The reason I had four martinis that night at the bar of the Delta Bessborough in Saskatoon was that it was Sunday, and all the restaurants were closed.
It didn't seem like they should be closed, because it stays light here until 11 in the evening. Also, the streets were full of people, thanks to various musical performances around town, and that, too, made it feel like the city ought to be offering dinner.
Of course, there were also the two lumber brokers sitting at the bar, to whom I listened for an hour as they discussed hedging strategies. Maybe that's another reason my head hurt so much the next morning: I had no idea the lumber business was so complicated.
Afterward, I took a night walk by the river – Saskatoon has a gorgeous riverfront – and listened to the last set of a pyrotechnical local guitarist named Tim Vaughn, who had a couple of hundred locals dancing like mad people. Then I walked back to my room and went to sleep.
Hence my crippling hangover. Not that a martini, or even four, safely consumed, is out of order on an eating trip.
My hangover breakfast— Ian Brown
I'd forgotten how big this country is: Winnipeg to Saskatoon is eight hours solid on its own, at 110 kilometres an hour. It took me 12, because I kept trying to interview owners of Chinese-Canadian restaurants.
I'd wanted to write a piece about Chinese-Canadian restaurants, which are still a staple of the cheaper, open-at-most-hours national food scene.
According to Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, a new book by Lily Cho, Chinese immigrants accounted for fewer than 1 per cent of the population in 1931 (the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in effect), but owned 20 per cent of the restaurants – and more in Saskatchewan.
Their restaurants were our first multicultural hangouts. Joni Mitchell wrote a song about one. Chinese cooks were the first to claim there was such a thing as Canadian food. But a lot of the owners didn't want to talk to me.
I drove a long way. I stopped for gas, for a Crunchie bar, for coffee (twice), and to take a few photographs, but the rest of the time it was just me and my white rental Impala and the long straight bone of Route 16, the Yellowhead Highway. You might think it would be boring, but it isn't: The clouds pile up in the distance like Imperial Cities in the sky, and the fields go bright yellow whenever there's a stretch of canola.
A field of canola. If you stand in the middle of it, you emerge covered with pollen and smelling like cooking oil. — Ian Brown
What I like most is the way everything is on the horizon, all of it still to come. It makes for hopeful driving. I listened to the radio, and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks live shows.
I thought about how I wanted to be careful, and not have an accident; about how much I missed my daughter, and what she might be doing back home. I spent some time speculating what would have happened if my wife and I had stayed in Los Angeles when we lived there years ago, or had more than two kids; or if I'd been a pilot, or a painter.
It's a fruitless line of thought, because of course you cannot do anything except what you have done, and you can stack up a pile of regrets driving by yourself across a flat green prairie without eating. I thought about trips I wanted to take, projects I still wanted to attempt, dreams: flowers in my garden, a shack by the sea.
A buffalo-mozzarella kiss
