This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
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Wednesday the 25th of July, 0915/1410. (Lost a day somewhere...oops. never mind.)
Well, yesterday took a bit of a turn, and all for the better. About 15 minutes after leaving the Chicken Shed, I was picked up by Lou from Portage, in his near-death Chevy Celebrity town car. Lou was in his seventies, wearing an engineer's cap and dungarees, with a strong accent which made it hard to make out what he was saying, and a distinctly alarming driving style which included swerving to the right when he turned to talk to me and drifting left the rest of the time, once into the path of a large truck which blared its horn at us to Lou's apparent amusement "Hee hee hee, scared the hell outta that fella". In town he drove with some agression but few observations, and comments like "Golly I'm a poor driver - missed him completely" accompanied by more chuckles.
He stopped in Portage at a Tim Hortons to let the engine cool "Or else stuff starts bubbling out of it" and we talked about his father, who had been from England. While we were talking, a slim, bearded man in his forties or fifties, who had been sitting at the next table drawing diagrams in a folder, turned around and introduced himself - his name was Keith, he was from Lancashire, and had been living in Canada for some years but lost almost none of his accent. After giving me his card and telling me to call him if I got stuck out east (his daughter lived in B.C.), he left and Lou dropped me on the edge of town. I was there about 30 minutes when a beautiful blue Chevy pickup (with a crack across 3/4 of the windscreen) pulled up, and Doug and Jerrod took me on an unexpected and extended detour.
Stylistic note: I'm switching to present tense at this point. I prefer the way it reads, it feels more immediate somehow. Please send all complaints to the yellow sponge mat under a tree in Canmore Municipal Campground.
Doug is in his early twenties, tall and skinny with blond hair just a bit overgrown under a baseball cap and rectangular glasses. Jerrod is a few years younger, equally rangy and with red hair. They gleefully describe themselves as "hicks" and "rednecks" but these are smart, quick-witted guys with a big vocabulary and serious views on work. "You can always tell the country kids from the city kids", Doug explains (he does most of the talking, Jerrod is still hungover apparently), "they got no work ethic, they just want to lie around all day and smoke dope". Doug is having a week's holiday from the local feedstore (which we pass later - not the log shack I half-imagined with bins of grain and seed but an industrial expanse with bulldozers pushing mountains of silage and cereal around), and Jerrod works for Doug's dad building houses. They are cousins - it's a cliche but almost everyone in this small community is related at least to some extent - one of the boys' mums tells me later that her daughter is currently in a rage because the third boy in a row she has gone out with turned out to be a distant cousin.
The initial plan is for them to drop me on the highway when they turn off to their hometown of MacGregor, but coming to the turnoff Doug says "If you're not in a hurry we can give you a tour of the hills". I accept and we turn south onto a gravelly Provincial road where the truck begins to throw up a long tail of dust behind us. Almost at once the landscape begins to change from the yellow stretches of the central prairie to rolling green hills and plentiful trees of all kinds. We turn again and again on the narrow gravel roads between close hedges, with country music always on the radio at full blast.
The dust is everywhere - if there's a vehicle ahead of us, even so far ahead to be out of sight, the air is full of it, like a fine yellow mist over the fields, dimming the sun. In time we reach Doug's place, a small bungalow on a little stretch of land off a back lane and surrounded by trees. There are four vehicles in the yard in various states of disrepair, slews of spent shotgun shells in the weeds and broken beer bottles everywhere. But inside the house is nicely-furnished and in no worse a state than most bachelor flats I've seen.
We bring in the groceries the boys have been picking up, and with a call of "Looks like beer o'clock to me" Doug starts digging bottles of Canadian Budweiser (a much superior brew than the watery american equivalent) out of the fridge, and we settle in the cool to talk. Doug and Jerrod's political and social views are fairly predictable - lefties are ruining the country, indians are all thieves and murderers ("we don't call the cops, we take care of that business ourselves"), but they are open and interested in the exchange of ideas, and by no means immune to other viewpoints or reactionary when they are put forward. They have a charming self-deprecating humour about their own "countryness", too.
I notice through the window that there is a rodeo practice barrel strung between the trees, an oil barrel with a saddle across it slung between four sprung steel cables, and discover that Doug is a bull rider. He's been away from it for a year - last year he cut his left hand just before an event and had to ride with his weaker right, failing to qualify. But he's riding in two days, on the second day of the huge Manitoba Threshermen's Reunion and Stampede, held in the adjacent town of Austin. "I've got a spare room here...you should see the first day at least". I accept his generous offer, reckoning that I can spare a day if I keep moving steadily west after that.
We drop Jerrod home for dinner with his family, stopping halfway to disperse to the corners of the truck and unload some recycled beer, and slinging our last bottles into the ditch as we come into town for fear of a police stop (when in Rome...), then return to Doug's place for a dinner of ham wraps (ham and salad wrapped in tortillas, very tasty), more beers and some comedy on cable. Dinner over, my host looks across to me "Want to go out and shoot some stuff?" It turns out that Doug has a Russian 7.62mm rifle behind the front door.
We grab another couple of beers and head outside. The evening is perfect, a cool breeze is lifting the day's heat, the sun is setting over the miles of rolling fields, crickets are buzzing everywhere and a big 3/4 moon hangs over the trees. We sit on the porch. The rifle is mostly polished wood with a bolt action, and Doug slides four of the big brass shells into the skeletal magazine and sets up four empty bottles on a trailer at the end of the yard, carefully set low enough that any misses will safely dig into the ground.
He works the bolt, putting one round into the chamber, and takes out the first bottle with his first shot, then hands the gun to me. It's heavy and unwieldy, but I set the stock firmly against my shoulder as instructed, line up the front and rear sights on the second bottle and to my surprise destroy it with my first shot. The kickback rams the stock into my shoulder with bruising force, and the report leaves my ear ringing for over an hour. We alternate, a couple of misses and a couple of hits, and Doug takes the last bottle which shatters particularly remarkably, the neck arcing about 20 feet over to fall into the weeds beside his shed.
Some more TV, then we decide to head out to Doug's local, an unassuming building beside the MacGregor community hall which turns out to be comfortable and clean, with a great jukebox and a beautiful top-condition pool table. We line up stacks of coins on the edge of the table and begin a series of games interspersed with more beers and rum-and-cokes, finding that we are at a similar level of comfortable incompetence which makes for great play.
A few other guys filter in, with a couple of squeaking girls who lay seige to the jukebox, but we get in a good few games to ourselves, developing a continuous volley of banter, self-mocking jokes, elaborate and unlikely called shots, "off those three cushions, then the 14 and into the side pocket - well, I'll look like a genius if it happens now" and rapid calls of "that's what I meant to do!" when we sink an unlikely rebound. The night is so humid the cues won't slide over our sweat-sticky hands, and we find a partial solution by chalking them till both our rest hands are blue.
In time two other pairs form up and we play for rounds, which results in Doug and I buying a lot of drinks. We drive home through the warm night, chomp crisps and pepperoni from Doug's fridge in front of late-night hockey reruns and I fall asleep in minutes on the mattress in Doug's spare room. I've been up for an hour now, washed and dressed, and I'm finishing this entry in a shaft of golden light falling across Doug's sofa. It's scorching hot already, the crickets are singing, looks like a good day for a rodeo...
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