A Thousand Words

This is a mental picture because cameras do no justice to the landscape.

The ribbon of highway stretches into eternity, but it doesn’t matter, this roadway always takes me to a wonderful place - home. The asphalt varies in age as the trip winds through the country side. The new sections are as comfortable as sitting in an easy chair in the living room, but they are few and relatively short. Most of the road is old, patched occasionally with new pavement like the knees of your favorite pair of jeans. The patched knees were never as comfortable as the original jeans, but they did extend the useful life of the pants, so you just put up with them. For most stretches the road is ancient, but since the road is so important to the livelihood of the province, the road is never closed for reconstruction.

New twinned lengths are under construction, but the progress seems slower than the coming of spring every year. At some point, the road will become a four lane divided highway, but most people assume the Second Coming will upstage the completion of the new roadway.

Random strings of asphalt emulsion litter the pavement for endless stretches in squiggles as though a toddler was practicing writing her name on a sidewalk with chalk. The emulsion seals the cracks on the surface of the road, but they also create a totally unorganized cacophony that can lull you into a stupor as the road disappears in the rear view mirrors. On wet nights the squiggles shine in the approaching head lights without rhyme or reason.

To me, because of the ultimate destination, the road is beautiful, and the variations remind me of brush strokes on a painting viewed from too close to make out the subject. The painted road, just like the art work, has to be viewed from a comfortable distance, not scrutinized by a critic. Beauty may be an object in the eye of the beholder with art, but for the roadway, it has to be experienced as a part of the journey home

To the east, a thunderhead hovers above the horizon like a giant lump of mashed potatoes on the thanksgiving table. The mound reaches into the stratosphere just like you wished your mother would have let you pile the papas before smothering them in spicy brown gravy. The top of the clouds seem as soft as cotton balls stretched into gauzy indistinct annonynimity. Underneath the weather, the cloud fades into battleship grey as the rain settles to the earth in the distance. The remaining light of the dying day creates a bright rainbow, and a softer more subtle shadow that mimics the original like your own shadow on the sidewalk of a lazy summer day. The shadow follows the rainbow like a new puppy, sometimes disappearing for a romp in the distant trees, then jumping back out, rushing to catch up.

I marvel at the natural beauty and wonder out loud, “What does it mean?” just like the guy from Mariposa I saw on a clip on youtube.com. Before I broke down crying, I remembered three things. One, I remembered learning about the covenant of the rainbow and Noah’s Arc in Primary years ago, or eons ago according to my children. Two, I remembered that I was not a dufus, at least not that big of a dufus. Three, I remembered that it really means that sunlight is reflecting off the water vapour in the air creating a prismatic effect of visible light segmented into the primary and secondary colors. Boring, perhaps, but still beautiful to anyone lucky enough to look up and recognize a small slice of nature’s wonder.

In my mother’s kitchen, years ago, we began to use canola oil because it was supposed to be unsaturated and healthier than lard or other frying fats used back in the day in kitchens all across the southwest. As a boy I only knew that her home-made tacos tasted like heaven, and that for hours after dinner the left-over shells were still tasty, not stale, like my grandmother’s newly cooked tacos. I never really questioned the use of the new oil. As I grew older, I learned to cook by helping my mother. Learning from her was easy as she was a natural teacher and loved the “help” from a teenaged boy whose main thoughts centered around sneaking tidbits and tastes of morsels before we sat down to eat.

My wife makes her tacos like her mother did, and they are better than breathing. She hovers over the stove like a search and rescue helicopter while each white corn shell is fried in canola. Each one comes out purer than Aztec gold ready to hold the rest of ingredients prepared with equal love and care. Some of our children used to stuff enough deliciousness into a single taco shell to feed small villages.

The sight of the canola in the fields is perhaps more delicious than the fried tortillas. The grain starts as tiny seeds, sown in late spring and ripening in the days when sun light grows from 6 hours into marathons of brilliance lasting more than 20 hours. Somewhere along the way the grain develops whispy crowns of new grain kernals that will ultimately provide millions of gallons of pure golden oil, but for now, another beautiful sight of northern Alberta begins to unfold.

As the grain ripens, the crowns fade from a soft green reminiscent of elementary school chalkboards covered in chalk dust at the end of mathematics lessons into gold like wheat. Then, in a truly wonderful display, the crowns start to glow yellow. Like a fire that grows from a tiny match flame into a spectacular bonfire, the yellow spreads across the fields into a brilliant inferno. The yellow is as pure as the oil will be and covers the fields like gigantic blankets laid out on lawns for a cosmic concert, interrupted at the edges by tree lines of poplar or birch or black spruce. The brightness of the yellow reminds me of Lucas and Amy Lightbrow. The afternoon sunlight only intensifies the brilliance of the yellow canola flowers to rival the searchlights at premiers of Hollywood movies.

Between the fields of canola there are fields of good old alfalfa as comfortable on the eyes as well worn sneakers are on tired feet. The alfalfa covers the gentle undulations in the fields like velvet flowing in a breeze. The alfalfa flowers are violet, blue, lilac, royal purple, and about 700 other shades in between. The tiny flowers play hide and seek as I speed along the highway peeking shyly between the leaves and quickly hiding again trying to remain annonymous.

The contrast of the alfalfa and the canola fields is as starling as cresting a hill only to see a full grown bull moose ambling along the shoulder of the road at dusk. The moose are as shy as fairies or wood nymphs, only appearing as the sun disappears below the horizon. They are however as large as pick-up trucks, which, when they appear without warning, is down-right scary. Imagine a black pickup speeding toward you, in your lane, without lights, and with total disregard for your presence or well being. Of course the moose are more spectacular than mere trucks.

Sunsets here seem to last longer than the hugs your parents used to make you give to the wrinkled old great-aunt in the stinky old rest home. Cleburn, Texas was where we had to visit monthly with my father’s great-aunt. I enjoyed listening to her stories of life on the frontier, Indian attacks, wild fires, and violent weather. We would stay until she was talked out or too tired to continue, which was really not very long, about 30 minutes, but to an 11 year-old boy, it might as well have been 4 days. Summer sunsets don’t really last 4 days, but they do last well over an hour and a half around the summer solstice.

Did you know that most beautiful sunset pictures are actually sun rises? When I was a missionary in southern Argentina, I witnessed more beautiful sun rises than baptisms. That simple fact, however, has not migrated north, or the sunsets are simply precursers of the day breaks. Most summer nights the two events are only separated by 3 to 4 hour dark grey dusks.

Both are beautiful as separate events, especially when the sky is littered with clouds. On the late Friday night drives north, I witness more sunsets and have never been disappointed like roudy children on Christmas morning when Santa forgets to stop. As the sun skids along the horizon, the colors of the sky fade in the growing dusk. I have seen the sky morph from blue to violet to grey while the fringe of the clouds start to glow like filaments in light bulbs, brighter and brighter. The evaporating cloud bodies fade from white to mauve as the sun sinks into the endless sea of trees on the horizon.

In the western sky, clouds melt into the dusk like smoke from a spent campfire seeping into a foggy grove of trees near the beach. Throughout the day the clouds have grown from small almost invisible puffs of breath into a thousand pieces of gigantic popcorn. Each cloud is as unique as the flakes of winter snows that will begin to overrun the landscape all too soon. Some of the clouds have decided to join together into a frenzy of turbulence of heat and vapor, released by the welcome rain. As the droplets cascade to the fields along the ribbon highway, the clouds melt into whisps of stretched cotton left to bid adieu to the waning day. The fleeing sun sends bright rays of polished silver through the rapidly melting clouds to illuminate random patches of the trees and fields in one last flash of beauty. One strong cloud, standing alone among his comrades, refuses to dissipate and is rewarded for his valor with a crown of silver adorning his head. All too soon, he too bows in humility, relinquishing his proud crown for soft pastels that have inspired poets across centuries. Finally, the entire cloud army surrenders to the dusk and quietly fades into the graying evening.

On the beach in California we used to welcome the sunset as it signaled the beginning of the drive home from a day of fun in the sun. From our garden in the backyard, it signaled time to kick up our feet for a few minutes before retiring for the night. In the winter we lose the daylight early, sometimes as early as 3 pm. But in the summer we revel in the time afforded to us and occasionally celebrate like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Eventually the light diminishes to allow night to creep over the landscape.

My traveling companions only accompany me for sporadic moments as I rush through time and space. The shiest are the elk and the white-tail deer, but the beaver, moose, and ravens, lazily pause from their routines to make sure I pass safely. Usually after dark on trips where I am far behind schedule foxes or wolves will dash across the road as if playing chicken.

As I crest the hill back into civilization I am grateful for the beauty of the drive, but also grateful for the end of the trip. The prize is always hugs and kisses from my family, and the beauty of the love cannot be described in mere words.