THE EXPEDITION Chapter 9: Wow (Section 1)

In which there is a doggy boot miracle 

Date: May 6, 2019

From Piapot to Sidewood Tompkins 17 km 27 km

Eventually the sun starting coming up, so I got up.

It was hard to get up in the morning. Afternoons were getting much warmer, but nights were still cold. The sleeping bag wasn’t nearly as warm as it claimed to be, not by a long shot. I’d have been sleeping with most of my clothes on anyways – and some nights, boots – but was also using my jackets as blankets, along with Mr Myrtle’s blankie, and Mr Myrtle snuggled into the bag with me. Puppies are warm to camp with.

Puppies who smell like half-wild Caribbean DNA do attract the curiosity of local wandering canines, however. And this particular one has truly awful, albeit thoroughly justified, other-dog C-PTSD. Other dogs scare the beejeezus out of him and he thinks they’re going to kill everyone. He gets hyperdefensive. It’s not good. Dogs, especially wild dogs, smell fear. I’d been scanning for company since beginning without seeing any, but at night, the coyote chorus would get going, and sometimes they were pretty darn close.

There’d been at least two other travellers camped in their vehicles there most of the night. We were tucked into a pocket of trees not far from the parking lot, but the tent was nearly invisible so they’d probably never noticed us. It felt safer having them there anyways though.

On top of that, it really was an awfully nice morning, sunny and fresh, and quasi-guerrilla camping felt like a really cool kind of a bucket list thing for a fifty year old lady to be doing.

All in all, the day was off to a good start. After getting us both rebundled against the morning chill, I got Mr Myrtle happily exploring the 40-foot diameter space available to him on the tie-out cable I’d brought and been using since Calgary. I nibbled a Clif bar as I packed. I was halfway living on those and Made Good veggie bars, and in Manitoba, the Gorp bars the rest of the country is seriously missing out on. They’re organic and gluten free and vegan, and relatively healthy, and easy to carry and eat. I did usually have some precooked organic rice and beans, and a bit of porridge that would only need boiling water, and sometimes a few apples. There was always kibble and treats of course (happily, it turns out most highway gas stations and truck stops have pet food), replenished in small bags with the new blended into the old if it was different, but that wasn’t mine (another thing to be happy about, though Mr Myrtle seems quite happy with it). I did eat in local establishments a lot, because they’re such good networking places, but in between, I admit the bars were pretty much what kept me going.

We’d have a relatively easy day; the maps (paper and virtual) said Sidewood was small, but only 17 kilometres away. Being up so early meant I could make sure to go slow and take good breaks. That worked fine until more than 17 kilometres into the then expiring day, Sidewood hadn’t appeared. I needed rest but I also needed ice. I kept going. Eventually I wobbled into a gas station, where none of the surprised and concerned folks there knew anything about Sidewood. They settled me into a chair with some chips and juice, and water and treats for Mr Myrtle , and phoned the hotel in town to tell them our story in a (very tiny, basic, and not very clear because of multiple things going on in both backgrounds) nutshell and make sure we could stay there and that they could help us out.

The town, and hotel, were about a mile or so down the side road. I was pretty much creeping along by  then. If my knee hadn’t hurt so much, I’d have quite literally kicked myself for not staying in Maple  Creek longer. As we came into the tiny town, I realized Mr Myrtle had lost a boot. They’re absolutely  necessary on the road, because of glass and garbage and ticks and hot asphalt and everything else, and  they’re not cheap. You can’t buy one at a time, and they’re hard to replace on the road. He was already  wearing one of the spares and we had a long way to go yet. I can’t remember if I really cried, but I  certainly wanted to. The idea of walking back to look for the boot was more than my knee or the rest of me could deal with. 

A family from a nearby Hutterite community was passing, and when they stopped, I asked if they might have noticed a boot. A very small dusty dark boot on a very large dusty dark road is basically invisible, but they kindly said they’d keep their eyes out for it on their way back to the highway; then, they apologized, they were going east. Before going on our ways, we had a long conversation, and another when they came back after having gone and searched more than four miles of the highway to the west – and then found it near where we’d met, on the way back to apologize for not having found it. The world really is pretty incredible, full of good kind lovely human beings all over the place!

We talked about the ways the Earth is changing and why. We talked of what that is leading to. We talked of how different ways of living can still change the future and the planet. We talked of respect, simplicity, life. We talked of how community living is so integral to our daily lives and to our continued survival as a whole, and as part of a whole.

There’s a lot of independent communities in the prairies. As well as a collection of more recent intentional communities of various sorts, there are many longstanding Hutterite and Mennonite communities. Respect for the Earth is as basic to their lifestyles as their religious beliefs are. People who live intimately with the land can see changes over time, and they understand the patterns and disruptions in ways that city folk and suburbanites have little opportunity to.

As we finally said goodbye, the father of the family said “Thank you. Thank you for what you are doing, and for giving me the courage to speak about this beyond my community.” I’ll never forget that, ever. It meant so much to me to have been part of his catalyst towards continuing, as he and his family had been part of mine just then – the encouragement of such good talk about the climate crisis right then was so very helpful to me. I was feeling so very squashed, and talking with them helped me put myself back together. We still stay in touch to this day, as I try to do with so many special people from this expedition, and I’ll apologize here for being crummy at keeping up with keeping in touch.

Mr Myrtle and I made our way into the bar as inconspicuously as, well, as an old hippie and a Jamaican dog in a prairie bar, which sounds like the beginning of a joke, and probably always will be there now!

We were in Tompkins. My day had gotten ten kilometers longer. Two guys in the hotel bar nearly dropped their beers laughing when they heard me wail about the whereabouts of Sidewood to the dear old proprietor.

“Sidewood?! What was left of that place got pushed in a hole years ago!” one of them called across the room.

“We’re from there!” The other offered – “or we were when it existed… now I guess we’re from nowhere.”

“The town formerly known as Sidewood?” asked the first.

“The hole in the ground formerly known as Sidewood.”

“Nah, it’s not a hole anymore, it’s all filled in. The empty space formerly known as…?”

“It was a good town.”

“Yeah, it was. Just too small.”

Sidewood doesn’t exist. It hasn’t for over twenty years, and there wasn’t much left of it when it folded.

However, it’s a common but little known (unknown, to me, till this point) habit of mapmakers to include small places that don’t exist, or similar oddities, in their work so they can tell when they’ve been plagiarized. Yay for them and their lawyers. Not so much for travellers. But it was nice to know I hadn’t lost my marbles or zoned right out or completely disassociated for long enough to miss a town or gotten abducted by aliens, and I was awfully glad to have made it to a good place.

They toasted their town sadly, but they were still laughing about the situation. They were also quite concerned about Mr Myrtle and I, as was the proprietor, but honestly I was laughing too.

I was also starving. Fries were about all I could have from the menu, but the proprietor took it upon himself to invent me a salad dressed up with cheese, olives, tomatoes, pickled egg, and I forget what else. He did that every evening for the whole five nights we stayed, to make sure I was eating alright. He and his wife are such good people, and part of a kind and closely knit community which the hotel had been central to for over 100 years. Everyone heard about Mr Myrtle and I and many would stop to talk when they ran into us, not that we were out and about much, what with my knee, or come over to our table at the cafe or bar.

#WalktoWakentheNationexpeditionbook