Pop89

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

Pop89 feels like a good title for a column by an ex-urbanite whose month-long retreat to a convent-turned-B&B situated on the edge of Grasslands National Park turned into an eight-year immersion into the sort of exquisite darkness and silence that both illuminates the soul and challenges ego on a daily basis.

Pop: 89 is a space to ponder on village life and how it shapes and, in my case, re-shapes perspective on the world in surprising, essential and irreversible ways. For urban readers less fortunate than I, I wish to celebrate and flaunt the countless benedictions of country living. But, even more so, I hope to engage rural readers who already know how lucky they are.

I expect to be enlightened and corrected by locals on matters pertaining to life in rural towns. After all, I’ve only lived in Val Marie, SK, for eight years. Most of my neighbours were raised here, and they raised their children here. And now those kids raise kids of their own, continuing a life of rootedness in contrast to my life as a kind of an existential drifter, a blow-in, hoping to rest a spell.

I am “rural by choice,” a term used by DownYonder.com author Whitney Kimball Coe, who left New York City to raise her children in Athens, (Pop: 13,000) Tennessee. Since I left home for university in 1977, I’ve moved every seven years or so, driven by restlessness, scratching a geographical itch.

Long before I landed here, I was drawn to the ruminations of rural authors. (Many of them American, due to a degree in American Lit.) I find myself often quoting the words of a farmer, poet and essayist. In The Art of Commonplace he voices the need for more farmers in a country where the number of prisoners is far higher. ( he is not a promoter of agri-business, and calls anyone who is a “pornographer of farming.”) He sees agrarian ideals as the alternative to an urban culture filled with stress, anxiety, and destructiveness. Berry tended his Kentucky farm (nearest town being New Castle, Pop: 912) until age limited his ability to work on the land. He bequeathed his acres to a community of farming nuns.

Chris Bohjalian is a novelist. (Buffalo Soldier and Skeletons at the Feast are among my favourites.) In 1986 he and his wife were car-jacked and dropped in front of a crack house, miles from their home in Brooklyn. While laying on the pavement, his wife suggested they move to the country. They did. And Bohjalian began writing Idyll Banter, a weekly column about living in smalltown Vermont. (Lincoln, Vermont, (Pop: 975).

My inspiration for Pop:89 came from Michael Perry’s book Population:485. Perry is a firefighter, an EMT and an author who writes above a storefront overlooking Main Street in New Auburn, Wisconsin (Pop: 485). I stumbled onto the book while living part-time with my bluesman boyfriend in Marshall, MI (Pop: 6,940). The toy shop-children’s clothing-bookstore stocked a hodge-podge of titles, a mix of mystery, detective and memoir.

In Population:485, Perry writes about returning home after nineteen years. “What I missed - what I craved,” he writes, “was the lay of the land. A familiar corner, a particular hill, certain patches of trees. Somewhere along the line, my soul imprinted on topography. I returned and the land felt right. The land takes you back. All you have to do is show up.”

I’d like to think that the land took me back, taking me for my mother. She was born three miles out of town along the RCMP patrol line. Mom left in 1946 at the age of sixteen, but the old house is still there, its roof collapsed inward. A double-arrowed trail post pointing West to Wood Mountain and East to Cypress Hills marks the property, one of its arrows shot off.

Or maybe the land senses my respect, notes my regular visits, my morning and nightly walks up past the cemetery, along Frenchman River or to the top of 70 Mile Butte. Because I do respect the land, and if I don’t, it will extract it from me. “Either way, the land gets its due,” to quote one of the valley’s first ranchers.

“Finding your place among people,” continues Perry, “now, that is another proposition. You can’t force your way in,” he warns. Nor, I’d add, can you impress, charm, bribe, or bs your way in.

Every year, as the park becomes more popular, there’s always a handful of tourists who descend upon us as if from a space capsule from the future. They come bearing wisdom and free advice for the locals. In patronizing tones, they inform them - us - of the world and its workings, assuming no one here has a computer or reads a paper or leaves their land. I cringe when I hear them. They remind me of me my first year here, compulsively sharing my literary accomplishments to a community that could care less. Can you drive a combine? Can you herd cattle? Can you flip burgers at the rodeo? Sell beer at the bonspiel? That’s what they need to know.

At some point in a youth’s life, we pronounce, to anyone within listening distance, that we were blowing this two-bit pop-stand. We are headed for the city, or for the halls of higher learning, or for the road. It doesn’t matter where, just not here. But then, around a dozen years before retirement, we find ourselves yearning for something smaller in scale. Something human-sized, less frenzied.

I want to talk about that yearning. About the things we do to fill or quell it. One thing some of us do is to arrive, late in life, into a human-sized, land-rooted community where, yes, everybody knows your business, but they also know your name.

“Your place in the cast of characters evolves over time,” continues Perry. I may not achieve local status, but I like to think folks are getting used to me. Above all, I like to brag that I live in a place where the deer and the antelope still play and continue to outnumber the humans, out here, at home on the range.