HOMECOMING
The car is crouched against the snow bank, emitting great clouds of early morning exhaust as if resenting having to face the cold and the darkness, I toss my bag in the back seat and we move through the empty streets of Brandon. Behind us, the west is still night. Before us, to the east, a thin pencil of light promises a coming sunrise. Eventually we reach the highway, on either side of us the the landscape stretching into the darkness. Dotted here and there in the darkness the illuminated windows of early risers shine like the lights of small ships on a vast ocean.
By now, snow is whirling in parallel lines and the edges of the highway have disappeared. My friend needs to concentrate on his driving. I am anxious about whether we shall get to the Winnipeg airport in time. For a while there is little conversation.
On and on we go, the car undulating gently along the east bound ribbon of the highway, its surface rendered delicate and fluid by the drifting of light snow blown across it. Suddenly, joy of joys, the lights of an all-night roadhouse bring the promise of breakfast.
Back in the car, feeling within us the life of a new day stirring, we begin to chat about this world in the middle of Canada, its layers of immigration, its history of depression, the promise of its rich resources, As we leave, an industrial plant casts a harsh light across the snow, its smokestack bidding farewell to the fading stars. Great hydro pylons march away to the north east. They stand cold, angular, steel-limbed yet they carry power that brings warmth and light. They look like enormous skeletons yet they carry life itself itself across the miles.
We move across this winter wilderness in our cocoon of warmth, the voice of a cheerful radio announcer reassuring us that the weather ahead is clearing. My companion asks if I know a famous Canadian poem by A. J.Smith called The Lonely Land. He loves poetry (as I do). He can recall only a powerful image near the end of the poem. I ask him to quote it. He recites it as we both gaze ahead towards the sun now well above the horizon, cascading light on a world of pure whiteness.
This is a beauty
Of dissonance.
This is the beauty
of strength broken by strength,
And still strong
I begin to imagine that we in our tiny chariot have been granted permission by some mighty beings to move across this winter domain, this country of their jealous possession. And with that thought came another. I had already lived in Canada for over forty years. I had travelled the length of this country and to many places within it mostly by plane. It had become natural to think of myself as Canadian. Yet somehow in the course of this night journey I had a strange feeling that mysterious powers we are learning to regard and to respect as the Spirits of the Land, by surrounding me in the pre-dawn darkness, by showing me the beauty of a prairie sunrise, by enveloping me in blinding snow, and by communicating to me the vulnerability of my humanity, these endless plains had somehow given to me a new and infinitely deeper appreciation of being now admitted fully to a vast family, my family, my Canada.