a land to mark the sparrow's fall

Snow! When the plane broke through the clouds at Regina Airport, the fields were a patchwork of white. In places, flood water came right up to the roads, reflecting the steel-gray sky. Normally by this time the farmers would be seeding; this year, some may not be able to seed at all. Everywhere we went, people bemoaned the weather. 

But this morning, as I headed West on the Trans-Canada and turned South towards Eastend, it was sunny and snowing. The gleaming hills were veiled in a luminous white fog. Water stood steaming in the summerfallow. It was magical.

Once settled in our final destination, Wallace Stegner's childhood home, we took an evening walk along the swollen Frenchman River and breathed in the quiet. Not two minutes from our door, a pair of courting bush rabbits scampered through the wolf willows as though we weren't there; a scattered herd of mule deer stared as we passed, unalarmed. The air was cold and clean as a butcher's blade.

My writing room looks out on the river and the steep, silent hills. With the lamp turned off, I pull back the curtains to let in the dying light. I can't wait to begin.

"Desolate? Forbidding? There never was a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drought or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don't get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don't escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.

It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe of impotent man. Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall."

 - Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow