Saskatchewan's Living Skies

25 June 2008 Saskatchewan’s Living Skies

A couple more reflections on 4 nights spent in Rapid City: It’s a town of 400 people with an elementary school with 70 students, some of whom can be seen early in the morning tearing hell f’leather on their bikes to school, with no regard for traffic because there isn’t any; and a good number of teenagers that spend the long sunny though not particularly warm evenings jumping off the bridge into a small dam or pushing each other off a raft tethered by a long rope to the bridge.

Onward along the Yellowhead Route into and through Saskatchewan….
The landscape is very gently undulating to flat, with vast expansive skies that feel full of life and presence, rising up from a 270 degree horizon (only because I can’t turn my head right around). Huge cloud formations are constantly changing shape and remind me of whipped up egg white ready to make meringues, glistening against a clear blue sky. Green farmlands extend for miles it seems, and we pass by large herds of cattle, smaller groups of horses, and fields of bright blue or orange beehives. We frequently look out at ponds encircled by reeds and cattails with happy ducks and ducklings going about the daily lives.

We spent Tuesday night in a small place called Wadena in the Quill Lakes Bird Area.
This is a “250sq km conservation area, including 3 saltwater lakes and several fresh water marshes, all part of Canada’s largest saline lake. It provides habitat for over 1 million nesting and migrating shorebirds, waterfowl, and songbirds”. Apparently it’s an amazing sight in the spring and fall when tens of thousands of birds are migrating.

The next morning we got up very early. It is beginning to get light at 4.30 and by 5.30 we were up getting ready to head out. We drove along a very narrow gravel road, glad that we weren’t towing the trailer and that we were the only ones negotiating the road, to a spot where there is a lookout tower and walking trails and boardwalks. Redwing and yellow-headed blackbirds were flying about in great numbers or sitting on the tops of cattails, making clackety sounds and occasional high-pitched whistles. We saw a family of coots, attractive water fowl. The adults are black and white and quite round and the babies are a sort of russet colour, really pretty. Also families of mallards, wood-ducks and ruddy ducks, and what we think were mergansers. I wished we’d had a knowledgeable guide. Once we had completed our walk we did the mandatory tick check and squashed quite a number.

After breakfast we visited the local museum, which was definitely in a developmental stage. The main house had been donated by a woman, who is now 100. She had left it as it was, with her clothes still hanging up in the bedrooms, high-healed shoes and hats galore, from the 1920’s to 50’s. The kitchen cupboards had stuff in them that she’d left, in boxes and tins, some that we recognized from when we were kids. A nearby church was going to be moved and placed there, also a bath-house (?) The local population mostly had old Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and Slavic roots and were farming people. I thoroughly enjoyed getting a sense of the place.