My Trans-Canada Bike Adventure — “Putting the Prairies Behind Me” Edition of Ride for Di

I Left the Prairies but They haven’t Left Me Yet

I drafted this post while hunkered down in my tent at Inwood Park Campground near Upsala, Ontario, just west of Thunder Bay.

I spent the evening—including dinner—inside a tiny tent while rain hammered down, accompanied by rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning. It was a bit like spending the evening inside an old phone booth lying on its side. Very constrained.

A perfect place, as it turned out, to reflect on the vastness of where I’d just been.

I left the Prairies three days ago, but in a lot of ways, the Prairies haven’t left me.

They begin just west of Calgary and end somewhere around Falcon Lake, Manitoba, where the landscape begins its transformation into the Canadian Shield. It took me a little over 12 days to ride from the land of endless horizons into the land of endless forests, rocks, lakes, and rivers.

It’s beautiful.

I love it.

Looking back over those 12 days, I’ve already written about the wonderful people and the brutal headwinds. I did have three days of tailwinds, but the other days were nasty enough to erase most pleasant memories of them.

But there were some striking things I left out.

From a bike, one of the most unforgettable is the constant presence of freight trains passing nearby—mind-bogglingly long trains. Some stretch for kilometres. They pass you heading east. They pass you heading west. The whistles, grinding wheels, and rumbling of these monsters carry across the Prairies day and night.

You’d think trade between East and West was booming.

Then there is the sheer size and scale of the farming.

I was fortunate enough to ride through during the early grain harvest. Vast fields of gold rolled like waves in the wind—which, on far too many days, was rolling in exactly the wrong direction.

Headwinds. Damn it.

From a bicycle, it’s easy to believe that the overwhelming majority of Canada’s farmland is out here. The scale is difficult to comprehend until you spend hour after hour pedalling through it.

And then there is the night sky.

The stars stretch in every direction, right down to those endless horizons. Standing beneath them, with almost nothing between you and the universe, you realize just how small you are.

I have rarely felt more tiny—or insignificant.

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While tenting, I got to see what other people in their “Returning” Stage like to do, and like to take with them.

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Prairies and Thoughts of Dianne

Dianne was the eldest of six children growing up on our farm, and she fit some of the eldest-child stereotype perfectly.

She took charge.

She could be hard at times, and she certainly suffered no fools. But she was fiercely loyal and extraordinarily kind to family and friends.

A close friend observed that during the last year or so of Dianne’s life, she softened considerably. She became kinder, more outgoing, more openly loving.

I noticed it too.

Especially during her final weeks, her conversations, observations, and reflections became more focused. More distilled. It was as though, with time running short, the unimportant things simply fell away.

It reminded me of the first person with cancer I ever knew, although at the time I didn’t know he had cancer.

I was 14.

I’ll call him Mr. H.

He “hired” me as his farmhand for the summer. I’m pretty sure my parents had arranged the job partly to help him out—a neighbour in need. That was simply what country people did.

He became a great mentor, and that summer job eventually stretched into a year and a half.

When I turned 15, my mother let me drive her car along the back roads to his farm. I would get up early, drive over and do the morning chores, come home for breakfast, catch the bus to school, return home, eat supper, drive back to his farm for the evening chores, then come home to do my homework.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Again and again, until he became too ill and other arrangements had to be made.

Eventually, my dad took me out for lunch. Alone. My father had never done that before, and he would never do it again. He told me Mr. H had died.

Like Dianne, as his illness progressed, Mr. H spent a lot of time observing, reflecting, and teaching me lessons that seemed pretty dark to a 14-year-old boy.

I understand them better now.

Death is a great teacher.

And a remarkably consistent one.

One day, Mr. H grabbed a hoe and took me into a cornfield. It must have been early July because the corn was about knee-high—right on schedule according to the old saying: knee-high by Fourth of July.

He pointed to all the milkweed growing among the corn and demonstrated how to carefully hoe around each stalk, removing the weeds without damaging the corn.

Carefully.

Delicately.

I am not, by nature, a delicate person.

This was going to be a problem.

Then he handed me the hoe.

“So you want me to do this patch here?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

Then he gestured toward the field.

The whole field.

“What?!”

It was 40 acres, but to a 14-year-old holding a hoe, it might as well have been the entire province of Ontario.

It would take forever.

“You’d better get started,” he said, “or you’ll never get ‘er done.”

I don’t remember whether I spent the entire first day cursing him under my breath, but probably.

I do remember thinking it was impossible.

I can’t even remember whether it took me a week or two to finish. What I do remember is that, after a few days, something changed.

I became comfortable being alone with my thoughts.

Mr. H would occasionally inspect my work and offer a few pointers. And he talked to me about being alone.

“You’re born alone, and even if you’re surrounded by friends, you live alone, and you die alone,” he would say.

I’m not sure whether he knew he was echoing Orson Welles.

But his point was clear: being comfortable alone—with your own thoughts, even while doing the smallest and most monotonous task—was part of the work of a good farmer.

Maybe even a noble one.

I would love to know what Mr. H would have thought of something Blaise Pascal wrote more than 350 years ago:

> “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

One of the unexpected gifts of this journey has been being largely free from the news and from social-media algorithms engineered to constantly grab our attention. There is something liberating about stepping away from the endless stream of distractions—news, entertainment, work, outrage—and simply having time to think.

On the Prairies, I had plenty of time to sit quietly on my bicycle.

And plenty more to lie quietly alone in my tent.

I won’t be solving all of humanity’s problems.

But I may solve a few of my own.

Out on the Prairies, on that starry night amid those endless horizons, everything is insignificant..

It is a lesson less about reason than about faith.

No matter how small the strike of a hoe, or the turn of a pedal, or the “I love you” to someone who matters to you every time you see them…it matters.

I can hear Mr. H saying: 

“You’d better get started…”