Canadians (37 page)

Like an old church sign, some of the letters are missing. Whatever became of M? Where is N? O? … Why no T?

I come to Raymore often. My wife Ellen's grandparents—John and Ellen Whitlock—homesteaded here at a time when Christmas and birthday cards arriving from England said “Mr. and Mrs. J.E. Whitlock, General Delivery, Raymore, Northwest Territories, Canada.”

They were living here in 1905, when Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces. They had their first two children, Ted and Flossie, in a
sod house, their next two, Rosa and Fred, in a white clapboard farmhouse with green shutters that still stands on a quarter section of rolling land just south of No. 15. Two boys and two girls, both girls heading off to nurse, Rosa to the east, Flo to the west, while the boys stayed on to work the farm. Not an unfamiliar story on the Canadian prairies.

Apart from Fred's war years as a bomber navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force, the two brothers never left the farm and were still known locally known as “the boys” long after their parents died—both at age ninety-eight, both staying on the farm virtually to the end, in typical Saskatchewan fashion. Ted and Fred were still “the boys” as they hit their sixties, their seventies. When Ted was well into his eighties he became ill with leukemia and died. When Fred hit his eighties he married Virginia, a widow he'd met at the Royal Canadian Legion in Victoria, where he spent his winters, and the two of them drove across the country in a silver Mustang convertible before heading out for a tour of Australia. When they returned, they came back to the farm.

I was going to dinner that cold, blustery night at the home of Don and Marcia Harris, goodhearted schoolteachers who had, over time, become the family Ted had never had. I stopped in at the little Raymore liquor outlet to pick up a bottle of wine.

And that's where I found the missing T.

T for Tate.

There was a bin near the cash register containing special Christmas gift suggestions from the provincial liquor control board. For $29.99 you could purchase a little red ceramic grain elevator filled with ten-year-old whisky and bearing the name of a town carefully stencilled on the side by the clerks of the various outlets. Depending on where the liquor store was, the popular names might be Climax or Eyebrow or Mozart— Saskatchewan leads the nation in place names, Newfoundland a close second—and here, in Raymore, the bin was filled, predictably, with Raymore and Semans and Southey and Wishart and Nokomis … but also several grain elevators bearing the name Tate.

People in town knew where Tate was—or at least where it
had been
. Just past Semans and, a few kilometres west, turn right and go north to
just beyond the railroad tracks. I tried the next day, but the drifting snow made passage impossible. Highway 15 was plowed and open, but the turnoff to Tate hadn't seen a snowplow in years, perhaps decades. It was a place to check out in finer weather.

I came back to Tate, Saskatchewan, on a summer's day when the flax was in magnificent bloom and the Saskatoon berries ripe for picking. Ellen and I came with our children as well as the Harrises and their children, Don carrying an old map he'd found somewhere that seemed to show where things once were in Tate. Through a long, hot afternoon we walked what's left of the streets of this ghost town that once had its own grain elevator, a hotel, Chinese restaurant, hardware store, post office, school, church, cemetery …

A few buildings were still standing, or half standing, a couple with hornets in the eaves and wild-animal droppings over the broken floors. The old post office still had “Tate” on the sign, the town named after D'Arcy Tate, a solicitor for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The whole place was overgrown with caragana and lilac that would have been planted by those who never for a moment imagined their dream would simply disappear. Abandoned cars were in the fields, their model years—1940s, early 1950s—a rusty reminder of when it all began to turn the other way.

Since that summer day we spent walking silently about the graveyard that is now town as well as cemetery, the post office has also vanished, burned down one late-spring evening by local high schoolers during what some say was a “bush party.” Now there's hardly any sign at all of Tate.

Not so with Smuts, which can be seen from a distance by anyone driving along Highway 41 running north and east of Saskatoon. Little Smuts came into existence in the 1920s, when the Canadian Northern pushed a spur line through to bustling Melfort and decided to name the key watering spot after a now largely forgotten politician, Colonel Jan Christiaan Smuts.

Smuts was the longtime prime minister of South Africa and has the honour of being the only signatory of both treaties that ended the two World Wars. Canada was obviously once quite struck by him, for there is a summit, Mount Smuts, near where the Rocky Mountains cross the
49th parallel into the United States. And, of course, there was once Smuts, Saskatchewan.

It was another wintry day when I came, in a different year, and the snow was crisp and fresh fallen under blue skies, the odd lasso of loose snow swirling in gusts across the open fields. At one turn in the road a single coyote, grey and sleek, sat on a small knoll of field staring at the traffic going by this winter's day. One car, one driver—we were the only two creatures for miles around.

There's not much left of Smuts. The houses are abandoned, the few storefronts boarded up. Where once the “Red & White” sign invited travellers to turn in off the highway, now the D dangled upside down in the wind. The boards had greyed and dried under the summer sun; locked doors had broken backward from their hinges. The only tracks, it seemed, belonged to the coyote, the deliberate wanderings of a night watchman as he moved from door to door to door in search of rabbits and rodents.

In one home, an old picture album lay on a bare floor, the photographs of a waving young family so faded they no longer had faces. In the old school, half-renovated, then abandoned as a home, a clean blue dress with white polka dots and a red sash was still hanging in a closet, perfectly fitted to a hanger and swinging oddly in the sudden wind that sent snow in through the window and caused the room to sparkle, magically, in the sunlight.

But the magic, like the town, did not last long.

In a far corner, the October 2, 1964, edition of the
Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
lay iced to the floor, the front page warning of Hurricane Hilda slamming into Texas and heading north. In another room the
Wakaw Recorder
of September 3, 1964, leads with “Rainfall continues to hold up harvesting.”

The fall of '64—Final Harvest.

Driving back down the 41 toward Highway 5 that would take me back to Saskatoon, I check the knoll for the coyote, but he was gone. According to prairie Native legend, when everyone else has left, the coyote still remains.

Someone, perhaps, to turn out the lights.

WHATEVER BECAME OF the 800,000,000 souls? That number is correct: eight hundred
million
.

Back in 1887 the Government of Canada, desperate to attract settlers to the Canadian West, dispatched Edmund Collins to New York City to see if he could get the word out that Canada was open for business. Collins certainly did his best. In an address to one of the influential business clubs on “The Future of the Dominion,” he offered up the incredible expert opinion that, “Alone, the valley of the Saskatchewan, according to scientific computation, is capable of sustaining 800,000,000 souls.”

Tate and Smuts would have settled, in the end, for one soul willing to stick around.

Collins was hardly alone in his wild ambitions for that part of the country. Sir Charles Tupper, one of the Fathers of Confederation, told the House of Commons in 1879 that “we believe we have there the garden of the world.” It was a common theme and remained in use for decades. Before he became premier of the province, Tommy Douglas would tell his Baptist congregation in little Weyburn that they would build a new “Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land.” As recently as 1944, the great seer Edgar Cayce was prophesying that rich, fertile, open Saskatchewan “must feed the world” that was surely coming.

But no one saw
this
coming—at least they didn't in the early years. By 1912 Saskatoon was calling itself “the fastest-growing city in the world” and predicting its population would crest two million by 1931. At that point, it was claimed, Saskatoon would join St. Louis and Chicago in the “great family of Western Cities.”

Of course it never happened. The Crash of 1929 was followed by nine successive years of drought and crop failure. It got so bad during the 1937 Dust Bowl that, in a small town near Regina, a young baseball player was said to have lost his directions after rounding first and was later found three miles out on the prairie, still looking for second.

Today fewer than one million people live in Saskatchewan, even fewer than there were a generation ago. In most years more people leave than come in, those leaving usually young families and young workers, those
coming in often retirees returning for reasons of nostalgia and cost. Some communities have been known to offer lots for as little as a single dollar, livable homes for not much more. There was once approximately a thousand communities in the province, but today for every little Raymore that keeps its hockey rink and gets a high school there's a Tate that vanishes or a couple of smaller communities just down the line—Semans to the west, Quinton to the east—that are fast fading. Only the very large communities—Saskatoon in particular, with its university and high-tech growth and increasingly diverse industry—can be said to be thriving. Everywhere else it's a struggle just to hold steady.

Drive a secondary highway almost anywhere in the grain belt, Roger Epp and Dave Whitson, two Albertan political scientists, wrote in their introduction to
Writing Off the Rural West: Globalization, Governments, and the Transformation of Rural Communities,

and the picture that emerges is not one of prosperity. The horizon is bereft of the familiar elevators that once announced towns and villages. The pavement is likely patched or broken. The road is virtually empty save for tandem trucks that spin a rock at your wind-shield or crowd you onto a shoulder. At strategic points along the remaining rail routes, near towns that survive as service centres in a contracting economy, you can see their destinations: high-volume terminals bearing the names of grain barons like Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, and what were prairie wheat pools before their corporate makeovers.

It's not that money is no longer being made by farming in the Canadian prairies, it's that the money doesn't stay—as a cursory look at most small-town Main Streets will immediately confirm.

Even the familiar landscape has shifted. The iconic grain elevators numbered more than sixteen hundred a half century ago, but today are roughly as many in number as the ceramic ones in the bin at the front of the Raymore liquor outlet. Some have been turned into museums. Most were torn down and carted away as the reality of modern transportation obliterated first the rationale of having one grain elevator or more in every
single community and then the rationale of the map-speckled communities themselves.

All that remains the same is the Big Sky—with fewer landmarks on the horizon.

In the great midlands of the United States they call this the “emptying out.” The young leave for opportunity, for adventure, for conveniences. Farming, with its uncertainty and its personal pressures, loses its attraction when those who dream of life on the land face up to such matters as international subsidies and competition, crop failures, fickle weather, and the totally unexpected, such as mad cow disease closing down the border to what had been a guaranteed market.

In February of 2000, during a series on Saskatchewan that Adam Killick and I were writing for the
National Post,
we made reference to Eric Howe, a professor of economics at the University of Saskatchewan who happened to call his beloved province “the Mississippi of the North.” Howe saw a province ill-prepared in both education and skills to deal with the vast changes coming in agriculture. He saw the best minds leaving and the Native population exploding to the point where, some demographers now believe, by the middle of this century Saskatchewan could become the first province with an Aboriginal majority.

The phrase “Mississippi of the North” outraged those who treasure this province. The premier at the time, Roy Romanow, was furious, claiming the series was factually incorrect—Saskatchewan had
more
than a million people and we were ignoring the fact of recent economic growth. By the time the next election rolled around, however, the census had borne out our numbers—the population had fallen to less than a million and the economy had soured. A short while later the economy shifted again, the oil boom elevating Saskatchewan into unfamiliar status as a “have” province that for a time delivered somewhat more revenues to the national equalization program than it was getting back.

The population, however, remained below a million, sometimes shifting up, sometimes down. Saskatchewan was increasingly seen as a province apart, a province of the past rather than the future, a province of the country rather than the city. It became symbolic of a growing
urban–rural split in this country, something that many were soon calling “the new Two Solitudes.”

At the time of that controversial story, however, angry readers were keen to shoot both messengers and professor without realizing that we felt as fondly about Saskatchewan as they did. When
Maclean's
columnist Allan Fotheringham called this “the most
Canadian
of provinces”— Fotheringham was born in its tiny community of Hearne in 1932—he wasn't being facetious, or sarcastic, or funny. He was simply being accurate.

But Saskatchewan was fast becoming Canadian in a
Canadiana
sense— a province whose fastest rising value was sentiment.