Saskatchewan

West of Calgary, in a normal year, the prairie, I think, is usually hot and dry. This year, though, a combination of nightly rain and daily sun made the July 1st rolling grasslands explode with verdence. Saskatchewan is not flat, nor is it dull. Throughout the southern part of the province, following the Trans-Canada, the landscape rolls and dips with the scars of glaciers. To the south of the highway until Regina, you see an island of green thousands of feet above the grasslands that surround it. This area, the Cypress Hills, is a remnant of what the prairies once were before the glaciers etched them flat--a thousand-kilometer plateau of mountains biomes not found anywhere else this far east. They follow you along as you pass through southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, mocking the low, chalky, valleys full of rocks and mud left behind when the great continental ice sheet receded 10,000 years ago.
North of the highway, little and big hillocks roll on until the horizon, left behind as the melting glacier dropped the rocks it had etched from the land. In between, just over the Saskatchewan border, is the worst-maintained stretch of highway in the history of road
construction. It's a patchwork quilt of oddball pavement. Each patch is an inch higher than the next, and the patchless spots could well be meteorite craters or dynamite scars, because this highway looks like a battlefield. Fortunately for me, the only victim in this battle was my back (as opposed to something mechanical on the truck that I couldn't afford to fix), with some collateral damage in the form of a mysterious rattle from inside the cab of the truck.
After about five hours of driving, the sun begins to set. I know I don't want to pay for camping, so I turn off the highway to find a treed spot near the South Saskatchewan River to roll up the tent trailer, happily following behind the truck (so far, anyway).
Off the highway, a little of the stereotypical Saskatchewan appears. North of the highway, in this area, farms do go on forever. Ranches and cows seem to be the only thing on this rutted gravel road. Irrigation gear rolls through the fields, watering some sort of plant I don't recognize. And the country roads barely correspond to the maps. I get sidetracked several times, half because I'm looking for an out-of-the-way place to park, and half because a straight road on an Canadian Automobile Association map is not necessarily a straight line in Saskatchewan's backwaters.
Lost or not, I scout horse farms, long treed windbreaks, and other hidden-looking resting places. At one point, I consider parking the trailer and truck in a long row of neatly arranged derelict vehicles, with my own dereliction as a disguise, but I realise the set-up trailer would be a bit of a giveaway.
Onward I go, watching the sun sink below the horizon. I'm now about 60 kilometers off course, though not entirely lost yet. I get the trailer stuck in a small grassy spot surrounded by ditch, and stall the truck at least 15 times trying to back out, while a family of farmers watches in the distance. They'd already shaken their fists at me angrily for coming down their abandoned farmhouse road, so when I passed by, they stared at me in a confused, animal-protecting-territory way. I avoided eye contact and retraced my steps back to the confusing road. Finally, after getting stuck at a ferry station on the shores of the South Saskatchewan, I turned 180 degrees (after jackknifing the trailer three times, and stalling four more in front of a man in a red pickup who I was blocking) and started up Highway 42.
In the distance, in the dying twilight, I saw what grew to be a grain elevator. No railroad tracks went up to the grain chute any more, though. Behind it, there were a few houses, none of which had any lights on. The streetlights were also out. Out of curiousity, I turned in, and drove past what might have been main street to what I called Second Street. It was a tree-and-weed-lined pair of still-paved tracks, with one dark house on one side, and nothing but Canada thistle and mosquitos on the other. I did a full lap of main and Second streets. The one house on the end of Main Street had had its lawn cut at some point recently, and two old trucks were parked out front, but its lights were also dark. I drove back into the thistle off Second Street, and parked. Stepping out, my mouth filled to capacity with mosquitos, and every available space on my skin was covered with the little bloodsuckers, hovering noisily onto my exposed flesh, and lining up like oil derricks on the endless Alberta landscape. Undaunted, I set up the tent trailer, and, feeling particularly defiant to the little assholes, assembled my telescope in the trailer, and carried it into the middle of Second Street, where I was besieged again. Wrapping a towel around my head, I see Venus' half-crescent, and just below it, Saturn, tiny in my viewfinder, wrapped perpetually by its rings. To the south, the last bright object, Jupiter, looks like a blur, but to the left of it, four tiny specks of light sit seemingly motionless.
Satisfied at my telescope prowess, and sick of having bugs in my mouth, I settle into the trailer for the first time since my uncle graciously donated it to my as of yet pointless quest, and began reading Carl Sagan's novel Contact, about, oddly enough, man's first contact with an alien civilization (which was turned into that movie with Jodie Foster). The trailer is comfortable, and outside is dead silent. I get through about three sentences before passing out.
The next morning, I awake to sweltering heat. The sun has been up for hours, I think, because I'm drenched with perspiration, and it's bright and humid inside the canvas walls of the ancient trailer.
Rising and replacing my damp clothes, I step out into a silent green oasis. The dark house across from me looks much less menacing this morning. A walk around the block reveals little I hadn't seen before--there's still nobody here. I find a few more houses hidden by overgrown ornamental shrubs, but that's all there is. There's what looks like an old shop building (though without windows or signs) on Main Street, but there's only a single door in the front, and it's closed. But it has power running to it, and the lawn is cut in front. There's still nobody at the truck house, either.
I go from empty house to empty house, trying to piece this story together. I assume, when the train stopped running to the grain elevator, the town died. I imagine all there was to keep the town there was the elevator, and with it gone, the residents either died or moved away.
The town had died so hard that the north side of Second Street was actually bordered by barbed wire. At some point, in the only sighting of reverse urban sprawl I saw on my trip, a rancher had actually annexed the yard and house here, and made it into pasture, though he left the buildings standing for the animals. I thought about this a lot as I packed up and drove onwards. In BC and Alberta, around every major, and even some not-so-major cities and towns, acre after acre were being scraped barren and then built upon, rendering the land dead and useless forever. Here, though, in this one, small, dead town, a tiny little space, no bigger than your average building lot in suburban Alberta, the land had won, reclaiming a little bit of territory in what seemed for all of the trip before and after this like a battle it would never ever win.