Summer Reruns

As our time in Saskatchewan draws quickly to a close and the move looms large on the horizon, I'll be away from blogging for the next three weeks. For those of you who are new to terra incognita and might appreciate a bit of an introduction to my blog, and for those of you who still check in out of habit and might appreciate something to read when you do, I thought I'd put together this line-up of summer reruns. I'll be back around the third of August, but in the mean-time and in-between-time, here's the best of terra incognita over the last five months of blogging (click on the links to read).

1.Thoughts on the Resurrection.

2. Math and spirituality

3. Work and eschatology

4. Genesis 18:1-15

5. The Tower of Babel

6. Mary and Martha

7. The Transfiguration

8. Worship, culture and eschatology

9. Ecology and the baptism of Christ

10. The footstool of Jesus

The Prairie Noah

About ten minutes outside Moose Jaw there's this obscure little museum called the Sukanen Ship Museum. It tells one of the most interesting pioneer stories I've heard in Saskatchewan.

Tom Sukanen was a Finnish sailor/ship-builder who immigrated to Minnesota in 1898. In 1911, he came to Saskatchewan to homestead a land claim, leaving his family behind in Minnesota and making the 600 mile trek by foot with all his belongings on his back. He filed a homestead near the town of Birsay.

Over six feet tall and weighing some 280 pounds, Tom was a man of almost legendary strength (he once clean-and-jerked the axle and wheels of a car at a town fair), infinite resourcefulness (he once knitted a suit out of bailer twine) and amazing inventiveness (he once designed and built his own threshing machine).

After the farm was well established, Tom walked back to Minnesota to retrieve his family and bring them out to Saskatchewan. When he arrived, however, he discovered that his wife had died in a flu epidemic and the state had adopted out his children to foster families. Twice the authorities apprehended him trying to bring his son into Canada, and when they finally threatened him with jail-time, Tom was forced to return to Saskatchewan alone.

And here's where the story gets almost surreal.

Dejected and isolated on his farm, Tom became obsessed with the idea of building a boat and returning to Finland. His plan was to follow local waterways to the Saskatchewan River, follow it to Hudson Bay (he'd already made this trip once by rowboat) and from there sail home to Finland. As large shipments of steel and sheet metal were delivered out to his farm, and as he completely abandoned his farming to work on his land-locked ship-building project, Tom became something of a curiosity among the gossips and scoffers of Birsay. Days they could hear his hammer pounding tirelessly, nights they could see the glow of his forge, as he built the steel hull and shaped the boiler for his ship.

From the Museum's description of the boat:

Tom's plan was to build the ship in three sections. The keel and hull would be water tight and could be floated on some very shallow water. The cabins could be loaded onto a large raft, along with other odds and ends. This raft would be powered with a motor and rudder, and by towing the keel and hull, he could catch the high water of the Saskatchewan River.... He planned to reach the deep water mouth of the Nelson River and then on to the Hudson Bay. There he would quickly have the various parts assembled and the steam engine and boiler installed.

Tom worked through the Great Depression on this unlikely project, forging and shaping the metal boiler, smokestack, pulleys and gears, all by hand. His status among the locals was upgraded from curiosity to eccentric and eventually to "That Crazy Finn," as he poured all his energy and resources into his strange obsession. When asked, "Why are you building a ship on the prairie?" he would reply with a stone-set face, "There's a great flood coming and I want to be ready to sail out of it home to Finland."

By 1940, Tom had finished his ship, but after a local farmer refused to tow the finished sections to the water, and after vandals looted and stripped the boat one night, and after townspeople began petitioning the RCMP to remove him from the area because his "junk" was a hazard, he had to abandon his dream a broken man. In the end, Tom was institutionalized in a North Battleford hospital, where he eventually died (April 3, 1943). His last words to a friend were: "Don't ever let that ship go. Don't let them tear it down."

But the ship lay derelict and nearly forgotten for almost thirty years. Much of it was wrecked by vandals and pillaged by scavengers, but the bulk of the remains were hidden on a farm in Whitebear, SK. In 1972, a Pioneer Village Museum outside Moose Jaw purchased and restored the ship, raising it as a monument to the indefatigable spirit that pioneers like Tom Sukanen brought with them to the often merciless Saskatchewan prairie.

This story has held a special place in my imagination ever since I first heard it. Something about Tom's dream to build an ocean going vessel in the heart of the prairies has always seemed distinctly Saskatchewanesque to me. It's that spirit of outlandish vision and bold resourcefulness and even a certain kind of creative restlessness that I've grown to love and am sure to miss about this place.

The Eyes and Ears of Saskatchewan

I only discovered him a couple of months ago, but Ken Dalgarno has become one of my favorite contemporary artists. Think Van Gogh meets Group of Seven meets Saskatchewan. His paintings have an almost startling vividness. And then the texture of them: you can almost feel the prairie wind against your ears.






There's also Yvette Moore. Sometimes her work is a little too linear for me, but at her best she has a patient, loving eye for detail and a careful hand. I read somewhere that before someone can learn to paint, they must first learn to see-- and this can take a life time. Yvette Moore is an artist who has, indeed, seen the prairies.

These two are my favorite Yvette Moores, both historic details from Moose Jaw. They're both unlike much of her work, but I find them strangely compelling. Subtle and evocative.



And while I'm noting Saskatchewan artists, I should mention one of my favorite Saskatchewan bands, The Northern Pikes. Their 1990 album Snow in June still echoes in my head once in a while, especially "Am I in Your Way." I used to sing the chorus of "Love These Hands" (hit play below) to my kids while I rocked them to sleep:

It's My Happy Place

Another thing I've grown to love about Saskatchewan is Corner Gas. One of our family traditions is the Corner Gas party, where we pop a big bowl of corn and hunker down together to laugh our faces off over three or four episodes for an evening.

Now, I realize (from the "thanks-but-no-thanks" expressions that sometimes greet my recommendations of the show) that Corner Gas is a bit of an acquired taste. But, what with it being filmed only 30 minutes down the road from us, and what with the very good chance that you might actually catch a glimpse of someone you know appearing as an extra, it was kind of hard not to be a fan. And the writing, really, was brilliant: lots of subtle word-plays and wry wit, mixed in with bizarre hyperbole and corny situational comedy. Corner Gas has added a whole repertoire of one-liners and disarming rejoinders to our family dialogue (though we've talked pretty carefully with our kids about the J-word).

But I don't think these were the things that finally cinched me as a fan: it was the way the show so effortlessly evoked a sense of place. There were times I was almost sure I could have turned off the TV and just walked out on my front porch to watch the rest of the episode. Scenes in Phil's bar, I could have sworn that if I took a deep enough inhale, I could smell the stale smoke and sour beer on the air. And I'm sure I've been in the cafe that inspired the Ruby, and a half-dozen others like it between Edmonton and Regina.

And, of course, the light. Sometimes the show so overflowed with Saskatchewan light that you were tempted to wonder if you left the curtains open.

Every place has, I think, a certain ethos, a texture you learn when you linger long enough. You don't know what it is, but you know when you're touching it-- when it's brushed against your face unexpectedly, or across your heart. In so many ways, Corner Gas evokes the texture of Saskatchewan that my time lingering here has taught me to appreciate.

Nothing to Block the View

So begins our final week in Saskatchewan. Spent the day packing boxes and waxing reflective on what I'll miss about this place. High on that list, no doubt, would have to be the living skies. Anyone who says there's nothing to see in Saskatchewan never looked up. By turns gilded, azure, silver, slate-grey, dappled, polished, cloud-brindled, wind-dancing, storm-scowling, bird-stippled, lowering, vaulted, blushing, sombre, crystalline, and blue, the Saskatchewan sky dominates my experience of the land in a way I'd expect the sea dominates the experience of many maritimers.

The perpetually changing constant.

My wife likes to take pictures of the prairie sky. From her collection, I've put together this "eight thousand word" photo essay on the beauty of Saskatchewan. In Saskatchewan, it's not so hard to take Isaiah at his word: when the Lord created the world, he indeed stretched out the heavens.