From the beginning of my envisioning of The Sun and the Wind Project I have referenced this quote from The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.
"In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences. It would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen could happen all you had to do was say it. Nobody could explain this. That’s the way it was."
So spoke Nalungiaq, an Inuit woman interviewed by Knud Rasmussen early in the 1900’s (source: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram) Nalungiaq’s words illustrate perfectly the feelings and motivations of Aoife, which in turn illustrate some of my own deepest dreams and wishes of finding a path to a new - or old or combination of both – way of being. It moves me, these words and speaks eloquently of the need for a way of speaking with the earth.
Aoife is a shape shifter, one whose very existence was formed by transformation, by imagining. She was born out of the old myths of the elder people who were at that time on the knife edge of the ancient hunter-gatherer and the new and radical groups that were beginning the slow crawl, in human perspectives, towards agriculture.
As the people changed, Aoife would move on to find a group that had not let go of the old ways. She was imagined in the northern part of the European continent, in what we would now call, Scandinavia, the Celtic lands and islands. As the people went so did she and in time she became diminished just as the people became diminished. Chance had it that she came to North America with the early travelers, explorers, the monks that left their lands many hundreds of years ago now. Upon arrival she left her hosts in their boats and found a people living still in the manner in which she was created. She quickly became a part of this world. As a shape-shifter, Skuld existed especially amongst and within the Raven. The warrior, the protector, the wise elder, the story teller, the singer of songs. Because of the diminishment of the people that brought her to form she had lost her beloved ability to transform, to fly amongst her brother and sister ravens. However, the Raven was also within the people of this, to her, new land and the power of the raven, of all the living was still intact, was still there. Aoife quickly and with great joy became able to once again fly with her kin.
Aoife lived for many years in this great land. As this land became itself invaded by the diminished ones from over the great oceans she would move on to find others who had not succumbed to these new ways of seeing, ever moving west and north. She believed that there would always be somewhere else to run to, this land, this Turtle Island being so utterly vast. It was not to be so. In the end, almost every people had embraced the diminished way of living. Skuld lost her way, lost her flight once again.
She now searches for her flight and for her ground. The industrial had for half a century now come to a crashing halt. A perfect storm of the insanities occurred. The twisted economies of the greedy; the wanton destruction of the land, the soil, the air; the stored sun and trickster power out of the ground; these all collected together and collapsed almost simultaneously. A mere long breath out. Leaving large areas of territory unlivable, poisoned. The great Mother truly became weary of the human game and decided that it was time to heal.
Many left. Those with a near memory of living with less, with less things, in truth with living with more, many of them continued, survived. The cities were the most heavily affected. Most to their very dying days believed that their old belief in the industrial would come to save them, that a technological fix was around the corner, that it would come riding over the hill to save the day. It was not to be. Some left the city to try to survive in more wild lands. Most of those had no idea of how to do so and perished, some were able to find sanctuary with groups willing to take them in.
2011 - The Sun and the Wind
Long ride day 2
Well, day one was quite an experience! After some hours of travel, I camped in a lousy damp spot with high grasses and willows. Because the ground was soft, the picket pins ripped right out when a truck blasted by and the horses spooked and were gone, trolling picket ropes and pins behind them. I was having visions of my long ride suddenly coming to a quick and very sudden end, with horses gone, most likely making a beeline back to Trails End Ranch and possibly with essential equipment lost and/or destroyed. Watching the two running off where we had just come, I started walking in that very same direction. After a good 2 km backtracking I did indeed find them standing off in the middle of a field with that, 'what the hell just happened' look on them that I have become quite familiar with. Lucky for me that that part of Saskatchewan is pretty treeless and pretty flat.
So, I walked up to them and they seemed happy to see me and came to greet me as I got close. Dakota's picket rope and pin was still attached to his leg; the rope still intact though quite frayed. Nahanni's rope and pin were not to be seen. As we walked back to our lousy campsite I kept an eye out for it following what I thought was their likely exit path. To my great relief, I did find it close to where we had stopped for our camp. Nahanni’s picket hobble was a little to big for her small feet and she pulled right out of it when the rope caught on a large bush.
Back at that lousy camp, I packed everything up and decided to go back the way we had earlier traveled to a place that I should have stopped at to begin with about one kilometer away.
I managed to get everything settled with the horses’ two front feet hobbled as well as picketed and the rest of the evening and night went without any problems. I was totally exhausted and couldn't believe that luck had gone my way. After a short rest, the three of us went to a nearby farmhouse to see if I could get water for the horses and myself and met a truly lovely elder woman named Violet. 93 years old, she gave us water and we had a nice chat and she was very excited to find out that one of my horses was half Canadian. She had never seen one but she had read about the breed. She offered me a bed for the night but I had to decline as I needed a good place for the horses to stay and she no longer had such spaces. We had a wonderful chat about what life was like when she was a child. How there were more people, more community in those days. It was to be the first of many conversations about how everything had changed in that part of the world. I ate a can of cold salmon and had a cup of wine for dinner. It tasted very good.
So now, as I write this, it's the end of day 2 and it was a good day. I've decided that I will start looking for a place to camp at around 1:30 or so in the afternoon and take the first good spot that comes up. Well, today that site came just at 1:30, so true to my promise, we stopped in this lovely place that used to be an old homestead lot with a farm house. I can tell because there are trees ... this is the prairies after all where trees are a landmark ... and the trees are arranged in a more or less square outline. Planted to break the wind, especially the 40 degrees below zero winter winds. Right now in this spot there are just grain bins and lots of grass for the horses and a slough nearby for water. Filtered for me, straight in a collapsible bucket for the horses. It’s really nice here with the wind in the poplar trees rustling and the birds singing and to top it all off it's been a lovely quiet afternoon. No trucks. Wonderful!
At this moment, I feel very happy to be doing this journey. I really thought it might take a couple of weeks to get to that point. Still, lots of fresh learning curves to come. No doubt.
Day 3 camped by the Qu'appelle River
Yesterday, day 3, made it to the Qu'appelle. I had originally thought that it would take 4 days of travel, wanting to give us lots of time to get used to traveling together. We're going to stay here for 2 full days so that we can practice the fine art of doing SFA. That would be sweet fuck all. Which I can say I am quite good at and have always strived to be so. I can also say that 4 months in Thailand helped me to hone it further. Sanuk it is called in old Siam. Where if you can’t enjoy your work and laugh in your day, then it is hardly worth doing at all.
Now you might be thinking that doing SFA would be an easy task and it is once you learn how to fully do it. However, in our puritan work ethic western culture, it is not so simple for many as it sounds.
So, today is mostly rest, washing in the river, going for little moseys with Nahanni and Dakota so they can be rid of those damned picket hobbles for at least a short time. Tomorrow I shall do a few equipment adjustments and of course some more SFA unless the horses take off and then it could be more of a long hunting expedition which, in truth, can also fit into SFA if you do it right as SFA isn't about doing nothing exactly, it's more of a state of mind.
Our camp is as good as it can get. Right beside the river, native grass everywhere. To me being on/in native grass prairie is very much like being in an old growth forest and probably has as much diversity, much of it happening underground but I can still feel the power of it. It's wonderful and not fully appreciated I feel.
Being by a river is a great luxury and I will strive to be by rivers whenever I can. My friend Edward Poitras suggested traveling along the Frenchman and Milk rivers as part of my journey. A better bit of advice could not be had!
Speaking of advice. I'm already realising that taking advice regarding routes from someone in a motorised vehicle is enough to make my eyes glaze over. We are operating from SUCH different time and distance perspectives that though not exactly useless to me, certainly takes some mental gymnastics to interpret. As in, ‘Oh, it’s just twelve miles down the road!’. To me that is a full days travel. Our riding yesterday was long and windy and sunny. I picked a good name for the project! The Sun and the Wind. The surprising part of the day was the amount of time spent off roads, riding through grass fields quite a bit of the time.
Riding through heavily farmed areas has a certain desolation to it and now that I am here I understand, again, why that feels so. I am thrilled to be here in the Qu'appelle, feeling the great beauty of the prairie as it should be and, all willing, may once again be everywhere.
I'm going to have a full post on equipment later on but for now I can say that I am so happy to have decided to take my smoke tanned deerskin clothing on this trip. Fantastic in the wind and sun, warm and also not too hot, if that makes any sense. A brilliant material that makes me marvel that the knowledge and skill of making it and using it has so diminished in our time.
15.6.11 day 7
Camped - in an abandoned homestead again. Mostly just a bunch of grain bins, open space with grass and trees. Trees! I could actually tie the horses to trees today.
Yesterday camped on the edge of the town of Brownlee (people live there but no grocery stores or anything. So many towns like that in the prairies now) in an abandoned school yard and met the most wonderful people, Pat and Stan Williams. I had some great chats with them and they gave me water and Pat in the evening drove me down the road to scope out possible camp spots. It was such invaluable help. This is a tricky part of the journey as it is mostly dirt farms and not a lot of open grass. I think that it will be better when I get into the south where there is more range land.
Next on to the Qu’Appelle