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Saskatchewan Calling
By Paul Draus

The Girmscheids were farmers, tile makers, and dairymen in Europe and when they landed in the United States of America in 1857 they took to the plow in the new land on the frontier of American civilization. Like many millions of other immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia and elsewhere, our ancestors left the certainty of early death and starvation in Europe for the less threatening devils of America. After disembarking in New York City they eventually made their way to the Mid-West and the uncertainty of the Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota frontiers then to the plains of central Saskatchewan at Handel, and later yet to the northern wilds of Canada at Loon Lake. At no time did they look back.
                  -Richard Germshceid, 2000

I. Northern Migration
Saskatchewan. Say it low, say it slow, and it sounds like a whisper. At least it did to me. I saw Saskatchewan in my dreams.

Traveling to Saskatchewan via Alberta is sort of like flying to Colorado in order to visit Nebraska. Yet this is exactly what my wife Carla and I did in the fall of 2003. For me, it was a long-awaited journey: ever since I found out about my distant relatives in the prairies outside of Saskatoon, I had a yearning to visit
what many consider to be the least remarkable of Canada’s provinces.

My grandfather’s name was Robert Adam Girmscheid. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of a barber and an actress, he was raised in the rural town of Antigo and met my grandmother, Theresa Marx, at a barn dance in the tiny hamlet of Phlox, where her family had a dairy farm. Growing up, we knew little else about the Girmscheid lineage, though the Marx side was rather extensively documented thanks to the efforts of my great uncle Benedict, a stern but friendly Catholic priest with an imposing buzz cut.

Unbeknownst to us, a man in Edmonton was assembling a complete history of everything Girmscheid, or in his case, Germscheid. Though spelled differently, both names were connected to the same family tree, and Dr. Richard Germscheid was determined to track down its roots as well as its branches. A doctor of education and former public school principal, Dick immersed himself in the reconstruction of family history following his retirement, and it soon became an obsession. He got wind of a wandering offshoot of the family that had settled in the Chicago area, and met up with some of them, including my mother, at a reunion in Minnesota. It was there that she obtained a copy of his growing Girmscheid epic.

When my mother related this to me, I felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. I knew I had some Canadian in me somewhere! Perhaps this could explain my longstanding alienation within my native land. I needed to journey north, and find my place in the great Girmscheid circle. Through the wonders of e-mail, I was able to contact Dick in the summer of 2003. I casually mentioned that we were considering a trip to the Canadian prairies, and he quickly responded: several Girmscheids from Germany were visiting in mid-September, and we’d be welcome to join them as well. “That sounds great,” I replied, “can you recommend a hotel?”

“Hotel, hell”, read his next e-mail. “You’ll stay with us.”

The invitation thus extended, we bought plane tickets and followed the path of the geese. Dick had one request: Could I pick up a couple of cartons of duty-free cigarettes before we entered Canadian airspace?

II. Alberta Beef
Dick and his wife Anne are kindly and gracious folks. With his neatly trimmed white beard and acerbic wit, Dick is a bit more on the professorial side than my own uncles, but in the best Girmscheid tradition, he loves to talk.

On our first night there, we stayed up to a rather late hour, discussing the history of the family and the state of politics in the world as well as in Alberta. In one of his e-mails, he had ironically written, “Being a conservative in Canada would likely place me somewhere to the left of your moderate liberals in the Democratic party. In Canada I would likely be somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini.” I soon realized that Dick, though older and wiser, was in a sense my mirror image: disillusioned with the failures of his own land, he looked south and saw much to admire. Where I saw the virtue of a Canadian health system that helped everyone, he saw the inconveniences of waiting lists; where I saw an American system that left too many behind, he saw the virtue of accessing medical services on demand (provided you could pay for them, I reminded him).

The following evening, Girmscheids from three nations gathered in Dick and Anne’s backyard for a feast of famous Alberta beef. An unfortunate case of mad cow disease had nearly crippled their exports to the States, and they were determined that we should make up for it while we were there. As Dick lined up the whiskey bottles and stocked the coolers I began to feel right at home. The Maple Leaf and Stars and Stripes flew alongside the horizontal black, red and gold bars of Deutschland as Carla and I were introduced to all as “the American cousins.” I had been forewarned by Dick that some of his children were not so fond of America as he was, and had a rather distorted perception of how us Yanks were likely to believe and behave, especially his daughter Lois. “They’re not monsters,” he had told her, in advance of our visit, “they’re just people.”

Late that evening beside the bonfire, after my exhausted wife had gone to bed, and plenty of beer, beef and whiskey had been consumed, Lois got to say her piece and I mostly agreed with her. Like the rest of Dick’s kids, who are all older than I am, she had never been to the states, even though she watched us every night on TV. “I just think Americans are like these fat, greedy people who aren’t happy being the richest, most powerful country on the planet, sucking up all the resources from everywhere else. They don’t want to give up anything, they just want to tell everyone else in the whole world what to do.”

She and her husband Ed were amiable folk who made their living on the oil patch. After all the others had given up and gone home we were still talking, so they offered to accompany me to a local watering hole. We took a taxi because no one wanted to risk an “impaired,” which is Canadian for what we call a DUI. The penalties are quite harsh; at least six hundred dollars and your driver’s license suspended for a year. If you’re in a cab, on the other hand, you can get as drunk as you want. This seemed like good common-sense harm reduction, and karaoke was always a laudable goal in my mind. What better way to heal rifts between families and nations?

J.D.’s Polar Pub Lounge had a neon sign pulsing as bright as the Aurora Borealis and an interior constructed almost entirely of rustic lacquered pine. Lois and Ed lost their karoake virginity singing “Like a Rolling Stone,” and I learned what a “loonie” was while buying a round of beers with the $2 Canadian coins—with the waterfowl prominently depicted.

Informed that Carla and I intended to go camping before we left the country, Ed responded in that matter-of-fact Canadian way, “You better take an air mattress, else you’re going to freeze to the ground, eh.” He promised to bring one by Dick’s house first thing in the morning.

III. Land of Living Skies
Early the next day we departed for Saskatchewan, ground zero for the Canadian tribe of Girmscheids. Dick remarked that “folks over there lean more to the left.” Saskatchewan’s marketing slogan is “Land of the Living Skies” and some might say the wide vistas are remarkable only because there’s so little to obstruct the view. But that was exactly what we wanted: absolute absence of all but the road and an endless rolling ocean of grass and grain.

Though it was late September, we were blessed with relative warmth and brilliant sunshine. The Trans-Canada Yellowhead Highway is the fastest route between Edmonton and Saskatoon, but we opted instead for the smaller, two-lane rural roads. A friend of mine had informed me that this region of Canada is sometimes called “the Duck Factory” because so many birds return to nest and breed among the ponds and potholes here, and we saw them all along the way. We stopped several times and flushed them into flight, just to see and hear thousands of birds rising and falling in waves, like a billowing sheet woven from beating wings.

Soon we crossed the border into Saskatchewan, and so engrossed was I in the living skies that I didn’t even notice the Canadian patrolman coming the other way. I pulled over as soon as I saw him turn his cruiser around, and when he walked up I didn’t even try to make an excuse. I had considered some lame plea about the strangeness of the kilometers on the odometer but abandoned that idea in favor of honesty. The first thing he said was, “I got one of these Pontiac Sebrings at home. They really go.” I handed him my Ohio driver’s license, explained that we were on vacation and visiting family, and prayed to my ancestors for mercy, imagining that Canadian traffic fines had to be stiff. Thankfully, my prayers were answered. He handed the license back and said, “Slow it down, eh.”

“See?” I said as I gently wheeled the Sebring back onto the asphalt. “Even the cops up here are cool.”

IV. New York is Big, but this is Biggar
Biggar, Saskatchewan is a farming community located about an hour west of Saskatoon. Several families of Girmscheids reside in the vicinity, all of them descended from the original homesteaders who settled in the nearby hamlet of Handel. We were greeted at the home of Marlene and Ray, our Saskatchewan hosts, by a houseful of people eating sausage and pierogi and drinking local beer. I had never met any of them before, but I felt like I had just walked into my own Grandma’s kitchen. The reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper hanging there clinched it. As in Dick’s family and mine, the Saskatchewan Girmscheids had intermarried with Slavs, in their case Ukrainians rather than Poles. But the potent cocktail of alcohol, cholesterol, and religion that resulted was about the same.

I filled a plate and sat down at the kitchen table, lined on both sides with seasoned Saskatchewan men in plaid shirts and feed caps, and did my best to fit in. This crowd was dominated by farmers, and they wanted to know my take on American agricultural policy: “How come they say we’re cheating because of the Wheat Pool, when they subsidize all those big corporations?” Here we were, in the heart of the Canadian breadbasket and they couldn’t make a living off the land anymore because the prices were too damn low.

I am, at best, about two generations removed from the noble profession of cultivating the earth. I currently get paid to produce writing that makes no sense to most people and is not read by most of the others. My doctoral training, which allowed me to pass off farts as fine cologne in some settings, did not cut the liver sausage up here. However, I recently lived two years in Iowa, and having paid some attention to what was happening there I was able to make a few comments about the corruption of our electoral system and power of agribusiness. As we drifted further into the realm of politics, one of them asked me outright: “How come they don’t have any left-wing candidates for President in the States?”

A few facts about Saskatchewan: with a population of just under a million, it is about a third the size of next-door Alberta, though it is a little larger than the American state of Montana, which borders it in the south. Among Canadian provinces it is one of the most politically progressive, and proud of it as well. Tommy Douglas, a Baptist preacher turned politician, won the Saskatchewan provincial election in 1944 and established the first socialist government in North America. Douglas was an early proponent of universal health care, and this and other social guarantees remain a hallmark of political life there. The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was a cooperative marketing corporation formed in the 1920s by the province’s farmers so they could directly negotiate fair prices for wheat while bypassing greedy speculators and corporate interests.

For these and other reasons, conservatives in Canada see Saskatchewan as an example of the perils of welfare-dependency and collectivism, and point to the out-migration of young people as evidence that it is an “undesirable climate for business.” I have often wondered why governments that endeavored to provide for their citizens’ needs—through ensuring access to health care or protecting worker’s rights, for example—were always blamed for making citizens’ lives worse when some of those businesses decided to increase their profits by moving elsewhere. On the other hand, when states that do nothing to impede the prerogatives of business are piss-poor, it is never because the free market has failed.

After a couple hours of dinner and conversation, Marlene and Ray’s son Terry took us on a tour of Prairie Malt Limited, where he worked as a shift supervisor. Now this is an industry that one can truly be proud of: every day they convert a river of Canadian grain into high quality malt, the raw ingredient for beer, and from there it flows to breweries and then into bottles and cans of Sam Adams, Sapporo, and Black Label. More than 200,000 metrics tons a year are processed—the bitter cold winters prevent insect infestation and make chemical treatment unnecessary. The plant is a joint venture between the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and Cargill, Inc., a partnership that benefits local growers and workers, generates corporate profits, and provides intoxicating refreshment for millions around the world. Meanwhile, the Wheat Pool became a publicly traded company in 1996, and many farmers and local communities believe that their interests were sold out to Wall Street at the same time.

Terry’s brother Laurie, like many residents of Biggar, also works at Prairie Malt. He is a skilled carpenter, but there aren’t many places of employment in a farming town of 2,000. Ray, his father, operated a grain elevator in a neighboring town for decades; he and Marlene have pictures of these square wooden towers hanging all around their living room, symbols of a bucolic agricultural past that is fading fast. In the absence of all other architecture, these stately sentinels once marked each sparse human settlement’s place on the immense prairies, and they took great pride in them. Grain elevators assumed a mythic significance; hence their designation as “cathedrals of the plains.” With the corporatization of the Wheat Pool, they are slowly being replaced by huge new facilities, each composed of multiple cement columns, cold gray suction tubes that pull in all the grain for miles and miles around.

V. Saskatoon Quest
The Canadians all knew that it was too damn cold to sleep outside in late September in northern Saskatchewan. I realized this when I saw that the campgrounds at Jackfish Lake, north of the historic Battlefords, were completely empty. We offered up unheard thanks to Ed for his thoughtful offer of the air mattresses, and set about pumping them up and pitching our tent as the sun dropped over the silent water and caravans of honking geese streamed across the orange and blue horizon. As the light faded, the warmth drained out of the dry air. We managed to throw together a quick fire, enough to keep us warm for about an hour before crawling into our bags for the night. We saw no elk or moose, as I had hoped we might, but Carla spotted a great snowy owl disappearing like a ghost into the trees.

The next morning we broke camp early and broke our fast in North Battleford, where we were unsuccessful in my quest for saskatoon pie. The native berries, for which the city was named, are gathered in late summer, but by late autumn they are scarce again. Nevertheless, I was determined to try one more time before leaving the living skies behind.

As we headed west out of Saskatchewan, the wind was whipping across the wide open fields, and the sun had returned. We pulled off the highway before we reached the Alberta border, and sought out the only diner in the miniscule town of Marshall. It was located in a plain white building across the road from the grain elevator and the railroad tracks, a lonely outpost on the prairie. The interior was small, no more than four tables in the whole place. There were two other customers inside, chatting with a woman who worked there. When she asked what we would like, I made my last ditch pitch for saskatoon pie.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t have any more. It’s out of season.”
My disappointment clearly visible, I explained that we had come all the way from the state of Ohio and we didn’t know when we’d be back in Saskatchewan, and I was really hoping we’d be able to see and taste some saskatoons before we left.

“Wait a minute,” she said, and went back into the kitchen, the other customers still standing there. She emerged moments later with a large plastic bag of dark purple berries. “These were in the freezer, picked fresh last summer. Go ahead and take them.”

“You’re kidding,” I responded, humbly accepting the icy treasure.

“How often do we have visitors from Ohio?” she said, handing us a red pen with the name of the place printed in big white letters on the side:
MUM’S RESTAURANT. MARSHALL, SK.

We thanked her profusely and returned to the car. It was only after we left that I realized we hadn’t paid for a single thing.

Another fact about Saskatchewan, as reported by the conservative Fraser Institute: of all the Canadian provinces, it was ranked as the most generous, based on three different statistical measures.

VI. Home Again, Home Again
That night, we returned to Dick and Anne’s cozy abode in Edmonton, and I offered her the full bag of berries, now softening as they thawed. We treated our kind hosts to dinner at a fine German restaurant, and then we shared a dessert of saskatoons and cream back in their small kitchen. Anne had fond memories of eating them that way as a girl, and she took a photograph so we could all remember the moment.

Almost all the folks we met up north were engaged in practical occupations—plumbing, contracting, carpentry, farming—and we must have seemed like clueless dudes, hopping off the train in our city duds, taking pictures of empty fields. Yet there were echoes of our shared heritage to be heard there: in the back yards and kitchen tables, in the modest ambitions and abundant opinions, in the embrace and disdain of one’s nation, in the struggle against obsolescence, the war once waged against wind and winter, now futilely fought against an unfeeling, unyielding thing called “economy.”

The next morning, we headed once again to the airport. Soon we were flying back home over a limitless beach of cloud. The miracle of modern transportation had condensed time and distance to such a degree that in five days we were able to span distances that our ancestors might not have traversed in a lifetime. This delicate thread of blood, firmly embedded in the American weave, was unseen until pulled. But the family lines that stretched across those distant plains, the scattered seeds that sprouted among the small towns and cities of the northern Midwest and the “Last Best West” of the Canadian prairies, all of these were within reach, accessed as easily as an e-mail is sent. These buried human trails still connected our separate bones, from the flat earth of Illinois to the benevolent skies of Saskatchewan.

Paul Draus is an itinerant sociologist currently residing on the lush and verdant western slope of the Miami River Valley, uphill from downtown Dayton, Ohio. In the autumn of the year, he and his restless band will migrate north to the untamed wilderness of Detroit, Michigan, or thereabouts. He earned his PhD from Loyola University Chicago in 2001 and is the author of Consumed in the City: Observing Tuberculosis at Century’s End (Temple University Press, 2004).