gave us only a little better, and 1919 served us up such blistering hot winds that we didnât evenbother to call in the threshers. One more year and we would have proved up on the homestead and been Canadians all the way instead of only halfway. But when you have stood for three summers in a row turning from the rainy east to the windy southwest, and propitiated one and cursed the other, and every time, just when you have been brought to the point of hope by good spring rains, have felt that first puff out of the southwest, hotter by far than the air around you, you are not likely to require further proofs. My father did not grow discouraged; he grew furious. When he matched himself against something he wanted a chance to win. By 1920 he was already down in Montana scouting around for some new opportunity, and we had stopped walking the paths and making our marks on the face of the prairie.
But how much of my remembering senses is imprisoned there where I would not for a thousand dollars an hour return to live! I retain, as surely as a salmon returning to its spawning grounds after six years at sea knows its native stream, and turns in unerringly from salt water, the taste and smell of the rezavoy when we swam in it among the agitated garter snakes and frogs. (Where they came from, God alone knew. There were none in that semi-desert when we built the dam, but next spring there were pollywogs. My mother firmly believed it rained them.) I could detect just as surely, if someone offered me a cup of it now, the clay-tasting, modified rezavoy water that we drankâthe water from a well-hole dug eight or ten feet from shore so that the seepage from the open slough would be filtered by earth. It took a good amount of earth and earth flavors with it in passage, and it was about as full of wigglers as the rezavoy itself. In late summer we boiled it, but it never lost its taste. The water of Coteau Creek, by contrast, had a slick, soapy taste of alkali about it, and if we had to drink it for any length of time, as we did the last two summers, it gave us the trots.
There was a whole folklore of water. People said a man had to make a dipperful go as far as it would. You boiled sweet corn, say. Instead of throwing the water out, you washed the dishes in it. Then you washed your hands in it a few times. Then you strained it through a cloth into the radiator of your car, and if your car should break down you didnât just leave the water to evaporate in its gullet, but drained it out to water the sweet peas.
We learned to drink with an eye on the dipper so as to keep from sucking down wigglers. When we went on a dayâs visit to some farm and had a good clean drink out of a deep well, we made jokes that the water didnât seem to have much body to it. All we lacked to put us into the position of the surveyors and hunters who had drunk slough water in that country in the 1870âs was a few buffalo to fill our tank with urine and excrement.
As much as we starved for a decent drink we starved for shade. No one who has not lived out on a baking flat where the summer days are eighteen hours long and the midday temperatures can go up to a hundred and five degrees has any business talking about discomfort from heat. The air crisps the skin and cracks the lips. There is not a tree for fifty miles in any direction, not even a whisker of willows, to transpire moisture into the air or shade one inch of the scorched ground. The wind that hundreds of miles to the west started up the mountains warm and wet had dropped its moisture on the heights and come down our side wrung dryâdry and gaining temperature at the rate of one degree for every four hundred feet of altitude lost. It hits the Plains and comes across Alberta and Saskatchewan like the breath of a blowtorch. There is no cloud, not one, to cut off the sun and relieve the glare even for a minute. The horizons crawl with mirages. Maybe, far back along the crest of the
But how much of my remembering senses is imprisoned there where I would not for a thousand dollars an hour return to live! I retain, as surely as a salmon returning to its spawning grounds after six years at sea knows its native stream, and turns in unerringly from salt water, the taste and smell of the rezavoy when we swam in it among the agitated garter snakes and frogs. (Where they came from, God alone knew. There were none in that semi-desert when we built the dam, but next spring there were pollywogs. My mother firmly believed it rained them.) I could detect just as surely, if someone offered me a cup of it now, the clay-tasting, modified rezavoy water that we drankâthe water from a well-hole dug eight or ten feet from shore so that the seepage from the open slough would be filtered by earth. It took a good amount of earth and earth flavors with it in passage, and it was about as full of wigglers as the rezavoy itself. In late summer we boiled it, but it never lost its taste. The water of Coteau Creek, by contrast, had a slick, soapy taste of alkali about it, and if we had to drink it for any length of time, as we did the last two summers, it gave us the trots.
There was a whole folklore of water. People said a man had to make a dipperful go as far as it would. You boiled sweet corn, say. Instead of throwing the water out, you washed the dishes in it. Then you washed your hands in it a few times. Then you strained it through a cloth into the radiator of your car, and if your car should break down you didnât just leave the water to evaporate in its gullet, but drained it out to water the sweet peas.
We learned to drink with an eye on the dipper so as to keep from sucking down wigglers. When we went on a dayâs visit to some farm and had a good clean drink out of a deep well, we made jokes that the water didnât seem to have much body to it. All we lacked to put us into the position of the surveyors and hunters who had drunk slough water in that country in the 1870âs was a few buffalo to fill our tank with urine and excrement.
As much as we starved for a decent drink we starved for shade. No one who has not lived out on a baking flat where the summer days are eighteen hours long and the midday temperatures can go up to a hundred and five degrees has any business talking about discomfort from heat. The air crisps the skin and cracks the lips. There is not a tree for fifty miles in any direction, not even a whisker of willows, to transpire moisture into the air or shade one inch of the scorched ground. The wind that hundreds of miles to the west started up the mountains warm and wet had dropped its moisture on the heights and come down our side wrung dryâdry and gaining temperature at the rate of one degree for every four hundred feet of altitude lost. It hits the Plains and comes across Alberta and Saskatchewan like the breath of a blowtorch. There is no cloud, not one, to cut off the sun and relieve the glare even for a minute. The horizons crawl with mirages. Maybe, far back along the crest of the
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