Hospitality Changes the Geography of a Journey

“A kindness is never wasted.”

Aesop, “The Lion and the Mouse”
 

The Kindness We Don’t Talk About

 

There are many ways to remember a journey across a country. Maps encourage us to remember places by their names and locations. Photographs bring back landscapes, buildings, birds spotted and moments of natural wonder. A GPS records kilometres with remarkable precision, while travel journals preserve dates, memories, and the events of individual days. Yet after more than two years of walking across Canada, I am beginning to realize that the map forming in my memory looks rather different from any of these. Increasingly, places are being remembered according to the people we met there, the kindnesses we were shown, and the hospitality we were offered.

 

As we previously mentioned, last night in Regina we met Heather and her family for coffee. She has been following our journey since the beginning, and we spent a wonderful evening talking about hiking, Saskatchewan's beautiful provincial parks, our adventures in Canada and our pilgrimages across Europe. Before we parted, she surprised us with two Saskatchewan Roughriders hats. They are small things in the context of everything we are carrying across the country, but this morning, as we prepare to leave Regina and return to the gravel roads stretching westward, they somehow seem to represent considerably more. We arrived in the city as two hikers following the Trans Canada Trail through another provincial capital. We are leaving wearing a little piece of Saskatchewan given to us by someone who took the time to come out, meet us and make us feel welcome.  Which is something we are both profoundly grateful for.

 

Perhaps that is one of the strange things that happens when you travel through a place slowly enough to meet the people who live there.  As a result, the geography changes.

 

Looking at Saskatchewan on a map before arriving, our attention naturally went to familiar names – the big cities like Regina, Saskatoon, and Moose Jaw.  The towns we have visited on VIA Rail’s Canadian train include Melville, Watrous, and Biggar.   As well as the popular places here such as the Qu'Appelle Valley and Buffalo Pound Provincial Park. Between them appeared enormous expanses of roads, agricultural land and small communities whose names meant very little to us at the time. The same had been true before reaching Manitoba, Northern Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. A map has to reduce a country this large into symbols. Towns become dots, roads become lines, rivers are splotches of blue and huge regions are defined by different shades of colour. It tells us where things are, but not necessarily what those places will eventually mean.

 

Walking fills in some of those spaces with experiences.  Sometimes the change comes from the landscape itself. Saskatchewan has already done a remarkable job of dismantling our expectations of what the Prairies would look like. We entered through the forests, lakes and rolling terrain around Duck Mountain, emerged into enormous agricultural landscapes, followed long concessions beneath skies that seemed almost impossibly large, and then descended into the extraordinary Qu'Appelle Valley. The province we vaguely imagined as flat has already shown us hills, valleys, wetlands, forests, sand, farmland and some of the most dramatic skies we have seen anywhere in Canada.

 

Yet people are changing the map just as much as the landscape.  This has been happening since Newfoundland. There are places that I can no longer think about without remembering the person who stopped to talk with us, the stranger who offered food or water, the family who invited us inside or offered us a warm meal, the trail volunteer who explained what we were walking on, or the person who simply appeared at the moment when a kind word or a bit of encouragement was most needed. Those encounters rarely lasted very long. Sometimes we never even learned a person's name. Yet years later I suspect many of those moments will remain attached to their locations more firmly than whatever distance we walked that day or whatever pictures we took.

 

Ontario increasingly became mapped this way. Along the Cataraqui Trail, Robert rode out to meet us, showed us a pathway he clearly loved, and later welcomed us for dinner. In Verona, Anil at the convenience store unexpectedly helped us with food and water. At Sharbot Lake, Kathy and her family gave two tired hikers access to a cottage, showers, laundry and a little breathing room. Later on, as we continued along the TCT in Campbellford, Jill and Darwin opened their backyard to our tent, shared dinner with us and then walked part of the trail with us the next morning. None of those acts changed the official route of the Trans Canada Trail, but they changed our experience of moving through it and our sense of the country. The names on the map stopped being merely names because someone now belonged to them.

 

Manitoba added other places to this strange personal geography. At Wakerobin B&B, Helen and Alan did far more than provide somewhere to sleep. They shared their knowledge of the land and trails, fed us, helped prepare us for the next day's heat, froze water for us and sent us away with homemade food that later became enormously important on a difficult day. Elsewhere, a farmer stopped his tractor when we were exhausted and dispirited simply to ask if we were alright and whether we needed water. He probably returned to his work minutes later and may never know how important that brief conversation was to two strangers sitting beside the trail. Yet when I think of that stretch of Manitoba, I doubt I will ever remember it only as a concession road through open agricultural land.  I remember his kindness.

 

This does not mean every encounter has been positive. Travelling slowly and largely on foot also leaves us unusually exposed to the places we pass through. There have been angry comments, uncomfortable moments, people who did not want us nearby and occasions when we have felt profoundly unwelcome. Perhaps that makes the opposite encounters more visible. When you cannot simply close the car window and drive off down the highway, the way people respond to you becomes part of the landscape. Hospitality and hostility both acquire geography.  So far, Saskatchewan has overwhelmingly been shaped by the hospitality and kindness we have been offered.

 

From our first days in the province, people have waved from passing trucks, stopped to ask whether we were alright, offered directions and taken an interest in why two people would be pulling carts across the Prairies. Park staff have shared local knowledge. People in communities have pointed us toward trails, food, places to rest and things worth seeing. Near Fort Qu'Appelle, when the Trans Canada Trail disappeared into another water route, Mike patiently helped us and our ridiculous mountain of gear around the section so that we could reconnect with the terrestrial trail toward Regina. As we were leaving, several women recognized us from the newspaper, wished us well and offered us their copy as a keepsake.

 

These are very small acts when written down. A packet of Mr. Noodles soup. A cup of coffee. A bottle of water.  A conversation. Some advice.  Two green Roughriders hats.  Yet on foot, small things stop being small and instead occupy a different scale.

 

When almost everything you need has to be carried, a bottle of cold water can change an afternoon. When you have spent hours walking alone down a gravel road, someone stopping to talk can change the mood of the day. When you are exhausted, encouragement from a stranger can carry surprisingly far. When you have spent weeks feeling like a visitor moving through unfamiliar communities, a hat associated with a place can suddenly make you feel, if only briefly, a little less like an outsider.

 

Perhaps this is another difference between crossing a country and travelling through one slowly. If we were driving, many of these places might be remembered according to where we stopped for fuel, where we spent the night in a motel or where we turned off the highway. We would undoubtedly still meet people and have a few chats, but I think that the nature of walking seems to make interaction almost unavoidable. We are slow enough to be noticed. Our packs and carts spark curiosity and raise questions. People have time to see us approaching, wonder what on earth we are doing, and occasionally decide to stop. In return, we have time to listen.

 

The result is that our mental map of Canada is gradually becoming populated by people and moments of generosity.   Newfoundland is no longer simply Cape Spear, the T'Railway Trail, and arriving in Port aux Basques. Nova Scotia is not merely Cape Breton, rail trails and Halifax. Prince Edward Island is more than red soil and the Confederation Trail. New Brunswick is not only the Fundy coast and Saint John River. Ontario has become far too complicated to summarize geographically at all, while Manitoba now contains individuals and conversations that immediately return whenever certain community names are mentioned.  And Saskatchewan has certainly also begun to do the same – in all the best ways.

 

This seems especially significant here because the Prairies are so often described from a distance as empty. People talk about driving across them and flying over them as though there is nothing between Winnipeg and the Rockies except wheat fields, straight roads and an enormous sky. Even before arriving, we had heard jokes about how flat, monotonous or boring this part of Canada would supposedly be. Walking through it makes that description almost impossible to understand.  There is extraordinary geography here, but it operates on a scale that does not always reveal itself from a highway, the backseat of a car or the window of an airplane. There are coulees and river valleys, wetlands and changing soils, patches of forest, subtle rises and falls in the land, grain elevators visible from kilometres away and clouds whose movements can transform an entire horizon. Birds gather in numbers that can fill the sky. Farms that appear as a single point in the distance can take an hour to walk past. And between all of these are a welcoming people.

 

Perhaps that is the part of geography that maps have the greatest difficulty showing. A map can tell us that Regina is here and that the Qu'Appelle Valley is there. It can show the road between two communities and calculate the number of kilometres separating them. What it cannot show is where someone stopped to ask whether we needed help, where a stranger offered encouragement, where someone shared their knowledge of a landscape, or where a family arrived at Tim Hortons carrying two hats for a pair of wandering hikers.  Those places exist only once you have travelled through them and spent some time there.

 

Increasingly, when we look back across the thousands of kilometres behind us, this is the Canada we see. Not a sequence of provinces crossed, or cities reached, but a network of landscapes tied together by encounters. Some lasted hours, others only minutes, yet each changed the experience of the place where it occurred.   I have begun to think that maybe hospitality does something remarkable to geography. It turns somewhere you passed through into somewhere you remember.

 

Tomorrow we will continue on across the province following the long roads of Saskatchewan. There are many, many, many kilometres still ahead, and undoubtedly countless places whose names currently mean nothing to us to explore.   If the journey so far is any indication, they will not remain that way for long.

 

See you on the trail.