THE TREETOPS STUDIOS - SAANICHTON

Manitoba Quilts

My wife and I were on our first long 'get away' vacation. The last child had been married off that spring and as a twenty-fifth anniversary present to ourselves we were driving to Tofino and back. We ran into rain in the Ottawa Valley and it stayed with us most of the way to Kenora. But the next morning opened up cool and clear, ideal for Elaine's introduction to the prairies.

I had spent my early teens on a tiny airbase in south central Manitoba. With an unrestrained curiosity, a large lunch and a one-speed bicycle I watched summer in every ditch and slough and gully for miles around. My wife had seen the prairies only from above. So, driving west from the Manitoba border I showed her how the land smoothes out under the forest and waited for her first sight of 'the Prairie' where the highway breaks clear of the brush near the Steinbach turnoff.

The prairie wasn't the same! Yes it was flat and the greens and golds and browns of late summer spread over the horizon. There had been no brilliant yellow patches when I was a boy but I had heard about canola, so we were ready for that. But what was the blue? Flax? Grown for its oil and meal? Something to ask about when we stopped for the night at the inn in Russell.

Central Manitoba does look like a quilt. But the image wasn't that obvious to a boy on a bike surrounded by grain fields. I remembered a grid of hot, dusty, tracks under a clear blue sky with a choice of adventures at every crossroad. Now, at least from the slight elevation of the Trans-Canada, the farmsteads were stitched onto a patchwork of greens, browns, black, golds, yellow and an almost sky blue.

Of course the prairie winter and the craft tradition have a lot to do with the beauty of Manitoba quilts. But maybe there is more to it than that.    Top

Savanne Portage

My wife and I usually take the north route, by Dryden, when we drive west from Thunder Bay. Settlement thins out and the road is often a causeway through the spruce and muskeg. Cars are few and many times our only companions are railway gangs tending the tracks beside us. But it's an interesting place. The portage is almost at 90 degrees west longitude, one quarter of the way around the globe from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The portage itself marks the place where the old route crossed the divide between waters flowing west and north to the Arctic Ocean and those flowing east to the Atlantic. For modern travellers it is also the place to change the clock back by one hour, from Eastern Time in the Great Lakes system to Central Time on the Prairies.

On our second trip we realized that the Trans-Canada Highway is just one strand in a loosely braided cable tying the central and western regions of the country together. The thought came as we crossed some low hills and noticed the long scar of a pipeline south of the highway and then that there were, in fact, several railway lines to our north. Could they be the east-west mainlines: double-tracked and heavy-bedded as I had been taught in high school geography? Were these bogs, then, the fabled muskegs where track had been laid and re-laid, bed over bed, as the mud swallowed each season's work?

Unencumbered adults play car games on long drives too. How many more strands of the east-west cable could we find? There seemed to be enough scarring for both oil and natural gas pipelines. And there had been that time when our young family stitched the country together by flying the milk run: Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, London, Toronto, Ottawa. Power and telephone poles paralleled our route and radio antennae poked up from service yards. They were probably not national links but there were microwave towers on the highest hills. Perhaps no longer the main service in this age of satellite communications, but once .... And on an earlier trip, a billboard had proudly announced that a newly strung line was an experimental optical fibre project.

The historical site marker speaks of 'Savanne Portage', suggesting voyageurs from Montreal carrying their canoes and cargoes through the bog. The optical fibre project had been given an impressive title but not one with the colour of 'Savanne Portage'. The cairn and the name on the map are the voyageurs' lasting reward for crossing the muskeg first and surviving the mosquitos and black flies. The railway navvies may have had a name for the place too, especially if these muskegs did swallow a railroad whole. The mosquitos and black flies would have been the same as the voyageurs knew. The navvies' name for the place may have been colourful, even romantic. But they came second and don't have naming rights. And perhaps what they called the place is best left unprinted anyway.    Top

Old Lilacs

When my cousin moved from a town near Toronto to a suburb of Edmonton she brought along her passion for horticulture. Every family visit now includes her stories of coaxing something delicate to survive in Sherwood Park. The current experiment is to plant small succulents in pudding and yoghurt containers set down into the soil. They can then be lifted back into the house in the fall until she finds a way to winter them over outside.

The same concern to bring some living thing from the 'old place' to a new home has probably been a part of moving in Canada for generations. Think of the care we take to preserve a root cutting from a sweet, stringless, strawberry rhubarb!

In the central part of Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley even a boy raised on airbases noticed that many fields had been left to deteriorate to rough pasture. But some of those fields contained a single large clump of lilacs, growing wild and rank and obviously unattended. Curious. I would have expected berries and bracken.

A closer look revealed that each lilac thicket sheltered the broken stone foundations of an abandoned farmstead. As much as a century earlier, new arrivals had set out a lilac cutting on the sunny side of their new found home; a welcoming gift from a neighbour or perhaps a momento from another life. The settlers are gone now. Their farmsteads are gone too, too small to support a family these days. But the lilacs have prospered, ringing the whole site, and still welcoming visitors.    Top

Prairie Spring

I'm writing this as southern Manitoba is being battered by one of the great Prairie heart breakers, the Easter blizzard. Prairie stories, especially prairie winter stories, are more often than not stories about storm and trial and disappointment. But remember that we write most of these stories as adults. As kids we were a lot closer to the ground and winter looked a little different.

Yes, there is no question that the Prairie winters are long and cold. In Manitoba they are not relieved by the Chinooks that sometimes even get as far as Regina. The northwest wind never seems to stop. Even a row of stubble has a little drift in its lee. Of course there is equipment to repair, and crafts, and cards, and curling. And snow to be shovelled, and minor hockey and skating with the gang, and ... curling. But by the beginning of March even the kids were looking for the first signs of spring. I don't think we ever doubted that it was coming, although the grown-ups said they weren't sure.

As a boy my first sign was the growth of icicles down the south walls of the school as the sun started to melt the snow off the roof. The next sign was the appearance of water in the shallow ruts on the roads, as the sun warmed up the narrow strips of exposed tarmac. Coming home from school we could sail chips and bits cardboard down the few yards of 'open water'. In the morning, on the way back to school, it would be frozen solid again but we could run and slide along our new rink on one boot.

Parents didn't seem to pay as much attention to these signs. The sun had been warming for weeks. But, except in the sheltered southwest nooks, the air stayed cold. They were waiting for the 'real' first day of spring - the day the wind went down and they could feel a little warmth in the air. Baby carriages appeared, tucked up in the sun against a south or west wall, or jolting over six-inch ruts in the road. We still had to wear boots but after lunch we could go out in a short jacket. The convoy coat stayed on its peg. At supper many pairs of sodden mittens sat drying on the registers. Spring was here for us, but maybe not just yet for the adults.    Top

Contact Us

Elaine Dendy e-laine@shaw.ca
John Oliver Dendy dendy@islandnet.com
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Revised 9 June, 2007