Suddenly the phone jangled at top volume, a big black shop model hanging right in front of us on the wall. He looked at us, wide-eyed, and then grabbed it, shouting, “Hello!” He listened for less than two seconds before yelling, “Wrong guy!” and slamming the phone back onto its metal stirrup. It whimpered a final feeble jingle.
“No one ever calls me!” he said, as if it were a threat rather than a statement of fact. Clearly, his solitude had been disturbed. As if he was waking up from a dream in which he’d invited two strangers into his house for a morning beer, he looked at us blankly. I was instantly grateful for having been given the chance to hop into his story. And so our peaceful morning coffee with the crabby, kindhearted, dirty-minded bachelor farmer ended. With handshakes and a salute to him from the car, we were back on the road.
—
We’d just passed a sign for a town called Love, in northwestern Saskatchewan, when the Justy stopped making its usual car noises. It took about a mile for it to wind down like a toy. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Aaron said. “We’re losing power.” He steered it to the side of the road, and we sat for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. Aaron got out and lifted the hood, but there was no smoke, no smell, no indication of trouble. The engine, which we’d discover later was fitted with an experimental “brush transmission” of the kind used in motorcycles, suddenly looked very tiny.
We could see a town on the horizon, so we walked the half mile to its main street and found an open café. It was midafternoon and we ordered pie and coffee. I chose raisin. Not the sour cream raisin pie I knew so well, the custard the color of a muddy river floating with cinnamon, this was just plain raisin. When it came, the filling was bruisy-purple, suspended in tart, shiny juice. The toffee-colored crust was stamped with dime-size holes, revealing blistered raisin skins bobbing to the surface. As I ate, pastry flakes fell onto the plate. I paused our current distress to momentarily take note: real pie.
Two weeks into our trip, this full stop was jarring, especially since we had been considering not stopping at all. Our return route had morphed into a vague plan to keep driving to the west into Alberta, and if we made good time, maybe even all the way to San Francisco, just in time for a friend’s wedding. We had a mutual creeping feeling that our cash reserve was dwindling but—as would become a hallmark of our romantic-financial partnership—neither of us could force ourselves to look at the balance.
We batted around the idea of calling our parents but doubted any of them would drive 776 miles up into Saskatchewan to fetch us and then drive the same distance back.
No, we were going to have to try to fix it. We trudged back. The Justy was parked next to a mailbox, and when we reached it, we saw a compact lady with a head of metallic curls standing in her driveway, holding a pitchfork.
“You folks need some help?” she asked, looking at us with a mixture of warmth and reserve.
We stammered out our story, about the car inexplicably dying and how we’d driven from Minnesota up to Flin Flon. We didn’t tell her the reason for our trip through the filament-thin roads of northern Saskatchewan, afraid that an artist’s grant wouldn’t seem very solid to her. An explanation turned out not to be necessary.
“Can we camp here?” asked Aaron, touching the cigar in his pocket, imagining relaxing around our hobo campfire.
She handed me her pitchfork and said, “You two can sleep in the house if you want to help us get this hay back in the barn,” then turned around and started trucking back to the barnyard. The farm’s pettibone had dropped a bale, spilling hay all over the yard, and over the noise of the machinery she pointed to where Aaron could find another pitchfork. With that, we had a place for the night—and, it turned out, for the next ten days.
Ruth Ivanenko (not her real name) operated a three-thousand-acre grain farm, the biggest one run by a woman in all of Saskatchewan. We would soon learn that the minute and a half that she stopped to question us was about as long as she could stand in one spot. She speed-walked all over the farmyard as if motorized, tossing out orders to her hired man, Lee, and to her son, Richard. If we were willing to work, our timing suited her. It was the height of harvest time, when their combine tractors combed the fields all day long and into the night.
That night at the dinner table she cheerfully announced, “The last person who broke down here was Red Skelton, and that was almost twenty years ago! He was just as funny in person.” She said this casually, as if she were about due for a new lonesome traveler.
Good news or bad news—Ruth didn’t linger long on either. Her fork worked her plate with a steady rhythm, and she didn’t look up from it. Her Velcro work shoes, which she briskly ripped off before entering her house, were indicative of her high personal RPM. Over the course of dinner we learned the reason for her efficiency: She’d been running this place for years. Not a month after she and her husband had bought the farm, they learned that her husband had MS.
“He walked across these fields only once, just that first time. After that, he was in a wheelchair. Every morning, until he got too sick, we lifted him into the hay wagon so he could come with us.” Her eyes flashed, shiny, while she smiled flatly at me and passed me the bowl of potatoes. After he passed away, Ruth began to buy more land, until she’d expanded to farm all the way to the horizon, and then way beyond.
Her son and Lee were essential to her, of course, but I swallowed thickly to think of the sheer volume, the height of the mountain of work, that she had amassed behind her. On the way inside, I’d noticed the vines of scarlet runner beans contorting around the railings of her porch—a variety known more for being decorative than edible. I pictured her as a younger woman, keeping the garden, raising their kids, doing all the canning, all the cooking, all the farming, and still managing to keep a cut-flower garden and plant decorative beans, just for eye candy. It was a reminder that daily beauty is part of what a farm yields. I felt suddenly lazy, guilty for all the times I slept late in our loft bedroom back home, not inspired enough by the chirping of birds going about the main thrust of their day to get up and begin my own.