Prairie

Arcola, Saskatchewan

“I would walk to the end of the street and over the prairie with the clickety grasshoppers bunging in arcs ahead of me, and I could hear the hum and twang of wind in the great prairie harp of telephone wires. Standing there with the total thrust of prairie sun on my vulnerable head, I guess I learned – at a very young age – that I was mortal.”
W.O. Mitchell from Who Has Seen the Wind

Somewhere between Arcola and Crocus, Saskatchewan there is a gap that separates reality from imagination. It is a little tricky to get from one side to the other but, if these directions are followed closely, you will make the transition, without fail:

From Dead Ted’s Bar in Arcola, travel north on Main Street,
Follow Main Street to Highway 13 and turn left,
Proceed west on Highway 13 toward Weyburn,
As you pass Kisbey, tune your radio back to 1955 and listen to an episode of Jake and the Kid.

Time and travel will slow down, the road will get rough, but presently you will arrive in Crocus, fictional home of W.O. Mitchell, iconic Canadian novelist, and dramatist.

William Ormond (but nobody called him that) Mitchell was born in Weyburn, SK in 1914. As a child, he was influenced by the boundless nature of his physical environment, and by the multi-faceted people he encountered in those wide-open spaces.

The early death of his father and a struggle with tuberculosis gave young Mitchell a keen understanding of his own mortality, and the unrelenting cycles of prairie life.

“W.O.” Mitchell, as he came to be known, had a profound understanding of the prairie experience; he transformed that knowledge into words. Mitchell wrote about the meaning of birth and death, life, freedom, and justice, often from the perspective of children, in the fictional town of Crocus, Saskatchewan. In novel, screenplay, and poetry, W.O. Mitchell captured the prairie and preserved it for all time.

Reading Mitchell’s work is like taking a walk down the railroad track on a July day. It is wind and gophers and grass, meadowlarks and heat mirage, life, death and above all, the love of prairie.

I have been following W.O. Mitchell’s path all my life. We both grew up in and around Crocus, or some such town in Saskatchewan. Mitchell relocated to High River, in the foothills of Alberta, to pursue his career; I moved to neighbouring Millarville for mine.

Both Mitchell and I lost a parent early in life.

I relate to several of Mitchell’s characters, Brian the boy growing up on the prairie, Hugh the reckless teenager, Jake the philosopher/hired man, and maybe just a little of Saint Sammy, the madman.

While W.O. Mitchell and I grew from common grassland roots, the depth and clarity of his ability to interpret the prairie experience eclipses mine exponentially. I marvel at Mitchell’s ability to convey the essence of prairie to the rest of us and I strive to emulate that talent.

W.O. Mitchell’s writing is a poetic blend of reality and imagination; he captures the wind, the sky, and the collective imaginings of people who share a love of …

… Prairie.

“What’s real? I’ll tell you – the beginnin’, that’s gettin’ born; – the end, that’s gettin’ dead . . .

Both of them is real – good an’ real.’

W.O. Mitchell from Who Has Seen the Wind

This is one in a series of stories entitled Tales from Dead Ted’s, a chronicle of fictional events with just a kernel of truth in each. The events occurred in and around Arcola in the 1960s and 1970s. Click on the link below for more stories about growing up on the Canadian prairie.

wellwaterblog.ca – tales from dead ted’s