Saskatchewan Revisited

I have driven through Saskatchewan multiple times in my youth —crossing the country between university in New Brunswick and a first real job waiting in Northern British Columbia. Miles blurred into one another. Gas stations, long stretches of highway, the same horizon repeating itself.

I have been back and forth across Canada a few times, sometimes solo, sometimes accompanied.

I am unsure if I truly ever appreciated the beauty that Saskatchewan held.  Although I can remember the very first time...

I had just graduated. My life, for the first time, felt like it was pointed in a direction—even if I wasn’t entirely sure what that direction meant. Beside me, my Shepherd–Rottweiler cross sat alert and steady, my only real constant. Together, we set out from one coast toward another.

Somewhere along the way, I became fixed on an idea.

I wanted to sit in a wheat field at sunset, the sky stretched wide and open, listening to “Wheat Kings” as the light slipped away. It felt important at the time—like something that would mark the beginning of whatever came next.

But the prairies don’t bend to your plans.

I crossed Manitoba too quickly. Then Saskatchewan. By the time I reached the fields I’d imagined, the sun was still high, stubborn and unmoving. The moment I’d built in my mind was hours away.

So I kept moving—but without urgency now. I let the road wander a little. Gravel roads turned into detours, detours into quiet pauses. The day softened.

My dog, who had never met a body of water she didn’t love, found one before I did. She had a habit of throwing herself into lakes without hesitation—even in winter, breaking through ice just for the chance to swim. So on that hot afternoon, when we came across a small, unassuming lake, she was already halfway in before I had stopped the car.

And then she stopped.

Not fully—but enough to turn and look back at me, her expression somewhere between confusion and accusation. She was moving, but the effort wasn’t there. The water held her up in a way that didn’t make sense.

I waded in after her and felt it too—that strange, effortless buoyancy. The body forgets, for a moment, what it expects from water.

It was only later I would learn we had found Little Manitou Lake—a place so dense with minerals that sinking becomes almost impossible. A prairie anomaly. A quiet kind of wonder.

We stayed longer than we meant to.

Time passed the way it does when you stop trying to measure it. Eventually, though, the road called us back. We drove on, sun beginning its slow descent, and pulled into a gas station not far off.

That’s when I noticed the looks.

They lingered a little too long. Followed us a little too closely. At first, I couldn’t place it. I laughed it off, said something to my dog about it as I slid back into the driver’s seat.

Then I caught our reflection.

She was coated in white—her dark fur dulled and dusted, as though she had aged years in an afternoon. I raised a hand to my own face and felt it there too—along my hairline, across my eyebrows, a dry, chalky residue left behind by the lake.

I stared at myself for a moment.

Then I laughed—loud and uncontrollable, the kind that fills the whole car. The kind that only comes when you realize you’ve been carrying something absurd without knowing it.

We drove on.

And eventually, without forcing it, I found the field.

The sun had begun to fall in earnest now, the sky opening into gold and amber, the light stretching thin across the land. I pulled over, left the door open, and let the music play—“Wheat Kings” drifting out into the quiet.

We sat there together, my dog and I, in the middle of it all.

And for the first time that day, everything arrived exactly when it was supposed to.

Not as I had planned it—but as it was meant to be.

Fast forward to driving at the end of March, though looking like the middle of winter, as I chased a snowstorm into Moose Jaw...