Episode 3

We left the next morning for Tisdale and points north.  Stops included Leroy, the Leroy cemetery, the site of my father’s former family farm, Tisdale, Tobin Lake, and Nipawin. 

We started the tour that day at the Leroy cemetery where my dad’s parents and some cousins are buried.  It was strange to see the new headstone.  The last time I visited the dead in that place was, easily fifteen years ago.  My grandmother was still alive.  The only headstone marked my grandfather’s place, a lovely stone with a horse head carved into it.  The new one is a shiny black one, with a lovely thank you on it to both of them for all they gave to make the lives of their children better. 

Cousins I remembered from my childhood, and aunties and uncles were there, too.  My father’s people rested in this place for at least 3 generations.  Pretty impressive for a kid who has only ever lived in one place for a maximum of 6 years. 

The rain the night before dampened the dust a bit on the roads, fragranced the air with the scent of wet earth and warming grasses…the olfactory memory of my earliest remembrances.

The house my grandparents bought in town, when they moved from the farm, was up for sale.  Dad took the number.  I wonder if he ever called it.  The current owners had added on to the front of the house and had built a deck on the side where the bathroom and dining room used to be.  I wondered how different the layout of the inside would be from what I remembered it to be in the early to mid 70s when we would spend Christmas’s there and when I would visit for summer holidays. 

We then drove out to the old farm location.  Nothing stood except for the well hole which has fostered a cluster of little bushes in the middle of a pea field.  It struck me how sad it was that all of the places I loved and that I loved had changed so much.  I wept in the field, with my dad, for the places that changed.  I asked why everything had to go away.  The house on James Cres looked smaller, the school where I attended grade one…the school where I pulled the fire alarm was completely torn down.  My Granny’s house in Tisdale, the school my mother attended, and the grain elevators I pretended were monsters, had all been replaced or removed.  Time had marched on without me and that was fine.  What I couldn’t accept was that no traces of my people were to be found.  I could not feel my Granny or my mother there at all…except that the sidewalk in front of the lot where my Granny’s house was exactly the same.  Who knew that a crumbling, old slab of concrete would bring so much comfort.  I really wanted to bring home a piece but there were none to be had.  Pretty good for a 40+ year old side walk job!

After seeing all of the changes to the places – how they have aged and grown and created new lives for the new people, it was crushing to be at the old land to see nothing but crops. 

The pea field on dad's old farm land.

I had yet to hear more stories of the place but the ones I knew had no place to haunt except the well site.  My first free run was on that earth and it remembered my tiny footprints.  I could feel it as palpably as I could feel that connection when I crossed the Alta-Sask border onto the legendary horrific roads of my birth province.  It felt like home: the bumpy roads where the government is too “poor” and the people too busy on the land to fix the highways chewed up by the grain trucks and the bite of deep frost in the epic winters. 

That land, in the pea field, knew me.  The families of that land were/are third generation farmers – caretakers – of that land.  Their ancestors were beneficiaries of the theft of the land from all of the original inhabitants: people and more-than-human kind.  It was very uncomfortable to listen to conversations about immigrants and farming at the table of my Aunty and Uncle, listening to Aunty talk about her mother’s people (my dad’s mom) and her father’s people homesteading the area that had been cleansed of Indian and buffalo.  I wanted to speak up but stayed quiet.  I could feel the fight in me between the settler and indigenous self.  One benefitted from the sacrifice of the other:  the true story of Canada, I believe. 

That conversation was days before the Tisdale trip, but still hung around me as we visited these places where my father’s family still farms the land.  It was/is a sense of pride that my family still makes a living farming land their great-great grandparents farmed…the land stolen from the original people.  It is a constant struggle in my heart.

After a nearly complete loop around Tobin lake to find the cabins my dad was looking for, and a drive in a prairie down pour, we headed out to Alberta via Batoche.  I had not been there since grade 12 when my Socials teacher took the grad class in 1985.  I only remember the farm house.  It’s still there and they are doing repairs to it. 

We took the shuttle around the property (there was no shuttle in ’85, I’m here to tell ya…we hoofed it around the place) and even walked a part of the Carelton Trail! 

The Carelton Trail

I was thrilled.  Dad seemed to enjoy it, too.  After that we headed to Bon Accord, just outside of Edmonton, and the place I have carried the longest.  The place that has meant the most to me of all of the places I have carried throughout my life.