Pop 89: Golden Hour on Grace Road

By Madonna Hamel

This year The Town Man is a teenage girl with the unsurpassed industriousness of an ant preparing for winter. Yesterday she filled the potholes on Centre Street. Most years the men from the RM flatten the whole mess with the grader and call it a day. The patchwork of shiny black ink spots on an otherwise dusty road suffices for a season or two.

Some roads are get no respect, others are best left untampered with. A narrow path through the grass, worn down by deer and cattle, show us the best route home. Mess too much with a dirt path and, after a heavy rain turns it to gumbo, you’ll be three inches taller by the time you walk in the front door.
However, The Gateway to Grasslands National Park - as Val Marie has come to be named - deserves a highway befitting international travellers. Highway 4 is the road that teases the world away from The TransCan (and up from America) to Val Marie and our national park. But returning from Medicine Hat along our great national highway the other day I noted that signs directing folks to Grasslands are vague if non-existent. “South on 4” the sign says. As if city folk know their North from South. The next sign tells folks wanting to go to Cadillac or Rosetown to veer off now, though there’s no indication that they are in opposite directions. And there’s no mention of GNP at all.

I’ve driven all over the States and Canada and I have to say that road signs in America give drivers plenty of information as to where to turn and plenty of time to get over to the right lane. My Saskatchewan friends don’t disagree. They just claim the vagueness is deliberate: They don’t really want tourists filling up this quiet and vast territory.

Larry McMurtry writes about his favourite highways in “Roads”. He opens the book waxing about childhood nights watching trucks pass his family’s land-locked porch in Texas. Unlike Mark Twain, he “ had no river to float on, to wonder about.” So Highway 281 was his river, “traversing the central plains, all the way form Manitoba to the Mexican border…its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement.”

Highway 4 is my river. I call it Grace Road. The rolling grass hills of sage and grazing cattle, of horses chasing each other in open fields, the bounding hares and stotting deer and antelope racing alongside me, the hawks and eagles and owls perched on fenceposts and telephone poles, the coyotes, foxes and badgers lurking in ditches, the epic Renaissance clouds - every one of them work loose my troubles. Like the little Lutheran church, in the middle of nowhere, weather-beaten but still standing, Highway 4 is a humble yet stalwart road.

My first foray down Highway 4 to Val Marie I was on my way to a three-month stay at The Convent Inn. A storm was brewing. Clouds were thickening and seemed to be zipping across the sky, gathering muscle as they fled. I was excited, not just about a new chapter in my life, but about the building storm itself. The epic quality of it felt like a good omen, reminding me that there are unpredictable forces in nature that can still shake a person in their boots and reduce us to teachable students.

After Cadillac, Highway 4 became an adventure - a beautiful, breathtaking, stunning, mediation of a wild and wide open country. Anything can happen, I thought. The only vehicle I met was a tractor turning into a farm road. After Cadillac, there be dragons, I said to myself, thinking of the uncharted maps of the ancient world. Dust began whipping insects through the sudden black air, with large strange ropes of lightning, lassoing the valley, circling me and my car. I drove through flying insects and hoops of lightning and when I finally pulled up to The Convent I was thrilled to be greeted by Mette, the owner, who showed me to my basement room via storm cellar doors.

Since then, I’ve taken Highway 4 hundreds of times to get supplies or go to the doctor. Once there I make a day of it, scouring the SPCA bookstore for something to take to Urban Ground and read over a latte. No matter my state of mind leaving home that morning, by the time I reach Beaver Valley most frets have fallen away. If the light is right, a shimmering bit of language presents itself, rising up before me like a larkspur flitting past my windshield and I have to pull over to jot down the words before they fly away.

Everyone who loves the road knows the sweet relief and release of driving and crying. Maybe you pump up your favourite heartbreak song or a soaring piece of orchestra - it could be Beethoven or Benny Goodman. Maybe you roll down the window and let the wind loosen the cobwebs in your brain. Or maybe, like me, you let yourself be shaken by the sudden golden rays - the God shot, as my photographer friends call them - piercing the columns of clouds rising all the way from the horizon to heaven.

I try to time my return trips to meld with the golden hour, when weeping comes easy. Sunset shapes the hills with the most dramatic, heaven-sent shadows and light. Sentinel hawks, eagles and owls nod in recognition as I enter the twilit zone, less a frightening sci-fi reality than a place where the veil between Down Here and Up There is so thin, anything can happen. And, “anything” does not mean spaceships landing as much as worries leaving, being freed from the quotidian restrictions of reasoning so prevalent in the harsh light of the noonday sun. At the Golden Hour on Grace Road, life feels less a series of unsolvable problems than a of bounty unspeakable mysteries, ineffable praiseworthy gifts.