The wonder of an open western sky

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/11/2023 (687 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Headed to Brandon early Sunday on a rescue mission for stranded family.

The weather? Fat snowflakes caught winding in eddies of wind at the beginning of the trip, freezing rain by the time I crossed the Perimeter Highway. Windshield wipers barely keeping up with the grey and streaking spray.

Slush in dirty wheel-made windrows between the lanes on the Trans-Canada Highway. One yellow snow plow energetically spilling grit with the freehand largesse of the first snowfalls, but sadly on the other side of the divided highway from me, heading east.

Bracketed by transport trucks, distracted momentarily by a huge freight train to the north of me, concentrating on making no sudden moves while my muscles refamiliarized themselves with every sideways skid my body’s ever known, right back to riding my first bike on gravel.

You know what I mean.

I was just past Portage la Prairie when the grey cloud pulled away from above me, and suddenly the angled sun was lighting a three-bar backdrop horizon. The colours: one bar, a pink-orange you might call salmon, if the pink was not so delicately opaque and the orange not so, well … powdery. Almost granular. The translucent solution chemists call a suspension.

That band was the lowest of the three.

The next, one thin line of grey matte-flat mist, providing, if not definition, at least delineation.

Above that again, a wide band of whitened winter-blue, that special blue of post-October and pre-April, when the yellow warmth of the sun has been replaced by a harder cold comfort.

The colours stretched impossibly far, to the north and south horizons, their even bands balanced and unending. A sky painted with three brushes of different widths. I couldn’t stop for a photograph — I was, remember, on a mission.

But. But the whole sky so damned big.

Forgive me if this is old news.

I have only been in Western Canada for two-and-a-half years, and the sky is still perpetually surprising to me. I stop on the sidewalk heading home, gawping upwards, amazed by the colours at dawn and sunset, while walkers shoulder past me and Winnipeggers behind their steering wheels course in straight lines to their next inevitable driving impediment.

If the sky were but the inside of a vast and overturned cooking bowl, then the Atlantic sky would often seem to be among the smallest of that bowl set: hemmed in by hills and weather, it only takes on the same kind of majesty on a cold, brittle-clear winter night, when you’re lying outside on a blanket in the pitch black and even the shyest of solar systems have their curtains open.

Or when you happen to find yourself on open ocean, moonlit or star-struck. And even then, the sky seems shallower than this Prairie sky.

Here, it’s like an everyday feast, ever-changing but delicious on any clear day.

Find the foot of Lake Winnipeg at Patricia Beach in summer, and even though the water stretches all the way to the horizon, the toy lop of its minor whitecap waves tells you it’s nothing like the import of an ocean.

But let your eyes cant upwards, and you can’t help but be struck by breathtaking immensity.

I once spent a whole day outside Saskatoon chasing scattered singular thunderheads across endless sky. I was caught zig-zagging in the unrelenting crosshatch of range roads, feeling like Don Quixote, seeing scores of towering clouds scudding eastwards but only ever catching one. Unable to capture the wonder of those slowly strolling towers of clouds in a picture, settling instead with shaping them in words.

Another day, in summer, I waited, hoping, near Ste. Agathe for a frontal system to get around to nudging itself in over me, the dark-grey front roll of the clouds ominous, a straight-line army of cloud marching east. Felt the air change and the temperature drop, prepared for the onslaught.

Just like facing a winter wind in snow, you turn and almost instinctively let your front shoulder drop — for me, left shoulder, always — as you lean into the coming storm, as if you were on a boat and you’ve turned the bow into the waves, ready to fight instead of surrendering to the wallowing risk of rollover.

I would guess it was near MacGregor where the sky cleared Sunday. My head was full of other things, not looking for road signs.

Fighting the now-slightly-improving road conditions, hands tight on the wheel with concentration, when the sky delivers a small and unexpected gift.

No one knows where they will end up, or when.

But even while you’re focused on something else, wonder can creep in.

Or it can burst out, spread large, and stop you in your tracks.

When that happens, I revel.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor of the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca