Remoteness

I'm currently in a very remote town in Saskatchewan.  I didn't use to think it was remote: small, yes, but not remote.  Things were also different back then.  I remember when the bus came to this town.

To me this is how remote is defined: if you can't get there by public transit, then you're travelling to a remote place.  I had to fly for four hours, stay overnight, and then travel by bus for another four hours late the next day.  And finally another hour by car, because the bus no longer goes to my hometown.  No public transport can take me home.

The bus people were very impressive however and fast, and even though the bus we were on had to return shortly into the trip due to a transmission problem, it was overall a good trip.  The bus people hustled.  They were well-coordinated, quick, polite, informative, calm, and well-prepared.  I watched them back the new bus up to the old trailer full of freight, reconnect it, change over all the luggage (including my daisy suitcase containing my entire wardrobe), and calmly inform us when it was time to switch seats, which was done with no trouble whatsoever.

And the bus ride itself was tremendous.  The bus seats are covered in soft blue velour-feeling material, clean, spacious.  Everyone gets two seats to themselves.  After travelling by plane, being on a bus is luxurious.  

Luxury.

I rode the STC line, which used to go to my hometown when I was a little girl.  My bus had great clean windows which, since we were going to be travelling south for four hours, faced into the prairie sunset after a rain.  The sun was sinking into a lush, rainy-in-July Saskatchewan setting.  I settled into my plush seat and prepared to enjoy the vastness that is the prairie.

I took some pictures through the glass:

Endless prairie poles.

Unbelievable water in the fields.

This is where we turned around.  Bad transmission.

Train tracks to nowhere.

Sun setting over slough water.

But then my camera ran out of juice and I just enjoyed the spectacle.  

The point is, yes, the flight was short, I enjoyed the layover in Saskatoon immensely, and the bus ride was both cheap (only $48) and moving, flooding me with feelings of love and nostalgia for the place where I grew up.

This still only got me to Swift Current.  After that: a one-hour drive by car.  Luckily the car contained both my dad and my uncle, who are some of my favourite people ever.  So we chatted and swapped stories and sped along the dark empty prairie highway under a black sky filled with stars.

It's not that the trip to get here is a bad trip.  I'm surprised more people don't take trips through Saskatchewan in the summer.  It's so beautiful, with so many secrets and good things: Pine Cree, Jones Peak, fishing at the dam, canoeing, camping, so much unspoiled nature.  There's Cypress, the winery, a horse ranch (more than one), sand dunes and the wandering desert, dinosaurs, rocks, birds, insects, good people.  And so much more.  Plants.  Flowers, trees, wheat, even weeds.  Thistle and tumbleweed and foxtails.  A photo of thistles growing along a bumper crop of wheat:

Crop by Winston Stevenson

It's a very beautiful place and I feel no matter how hard I try to capture it, to document it, to photograph it or write about it, there will always be more.  There are dozen different views just from my hammock chair.  There are always half a dozen ways to photograph the same thing: a field of wheat, an individual farm, the land, the sky, an old car in the weeds, the pasture.  I could go on forever.  The prairies are vast.

Which is, of course, what makes places in them so remote.  And it's the remoteness of the prairies that makes them so precious, the absolute absence of people.  Not many are willing to make this trip.  Not many see the point.  

People travel to see mountains or beaches or tropical forests.  But to me the most beautiful place is where I was born: in the wide open space of the Canadian prairie.  Where one has the freedom to walk in a beautiful garden, and be utterly alone, except for a friendly cat.  

Very friendly.

This is one of the world's perfect vacation spots, completely hidden from the outside.  An oasis hiding in plain sight.  Worth a plane ride, a layover, a broken bus transmission and a road trip to see.