A town by any other name

I love Canadian names for their towns…they are so descriptive even if I don’t understand the origin…we passed through Medicine Hat, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, and I had to bypass “Old Wives,” a small town here in Saskatchewan….it was one of those situations that was rife for problems…so the best thing to do was to press down on the accelerator and “Don’t say anything Jim…keep your smart-ass mouth shut.”….sometimes I can actually remember to do this before I speak instead of afterwards. There were so many possibilities with a town named “Old Wives”…it was just so easy. All of them would have been fun for the moment, but then there would have been hell to pay. I’m sure you can come up with your own responses if you were to see the name of the town on the mileage post. We also passed the town of “Findlater,”…but I think maybe I won’t. To get here, we headed out of Calgary and went to a fascinating area where many of the world’s great Jurassic discoveries were made…A town named Drumheller with the world’s largest Dinosaur marking the tourist information outpost…and did I mention gift shop selling everything imaginable with dinosaurs on them….key chains, baby bibs, rubber pteredactyls, fuzzy claw foot slippers and other things which I didn’t even want to look at. We did get good information from the gal at the desk, so it was worth the marketing ploys. The Royal Tyrell museum is one of the most complete and well organized museum on dinosaurs and Precambrian (I think) period fossils…very interesting, and I wished my grandsons were here to enjoy it with me…..They, like a lot of boys, are very big on this stuff…of course, I’d have probably never have gotten them past the fuzzy claw foot thingies without forking over some foreign exchange. We stayed the night at Medicine Hat with the world’s largest Teepee….getting the picture here?....Alberta is “Big” on big…we have, in addition to the aforementioned items, the world’s largest Easter egg…the world’s largest bone, the world’s largest “loonie” (the $2 coin) and others “World’s biggest” that I mercifully passed without seeing or knowing about. The only way we could get to Regina from Medicine Hat was to start on the Trans Canada highway…which is a great road with the exception that it is utterly boring….long straight stretches, so flat here on the prairie that you could shoot a laser down the center line and it would stay true to its line and height….How Flat is it: “I can see Russia from here.”….okay, that’s a bit of a stretch, but one should never miss a chance to rag on Sarah Palin…I passed on the “Old Wives,” and there is a limit to how much I can be silent about. The Trans Canada was really not what we were looking for, as we prefer the small roads and out of the way places…yes, Mom, I found some more “black” roads. We cut south a little and it made a tremendous difference…no longer straight no longer flat…just 20 miles south we were in twisty rolling hills for over 100 miles….it was a mixture of wheat fields and cattle grazing….the land having so many dips and hollows allowed water to gather at the low spots, and we were amazed at how many there were and the size of them…I found an old farmer working the irrigation line on his ATV and pulled over…we had a great conversation and I learned much about how things work…he’s only got 500 acres left that he works, since he is 72 and walking on two artificial ankles….I didn’t even know they did that…knees, hips, yes…but ankles? Anyway, found out that his water table is just 6 feet below the surface, and that he pumps 85 gallons a minute from that….below that it is solid granite…so that’s why even now at the end of the summer, the ponds still have a lot of water in them…it’s got nowhere to go. Saw another farmer working on his combine, so I pulled over and went over to him…we talked about 20 minutes on farming in Saskatchewan…turns out he’s just really small potatoes, or wheat, since he farms 1,000 acres of organic wheat…..one “family” farm totally owned and run by one family has 48,000 acres ….almost 20,000 hectares for those using that measurement…. He told me that the Chinese were buying up Canadian farm land at a rapid rate, and there is some concern that Canada is losing its farmland to food-hungry China, and that they may not have total control over their land…. Another farmer told me that the Hutterite colonies are expanding rapidly as well….it used to be that they didn’t have a colony closer than 25 miles to another Hutterite colony, but now, it’s down to 5 miles apart…..it was really fascinating to talk to the two men and it gave me a much better understanding and appreciation for what we are seeing mile after mile after mile. If you get confused as to which direction you are traveling, just look up at this time of the year…the geese are all getting out of Dodge in a hurry, and the flocks are becoming more prevalent and larger each day…They’re all literally headed to greener pastures….south. All along the way, if you see trees, you know there is a house there, and they really do need windbreaks…this is productive farmland and not designed for beautification projects…this Prairie farming is the real deal….The combines and harvesters work day and night…the man with 1,000 acres says that it takes him a full two weeks to harvest….the machinery looks like something right out of the “Tholian Web,” for us trekkies. They cross and weave their way around the land leaving clear and distinct markers of where they’ve been and where they’re headed…fascinating to be here at this time of the year…yesterday it was 88 degrees, and for once, the farmers aren’t bitching about the weather…the extra warmth has extended the harvest and taken the stress out of trying to get it all done before the weather gets nasty. We passed the “Riskan Hope Farm” down by the road aptly named “Elevator Alley.” All along the prairies, the grain silos/elevators have been getting more frequent, the clusters have more silos in them, and the size of the silos has been getting taller….now we’re into industrial grade grain elevators, and now into the real grain country…Wheat, barley, oats, canola and who knows what…Many people told us that it would be extremely boring, but we haven’t found it so…quite the opposite…the land has a beauty of its own…okay, it’s not Banff or Jasper, but it doesn’t need to be…it is what it’s supposed to be…the prairies. Stay safe everybody, and always remember to live large…we are. Carol and Jim