he is but knows from whence he came: “…a good part of my private and social character, the kinds of scenery and weather and people and humour I respond to, the prejudices I wear like dishonourable scars, the affections that sometimes waken me from middle age sleep with a rush of undiminished love, the virtues I respect and the weaknesses I condemn, the code I try to live by, the special ways I fail at it and the kinds of shame I feel when I do, the models and heroes I follow, the colours and shapes that evoke my deepest pleasure, the way I adjudicate between personal desire and personal responsibility, have been in good part scored into me by that little womb-like village and that lovely, lovely exposed prairie of the homestead.”
But you don’t have to be born here. You don’t have to stay. More recently, another big city dweller, Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music critic, travelled to the home of Willa Cather in Nebraska and found there a landscape and prairie where “you move not only backward in time but also out into symbolic terrain, one in which the self becomes a ‘something’, in which a moment of supreme bliss is indistinguishable from death.”
It is, for me, as if, after hundreds of walks on the land a kind of human erosion happens, evoking with it a natural sense of dying.