Living Skies
a meditation on my time in Saskatchewan
It’s inevitable in the lulls of small-talk with friends or strangers, that the conversation shifts towards talk of the weather: what’s been, what it is, and what is to come. When I arrived on the prairie years ago, I saw this as a quaint agrarian holdover— leftover from when farming was the main profession and people paid their university tuition in wheat. I’ve come to see it as something deeper. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time in Saskatoon, it’s the beauty that accompanies each season, and the comforting rhythm of it all that binds us together in shared experience.
Torn away from the comforting embrace of my west coast mountain ranges, it took time to fall in love with the skies and the stories they could tell. “It’s the Land of the Living Skies” they told me, over and over again. But it was more than a cute moniker; the wide open space was at first disorienting, but that feeling of nakedness fell away as I leaned in and gave myself over to it. Slowly, I found that the seasons were marked with their own dramatic backgrounds.
Spring began timidly, hiding in the long winter, an ember of hope to come. As that ember grew, the snows slowly melted and the Spring (real spring) brought torrential rains, and dramatic flourishes of lightning followed by earth-shaking, enveloping rumbles of thunder, shaking the deepest part of you.
Summer brought blue cloudless skies, but a depth of blue that I’ve never experienced. In the words of Rebecca Solnit, “[t]his blue is the light that got lost” [1], except in the leisure and heat of summer, I imagine this light wandered and took its time, sun-drunk as time stood still. These summer days were our reward for the long winter— and the sunlight was there to celebrate with us late into the night.
Much like Spring, Fall was also premonitory. The skies were a theatre; the clouds took to the stage, prairie winds propelling them swiftly across the skies, taking on shapes and forms I didn’t know existed. I knew the ending of this performance as I felt the chill of winter beckoning, but how the story arrived there was always unknown. Fall was a beautiful omen, welcoming the harvest of the summer and warning us to heed the oncoming winter.
The winter skies took me more time to learn to love. At first, all I saw was darkness; my day in a windowless office, hiding from the bitter cold, was bookended by a late sunrise and an early sunset. But one night, walking towards the bus, I looked up into a dark, starry sky to be greeted by the colours of winter, seeing for the first time in my life, the northern lights. Brilliant streaks of blue and green dancing across the sky. Since that night, whenever the conditions looked right, I ’d often take a drive late into the evening, searching for those colours once again. When I began to look past the frigid temperatures and stepped out into the short light of day, what greeted me was a cast of characters that have since, year after year, carried me through the hazards of winter. The pillars of fog that reach from the river towards the sky early in the morning. The Sundogs: miniature rainbows that rise with the sun, flanking it on either side. And, the sun itself! As the cold wrung the air out of its moisture, those cold, bitter days became brilliant, crisp, and cloudless, as if the sun were more alive after its long slumber.
Saskatoon is a city that is so strongly shaped by agricultural rhythms: the frenzy of seeding after a long winter, the relative leisure of a hot summer, the blessing of harvest and the ensuing race with Jack Frost, and finally the quiet rest of a fallow winter. On the West Coast, the rain was a persistence in our lives; on the prairie, I began to understand the rain as blessing. On the West Coast, the snow was a curiosity, and then a nuisance. On the prairie, it was an identity and a bond of community. No wonder these living skies remain as a common language and shared experience of friends and strangers alike. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though we yearned the most for summer, it was the winters in which we grew the most.
Outside of Swift Current, miles away from any city is the place that finally made me fall in love with the prairies. It’s a generational farm riddled with hidden coulées and stalwart wind turbines punctuating the landscape, and a place we would come back to year after year. There’s a beautiful minimalism as you look to the horizon and the sky is laid out on display, and you can watch the colours and textures of the prairie come alive in front of you. It’s here that I’ve found a quiet that I’ve never known in my life. It’s time that I came to crave every year, and a ritual that spoke to something deeper in me. Saskatchewan has taught me to never stop search for beauty wherever I am, and that even when presented with new challenges, each season brings something new to celebrate.