Nobody is surprised about the following two things.
First, the Canadian prairies are vast. I’ll bet that “vast” is the most-used adjective to describe them .I drove a bus across them once, pedaled across them once, and now we’re in Manitoba. Vast.
Tonight I phoned our youngest son to congratulate him on pedaling across the prairies. He congratulated me too. A mutual ad society. Of course, boasting is horrible, but holy smoke, that is a vast landscape to pedal across. We saw two individuals on bikes in the last few days---both of them looked absolutely lost. Hard to believe we ever did that…anyway, enough of that.
The second unsurprising thing is that Winkler Manitoba, and many other towns in Southern Manitoba, are just so tidy. Well ordered, well maintained, tidy little oases. They have a prosperous look about them.
In the last few years we’ve read a couple of books by authors from this neighborhood. Miriam Toews wrote A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows, and a woman named Rhoda Janzen wrote Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, among other things. Those authors had different takes on things, but I don’t remember them disagreeing about the look of the towns. They all look like postcard material.
Which, to me, at any rate, is not surprising. I was around La Crete Alberta a bit back in the day. La Crete is a Mennonite enclave, such that people talk to you first in low German, and when they see you’re not picking it up, they switch to English. A very Mennonite place. Very tidy. Very prosperous. It’s just the way they do things, at least in my experience, so I was not surprised to hang around southern Manitoba for a day and discover the same thing. Drive around Morden, for instance. Very tidy. Attractive. Second only to the Uplands, I’d say.
Last night there were some good thunderstorms around; tonite it is mosquitoes. But the view is lovely, across green fields to a wide western sky, and the air is redolent with spring. Redolent. I like that word.
Tomorrow it’s Winnipeg for a day, probably the zoo and the Forks and and and. We’re gonna leave the moho here in Morden and drive the car in there just because it’s easier. And cheaper. After that it’s on to Canada proper, or central Canada as it is known. Actually, you have to go another thousand k or so after Winnipeg before you feel like you’re where the action is, but that’s another story.
One other thing: there are lots of Maxime Bernier signs around here and only Maxime Bernier. The signs say he will do good things for your family. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
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