Elkhorn, Canadian memories

I’ve gotten to know Canada pretty well as a journalist. Since it all started in 1979, I’ve lived and worked in most of Canada’s major cities and I’ve experienced a lot of what we’ve come to know as our cultural mosaic. I’ve spent time with a lot of different cultures and it’s been an outstanding thing. The idea you get of a unified yet diverse homeland is empowering.
But years ago, when I was rootless and looking for a peg to hang my life on, I got to know Canada pretty well too. You don’t have to have a college degree or a high paying job in order to find yourself in this country or get educated in how it works. What it takes is experience. The land is there to be experienced. When you allow yourself the time to be with it, she informs you of your place and your function. I didn’t know that philosophy back then, I only understood that I had a hunger.
That hunger drove me out onto the roads to hitchhike. I wandered everywhere. I worked at a plethora of positions, none of which meant security or fortune but rather, a pay check, food and shelter. When the job ran out the road was always there beckoning and I always responded. I spent a long time with my thumb in the wind. I saw a lot of territory.
But in the early fall of 1975 after a fairly lucrative run of construction, factory and foundry work I could afford a car. It was a beat up old Datsun wagon, originally tan but freckled with rust. I set out to drive across the country. The run of work was over and I headed out as I’d done before to test the horizon and seek my fortune somewhere else. It was different as a motorist but the road still held that magnetic, gypsy appeal.
Well, that old car broke down outside of Elkhorn, Manitoba just as night was falling. I left it at the side of the road and walked to a service station. It was closed and it was dark by then so I bedded down in the box of a pickup truck for the night. I feel asleep to the cries of coyotes and the smell of the wind rich with straw. The RCMP woke me early the next morning.
They didn’t like drifters or vagrants in Elkhorn so I was offered the choice of a job or jail. I took the job. I went to work as a field hand for a wheat farmer. There were about a dozen of us who shared a bunkhouse and we were from everywhere. My new friends were from places with names like Wandering River, Snag, Come By Chance, Sissiboo Falls and Moosehorn.
They were Swedes, Hungarians, Chinese, Blackfoot and Cree. We worked hard all day and shared stories at night. It was a marvelous adventure.
Everyone came with stories that crackled with the light of the fire outside the bunk house and songs were sung while goatskins got passed along with the last of someone’s hash. The moon hung like a blind man’s eye throwing everything in that prairie night into a mazy, snowy blue. Then the voices stilled, the fire died and the lot of us stumbled to our bunks to dream of better days somewhere beyond the dry rasp of wheat and the press of heat like an iron to your back and clouds of chaff in your nose.
We got paid out after ten days and the farmer drove us to town in his stake truck. We sat in the back and smoked and laughed. We were all young and adventurous and filled with dreams. I smoked and watched the land sail by and wondered where I’d land next. I remember someone bumping my foot with the toe of a broken shoe and I handed off the smoke and watched him lean his head back against the wooden slat and exhale, the cloud of it vanishing back behind the truck like dreams born somewhere I never heard of before.
When we parted we exchanged promises to hook up somewhere again down the road. We never did but the memory has stuck with me.
See, this country we share is filled with stories. They come from every corner and they are carried by everyone from every stripe and color. Without them we are less. All of us. That’s what I learned around that fire outside that bunkhouse in all those stories outside of Elkhorn, Manitoba.