"In the night I woke to a steady rain and random thunder. Sheets of lightning stretched away to the wooded plateau known, with poetic licence, as Moose Mountain. Yet by breakfast-time it was hard to tell that any rain had fallen. The fierce wind that ushered in the sun forced me to concentrate at the wheel, even as I headed south from Stoughton along a road that fed its two horizons without a single bend. A horde of tumbleweeds cartwheeled over the highway like scampering porcupines; a wire fence held dozens in its grip.
Here the sky seems even broader than it does near Saskatoon. The land's dryness encourages farmers to raise cattle as well as grain. On this seemingly endless sentence of earth, the cows' bodies act as punctuation: brown for the Herefords, black for the Aberdeen Angus, and white for the growing number of massive Charolais. To run a flock of sheep would be to risk both insolvency and contempt.
I could have crossed the American border in less than an hour; the car radio was pulling Montana loud and clear. But the strongest signal came from CKSL, Saskatchewan's "Country Giant." Every few minutes its disc jockey rehearsed the details of a new competition. To be eligible, a listener had to obtain a CKSL sticker, shaped like a heart, and glue it to his car. The prizes? A car stereo, a side of beef and a weekend for two in North Dakota.
Almost against my will, I was acquiring a relish for country and western. In these huge spaces, where the nervous pulsations of rock sound as ridiculous as a Rossini opera, country music fits. Most of its songs accommodate a flush vein of narrative; they tell familiar tales; they keep an oral tradition alive. The music has little to do with the grand passions, the tropical excitements of life. It attends instead to adult themes of loss, disappointments and sheer daily fatigue. While the writers of country lyrics are guilty of constant sentimentality, they rarely whip up a frenzy of sterile excitement. If rock music is a rampant illusion, country is a distorted truth. Its awareness of hard work enables it to soften a lot of pain.
Or so I was thinking to myself north of the low suburbs of Estevan, a dreary town that calls itself a city, as the deep blue of the sky mingled gradually with brown. I had been wearing sunglasses against the glare but now, as the visibility shortened from miles to yards, I resorted to the Dodge's headlights. A cloud of topsoil swirled around me for a few seconds and drifted eastward, gathering land as it went. The world brightened; my attention expanded again from the highway, and I caught a jingle for pizza on the radio. Then the dark fog arrived with a vengeance.
At one moment, a calm landscape of pastures, sprawling fields and faraway houses unfolded before me. The next, it vanished in a brownout. Dust storms, like rivers of lava, disturb the mind; they subvert what we assume to be the natural order of the elements. A few feet ahead of me, the car's lights died in a turmoil that extinguished the sun. I grounded the brakes and waited for the road to return.
Dust storms like this were common in the 1930's. A drought, an economic depression, a plague of wheat rust, an infestation of grasshoppers that surged to mythic proportions (the insects would even munch the sweaty handles of pitchforks - or so the story goes): farmers endured them all. Conditions in the grain belt of Saskatchewan grew so extreme that after the harvest failed in 1937, two in three farmers were destitute. The experience remains central to the psychology of the prairie west; more than the intermittent affluence of postwar decades, it tints a westerner's outlook on life. He continues to live in Next Year Country, where he smokes a pack of hope a day.
In southern Saskatchewan, the 1980s too have proved hard. Rainfall, snowfall and grain prices shrink; erosion steals the topsoil; grasshoppers and cutworms swarm. Surrounded by a brown cloud, I had the grim suspicion that I was inching through the future. Even in a closed car, protected from the rasp of dirt against my skin, the bruising whistle of the wind and the choking taste of solid air, I felt helpless in the storm's blind eye.
The weather cleared enough for me to slink through Estevan and turn eastward, keeping a few miles above the 49th Parallel. Around Bienfait and Roche Percee, gusts of coal dust joined the soil in the sky. Jutting out of the raw canyons of the Souris River, the village of Roche Percee wears a sour, mean face. I passed a short alley that led up from the road to a house, without a tree in sight. The signpost read: Elm Drive."