It’s sunrise as I write this. I’m looking out over a wheat field in late July. They say a good crop is one that looks like a tabletop. Of course, being a generation removed from ``they’’, I have no clue whether what I’m looking at looks like a tabletop crop. It’s all flat. It’s all coloured a balding green. It’s all wheat (as far as I can tell). It’s entirely uniform. Well, in three dimensions at least - like all uniform things, it promises uniformity over time and then fails spectacularly. The next grand phase of this wheat’s life is probably harvest, but after that the uniformity dissipates. Ground into flour, it can become bread, cakes, naan, lahoh, marraqueta, the list goes on and on. But right now, it’s all just wheat. It’s still sunrise as I write this. The one uniformity I can falsely believe won’t dissipate.
When I was a child, I would go out into the fields and think to myself, ``I am so fortunate to live in a place so untouched and so wild’’. In my naive child brain, the only trace of humanity was the gravel I walked along to get here. I don’t know what it was about a quarter of land with, for all intents and purposes, one plant that made me think I was standing in the wilderness. Was it the lack of people? The lack of cement? The lack of animals with neither stuffing nor seasoning? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that the gravel with its weeds and its weevils was more natural than that field. Every animal makes a path, but only one transforms thousands of square kilometers of grassland into a factory.
As with all things uniform, there was a ``before’’. The native grasslands were here less than 200 years ago. Before that, around 2 million years ago, it was a glacier. Before that, around 60 million years ago, grasslands again. Before that, around 145 million years ago, it was water: the biblical blank slate. Not a beginning, but a reset. A save point for geology. There are a lot of decisions that went into shaping the land as I see it right now - from rural municipality lines to the distribution of land for homesteading to what one farmer decided to plant in one year. But all of these decisions stem from circumstances handed down by time. To put it in terms my in-laws use: we make the important decisions, but the water and the glacier decides which decisions are important.
It’s not sunrise anymore. It will be, hopefully, tomorrow, but not right now. My license plate has the slogan ``Land of the Living Skies’’, which is a pleasant and euphonic way to make the joke ``If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes’’. That is true of this place, so I can’t really say either way whether the sunset will be lovely. But it looks like it’ll be lovely. Right now, I can say the sky is kind. There’s a light breeze. A bird has found company in a lonely tree on the edge of the field. There’s a beetle that looks at the field like a forest and bravely enters. And there’s the field, there’s myself, and there’s yourself.
And there’s the flatness. The water and the glacier left behind its trademark flatness, along with many of the things people depend on now such as oil and potash. As much as the local economy circles like vultures over these natural resources, I secretly think that people here are more proud of the flatness. People often joke about how you don’t need to worry if your dog runs away because you can still see them three days later. On a clear day on a mild hill you can see pretty much anything you want to. This is the gift of flatness: to be unobstructed. For me, it’s this unobstruction that can translate into banality. When I can see where I’m going, I hasten to limit the time between now and when I get there. The flatness doesn’t allow itself to be appreciated. Right now, I am trying to appreciate the flatness. It is late July as I write this, and I apologize to the flatness that it took 25 years to see you. In my defence, the wind also enjoys your ease.
As I sit here, my mind starts to wander (yet another example of the flatness’ ease). I think about how I got here and the plethora of decisions I made that led to it. I think about how I’ll get home, as I’ve locked my keys and cell phone in the car and I’m twenty kilometers from the edge of town. At least I have legs and time. And even if I didn’t have the time, the time has now been gifted to me ever so graciously by circumstance. Ironically, the purpose of this trip was to clear my head. This is something I’ve tried numerous times in my life. I briefly lived in a big city once. The only thing that kept me sane was leaving it. I would get lost outside the city a lot, which hindsight reveals was probably the goal of leaving the city. It’s much easier to replace a problem than to solve a problem.
As I sit here by this field, I feel a little like Thomas Berry. He was by the edge of a meadow when he had the epiphany outlined in his essay The Meadow Across the Creek. His worldview stems from that moment: ``Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good.’’ I am currently in the mood for an epiphany and a new worldview, but it doesn’t come today. A lot of the time, Berry’s approach is taken by farmers for their fields. The same reason why so many people living in the city say of the rain, ``we really needed that.’’ Like me, they are generationally removed from the physical labour, but never removed from the mental labour. Rain or shine, the field must be preserved in its natural cycles, even if only by thoughts from third floor balconies or city dwellers out to clear their heads.
I do admire Berry’s elegance in thought, but its application here can be misleading. The rain is not for the field. The rain is for the crop that is harvested and sold by the farmer. The meadow is deeply natural, but, as my childhood self did not realize, the field is deeply unnatural. What is good for one farmer may not be good for the land or the next farmer or the neighbour’s land. We see this most noticeably in the removal of topsoil, the diverting of water away from natural sources that need it, and the homogeneity of plants in the field. The cruelness of modern life’s complexities is that it creeps into even the simplest of exchanges; the basic necessity of food is overrun with short term gains exchanged for long term losses and the brunt of all human follies.
But the socio economic issues of the field are not what I am here to witness. I am here much like Annie Dillard at Hollins Pond: ``I came to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it,’’ although I did not expect forgetting how to live to mean forgetting how to not lock yourself out of your car. I am here to witness ``the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.’’ There are certainly plenty of edges. The satellite view of this land looks like an enormous, colourful sudoku game. There is certainly the lack of objects; at the very least the lack of obstructions. But I don’t see love. I see passion, fortitude, and hard work that has paid due dividends. I see a person providing for their family that they love. But I don’t feel love when I am in this field. Not for its own sake. Certainly not for the field’s sake.
It’s getting late and I have a long walk ahead. As I turn my back to the field, I think about the recurring line from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: ``The world is quiet here’’. The world, all of it, in this place, is quiet. Regardless of the turmoil happening outside this field, it is quiet here. Regardless of whether the quiet is of discontent or of peace, it is quiet here. Regardless of whether uniform’s before or after was or will be quiet, the now is quiet here as I write this.
I give this wheat field in Saskatchewan three stars.
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