Refugees of Reason

Dust, 1971

August!
It's the middle of the summer
and there is no escape from
days of dry, oven like, heat
(except, perhaps, the short-sleeved
nights).
Some call it the 'dog days'
of the Saskatchewan plain.

It's mid afternoon.
The atmosphere ripples in the distance,
cooked by the heat;
the distant town buildings seem close
— but it' s a mirage.
Far to the west a thin dark line
emerges and creeps over the horizon.

Days, no weeks, without rain;
Crops fry in the relentless heat,
encased in the hardened, wizened
        earth
permitting only the luckiest seeds
        to grow
and the very few, luckier, to thrive
— those that germinated at slough's
        edge;
like so many things in life, the
privilege of success is often a product
of the geography of where you were
        born.

Fields a mile long and a half mile wide,
framed by the surveyor's Dumpy level,
from a hundred years gone by;
the road allowances, their remnants,
        spread,
like quilt work across the prairie
        landscape
from St. Pierre-Jolys to Grande Prairie.
A grain elevator, therefore a town,
every eight or so miles along the
         national dream;
quota books and 'Crow Rates',
a grain deal with China;
certainly, with hard work, a narrative
         for prosperity.

Yesterday the temperature hit 39,
the old timers say "102 in the shade."
It's sweltering.
On the horizon
the atmosphere still bubbles, and
to the west the dark line thickens,
a pernicious clue to what is to come.

"What crops?" a farmer asks,
as he stands on the gangplank
talking with neighbours and the
        elevator man,
that agent of the postmodern
        conglomerate,
the seductive purveyor of a 'better
        world'.

It's been like this before,
"Dirty Thirties," they called it. 
"Much worse. Much, much worse"
(with much shaking of heads).
"Endless drought," say old timers,
the survivors of an era of destitution
when dust piled up against buildings,
trees, tractors and thrashing machines,
and so many lost so much.
Now the younger farmers lament,
as their crops wither in their fields,
on farms that have never been debt free.

To the west the darkness gathers,
whipped by unseen, unknown forces,
forces as great as those of physics,
unchanged since antiquity,
throwing the plans of most awry;
man, like beast, splayed naked
and deposited as dust against
a fence line constructed to keep
         things in
— and to keep things out.
But some things can't be kept out.

Formidable!
The black horizon thickens with
approaching gloom,
dust whips 10000 feet into the air
and easily 30 miles or more wide
thinning to the north and to the
        south
to vanish beyond the horizon;
dark, billowing and convulsing,
it rolls forward.
An impenetrable force of nature
this dry Tsunami of the prairies
rolls across this burnt and tired land;
there is no stopping its inevitable
        surge.
It is relentless.

Elsewhere,
a mother yells across a large
        farmyard.
In the yard children play,
oblivious of any danger, they
dismiss and ignore her words,
but should they be engulfed
they could easily be lost,
to fall, to drown, at the bottom of the
         dugout,
that muddy, murky reservoir that
         feeds the well
and consumes two acres of pasture.
She hastens to gather them
and get the laundry off the clothesline.
To the east, dust billows,
her husband's pickup,
careening towards them
down the back road his father created
with horse drawn machinery
a lifetime ago.

Father, mother, children,
like characters from a 1960s
       technicolor film,
race through this surreal scene
to the farmhouse,
to the safety of the basement.
Looming, ominous, imposing and
       inevitable,
a wall of dust, fuelled by a wind
originating in a far off place,
and picking up soil from fresh
       turned fallow,
the shadow preceding it as a wave
       engulfs all.
How nature can bring everything
human to a stop.

The old timers came here for a new
       life.
Their souls and their descendants
       are here still.
They left behind an old world and
        old ways,
a world of class and inequity,
to take control of their lives,
the promise of this prairie land,
the promise of freedom,
to live as they may,
and the freedom to die as they have
        lived.

These men, these women of the prairie,
toil to shape their land and control
        their lives,
and still events can conspire
to leave each generation in servitude;
chained to the machinery of debt,
mastered and controlled by corporate
        lords far, far away,
puppets to a system incapable of
        empathy or remorse;
the privilege of money is often a
        product
of the geography of where you were
        born.

We are all dust.
Everything that man builds,
his ideas,
his ideologies,
his grand theories,
become dogma, and
all his systems of measurement,
economics, and politics,
are like dust;
each Weltanschauun come as a
        wave,
crash and subside on the sunlit
beaches of people's dreams,
a new sun rises and awakens man's
        sensibilities,
and always a new rich emerges to
        replace the old,
and the 'common man,'
weak and destitute,
is left to rebuild.

There are no universal truths,
just grand narratives created to keep
the powerful powerful,
good men and women
indebted and in line,
stoking the fires that serve the few,
creating smokescreens that obscure.

Yet, on this Saskatchewan plain
a family ascends from their basement
        unconquered;
unconquered in their beliefs,
better days ahead,
making the impossible possible.
They climb the stairs from their
basement,
open the door to bright sunshine;
a wife, a mother, hangs clothes to dry,
a father drives away in his pickup,
and children begin to play.

~gtk