A thing about Aaron: When he walks into a room, he will choose a hard-backed chair over a cushy upholstered one. He prefers scratchy wool over cotton, even in a robe. He’d take 30 below over 90 degrees above, any day. When he dreams of places he’d like to visit, he doesn’t think of sandy beaches, a hot book, and a cold cerveza with lime. No—even though he lives in rural Minnesota, in the coldest place in the continental United States—he wants to go north. Karelia, Finland. The Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. Northern Canada.
In the summer of 1997, the state of Minnesota gave Aaron an artist’s travel grant for three thousand dollars and the encouragement to indulge in his uncommon kinship with severe northern places. So that August we took off on a road trip straight up into the arterial passageways of rural Saskatchewan. His stated purpose was to take photographs for his carvings and “to drive as far north as was possible.” Mine, less official, was to catalog the local food. Still fascinated with American pioneer women’s diaries, I wondered what regional holdouts I’d find from Canada’s rural immigrant and native groups. We packed a sketchbook each, two suitcases, Aaron’s guitar, and a cooler for road food into his tiny gas-efficient Subaru Justy and drove for hours through what seemed to be the same landscape: the endless plains, flat as a bath mat. During the first two days, I’m afraid I didn’t share his fascination. Trying to disguise my boredom, I stared at the huge map on my lap, studiously doing my job to keep us on course. In about seventy-five miles, I figured, we’d have to make a turn.
“Look out the window!” Aaron pleaded, frustrated that I wasn’t sharing his excitement for the emptiness. “If you don’t look, you won’t see anything.”
As we drove, the pine trees, shaped at first like perfect cones, gradually grew thinner until they were sharpened to bare twigs with round, wiry tufts on top, until they looked like skinny bottle brushes—fancy ones, for the narrowest of glassware. As the trees narrowed, so did the roads.
According to Aaron’s plan, we took roads along the old railroad routes, hitting every little pinprick of a town. Following the main street to the grain elevator to the river, he’d scan the banks for old factory buildings, looking for evidence of the main economic thrust of the place. “See—there are a bunch of town lots there, you can see their square shapes all the way to the end of the block,” he’d say, his finger tracing a sidewalk until the end frayed into a heaved-up pile of bent earth and cement, like a crooked string of teeth after a lifetime of chewing.
Turning the car off the main road toward an abandoned railroad station, he’d clutch the wheel and sit up straighter. “And there’s the mill. Oh, man, at one point this was a big town…Any one of these towns could have become the dominant town, the county seat,” he said, stretching up to see over the bridge we were passing, like a beaver popping its head high out of the water to scout downstream. Then, looking crushed, he said, “They didn’t all make it.”
In addition to invisible lots, old buildings really stoked him up. Crumbling town halls. Main Street storefronts with false facades. Houses with curious additions. Stone-stacked fire halls that had since morphed into cafés. Mason halls, Odd Fellows halls, and Rebekah, the female Odd Fellows halls. These towns looked just like the ones in his carvings, like they’d been booming until some cataclysmic event caused the entire society to take off in an instant, leaving garage doors stuck halfway open and pots of stew steaming on stovetops. It dawned on me that the diluted dream was what he was looking for.
When we passed rare newly built Lions Clubs halls, housed in long khaki-colored sheet-metal buildings with tiny windowless doors, they weren’t beautifully decrepit like the rest, but somehow their bleakness won us over, too. With all that stoic we-don’t-give-a-shit siding (surely lined with git-r-done drywall), they reminded us of the sheet-metal explosion in our own town. Even here, on the prairie that rode up into Canada, we found our unsentimental Midwest. Looking through Aaron’s staunchly optimistic, contrarian viewfinder, I found myself falling deeply in love with what he saw: the grandiose, the downtrodden, and the cheaply built alike.
Like in the rural Midwest, pickings were slim for food in the public sphere. Most of it was indistinguishable from what we ate in the Sysco-fed restaurants back home. We found multiple Chinese restaurants, though, and cafés devoted to Native American food, and Ukrainian restaurants. When I peered down into my shallow bowl of pelmeni, shiny and full-bellied and bobbing in butter, they looked like little clams and tasted just as slippery and sweet.
After each town, we reentered the rural countryside. Soon enough, there weren’t two people to rub together, but we talked to nearly everyone we met. The first was Rene Doucette. We were driving into a gray area on the map called the Carrot Valley, and when I looked up, the color in the air was the same as the shading on the map: cement-gray and foggy, even at midmorning. A man was standing next to a horse at his front fence when we pulled up. Only halfway lost, Aaron stuck an arm out of his window.
“Are we on the road to Flin Flon?”
Within minutes of trading weather and geographical banter with Rene, Aaron was exiting the car and following him to his enormous garden. The size of a city lot, Rene’s garden seemed to me to contain a lot more food than a single guy could ever eat. In late August, even with a summer with more daylight hours than ours, his tomato plants were starting to wilt, as if they’d already been threatened with real frost. It looked like he’d already dug all of his potatoes. Rene asked us, “You guys ready for a beer?”
What the hell. We were on vacation (weren’t we?) and also curious to see the interior of one of these houses we were forever passing. So it was that we found ourselves at 10:30 in the morning sitting at Rene Doucette’s kitchen table, drinking tall, watery cans of Canadian beer. It was what skinny, lonely guys like him call their morning coffee.
Hanging above the phone was a shop-equipment-sponsored nudie calendar. The girl’s shiny ass pointed straight into the room, providing its only decoration and giving me the feeling that Rene’s bachelordom had been a longtime situation. He’d originally raised hundreds of heads of cattle, he told us, and the crops to feed them there in the Carrot Valley, the northernmost farming area in all of Saskatchewan. Past that, the taiga—the northern frozen bog, its soil too acidic to grow anything—began in earnest. Rene shrugged as he revealed the real reason for his many rows of vegetables: his was a free community garden. All summer, anyone who wanted to come out could pick. He sent bags of beans and potatoes and squash back with low-income families who drove out from The Pas.
“Those kids do a good job picking those vegetables,” he said, tipping back his can.