Over Prairie Trails
Page 15
We went ahead. The drift held, and slowly we climbed to its summit. It is a strange coincidence that just then I should have glanced up at the sky. I saw a huge, black cloud-mass elbowing its way, as it were, in front of those islands of light, the promise of peace. And so much was I by this time imbued with the moods of the skies that the disappearance of this mild glimmer sent a regret through my very body. And simultaneously with this thrill of regret there came – I remember this as distinctly as if it had been an hour ago – the certainty of impending disaster. The very next moment chaos reigned. The horses broke in, not badly at all; but as a consequence of their nervous condition they flew into a panic. I held them tight as they started to plunge. But there was no guiding them; they were bound to have things their own way altogether. It seemed as if they had lost their road-sense, too, for instead of plunging at least straight ahead, out on the level trail, they made, with irresistible bounds and without paying the slightest attention to the pull of the lines, towards the east. There the drift, not being packed by any previous traffic, went entirely to pieces under their feet. I had meanwhile thrown off my robes, determined at all costs to bring them to a stop, for I knew, if I allowed them to get away with me this time, they would be spoiled for any further drives of mine.
Now just the very fraction of a second when I got my feet up against the dashboard so as to throw my whole weight into my pull, they reared up as if for one tremendous and supreme bound, and simultaneously I saw a fence post straight under the cutter pole. Before I quite realized it, the horses had already cleared the fence. I expected the collision, the breaking of the drawbar and the bolting of the horses; but just then my desperate effort in holding them told, and dancing and fretting they stood. Then, in a flash, I mentally saw and understood the whole situation. The runners of the cutter, still held up by the snow of the drift which sloped down into the field and which the horses had churned into slabs and clods, had struck the fence wire and, lifting the whole of the conveyance, had placed me, cutter and all, balanced for a moment to a nicety, on top of the post. But already we began to settle back.
I felt that I could not delay, for a moment later the runners would slip off the wire and the cutter fall backward; that was the certain signal for the horses to bolt. The very paradoxicality of the situation seemed to give me a clue. I clicked my tongue and, holding the horses back with my last ounce of strength, made them slowly dance forward and pull me over the fence. In a moment I realized that I had made a mistake. A quick pull would have jerked me clear of the post. As it was, it slowly grated along the bottom of the box; then the cutter tilted forward, and when the runners slipped off the wire, the cutter with myself pitched back with a frightful knock against the post. The back panel of the box still shows the splintered tear that fence post made. The shock of it threw me forward, for a second I lost all purchase on the lines, and again the horses went off in a panic. It was quite dark now, for the clouds were thickening in the sky. While I attended to the horses, I reflected that probably something had broken back there in the cutter, but worst of all, I realized that this incident, for the time being at least, had completely broken my nerve. As soon as I had brought the horses to a stop, I turned in the knee-deep snow of the field and made for the fence.
Half a mile ahead there gleamed a light. I had, of course, to stay on the field, and I drove along, slowly and carefully, skirting the fence and watching it as closely as what light there was permitted.
I do not know why this incident affected me the way it did; but I presume that the cumulative effect of three mishaps, one following the other, had something to do with it; the same as it affected the horses. But more than that, I believe, it was the effect of the skies. I am rather subject to the influence of atmospheric conditions. There are not many things that I would rather watch. No matter what the aspect of the skies may be, they fascinate me. I have heard people say, “What a dull day!” – or, “What a sleepy day!” – and that when I was enjoying my own little paradise in yielding to the moods of cloud and sky. To this very hour I am convinced that the skies broke my nerve that night, that those incidents merely furnished them with an opportunity to get their work in more tellingly.
Of the remainder of the drive little needs to be said. I found a way out of the field, back to the road, drove into the yard of the farm where I had seen the light, knocked at the house, and asked for and obtained the night’s accommodation for myself and for my horses.
At six o’clock next morning I was on the road again. Both I and the horses had shaken off the nightmare, and through a sprinkling, dusting fall of snow we made the correction line and finally home in the best of moods and conditions.
AFTERWORD
BY PATRICK LANE
In the heartland of the western prairie it is December, and the radio announcer is talking about the coming blizzard, the first of the year. There are travel warnings and drivers are told to make sure they have survival kits with them, candles, food, and warm clothing. The highest branches in the Manitoba maples have begun to tremble, their ragged black thin and stark against the white sky. There is no horizon, the land and sky are one colour. It is thirty below and the temperature is falling. Soon there will be snow and the heavy winds will lift the small fine flakes out of the air and drive them in long scouring sweeps among the hedges and fences of the city. In the open country snow will begin to fill in the shelter-belts around the isolated farmhouses, curving in curious formations at the corners of barns and sheds, the wheels of tractors and combines.
Somewhere Frederick Philip Grove is getting into his cutter and wrapping himself in a heavy robe. He is just outside the livery stable. It is night and he has lighted the searchlight he scavenged from a junk-pile, the gaslight barely piercing the gloom around him. His two horses stand in harness waiting: the steady, responsible Dan, a sorrel with some Clyde blood in him, and the lazy Peter who, without Dan beside him, would sooner stop than go, stand than move. Together they make a good team. The wind is steadily rising and far ahead at Bell’s corner the drifts are building. Grove is anticipating another of his long journeys north to the school where his wife and young daughter are waiting for him. He thinks of them briefly, but mostly he is excited by the trip itself, the difficulties that lie just ahead. His young wife has lighted a lamp and has placed it in the window of the schoolhouse. Grove lifts his whip and lightly touches Peter and the horses begin to move, the cutter sliding, the snow already beginning to fill the seat beside him. It is a late afternoon in December and it is already dark. He is nine hours from home. There will be a blizzard tonight and there is no one else on the road.
Grove will make thirty-six such trips over that winter: seventy-two drives in all. He will compress them into seven autobiographical essays. What is interesting about the trips is that he makes them alone. Only once is there someone with him. The journeys Grove makes in Over Prairie Trails are all returns, an endless quest for home. Like Odysseus, Grove is a figure of the outward, the man who must endlessly quest and test himself against the elemental world. The challenges he faces on his journeys are always greater than the arrival at his goal, the remembered hearth and home, the wife and child who wait for him. Each time he sets out, he does so as a sailor must upon a sea. Grove’s repeated journeys are celebrations of his strength, his sagacity, his ability to confront and overcome all impediments, all difficulties. In the essay he calls “Snow” he stops his cutter and looks at a half-buried, frozen world. He faces for the first time the sun and he writes:
It suddenly came home to me that there was something relentless, inexorable, cruel, yes, something of a sneer in the pitiless way in which [the sun] looked down on the infertile waste around. Unaccountably two Greek words formed on my lips: Homer’s Pontos atrygetos – the barren sea.
Reading those words I can feel the delight Grove must have felt when he found that analogy. He is writing, of course, as all writers do, out of the memory of his many journeys, but it is at this point in the book that Grove
defines himself as the lonely wanderer he was most of his life. “Snow” is one chapter of seven, and in it, as in the others, Grove compresses all of his many experiences during that school year he travelled north. Almost all of them take place in the winter of Manitoba. In “Snow” Grove thinks of the “infertile waste around him,” and then he sees before him a veritable “fortress of snow … a seemingly impregnable bulwark, six or seven feet high,” and you know that Peter and Dan, the cutter and Grove, will somehow make it through. They have to because Over Prairie Trails is a celebration of man’s indomitable spirit, his overcoming of adversity.
Over Prairie Trails is an archetypal book. It encapsulates the essence of the Canadian experience, the violence and beauty of its landscape, the loneliness and courage of its people, the beauty and severity of its seasons. Alden Nowlan, the quintessential Canadian poet, once said that Canadians live in a country where simply to go outside is to risk death. He was speaking of our winter, that most unique and ubiquitous of our seasons. The cold and snow of our long winter separate us from other nations and other cultures and distinguish us from them. In the heart of a Canadian winter the world is changed. It becomes immutable, transformed into a kind of silence, stark and exquisitely beautiful. It isolates us, stripping us of everything but ourselves. Grove describes his feelings as he looks at the winter landscape:
It looked so harsh, so millenial-old, so antediluvian and pre-Adamic! I still remember with particular distinctness the slight dizziness that overcame me, the sinking feeling in my heart, the awe, and the foreboding that I had challenged a force in Nature which might defy all tireless effort and the most fearless heart.
Grove was born in West Prussia (now a part of Poland). He came to Canada after wandering around the world, finally settling in Manitoba where he married and had a child. He fell in love with the West and set four of his novels there, Settlers of the Marsh, Our Daily Bread, The Yoke of Life, and Fruits of the Earth. Each of these describes the harshness, the difficulty of establishing a community in the Canadian West in the early twentieth century. In each of these the climate and the land are man’s greatest adversary, yet all of Grove’s protagonists confront that adversity with courage and dignity.
Over Prairie Trails, published in 1922, was Grove’s first book. It is, I think, his best work. In his novels Grove can sometimes be a stern moralist who talks down to his readers, but in Over Prairie Trails he becomes a student of the natural world, observing with intricate detail all of the West’s most subtle attributes, the delicacy of a flock of yellow warblers among highbush cranberries in the early fall, the motion of a single snowflake watched from his moving cutter in a storm, the beauty of hoarfrost: “The white diamond lying on snow-white velvet, the white of a diamond in diffused light.” Here he is a lyrical observer, a recorder of the subtle changes in the land and the weather, and in the process of recording these changes he also writes of man’s participation with the land, someone who is an integral part of the environment he struggles against.
Grove’s was a Gothic sensibility and his imagination revealed a bleak vision in his novels. Yet Grove, like the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, believed that the natural world contained all the perfection man could desire. In Thoreau’s Walden perfection lies in a calm, meditative retreat from the world. Grove’s meditations in Over Prairie Trails, however, are active confrontations with it, a violent joining with the world. In the essay “Wind and Waves,” he speaks of his many curious obsessions, his delight in recording the most intricate details of the winter landscape around him. He writes:
I am aware of the fact that nobody – nobody whom I know, at least – takes the slightest interest in such things…. But to me it seems that the Kingdom of Heaven lies all around us.
In Over Prairie Trails Grove describes his version of Heaven in seven vignettes, each one a journey through vicissitude and struggle, a return to the heart of things, home, a lantern in a window, a wife and child. Yet there is a kind of loneliness at the heart of Grove’s writing. In Over Prairie Trails he is always the man about to arrive, the man who is always on the road, the traveller, the one who is finally not really home anywhere, just someone on the way. But he makes that travelling (so much a part of the Canadian experience itself in this vast country) a part of each of us. Each journey he makes is described with great exactness, an objective detailing of the event, yet he creates something more out of them than simple observations. He catches with acute precision the exactness of snow, of fog, of hoarfrost, of wind and weather, and he does so with an almost surreal ability to capture with humility the beautiful in everything he sees. The landscape and the plants and animals that inhabit it are transformed in his writing, changed by his intimate, detailed view. In “Dawn and Diamonds” he writes:
It was never the single sight nor the isolated thing that made my drives the things of beauty which they were. There was nothing remarkable in them either. They were commonplace enough. I really do not know why I should feel urged to describe our western winters. Whatever I may be able to tell you about them, is yours to see and yours to interpret. The gifts of Nature are free to all for the asking.
For Grove winter becomes a metaphor for our Canadian lives, a symbol of our struggle in the wilderness. For Grove, to engage in that struggle is not simply an act of survival, rather it is a celebration of his ability to confront and endure. In Over Prairie Trails the landscape and the weather become a character, a joyful antagonist. The destination Grove strives to reach is the goal, but that goal is less than the process of getting there. At the end of each of the essays there is a falling away, not a disappointment but a realization that the unbearable moment is over and must be experienced again. Indeed, Grove looks forward to it. The great moment or event lies in the confrontation with life, Grove’s exultancy at the challenge met, experienced, and overcome.
If there were a radio near you right now, there would be a disembodied voice talking to you about a blizzard. It would be saying: It is minus 35 degrees and dropping. There is blowing snow, 50 kilometre winds out of the north, and the windchill factor is at 2500. Exposed flesh will freeze in less than a minute. Frederick Philip Grove has stepped out of his cutter and is standing, checking the harness of Dan and Peter very carefully. He is at Bell’s corner. The snow, like waves in the sea, lies in great drifts across the road in front of him. He is excited, full of dread and expectation. For a moment he stops and watches the way snow gathers in the lee of a clump of wolf willow. Dan shivers and Peter, his back leg up, stares down into the snow. Grove gets back in the cutter and picks up the reins. He is there, heading north into the storm, somewhere far ahead of him, home.
BY FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In Search of Myself (1946)
ESSAYS
It Needs to Be Said (1929)
FICTION
Settlers of the Marsh (1925)
A Search for America (1927)
Our Daily Bread (1928)
The Yoke of Life (1930)
Fruits of the Earth (1933)
Two Generations (1939)
The Master of the Mill (1944)
Consider Her Ways (1947)
Tales from the Margin (1971)
SKETCHES
Over Prairie Trails (1922)
The Turn of the Year (1923)
LETTERS
The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove
[ed. Desmond Pacey] (1976)
This edition is an unabridged reprint of the first edition of Over Prairie Trails, published by McClelland and Stewart, Toronto in 1922.
Copyright © 1991 by McClelland & Stewart Inc., by arrangement with A. Leonard Grove
Afterword copyright © 1991 by Patrick Lane.
First New Canadian Library edition 1991.
This New Canadian Library edition 2010.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Grove, Frederick Philip, 1879-1948
Over prairie trails / Frederick Philip Grove ; illustrations by C.M. Manly from the original edition ; afterword by Patrick Lane.
(New Canadian library)
eISBN: 978-0-7710-9396-8
1. Grove, Frederick Philip, 1879-1948. 2. Manitoba–Description and travel. 3. Frontier and pioneer life–Manitoba. I. Title. II. Series: New Canadian library
FC3367.3.G76 2010 917.12704′2 C2010-900039-0
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