Dave Bidini is a member of Rheostatics and author of The Best Game You Can Name.
Despite suggestions of its “miles of wheat and indifference” (Mordecai Richler), I still dreamed of Saskatchewan. This was owing mostly to its hockey players: Gordie Howe from Floral; Wendel Clark from Kelvington; the Bentleys from Delisle; and Johnny Bower from Prince Albert. Bryan Trottier was from Val Marie – way down south near Grasslands National Park, where his sister, Nancy, still works – and after being invited to the Moose Jaw Literary Festival in 2014, I conspired to drive the province top to bottom, looking for Aneroid (Patrick Marleau), Oxbow (Theoren Fleury), Shaunavon (Hayley Wickenheiser), North Battleford (Emile and Bobby Francis) and other places that sounded as if torn from a C.S. Lewis notebook: Craik, Grenfell, Esterhazy, Wakaw, Spy Hill, Indian Head.
I arrived late in Val Marie to find the local hotel/tavern barely open – it was Monday and nearly empty, and the only sign of life was a truck rumbling in its spot outside the building. When the server told me they were closing early, I must have expressed the long wan gaze of a starving, exhausted traveller from elsewhere because, cocking an elbow to her hip, she said, “Okay, hold on,” then disappeared outside. I went to the window and saw her lean inside the truck. The driver turned off his rig, butted out his smoke. A few minutes later, a grilled cheese with bacon arrived at my table. I spent the night in a convent – this should be the beginning of a joke, but is not – where ball lightning brightened my room through the storm. Day for night in the great wide open.
Saskatchewan has always possessed a deep magic, the kind produced by empty places with big skies and yawning land. That Humphrey Osmond pioneered LSD research in Weyburn is no accident. The provincial tableau has always teased psychedelia: blazingly golden fields, endless blue horizons and a flat green baize giving way to prehistoric coulees and colossal buttes as the province tickles the American border. My band drove it on our first tour after being expunged from the Ontario north – the burnt-speaker clubs, beer-pool stages and war-zone parking lots. To drive those roads was to meditatively push along the rhythms of thought before being knocked around by the Foothills, the Rockies, and the roaring tumult of the ocean.
The tragedy in Humboldt resonated for a lot of reasons, not the least being the fact that, after driving through the town a few years ago with Wendel Clark – let it be noted that driving through the town a few years ago with Wendel Clark is not a sentence I take for granted – we stopped to visit the wood-hewn plaque recognizing Glenn Hall, the great stand-up goaltender and Humboldtian. My hockey hero and me, in Humboldt. The town stayed with me.
Last week’s tragic crash came after a long, cruel winter. Fighting snow and frozen winds left us, I think, more vulnerable to the impact of the terrible events on the prairie. As Canadians, winter both fuels and drains us. We push ourselves into the cold lest we dry up inside, cowed by the forces of nature. But in our defiance to create outdoor games and make art based on the elements of survival, it’s also hard to reconcile the fact that that which binds us together also steals from us. The highway tragedy was a reminder to beware the distance that we have to travel to be together. It set us right while making us sick that anyone had to die to hold this truth to the light.
There is dark magic and white magic in every town. We disrupt these forces because we are living in the world and those kids who lost their lives were travelling because they loved to move about and play; they loved being in the world, with their friends, with their team. Moving across Saskatchewan playing hockey in arenas where Eddie Shore, Fred Sasakamoose or Ron Hextall played? Gliding in the skate grooves of the province’s legendary players? Man, what a life. The players’ courage to live their dreams should not be forgotten. They were out there, moving.
We’ve all been so close to what happened to them – as Canadians, as northern people. I remember begging our Australian road manager, Richard Burgman, to let me drive our RV on the last leg of a national winter tour. He finally relented, handing the wheel to me during a nine-hour overnight drive back through Northern Ontario. At one point, I stopped for gas, peed, bought some snacks, then pulled out while everyone else slept in the back. Swinging back on the highway, I felt a swoosh barrelling inches past the vehicle: an enormous tractor trailer hurtling down the road. I’d looked right, but not left, and if one minute or a handful of seconds had not been ordered the way they were in my universe, we would have died, all of us. Anyone who has travelled in winter in Canada has tasted this feeling: the hot bile of the moment, the terrifying seizing of the spine and the knowledge that to carry on moving is a mortal gesture sandwiched between the immortality of memory and experience. This is the first time I’ve told this story. I never wanted the rest of the guys to know.
As Canadians, we can’t stop moving. We must keep going for the same reason the Humboldt Broncos players did and for the same reason they no longer can. We must keep moving to celebrate life, as well as the exquisite, beautiful and hard game that has helped us know one another better than anything Canada has produced, providing geographical and emotional shorthand in a country that can’t expect to know itself whole. Although, I suppose, we try: a dirty Leafs fan once recognized a dirty Habs fan on the crooked steps of a wind-broken porch on the shores of the Arctic Ocean in the remote hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, NWT. It happened. He pffffted and turned over his thumb, holding it out in front of him. I booed at him. He booed back. We both laughed. We moved on. But just like that, we’d grown closer.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this essay said Humphrey Osmond pioneered LSD research in Yorkton, Sask. In fact, it was in Weyburn.