Preface

Where I Live Now

In 1994 I published a memoir called The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature. It was my eighth book, my first non-fiction, and to this day the best-received and most successful of my books. I take little credit for this: Phyllis Bruce, my editor, took a small manuscript about building a relationship with nature and encouraged me to turn it into a narrative about a life lived on the land, and then we sent the memoir out into Canada having no idea — or at least, I certainly didn’t — of what to expect in terms of response. I went off to Italy with my older sister something like the day after it was released, and after a week in Rome and a few days in Florence, while visiting in my sister’s sister-in-law’s house in the Friuli countryside about an hour from Venice, I phoned home. My husband told me that my literary agent and Phyllis had called to congratulate me because the book was on the Canadian bestseller list, I think then at number four. By early July it had gone to number one; it would stay on the list for a year. I’m telling you this not so much to brag — I still have a faintly stunned look on my face when I think of it — but to provide you with background to this book before you.

When I say I take little credit for that book’s success, I mean that sometimes such a response is not so much that the book in question is brilliantly written or wonderfully astute and incisive. It is simply the right book at the right moment. Inadvertently (or perhaps not so inadvertently), a writer has something to say that is exactly what the reading public is parched for, and when such a book happens to appear, everybody clamours to read it. Much as I want to believe that The Perfection of the Morning was a work of genius, I know that it was what it was (not for me to judge) and that it was one of these books I’ve been describing.

At that point I had been living on my husband’s cattle ranch and on the hay farm (forty miles — nothing in that vast country — northeast of the ranch) for around twenty years, having come from the small city of Saskatoon, where I’d been working on a graduate degree and teaching at the University of Saskatchewan.

I do not come from a distinguished academic family. I believe I was the first to teach at a university, but within months and then years I was leapfrogged over by a cousin who earned the first PhD, and soon by the unstoppable and ebullient younger generation, and now by their children, so that graduate degrees in the family today are fairly prosaic. All of this is to say that it was unexpected that I would one day simply walk away from that esteemed life and a respected university position and go to live on a remote cattle ranch located in the extreme southwest corner of Saskatchewan only a few miles from the Montana and Alberta borders. The ranch is situated on the Old Man On His Back Plateau — the naming is Blackfoot or Siksika and refers to their cultural hero, Napi, who is the “Old Man” of both the plateau and the river in Alberta. In some way I don’t fully understand, the plateau is Napi’s body, or it is the mark or formation left from the time that he lay there, weary and bleeding from battle, before he rose and went west to disappear into the mountains. One day he will return, I am told, is how the rest of the story goes, although to the First Nations people to whom this story belongs, it is not merely a story, but traditional belief. I would never get over the thrill of knowing that now I lived in such a potent place.

No one could understand our marriage, no one in Peter’s world and no one in mine: Peter’s friends and family said it wouldn’t last a year, and mine, being slightly more optimistic, gave it two years. I was a “city girl,” and city girls were famously feckless when it came to milking cows and chasing them around on horseback, to helping deliver calves, to understanding the seasonal round of work, or to telling one grass from another or poisonous forbs from nutritious ones, work utterly vital to the cattle enterprise. Nor were they able to stay on horseback for ten hours at a stretch, or to know in a treeless country how to lie low in the tall grass out of the wind to keep warm.

And the history! Every moment of every day we lived in the midst of the settlers’ past where no piece of land, no falling-down empty house or shack was without a story, nearly always about heart-breaking hardship overcome, or about the saddest failure, the ignominious, broken departure from the land. Occasionally, many years later, I would meet a man whose story I’d been told — one of those who had had to leave his land. I would be rendered speechless by the meeting of myth and reality. All of this was a lesson in stories.

What Peter and I shared, as this book will tell, was a deep love of and respect for the beauty of nature and its ineffable mystery, the wonder of the deer, moose, pronghorns, occasional elk, the coyotes and foxes, all the way down to little creatures that ran the banks of the Frenchman River at the hay farm, the schools of fish that swam in it, and the snakes of sometimes astonishing size. Great birds came and went: pelicans, wild swans, ducks and geese and eagles, both golden and bald, and snowy owls, and songbirds — red-winged blackbirds and bluebirds and meadowlarks. We lived for the smell of the prairie in the spring, for the way the leaves of a certain grass curled, or made eyebrows, or another turned mauve for a few days on its way to maturity. We loved the buffalo horn casings we dug up out of the prairie, the stone flakes and artifacts from centuries ago. We loved the moon and the wheeling constellations and the way the coulees ran musically with melting snow in the spring. I think we loved even the howling blizzards and the sucking mud and the rocks scattered everywhere by melting glaciers.

But as the years passed, slowly, one after the other, not with neat calendar breaks but seamlessly in an eternal round of being and doing, a life lived under the stars and the endless sky, in the constant wind, through killing blizzards and summer storms that cracked and bellowed, and lit the sky from horizon to horizon, and periods of such intense cold or equally intense summer heat, I began to feel my mind, my heart, my soul — all of them — being slowly opened so that the boundary between me and these things melted, dissolved. Through awe-inspiring dreams, eventually through small visions, the Great Mystery of our being became clearer to me. Not the answer, but the question — the eternal question.

I had to re-educate myself. I learned not just about grasses, forbs, shrubs, or rocks, lichen and moss, or land formations or birthing calves or diseases of cattle, or the wild animals of the plains, but about the further history, the very long one of the Indigenous people (in Canada we say, at their request, the “First Nations”) whose land we were living on. This vast, empty, grassed land filled up with stories: the easy ones — of settlers, government policies, agricultural changes — and the very hard, long First Nations’ ones.

All of this is what that small book, The Perfection of the Morning, was about. How living on the land as thoroughly as we did, as completely as we did, changed us, or changed me. The book was about me learning to live in nature. In this I was taught the practicalities by Peter, my husband, by my books, by what I learned walking over the unplowed prairie every day for many years and, most of all, by the things I saw out on the land that I knew weren’t “really there,” though they once had been, and by my dreaming. There, in an excess of wonder and bafflement, rage and desire, I became a writer.

Thirty-three years I lived on those plains in the end, thirty-one as Peter’s wife. A relatively young divorcée and single parent of thirty-six turned into a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother. It was a terrible life; it was an enchanted life; it was a blessed life.

And, of course, one day it ended.

There would be for me, I would find, no “normal” life after that; I would live the rest of my years in the shadow of that world. This is what this book is about, both the leaving and the sorrow and unending grief, and the inscrutable undertakings of fate and the future.