The Globe and Mail

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.

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.

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

A friend of mine had put me up for a couple of nights in Winnipeg, and we'd had such a suddenly brilliant meal at Bobby Mottola's Pizzeria Gusto that, for a little while, I even fantasized about starting a restaurant.

It was the best Caprese salad I'd ever had in Canada, made with a new breed of local Manitoba tomato from Greenland Gardens; fresh, almost-Roman buffalo mozzarella from British Columbia's Fairburn Farm (in the Cowichan Valley) and the Natural Pastures dairy in Courtenay, B.C.; rustic (roughly chopped) pesto; and brain-blowing olive oil and balsamic vinegar imported from Italy via De Luca's, an Italian specialty shop in Winnipeg.

The salad was paired with a Sylvia Pizza – fig jam, prosciutto di Parma, cooked for about a minute and a half in a 500-to-700-degree, shimmering, wood-fired oven and then layered with gorgonzola dolce and micro-arugula. It was one of those meals you don't expect and never forget, like a lush goodbye kiss from an acquaintance at a party.

As we ate, Bobby talked about his upcoming marriage and his 220 days of sobriety since he had given up drinking and cocaine; about his grandfather, Sicilians and Winnipeg. He was the type who feels something and says it, with no hesitation in between, a person who values loyalty.

My Winnipeg friend had made me a lunch for my long drive to Saskatoon: two peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches on Italian bread from De Luca's, an apple and a little baggie of cheese and crackers.

“I feel like your mother,” he said, plastering the peanut butter across the nutty bread.

“Well,” I said, “you don't look like her.”

He wanted to leave Winnipeg, and head west to Vancouver. Maybe that had something to do why he made me sandwiches, getting up at 6 a.m. to hand me the sack and shake my hand as I departed. It was a sweet thing to do, in any event.

I polished the sandwiches off before I got to the city limits of Winnipeg, before I'd even swatted all the mosquitoes that had snuck into the car. There are a hell of a lot of mosquitoes in Winnipeg.

It wasn't that I didn't try to stop for lunch either.

In Neepawa, Man., where Margaret Laurence grew up, I pulled into Brahma's Grill and Steakhouse and ordered a hamburger to go. If Brahma's Grill had been around when she was alive, she might have channelled her rage into writing The Stone Hamburger instead of The Stone Angel.

It was almost inedible and tasted of fish, and I threw most of it out the window of the speeding car for a crow to choke on. The crows and magpies out here are the size of cops, and lurk on the highway like an auxiliary police force.

Pie under the big sky

Then I decided to visit the house where Ms. Laurence grew up, and on the way noticed Wilson's Place, which is owned by John Wilson and sells his wife Val's famous pies. There's a sign in the small, cluttered shop that says, “Life is Uncertain, Eat Dessert First.” I had a piece of rhubarb pie made with a lard crust, and it blew my socks off.

Val's pies are considered the best pies for quite a stretch: Four were recently auctioned off for charity for $160. She makes 135 pies a month, or about four a day (lemon meringue, apple-blueberry and saskatoon berry are the staples), sells them for $10 whole or $3 a slice, and frequently experiments.

She gave me the first two pieces of her latest invention, an apple-pineapple-blueberry combo, to take out.

“So you will have tried these pies before anybody else in the world,” Val said.

I didn't think the pineapple would work (I'm not pineapple's biggest fan), but its tasty brightness turned out to be a terrific foil to the dusky apple, all of which was zested into new territory by the tang of the berries.

She's going to try it next with saskatoon berries, which taste like blueberries that grew up on a big farm with a strict dad.

While I forked pie into my aptly named pie hole, Val and her friend Darlene had the kind of conversation people have in pie shops in small towns.

“You know Bill Dean,” Val said, “he's what, 5-foot-9?”

“I don't know him,” Darlene said.

“You know him! Bea and Bill Dean!”

Then Val went off to give someone a bowl of barley soup, and Darlene told me she was a month away from getting her licence to drive a semi-trailer.

She's 60 and has already been offered a job. Her husband Al, 64, drives a truck too, and does two runs to Winnipeg and back every day.

“You'll never see each other,” I said.

Darlene said, “We never see each other anyway.” She told me it was her lifelong dream to be a truck driver.

But most of the time I just drove and thought, the way one does in the car.

When I got tired, I sang out loud and made rude noises with my tongue, and did a lot of driver-seat dancing with the windows down, and that got me the rest of the way to Saskatoon, still awash in sunlight but otherwise shut down, and that led me to the bar and the martinis.

So in the morning I woke up and felt as if someone had mechanically transformed my head into a clothes dryer while I was asleep.

I staggered out of bed, had a shower and shampooed my hair, shaved and made a micro-pot of hotel-room coffee (which I can't say I hate, however bad it is, because at least it's coffee).

Then I discovered it was 7 in the morning.

In the elevator, a woman in workout clothes looked at me and said, “I see you've decided to go casual today.” What sort of a thing is that to say to someone?

I headed across the street to the Sheraton Cavalier and bought some yogurt and a cranberry scone and some fresh fruit.

I sat in a corner of the restaurant and read the newspapers, about demonstrations in Toronto and the Stampede in Calgary and the oil spill in the Gulf and the political puling in Washington – about the whole world that was out there, unknown to me as I sped through the prairie air in my car.

I enjoyed the yogurt and the fruit immensely, and about half the scone before my mouth went into a full dry-crumb seizure: I'd forgotten butter.

Finally, I stood up purposefully, nodded to the people in the booth next to me and headed back to my room to write.

In the elevator, to my surprise, I burst into tears: It's so hard to be alone, to see the point and keep going when there's no one to keep going with. What I'd give for breakfast with my daughter!

I got that out of me, and then I felt all right again. A little breakfast, a little loneliness, a place to write it down. Could be a lot worse.