Pop 89: Prairie Gold
By Madonna Hamel
Prairie gold is not always wheat. It is also the wealth of writers sprung from this land. So much of the character of this place, its very soul, is in its stories, many of them not written but told over years, decades and generations, in tents and around fires, through winter counts, and myths and legends. Among them also, are ghost stories and witness impact statements recounted by ancestors. And they become valuable gold when passed along.
The library is to books what grain elevators are to wheat, I think, as I labour home past the old elevator with my bag of thirteen library books. Our little Chinook library branch sits at one end of the main street. At the other end is the elevator, preserved and re-painted, still waiting on the restoration committee to bequeath upon it its new identity.
An elevator is a storage tank of rich potential, I continue to muse, shifting the book of bags from one hand to another. It holds materials until they can be taken away and made into things like bread and cakes and pasta. So too, is the library a holder of potential, of worlds sitting waiting to be discovered and plumbed. I stop and salute the WWII cenotaph (and my uncles’ names among those who served ). But I’m also saluting the elevator, standing like a sentinel behind it.
It’s sad to see the elevator empty, like it’s sad to see an empty bookshelf. I understand some people work hard all day. And what young parent has time for books? But I also know that a lot of people squander their precious time scrolling through inane posts on their cell phones, surrendering their valuable time and energy bearing witness to the successful attention-seeking behaviours of celebrities named, at the moment, Kim and Kanye.
These postings are nothing more than tributes to tantrums. I didn’t subscribe to them, and yet they show up on my phone on a daily basis, pandering to my susceptibility to rubber-neck at a crime scene. They elbow their way into my brain every time I check my phone my phone in case my sister called with updates on my father’s health.
Against all my better angels, I catch myself gawking at his childish pout and her painstakingly manicured hair and face, a feat curated by an entire team to cash in on a planned camera op to “spontaneously” catch them entering or leaving a building.
Why do I do this? Is it just so I can express my righteous indignation at a culture so totally bereft of soul? Does it make me feel better? No. Because getting caught staring at the train wreck of American popular culture is a massive time suck, and, more importantly, it does not reflect my life out here on the prairie where no woman owns a pair of stilettos. (No, wait, I take that back, a few young ones still have a pair stashed in the back of the closet they haul out once a year when they drive to the city to go to a wedding reception or a club.
I recently reread James H. Gray’s The Winter Years. Gray started his illustrious career as a chronicler of prairie history reporting for the Winnipeg Free Press. Like most westerners, he struggled to keep food on the table during the Depression. In The Winter Years, he writes how the local library became a kind of halfway house. On his return home from another fruitless job search in the dead of winter, he’d stop in the library to get warm. The library was a haven for himself and others less fortunate.
People became loyal library patrons, spending whole days among the stacks. They weren’t always reading, but if they wanted to stay, they would have to start. Or at least appear to be. “All over western Canada, people were reading as never before,” he wrote. They may have been sleeping under those books, but they were also looking for something beyond distractions to kill time. They weren’t looking at cell phone posts. “They were searching for a sign, a light to pull them out of their personal wilderness.”
Gray maintains that, in a big way, libraries brought in “a new generation of dissenters.” They were looking for answers to their plight. “The economics shelves at the libraries were taking up more room,” he wrote. Books by H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley rubbed covers with J.M. Keynes and Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class. If the authors of said books were thrown together in the flesh, Gray joked, they’d break into a brawl. But the library, being the greatest example of democracy, threw all kinds of ideas together. New ideas and perspectives “were sifting into the public sphere.”
It will be interesting to see if the pandemic provoked a rise in reading the way the Depression did. It will take volition to put down our phones and pick up a book. Gray and his contemporaries never had celebrity pouts and poses following us from room to room. But he did benefit from a reading culture, and eventually, he became one of a lineage of exceptional Prairie authors whose collective gifts, I believe, were bestowed, and sometimes foisted, upon them by this vast and raw land, with all its challenges. This land has a knack for tethering wayward minds, of bringing us back to ourselves.
My hope is that you, dear reader, will give yourself that gift of prairie gold, that pleasure that returns you to yourself, by reading an author whose tales sprang from this land. I wish for you the thrill of reading. I hope books bring you what they brought Mr.Gray all those dark Depression days: “a light that pulls you out of wilderness”. And may it pull you into the immediate world around you. Next week I plan to share with you a brief list of my all-time best-loved prairie authors and their books. I hope you’ll share yours, too.