Where The Hills Are
Darryl October 9th, 2007
Goodlands, Manitoba, Canada… I hunched over the console of the four-wheeler bundled in thick winter gloves, coveralls, and toque against the cold rainy air.
Dan fiddled with the ignition key.
‘Ok, now press the starter button.’
The four-wheel came to life under me. A few pumps on the thumb throttle showed that this little machine was ready to go.
Dan on his Polaris, me on a Honda borrowed from the neighbours, we gunned up, made a tight circle in the turning area in front of the big horse barn, then rumbled through the pasture gate.
It was a grey fall late afternoon in Southern Manitoba, just about two miles from the Goodlands crossing into the US.
Nancy and I had arrived the day previous at the farm of her cousin Heather and her husband Dan, after a three day trek across the Canadian prairies from Edmonton.
We were now parked, plugged, and leveled in the driveway beside their farmhouse. The current view from our fifth wheel’s bay of windows was a brown grass coulee to the north peeking through hundred year oaks, now bare.
Nancy’s great-ancestors had come to Canada in 1885, all four arriving in this little corner of Manitoba after crossing the Atlantic from England on the same ship. Now they lay head-to-head about six miles away in the oldest cemetery in the area, forever together in the timeless rhythm of snows, crocuses, and switchgrass of the Turtle Mountains.
We were home it seemed.
Our preoccupation while visiting was to catch up with the family news before moving on; the new babies, the health of the older people, and the most recent chapters in the farmer’s story, the endless wrestle with omnipotent soil, beast, weather, and marketing boards.
Dan and I snaked steadily up the pasture as our noisy machines climbed Dan’s home section of the western rise of the Mountain. Up the hill and away from our sudden disturbance, fifty magnificent horses broke into a gallop, disappearing over the crest.
At the top of the open pasture, we halted at a gate of three-strand barbed wire. A dropped marionette, its strings and arms suddenly losing all articulation, the wire gate collapsed into the brown grass and gravel ruts. Single file, we pulled our machines into the next pasture and stopped.
Still showing the effects of a protective mare’s kick the previous week, Dan hobbled over to close the gate behind us, then yelled our destination over the idling machines. We were going to take the trail ride path back through the hills, up through a couple of valleys, then run down the north-south fenceline to the border.
Just before the start of the woods at the top of the pasture, we broke over a summit to a panorama over some 500 square miles that lay below us.
Dim light of an unseen sun behind glowing clouds turned far-scattered metal grain bins and distant villages into dull highlights on the vast checkerboard spread before us, as the west escarpment of the Turtle Mountains surrendered back into flat prairie.
The terrain changed abruptly as we turned off the stubble onto a deer trail parting dense bush. Our machines wove between oak and white poplar trees rising from the forest’s mat of tall dry grass, naked of their leaves in the wet grey of late fall.
At the first valley we drew up to the edge of a precipice about seventy-five feet above the creek bottom. In the distance, wet black branches scribbled on a fiery yellow carpet of fallen leaves damply stuck to the steep slope of the opposing valley wall.
A bald eagle dropped from the tallest tree and flew across our view, long powerful strokes pulling him up the valley.
“This is Eagle’s Nest Hill,” Dan shouted. “Usually two pair here”.
I asked if they wintered, and what they ate. Yes, they stay through. Roadkill and deer carcasses.
Dan throttled up and roared over the hummock. For a few seconds, I stayed behind, watching the eagle bank around the last bend at the top of the valley, then I gunned over the hill myself.
Loosely following the north-south fence line, we wound our way down the trail through the leafless bush, breaking out now and then to cross hidden glens of tall dry grass.
The air was crisp and biting against my face. As it bumped me over the uneven ground, controlling the four-wheeler was intensely physical. Under my coveralls, my body radiated a constant supply of heat.
We paused in a clearing surrounded by forty-foot bare white poplar trunks standing upright against deep green spruce.
Dan pointed to an almost indescernible rise in the meadow.
The mound was where a house had once stood. A man had lived there hermit-like for many years, finally dying alone one winter. Waiting peacefully, it was some time before he was discovered by the neighbours.
The small wood house, barn and outbuildings were long gone, traces of his lane all but erased by grass now ruffling in sunset’s gusts across the meadow.
I stood up on my machine looking over this one man’s place of solitude. Not a trace remained of the man, just his story. His time here, and his end to a time on earth seemed fitting, and perfect.
We emerged from the end of the draw about where the hermit’s road must have, then rounded a thick bush. Sitting into its edge was an old trailer.
A large dead tree had fallen midpoint into its roof. Poplar and scrub oak were well along as they reclaimed the yard area.
Hauled in many years ago, the trailer was the lodge of urban hunters who had been coming every fall for moose and deer. They would be back this year, and likely for a few more years after that. In the larger scheme of these hills, it would not be long before the trailer itself would rejoin the land, and this meadow too would have only a story for a few generations.
We broke through an open pasture gate onto a road running perpendicular to our general direction of travel. This was Boundary Road, the last road before the US border.
There was one more field to the south, and we followed a set of ruts a short distance to its edge and then stopped.
We had arrived.
After our journey through the valleys, it was an uneventful place.
An uneven rill of gravel had been piled up on one side of the cut by a grader or caterpillar, now serving as a ceremonial wall between us and the United States of America.
It was strange to me that trees and rocks and seasons in a land just a few feet away were somehow perceived by the larger world to be so much different than the trees and rocks and seasons I was standing among in this country. I looked to see if I could see something different. I could not. It seemed the same.
Dan pulled his watch from his pocket. We had just enough time to get back for dinner.
Motivated by a hunger about to be satisfied by some good home cooking and needing to stay on a schedule promised to wives, we would take the fast route home down Boundary Road to the main highway, then back north along a path in the main highway’s ditch.
The highway to and from America was as bare as the fall’s trees, empty as we made our way along its sloped ditch.
Turning, we bumped over the field road leading up to the barns, approaching from the south.
We rolled into the farmyard and shut down the machines. The expedition had chilled Dan’s hands, arthritic from years of work and cold, and he was anxious to get into the warm. The day’s light was almost gone as we walked to the house.
Nancy and I had been coming to the Turtle Mountains for close to forty years. For the first time, I had just become part of something I thought I knew well.
I felt somehow more completed.
Suddenly, I thought of my brother who had four-wheeled for thirty years as he surveyed the prairies. We had been around him and his machines constantly. How was it that I had never even been on one before?
I realized what had just happened, what had changed to make it possible.
A life too busy with pursuit had left neither time nor attitude for seeing rather than looking, doing rather than dreaming.
Before I could protest out of habit, a cool fall afternoon with no plan and a four-wheeler had effortlessly taken me right into the hills. They had gently forced me into enjoyments that, over all those years for reasoning I no longer laboured under, I had found reasons not to partake.
In the house, the smell of fresh buns hot out of the oven overtook all other thoughts. I quickly peeled off my outer layer and washed up.
Four-wheeling, the Turtle Mountains of southern Manitoba, and simple participation in the here-and-now, these would be invitations that I would not pass up on again.