Moose Jaw

November 8, 2011

            Road trip! Road trip!             Yay!!!  Clearly I’m feeling better today.

            Hunters were gathered at Dale’s café for breakfast. The two booths of hunters fell silent when we walked in. We felt like we were strange specimens in need of inspection.  Little did they know that I was raised on November deer hunts. After a few minutes they went back to their stories, and I felt totally at home.

            There was a bite in the air and snow spread across the fields as we crossed into Canada this morning. Crossing the border is not like it used to be.  The border guard was very stern with us. She wore a bullet-proof vest under an impeccable uniform. Her questions were clipped without a hint of warmth until she had run our passports (which we had forgotten to sign) through the database. 

 
            Just before we crossed the border we found an interesting batch of stark hills, which we assumed were the turtle hills, but shortly after the crossing, everything returned to such flatness it was enough to make one question whether the world is really round.  (I just discovered it is a myth that Europeans in the time of Columbus believed the earth was flat; the theory of the earth as a sphere was developed in the 6^th century B.C. Did everyone else already know that?)     

          As we sped by mile after mile of white fields and pewter sky, silver grain mills, white wind mills, even a town called White City, we wrapped ourselves in the rich warm sounds of Cantus and I felt perfectly content.  When it became too soothing for the driver, we had to switch to some toe-tapping “Treasures of the Old West”:   Rawhide, Bonanza, Tumbling Tumble Weed, etc.

            Thank God for Bob.  He’s the one who noticed the wolf running through a field off to our right and the bald eagle settling onto the highway median to our left and the brilliant magpie perched atop a frosted tree.

            We stopped for the night in Moose Jaw. We couldn’t pass up a town with a name like that.  It turns out to be a very interesting place.  More on that later.  In the meantime, know that we are walking on snow and ice-crusted sidewalks wearing winter jackets.  And know that this was intentional: we figured this was necessary in order for us to appreciate a winter in California.