Creatures Beneath Me

It was a hard climb out of Drumheller. Halfway up, I saw above me the green edge of prairie rolling into the abyss, falling toward me like flowing water (see picture). Even the name, Drumheller, bespeaks hot rhythms—drumming ancient cycles of birth and extinction. I was rising from a gash in the smooth prairie, an excavation revealing its dead, corpses in a cemetery. Like near-death trauma, I returned onto the grassy surface pondering what I had seen, that beneath these immense fields of winter wheat lie myriad gone creatures, who, like me and these scattered farmers, also hoped for another day’s food. I wonder what creatures will occupy the layers of rock that may one day rest above us.




The old prairie with its little houses and horse-plowed fields is fading into a layer of geology like dinosaurs.








I kept thinking about the shifter as kilometers passed under my tires today. (If you are starting your reading here, you need to go down the page, back in time, to understand this.) I try to be a character with some form of success, proud, ingenious, and setting my heels against society’s pull. I like to think that I attack problems in sensible ways, avoiding emotional pitfalls and nonsensical deductions. But when the trip seemed doomed by that array of parts, laid out before me in a motel room, that would not go together, I had to admit that I was trying ideas that made no sense. And I was trying anything in near panic. In the end, it was only when I backed away from the problem and sat down to a good meal that the solution appeared. Today, the shifter worked as smoothly as I could expect with one of its parts broken and removed, not quite like Terry Fox, the famous Canadian a runner who continued running after losing a leg to cancer, but that idea. And I think it can make it to Saskatoon where a bike shop should provide me with a new part.