half hour or so. Then, in the middle of nowhere, without a bang or a sigh, our old van abruptly expired. No matter how often we turned the key or gazed longingly under the hood, nothing we did could persuade it to move an inch.
If you’ve never squeezed into the cab of a tow truck with three dogs, you really haven’t lived. So there we were, enveloped in clouds of warm dog breath, our vehicle dangling from a winch, forcibly returned to our starting point. Back in town, the mechanic at the gas station obligingly tweaked a thingamabob or two, replaced a widget that had blown, and expressed the hope that “she should be good to go.” Thus reassured, we set out next morning for Fort Walsh, a historic post of the fabled North-West Mounted Police, which lies in a picturesque valley just west of Maple Creek. New destination, same story. Five minutes west of Eastend, the van sputtered to the side of the road, and there we were on the end of a winch, being dragged back home.
You might think that by now we’d have received the message, but not so. It was only after our fourth outing, and our third tow back to town, that we finally gave up and submitted to the inevitable. For the time being at least, we were going nowhere. On the surface, the cause of our predicament was obvious—some intractable mechanical problem, not surprising in our old tin can, perhaps brought on by unfriendly weather and lamentable road conditions. Crazy thing, though: that wasn’t the way we felt. Instead of registering as an inconvenience, our dramatic returns to Eastend took on the aura of an intervention, as if some Power Greater Than Ourselves had resorted to the means at hand to grab hold of our attention. (Bad weather, maybe I could accept that, but did the gods really speak through clapped-out Astro vans?) It was ridiculous, we knew, but even though we laughed and shook our heads, we couldn’t quite shake the sense that we were being offered a teaching moment. “Stop,” a quiet voice kept saying. “Stay put. Pay attention to where you are.”
In the week since we’d left Wyoming, Keith and I had been in ceaseless motion, traveling across boundaries, over watersheds, through memory and forgetting, knowledge and ignorance, in the uncharted territory between history and legend. Now we stood on the divide between the mundane and the numinous, between the events of our everyday lives and the meanings that were speaking to us. “Stay put,” that still, small voice insisted. “Pay attention.”
{two} The Stegner House
Find yourself in the middle of nowhere.
Former Eastend tourism slogan
What we noticed first was the silence. If you stood on the curb in front of the Stegner House and listened, you could feel your ears reaching for sounds, as if they were trying to stand up as sharp as a coyote’s. Now and then, a vehicle whispered along the main drag a couple of blocks to the south, and every hour or so a truck hauling a load of huge round bales growled down a gravel road on the western edge of town. But apart from these brief transgressions, the houses on both sides of the street seemed to lie in a trance, as if even the ticking of their clocks had been silenced.
In the kitchen of the Stegner House, the prevailing quiet was broken by an aged refrigerator, which wheezed asthmatically in the performance of its duties. When the wind blew, the storm windows rattled in sympathy and the rooms filled with the rhythmic, wavelike whooshing of the spruce trees in the front yard. But inexplicably these sounds served only to signal an eerie absence of noise. The black rotary telephone beside the dining-room table did not ring. Although our hosts had foreseen all of our basic needs and comforts, they had neglected to provide a radio, and the antiquated TV in the living room, equipped with rabbit ears, could emit little more than hiss. (Our attempts to watch the Canadians beat the U.S. 3–2 in the gold-medal game of the Women’s World Hockey Championship came to naught because the action appeared to be taking place in a blizzard.) With the van consigned to dry dock for as-yet-undetermined repairs, we did not even have the benefit of the radio there. We had been cast adrift, with nothing to guide us but our thoughts and our unaided senses.
Morning after morning, Keith woke to report strange dreams, many of them about his father, who had died, in England, six months earlier. “I’ve never dreamed anything like that,” he’d say, and then tell me how, in his sleep, he had looked at himself in a mirror and seen the face of his dead father looking back. Do you think it’s this stillness? we asked each other. Do you think that staying busy, in constant commotion, is a way to keep from knowing what is really happening to us? Is that why people talk about “profound” silence? For my part, I slept dreamless, as if I were made out of wood, as if I were sleeping the rooted sleep of a poplar.
That was another thing: the dark. On clear, moonless nights just at bedtime, we’d often stand, shivering, in the backyard and gaze out into the universe. The darkness was as black as water, and you sensed that if you lost your footing, you might fall helpless into its depths. And the stars, stars beyond counting, streaming across the sky, all trillions of miles distant across an ether of space and time. “Stay put,” the voice had told us. “Pay attention to where you are.” We were in the yard of the Stegner House, on Tamarack Street, in the town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, at the foot of the Cypress Hills. We were whirling through space on the skin of a living planet.
In a town where everyone knows everyone else, visitors are painfully obvious. So we weren’t surprised when, occasionally, someone stopped us on the street or in the grocery store and politely ran through the basics of who, what, why, when, and where. Were we enjoying our stay in Eastend? they’d ask in conclusion, and we were happy to oblige with a “yes.” But the aisles of the Co-op, between the tea and the tinned beans, didn’t really seem like the place to talk to strangers about our inner lives. Instead, I might say that it was a treat to see cottontails and white-tailed deer grazing on people’s lawns. Or in a more expansive mood, I would rhapsodize about the view from the room at the top of the Stegner House (where I should have been working but wasn’t, though they didn’t need to know that) and the way the land drew your eyes from the backyard across the alley to the creek, with its fringe of willows, and then up and away to the hills. Strange, misshapen hills that made me think of ancient, fantastical worlds.
If the questioner seemed particularly sympathetic, I might even admit to the homely pleasures of nostalgia. For walking the streets of Eastend that autumn was like walking onto a set for the movie version of my childhood. Although the prairie towns of my youth were hundreds of miles distant and decades in the past, this place was almost as I remembered them. The grain elevators that presided over Railway Street, though strangely unbusy, recalled the dry, half-forgotten aromas of grain dust and “chop.” The guys in ball caps who drew their half-tons up side by side in the middle of the main street looked familiar as they leaned out their cab windows to exchange shop talk. The kids on bicycles who, unafraid of strangers, stopped to talk to me and Keith could have been my childhood friends or models for paintings by Norman Rockwell. When the school bell rang to announce recess, it was all I could do to keep from hurrying over to the playground and looking for my own small self, shrieking with joyful dizziness on the merry-go-round or catching spiders in the tall grass along the fence.
If I were ever to lay claim to a hometown, it would have to be somewhere like this, a kind of simulacrum of all the places where my family had lived. Although my parents had both started out as teachers, my mother gave up her profession in the late 1940s to prepare for my birth, the first in what would become a family of three daughters. The result was that our family life, thereafter, was ruled by my father’s career. Motivated sometimes by necessity and sometimes by boyish ambition, he moved from job to job and from success to success. Every time he changed jobs, and sometimes when he did not, we moved house. In my first fourteen years, we moved fourteen times.
I don’t know how my mother put up with it, all that packing and unpacking, all that rending and rebuilding of life, but as a kid, I was remarkably open to the promise of a fresh start. Maybe this time I’d get a room of my own. Maybe the new town would have
