A Quest for Canada is a series of articles that will appear in both my Witches & Pagans column 49 Degrees and my Patheos blog Between the Shadows on an alternating schedule between the two blogs. Links will be provided in both blogs.
It was the perfect moment.
I was driving our RV down the Trans-Canada Highway, somewhere between Grand Prairie, Saskatchewan and Brandon, Manitoba. We were heading East, out towards our vacation, and the sun was glowing redly in the rearview mirror, where it had been hovering for an hour or more. The light was purple and the sky spread in a vast field of rolling clouds, like something out of a dream sequence in a movie. The endless landscape rolled like gentle waves beneath us, oscillating up and down like a theta wave. On the radio, my partners and I were listening to one of our favourite CBC Radio programs, Tonic, which features classic and Canadian jazz.
People who do the drive across the Prairies regularly – not uncommon for Canadian businesspeople – often say this drive is boring. They claim that it’s flat and that it goes on forever. I don’t think it’s boring; I think that’s what makes it so special and so beautiful. But then again, I was born in the Okanagan Valley surrounded by mountains. The first time that I made it past the Rockies I was nineteen years old. It was nighttime, and I found myself staring deeply into the horizon, like something was off, but all I could see was mist. It was an hour or two later that it finally came to me; I was trying to see mountains! There had always been mountains; why wouldn’t there be mountains now?