The Long Distance Between Seeing and Arriving

“Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labour and to wait.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life”

 

Prairie Reflections, Prairie Worries

 

Today Saskatchewan did something to distance (or at least our perception of it) that I don't think either of us was prepared for. We began the morning surrounded by the forests, lakes and wetlands of Duck Mountain Provincial Park, where Madge Lake was calm in the early light and Common Loons were calling across the water. For the first part of the day, our route still felt reassuringly shaded and relaxing. Tall trembling aspens lined the roads, cottages appeared between the trees, and small lakes came briefly into view through gaps in the vegetation. Having spent much of the past month crossing the exposed agricultural landscapes of Manitoba, entering Saskatchewan through such a green and shaded place had been a welcome surprise. It was certainly not how either of us had imagined the beginning of another Prairie province, and for a little while it seemed as though Saskatchewan might ease us gently into whatever came next.  Which is something we were grateful for.

 

That impression did not last long. Beyond the park, the Trans Canada Trail became increasingly difficult to follow. Where the map suggested we should continue, the pathway seemed to disappear beneath cleared trees.  We backtracked and, finding one TCT trail sign, tried another stretch only to find ourselves beside a pile of brambles blocking what we thought might be the official route.  So, once again we backtracked, tried neighbouring concessions, searched for signs and compared what we saw on the ground with the trail app, only to find more dead ends and places where the route on the screen no longer seemed to correspond with anything in front of us.

 

By the time we finally gave up trying to reconnect with it and chose a gravel concession leading west toward Kamsack (today’s hoped-for destination), we had already added a lot of kilometres to what was ready set to be a long day. Then, as we began descending out of the higher country around Duck Mountain, the trees suddenly gave way, and Saskatchewan opened in front of us. From where we stood and the panoramic view we were afforded, we could see for miles across a patchwork of green, yellow and golden fields, interrupted here and there by small dark clusters of trees and the occasional grain elevator. The horizon seemed impossibly vast, and everything seemed incredibly far away. After weeks of travelling across Manitoba, we were hardly strangers to Prairie landscapes, yet this somehow felt different. Perhaps it was the suddenness of the transition, or perhaps we were simply tired after spending the morning searching for the trail, but while the view was beautiful - if I am being honest – it was also more than a little terrifying.

 

I think part of what unsettled us – and I hope this makes sense - was that the landscape suddenly made distance visible. We both felt like we could see across the entire province and it simply appeared to go on forever. 

 

In forests, distance tends to hide itself. A trail bends around trees, disappears over a rise or vanishes into vegetation, and five kilometres ahead remains largely an abstraction because you cannot see it. You move through whatever is immediately around you, have a sense of progress, and trust that eventually another bend, bridge, hill or clearing will carry you farther along the route. Even in mountainous landscapes, where enormous distances may be visible, ridges and valleys divide the terrain into manageable or at least comprehensible pieces. Here there seemed to be very little dividing anything. The gravel road stretched straight ahead between the crops with a vast sky overhead of them. For perhaps the first time on this journey we could look toward where we were going and understand, with uncomfortable clarity, how much ground actually lay between where we stood and where we hoped to end the day. 

 

Approaching Kamsack

 

About fourteen kilometres outside Kamsack we could already see the town ahead of us. Fourteen kilometres is not an extraordinary distance for us anymore. Under normal circumstances it represents a few more hours of walking, and over the past couple of years we have covered farther distances after dinner, while searching for somewhere to camp, or because plans have gone sideways late in the day. Yet there was something peculiar about being able to see Kamsack so clearly while knowing how long it would take our feet to reach it. The town seemed close enough to touch and impossibly distant at the same time.

 

We kept walking, the fields continued to pass beside us, and yet each time we looked up the community appeared almost exactly where it had been before. Our bodies, the GPS, and the time all assured us that we were progressing steadily westward, but our eyes seemed considerably less convinced.

 

Perhaps this is one of the peculiar ways the Prairies alter the experience of travelling on foot. From a vehicle, the same openness can make the landscape seem almost compressed. Roads run straight toward the horizon, and communities emerge when water towers, church steeples or grain elevators appear long before you actually enter them. At highway speed, that visual promise is fulfilled quickly: something appears in the distance, becomes a town within minutes and then disappears into the rear-view mirror. Walking makes the interval between first seeing and finally arriving a long experience in itself. A grain elevator is no longer simply a landmark indicating that a community is nearby - it can remain in front of you for much of an afternoon or a day. A stand of trees that appears close enough to offer shade may still be several kilometres away, and a road junction clearly visible across open fields can require another hour of walking before you actually reach it.

 

We have always known, obviously, that our eyes can see farther than our feet can quickly carry us, but there is a difference between understanding that intellectually and spending hours approaching something that seems reluctant to get any closer.  In some odd way, once Kamsack appeared on the horizon, another strange thing happened: mentally we began arriving long before we physically did. We started thinking about cold drinks, food, somewhere to sit down and whatever else might be waiting in town, even though several hours of walking still separated us from those things. In a forest there is usually enough uncertainty about what lies ahead that attention remains with the immediate landscape, but here the destination itself continually occupied the centre of our view. Every time we looked ahead it reminded us where we were going, and every time it seemed scarcely closer it also reminded us how vast this landscape is and slowly we were getting there. I suspect this was part of what made the vastness we saw from the edge of Duck Mountain slightly unnerving.  And in that moment we were not simply looking at Kamsack, but across Saskatchewan and for a spell it felt as though we were looking directly at the amount of time and effort required to cross it.

 

For most of the Trans Canada Trail, distance has existed for us primarily as numbers. Twenty kilometres to the next community, thirty-five planned for the day, another hundred before the next major resupply point, a thousand to the provincial border and many thousands still separating us from the Pacific Ocean.  Numbers that large become manageable only because we divide them into days and those days into the next step. We do not really wake up each morning thinking about walking across Canada. We think about finding water, reaching the next town or campground, getting through whatever trail lies immediately in front of us and finding somewhere to sleep at the end. Then tomorrow we do it again. That has been one of the psychological tricks that makes an undertaking this large possible. Descending from Duck Mountain, however, the Prairie seemed to interfere with that arrangement. Instead of allowing the future to remain hidden around another corner, it spread part of it across the horizon in front of us.

 

There was something humbling and unnerving about that.  But I think that the openness here requires a different kind of patience. There is less opportunity to convince yourself that the next bend will reveal the destination or an unexpected treat because sometimes there is no bend for twenty or fifty kilometres. There may simply be a straight rural route, a distant grain elevator, fields stretching to either side and the knowledge that the place you can already see will take considerably longer to reach than appearances suggest. Amid this, progress (or the sense of it) becomes subtle enough that it has to be trusted rather than constantly confirmed by changing scenery. One foot continues in front of the other, a field eventually gives way to another field, and somewhere almost imperceptibly the distant buildings begin to acquire shape.

 

Eventually Kamsack did (as you know) get closer, and we did arrive. The marks on the horizon separated into buildings; the grain elevator became a structure rather than a distant tower, and roads, homes and parks gradually emerged around us. By the time we reached the beautifully maintained Trackside Gardens beside the railway, the place we had been looking at for hours had finally become somewhere we were standing.

 

In that moment nothing dramatic happened at the time of arrival - we simply walked into town, found somewhere to stop and carried on with the ordinary business of finishing another day. Yet tonight I keep thinking about that long approach and about how strangely different distance felt once the landscape allowed us to see so much of it at once. Perhaps this will prove to be only an impression from our first full day outside Duck Mountain, or perhaps it is something we will encounter repeatedly as we make our way farther across Saskatchewan on the Trans Canada Trail. For now, all I know is that the Prairies seem capable of showing you where you are going long before they allow you to arrive, and walking through that enormous space may require us to learn a new way of thinking and a deeper sense of patience.

 

See you on the trail.