Spend a year living in the past and you're bound to have some trouble getting reacquainted with the present. When you've been living the life of a prairie settler from 1870, getting your bearings may be even tougher.
That's the challenge facing two couples who one year ago agreed to try reliving a period of prairie history from the inside out for the TV series Pioneer Quest: A Year in the Real West.
With their made-in-Canada Survivor-style epic now at an end, Frank and Alana Logie from Fergus, Ont., and Tim and Deanna Treadway from Kenora, Ont., seemed the picture of health yesterday as they met the media in a replica cabin, set in a Winnipeg park. Yet each acknowledged some rude shocks on re-entering urban culture.
For example, they agreed that long days of hard work and disappointment were calmed by a peacefulness they don't expect to find back in the city.
"That's going to be one of the hardest things, to get used to the noise," said Mr. Treadway, 50, a carpenter and trapper when not on TV. "Even sitting here, there's a terrible amount of noise. It's very different when you're in peace and quiet, which we've experienced for the past year."
The two couples were among 1,000 hopefuls who applied to the original call for the reality TV series, produced by Credo Entertainment Corp. of Winnipeg and airing on History Television. With the promise of $100,000 for each couple should they last, they were moved last June to a 32-hectare piece of unbroken land near the hamlet of Argyle, about a 30-minute drive northwest of Winnipeg. Following in the muddy footsteps of the settlers, the couples were left with their wits and -- beyond a dozen chickens, some pigs and horses, a cow and a rooster -- not much else. Although all had some experience in the outdoors, they had to learn to build a home and tend to their stock and garden. Along the way, they endured an uncommonly rain-sodden June, the most brutally cold December in more than a century and the daily challenge of turning city hands to vintage plows and tools.
And Canada watched. From the first telecast of two hour-long episodes in November, the audience kept growing. The sixth episode, aired on April 1, drew 575,000 viewers -- the highest rating for History Television in its four-year existence as a specialty channel.
Yesterday, the four pioneers reviewed the daily challenges of life in the rough. Ms. Logie, 29, a registered nurse, noted that having to create virtually everything they needed resulted in a day's work lost on building their home, because they needed to build a ladder first.
"Learning to plow, that was probably the hardest thing," said Mr. Logie, 26, a millwright. "Nobody showed us how to do it."
The crew, consisting of director Andy Blicq, one camera operator and one sound staffer, spent only about 30 days in total on site.
Mr. Blicq did much of the shooting alone with his digital camera. "I decided from the start that this would have to be a personal as well as a professional relationship," he said. "The big difference between this and a traditional documentary is that this is a construction. In other documentaries I've done, you're always following people in their lives. With this, we constructed something and put them into it."
The final two episodes of Pioneer Quest air Sunday, June 10, on History Television.