I will miss the open prairie and big sky.
This is part one of a two-part goodbye to Saskatchewan column.
Rumours of my impending departure are true. Rumours that my wife left me are not.
In the middle of June, I will be headed east (and north) to join her in Labrador.
I was born in Regina in 1963. In 1970, my family moved to Ottawa. It was a traumatic experience for me. Looking back, it felt kind of like a betrayal, uprooting me from the only life I had ever known and dragging me halfway across the country. I was just young enough to be terrified and just old enough to be aware of it.
In any event, at that point, I had lived just long enough in Saskatchewan for the province to have become firmly etched in my psyche. I have always been drawn back. And I have always been a Roughriders fan.
One of my most enduring memories from those early years was cresting the lip of the Qu’Appelle Valley on the way to Regina Beach, where my grandparents had a cottage (there’s the easterner in me). So, it was perhaps fitting when I finally made my way back in 2007, newly married, that our first stop would be within that valley, albeit 80 or so kilometres east as the raven flies at Fort Qu’Appelle.
We, Lorraine and I, arrived in Fort Qu’Appelle from Smithers, B.C., where we, two nomads with wanderlust trying to find our place in the world, had met.
We kept wandering from Fort Qu’Appelle to Saskatoon and then Yorkton.
Could this be the place? We tried to put down some roots here, we really did, but they didn’t take.
We gave it the old college try, though. In fact, as I was puttering around what is now our mostly empty home, listening to my footsteps echo, I realized that aside from my childhood home, that is, my parents’ house in Ottawa, the house on Aspen Place is the dwelling in which I have lived longer than any other place in my life. And not by a little bit, probably by about double.
I actually lived slightly longer in Austin, Texas (by a couple of months), but I lived in four different abodes while I was there. Here, only the one house.
And Lorraine even has me beat when it comes to moving around because being the child of an RCMP officer, she never even had the stable childhood home.
Each of us had a different circuitous route to get to B.C. Hers took her from Ontario to Newfoundland to New Brunswick to Maine, back to Ontario then B.C.
Mine was from Saskatchewan to Ontario to Quebec back to Ontario, Texas, Ontario again, and B.C.
Since then we have been in-step with one another, albeit with the requisite occasional challenges that go hand-in-hand with going hand-in-hand with another person.
When I complete the move to Newfoundland and Labrador we will both have lived in five Canadian provinces and one American state.
Northern Labrador is not unknown to me. I spent the summer of 1989 there, doing geological work for the Geological Survey of Canada. It was one of the most transformational experiences of my life.
The nature of geological work can take you to the most inaccessible places. We visited areas inland that could only be reached by helicopter, or perhaps caribou trail. We visited islands that were completely untouched by humanity.
With each footstep I took in those remote places, I had a profound sense that I may be the only person to have ever walked there. It is a truly humbling, yet somehow affirmational feeling.
The north coast of Labrador is one of the most remote places on Earth where people still actually live, although not very many. The entire population of Labrador is around 26,000 and 20,000 of those are concentrated in and around the interior communities of Labrador City and Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
Postville, where I am going, where Lorraine already is, is a village of 180-some people up the coast from Goose Bay, which is only accessible by air or by sea.
When Lorraine got on the plane to Postville, she posted a picture of her handwritten boarding pass on Facebook. When was the last time you saw a handwritten boarding pass?
Suffice it to say, I am excited. It promises to be a rare and wonderful adventure.
It is not without some mixed feelings and trepidation I embark on this magnificent journey, however.
I will save that for next week.
