Film follows Prairie survivors back to real world

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/12/2001 (9028 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THEY were very different people on the 19th-century homestead, so there’s no reason to expect they’d be any less dissimilar in the 21st century.

And it’s the differences between the two sodbusting couples that is most apparent in Pioneer Quest: Survivors of the Real West, an hour-long followup to the immensely popular series that airs tonight at 8 on Life.

As the title suggests, this new film picks up where Pioneer Quest: A Year in the Real West left off, joining the two now-famous couples — Frank and Alana Logie of Fergus, Ont., and Tim and Deanna Treadway of Kenora — as they leave their back-in-time adventure behind and try to readjust to life in the modern world.

In case you’re one of the few Manitobans who missed it, Pioneer Quest was a locally produced documentary series that followed the aforementioned four participants as they attempted to re-create the lives of Manitoba’s early settlers on a remote plot of land near the Interlake town of Argyle.

The Logies and the Treadways were given a wagonload of supplies and a few farm animals, like the ones the 19th-century settlers might have had, and built a life from the ground up, planting crops, building homes and surviving all that Manitoba’s often-harsh climate had to offer.

It wasn’t easy. The summer of 1999 was rain-soaked and mosquito-infested, and the winter that followed included the coldest December in more than a century.

But the latter-day pioneers persevered and, in many senses, thrived. And as this “Survivors” documentary shows, the adjustment from that world to this one provided its own share of tough challenges.

“I think the word would be ‘aliens,'” Tim Treadway says of the transition back to 21st-century living.

That’s just one of the points on which the Treadways and the Logies differ. While Tim and Deanna seem to have spent most of the last year doing whatever they could to extend their pioneer experience, Frank and Alana appear to have been much more inclined to leave Pioneer Quest behind.

The Treadways have made an endless stream of public appearances — often more than a dozen a week — and are still at work on a book that chronicles their adventures.

The Logies, on the other hand, have declined most offers for speaking engagements and pulled the plug on a book deal because their hearts just weren’t in it.

“I think it’s normal to want to move on,” says Alana Logie.

Adds husband Frank, “We don’t want to do anything. We just got back to our normal lives, and that’s all we want to do . . . That was last year, and now we’re in this year.”

It isn’t, however, as if Pioneer Quest hasn’t had a lingering effect on the younger couple. After leaving the homestead and spending a few days in hotel-suite luxury in downtown Winnipeg, the Logies returned home to Fergus, only to find that there wasn’t really all that much waiting for them there.

Eight weeks later, they packed all their belongings into their mid-sized automobile and hit the road — headed for a new home in Winnipeg.

“It’s cheap, and it’s friendly,” says Alana.

In the end, this hour-long film doesn’t possess any of the harsh-living drama that made each hour of Pioneer Quest so fascinating to watch. But it’s a fitting way to bring closure to an adventure that was, for so many Manitoba TV-watchers, a very personal kind of experience.

One way or another, the pioneers have moved ahead, but it’s clear that each of them has a deep appreciation for the opportunity this modest but meaningful bit of reality TV afforded them.

“We’ll never be able to re-create it,” says Frank Logie. “There’s no holiday you can go on that will give you this experience.”