Roadtrip tricks
Sitting in a car, watching scenery go by feels like something both familiar and conditional to living on the prairies. Getting to anywhere outside of Winnipeg, you get familiar with the handful of highways that connect it to the direction you’re going. But crossing three provinces is an all-day affair…
Making it slightly less tiresome for the driver was the audiobook Into Thin Air, an adventure so gripping, our 10-year-old was captivated. (It can however be a little anxiety-inducing if you have a sensitive stomach.) It was a subject that touched on the object of our destination… a bit of time in the mountains, where, from a safe distance we could imagine the adventures of mountain climbers as we were surrounded by peaks that loomed.
Another thing we enjoyed: a podcast recommendation by Catherine Newman titled This Is Actually Happening. Because, as previously mentioned, we were sharing the car with our kids, I downloaded only two episodes ahead of time… but just that, and we wanted to listen to more.
Also… always bring bags for garbage. Don’t ever not bring bags!
Prairie
On this road trip, I finished Candace Savage’s book Prairie. (It’s hard not to be immediately endeared to the book’s subject when the author writes in the introduction: “It's time to drop out of the fast lane and give the prairies, our prairies, a second, loving look.”)
The book leant itself well to reading excerpts out loud to Christian. There’s a brief history of wild bison for example; or the usefulness of ants… Christian and I both have farming roots and what Savage writes on the subject felt especially pertinent:
The acceptance of conservation as an everyday aspect of farming practice has been halting. On the plus side, thanks to the object lessons of the Dirty Thirties and subsequent periods of drought, the importance of soil conservation is now well established and has been widely translated into both policy and action. On the debit side, however, conservation of wildlife habitat is often a hard sell. Sometimes producers resist as a matter of principle. Having devoted their efforts to maximizing yields to feed a hungry world, they argue that leaving space "idle" for wildlife is a misuse of productive potential. But while this position might have been irresistible in the 1960s, when an exploding human population faced a net shortage of food, it is not so convincing today. In the intervening decades, a complex suite of developments, some of them halfway around the world, have opened up new and more hopeful options for prairie agriculture.
The achievements of the world's farmers since World War II have been stunning. Between 1950 and 1992, for example, world grain production increased by 170 percent, with only a 1 percent expansion of the area under cultivation. Although many people still go hungry, there is still more than enough food available to feed everyone on Earth. This triumph has come about as the result of a no-holds-barred commitment to maximizing production, known colloquially as the Green Revolution. Sparked by an Iowa-born scientist named Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize in 1970 for his work, the revolution was based on the development of high-yield varieties of wheat and corn. And yield they certainly do, provided that they are supplied with ample stores of nitrogen, from artificial fertilizer, and abundant water, typically from irrigation.
Unfortunately, the environmental costs of this high-tech fix are becoming inescapably obvious. On the Great Plains, in particular, the damage has included the depletion of aquifers through irrigation, the poisoning of groundwater and wetlands with agricultural chemicals, and the overfertilization of entire river systems. (p 261-2)
As I was reading Prairie, a high school classmate, Alexis Normand, was advocating for Savage’s 2019 book Strangers in the House in the “Combat national des livres 2025”. This clip (in French) features the high school I attended. The convergence of person, places I know, subjects I like, and an author at the center of it all is a delightful affirmation of writing!
The art of short videos
To better capture the feeling and events of our days on holiday, I started making little video summaries, sans narration, on CapCut. It was a fun exercise, but about three days into it, I realized the novelty had worn off, and that I was meant for self-expression in a slower mode. It was nonetheless fun trying to capture introductory seconds of video to establish the day’s weather for example. I was thrilled when one morning, having set up my camera on the patio, a jack rabbit hopped by…
Soap
In the course of our visit West, we picked up good-smelling hand soap. It was just the excuse to upgrade our hand soap dispensers.
Cooking
This week we made Suzanne Goin’s “Wild Salmon Salad with Beets, Potato, Egg, and Mustard Vinaigrette” from her cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques and it tasted like an exciting twist on the usual Niçoise salad we have at this time of year. Thanks to a meat thermometer, we pulled off perfectly cooked fish!
Ice cream
We live close to Lick’s and BDI is a well-known destination, but sometimes it’s worth exploring other areas of the city. On Friday made a trip to Sub-Zero for a little taste test, and the place no bigger than a house with a cheerfully-painted pink interior, was worth the ride! The menu has lots of variety and the ice cream is nice and creamy.
Postcard
Here… our garden in the evening…
Happy Sunday!