Much like how I took to mixology and card games in the Arctic as was the culture, so it’s no surprise I have taken to country music (something I never thought I’d say) during my time in the Great Plains.
Swift Current – home to the Canadian country singer Colter Wall that I have really enjoyed, is where we spent the first week of July. Instead of Canada Day fireworks keeping us poor field-workers awake, it was actually the CN Rail not more than 20 meters from the back of our AirBnB that would rock the house hourly – all throughout the day and night.
Swift Current is a weird amalgam of newer, larger developments on either side of the Trans Canada that seems to bisect the city and then smaller, more traditional prairie homes clustered on either side of the Swift Current Creek connected by twisted roads of half paved-over gravel. Depending on where you were dropped off, you may assume you were in an upper-class neighbourhood belonging to a city of over 50,000 or in the middle of no where population of 300 township. With a population of 18,000, Swift Current is also somewhere in the middle of that identity and thankfully retains its small town community through expansive community gardens, walking trails, and beautiful public greenspaces with towering cottonwoods that shade workout spaces, play structures and splashpads.
We also started out field surveys of the farms we had previously visited to set up the Automatic Recording Units (ARUs). With the wet season this year, the fields were incredibly wet in the early morning and leaving our soaked boots and pants out on the porch for the midday sun to scorch them dry was a common occurrence for the rest of our field work in Saskatchewan.
Wildlife on the Road
In order from top left: Juvenile Great Horned Owl (we saw a few adults over the two weeks but couldn’t snap a photo of them in time), a lone moose out on the prairie outside of Regina, some cute cows, juvenile hawk of some sort, the long road that intersects Chaplin Lake.
Chaplin Lake (and by extension Reed Lake) is a black swan in the land of freshwater lakes as it is one of the few natural bodies of salt water in Canada and is a very important stopover for migrating and nesting shore birds. We saw many ducks and other shore birds in the water, and at Reed Lake (further West towards Swift Current) there were rumours of a piping plover that two Swedish researchers working for Western University had seen 10 minutes prior to our arrival.
I’ve really enjoyed taking the time to explore in the places we’ve have the chance to stay in for a few days. I feel more connected to places people often overlook or don’t think of much, and in a funny way, it makes me feel more Canadian than the center of the universe mindset some people fall into when living in southern Ontario (much like Americans that never leave their country). I am sure my grandparents and mom are chuckling at me saying that because it probably sounds like a baby learning to walk, but what can I say? I’ve become a Canadiana cowboy as of late.
Regina is incredibly underappreciated as a provincial capital, despite it’s smaller size than Saskatoon (and 20,000 people smaller than Kitchener-Waterloo). And while it obviously is a city just like any other city with it’s urban sprawl and ugly city sections that seem indistinct from any unique identity, there are spots that Regina’s character shine through.
I visited Wascana Centre, a large greenspace built around the man-made Wascana Lake and was in awe of how close it felt to Central Park in NYC or Toronto’s High Park and was certainly not expecting something like that to be in Regina of all places. It not only contains the Legislative Building, but also both University of Regina campuses, Science Centre, Museum, and two art galleries. Bordering the bridge towards the Legislative Building is a walkway over the water that has multiple signs and plaques that describe the history of Regina and the Wascana Centre and scattered through the park is more bits and pieces of history old and recent.
After walking through the Wascana Centre, I went on a free tour through the legislative building and learned way more about the premiers of Saskatchewan than I thought I would ever learn. Thomas Walter Scott, the first premier of Saskatchewan, was so sure that the Prairies would be THE place for Canadians to settle, made sure the Legislative Building was one of the largest and most grand. Ironic, I know. Turns out that this tour would be even more of an art tour than the art gallery I later visited. There are many pieces of native prairie landscapes and early Saskatchewan locked in the bowels of the basement hallways that none besides security and the odd government worker will lay eyes on, unfortunately (I even asked if they have considered art tours as the main tour only showed portraits of important officials). Most of the building has been off limits since the 40s when the establishment of public health care was so controversial, the building stopped allowing people to visit without a guide due to the fear of violence and vandalism to the building as well as towards officials.
The MacKenzie Art Gallery sits a short walk away from the Legislative Building and was a complete ghost town besides the two front desk workers and the volunteer gallery security. To me, I would think Sunday would be a great day to visit the art gallery but the ladies at the front said Sunday’s are usually quiet (but never that dead). So, I got to tour the gallery completely alone. What an experience!
The first exhibit was on the current age of social media and performance of our public lives can be compared to that of being on the stage of a theatre production. With mixed media of clay sculptures, animated statues, music commentary and classic paint on canvas, it was divided into 5 ‘acts’ that when through the behind the stage dressing room, the stage itself, so on so forth. The next explores a dystopian future where two characters, The Scavenger and The Sower, go about their own ways of protecting the last of plant matter in an apocalyptic Earth including the story of a group of witches and a time travelling canoe to travel back in time to bring back plants so their children may experience forests and fields of green as they once had.
It was quite a lovely first date with the city of Regina and just goes to show, there’s always pockets of fun and colour in what may seem on first impressions, bland and uninteresting.
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