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FALL 2019 ISSUE 02 / VOL . 04
DAY FOUR : As we head across Canada , I recall snatches of a song by Ian & Sylvia , two folksingers from the ’ 60s , something about short grass , cowboys and the land : “ The sun burns the snow high on the mountain , it runs and it roils to the sea / Silt and soil , down it pours / down to the river the gold river flows / to the sea .”
We are riding the song in reverse . The Plains are slowly rising , a process we notice only when the land falls away . We stop on the edge of a valley cut by the Saskatchewan River , and look down into beauty . For hours we ride the ridge , skirting a plateau to the north , a declining slope to the south . “ Ghost Riders in the Sky ” replaces the song about landscape .
Today , we ride the sky . You can see weather cells form 50 miles away , watch thunderheads climb 50,000 feet in a half hour , clouds that look like the Three Mile Island cooling towers turned upside down . Clouds do what clouds have never done before , assume shapes that make no sense , that threaten , then release rain .
In the space of minutes we are pelted by hail , rain and a flurry of snow . Back home , we ’ d wait out the weather under an overpass . Canada , it seems , does not waste money on such frills . Here there are intersections . Roads cross . Deal with it .
At a gas station café the owner invites us to wait out the downpour with pie and hot tea . Another customer says he ’ s willing to buy our bikes , real cheap .
We push on . The rain stops , but the clouds gain a dark mass that obliterates the sky , save a narrow band of blue to our west . As we reach Saskatoon , a setting sun fills that gap with
After five days of wheat fields and prairie we hit the Canadian Rockies . God ’ s own art gallery , the wild rock more magnificent than any peak in the Lower 48 .