I was fortunate enough to be staying next to some grain fields that were being used for overnight resting and feeding by large mixed flocks of geese (Canada geese and Snow geese, maybe others), on their way south for the winter. Loud honking calls, a golden misty sunrise, and the sound of rushing wind from all those wings!
If you’ve traveled around Canada at all, then you’ve seen the vast abundance of pretty much everything: trees, hills, bodies of water, farms. The Rockies, with steep panoramic views around every corner. This is the experience of driving, rather than flying. The unimaginable distances between points on the map; the unbelievable sizes of things. It’s easy to get lost in it, lost even in the idea of it.
So many cities bustling with traffic and students back at school and yellowing leaves. So many highways and hills, so many flat wide open spaces! So many quiet old prairie towns; so many gas stations and coffee shops; so many lakes and ponds full of migrating birds. And so many photographs! Here are just a few . . .
Listened to a CBC Radio report on the dwindling salmon fisheries on Canada’s Pacific Coast on the way out of BC; another on the declining grizzly bear population of Alberta as we passed through that province. Welcome back to Canada! Well, it was a nice day for a drive anyway. Despite the slight forest-fire haze in the distance. Unbelievable peaks, old hitch-hiking memories, I thought we’d be out of the mountains around the next bend but they just kept coming! Stopped for a wash in a cold silver-blue river. Then the horizon opened up, and the air was scented with a sweet grainfield smell, something familiar but I don’t know if I ever knew the name of that plant. Weathered farms and new ticky-tacky subdivisions, mountains and then foothills receding in the distance, and then flat, flat land spread out for miles, ripped and crinkled with the occasional old signature of glaciers. Days in the Prairies: mosquitoes, sunsets, Canada geese, autumn colors starting to show themselves. Photos coming soon! Now: leaving Winnipeg to head back West . . . ?
(A little poem of mine has just been posted – Thursday 10 September 2009 - on the website A Handful of Stones: “a small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention.”)
A poem of mine (from my chapbook Circumambulations) was just posted on Bolts of Silk. Please have a look. Thank you Juliet!
My short essay on nature writing has just been posted on Marsha Durham’s excellent creative writing website Writing Companion. Please have a look!