Going to a cave
Me who used to be claustrophobic
Water, sunscreen, food
Twentieth street to see a friend
Where the food wars are
Do I want to be near a war?
I saw Sacred Space XYE
No idea what that is
And my friend is not there
At nine am
Doesn’t start till eleven
Air Canada plane coming down
As we leave Saskatoon
Is seventy-first the last street now?
New buildings going up
Reflecting: if daughter had bought
House north of Saskatoon
How life would have changed
New businesses galore
Storage, storage, storage
RV’s are big in Saskatchewan
Green and sage green
The grasses outside the city
Lots of rain
Big houses in the distance
Can smell the country
Fox tail surrounds
As we go by Martensville
Sleepy time horses
Look at the map
Could be in a different country
Edenbud, Blumenheim, Rheinland
Schoenwese, Neuhorse, Gruenthal
Commune style villages? farms?
Crops may be up to knees
Some say six weeks behind
Rain never came till first of July
After a drought
Green oats, bearded barley, yellow canola
Patchy and bare
Lots of bin storage by Hepburn
Will it be needed?
Onto a grid road
See if we can find
Shekinah Retreat Centre
Roses in the bush by the road
Not recognizing some crops
Birch firewood pile
For sale in farmyard
Here canola out of bloom
U pick strawberry signs
Mounds of clay in a long row
Serious trenching or gravel pits?
Earth not put back as was
Caragana farmyards
Win rows in the fields
Skinny fence posts
Leaning this way and that
Two donkeys and two heifers
Salem Church Cemetery
1899 Families from South Dakota
Krimmer Mennonite Brethren
Quiet
No sounds
Butterflies, birds and grass swishing
Someone keeps it clean and tidy
More strawberry farms
Crops like corn
Only a foot high
Beehives and bales
Great gravel roads
In distance must have had water
At one time
As trees dead
Wrong road obviously
As now my first experience
On a Hutterite Colony
“Look at the rigging,” my hubby says
Brand new combines in a row
Bins and more bin
Very well kept
New buildings all over
All neat and tidy
Lots of new vehicles
ATVs for running around
Twenty years they’ve been here
Says the guy we ask for directions
Big residential buildings
Six to ten of them
Too much to take in as we drive away
Goats in a cage in the ditch
About two miles away
And we find the right road
And the impressive building
Of reclaimed lumber
Foot wide timbers
Built this Mennonite retreat centre
And creaked through the night
Said the guy we met
In this river valley setting
Guarding the wedding preparations
For later that afternoon
Had a little tour
Saw where I slept in a bunk
Two decades ago
At the worship music retreat
Hermitage on site
Saskatoon berries not ripe here
Next stop
Springfield School Site
Forty-nine students
Year of 1935
Discontinued school in 1960
Backtrack past the donkeys
Blue sky and a thirty one degree day
Was 32 in Arizona this morning
To be forty-three by afternoon
This short-bearded wheat or barley
Turning color from heat we’ve had
Concerned I’m using plastic water bottle
Is it I’ve been educated
Care what people think or
Is water full of plastic
If left in hot car
Or sitting in cupboard since December
Back on highway to Blaine Lake
Don’t recognize farm machinery
Oversize load coming at us
Don’t know what it is either
Square box building
Clay oven bread sign
Petrofka Bridge
North Saskatchewan river
Orchard, trails, café, market
Golden barley swathed in next field
Canola all around as far as we can see
Turn on to the BIG TREE road
We’ve seen it already
Biggest tree in Saskatchewan
And here we are
At the Doukhobor Cave
First see a farmyard
1899 arrived from Russia
Just before freeze up
Washrooms
Pink and blue out houses
Park by a machine shed
Museum and Picnic tables
Quote by Leo Tolstoy:
“Those who own more land than they need
to feed their families
are guilty of causing the poverty of many other people”
Word Doukhobor means “Spirit Wrestler”
We walk around
An old chicken coop
Farm implement display
Sweat house tub and stove for sauna
Songbirds and view of the river
Meet at the flagpole
Dugout houses built in the riverbank
As emergency shelters as settlers arrived
Just prior to winter
1907 government took back homesteaded 250,000 acres
From those who would not sign allegiance to the British Crown
Fearing they’d be conscripted and they were pacifists.
Dugout house was mud and wattle
Things I learned: They were vegetarian
No alcohol or tobacco, prayed in homes
Christian with two commandments
And belief that the Holy Spirit dwells in every person
Gathered Seneca medicinal root to make money
Things I saw from my childhood
Wash lines, cream separator, cream cans
Egg crates, treadle sewing machine, crocks, threshing in 1950s
Head coverings, outhouses, farming
Cowbells, tin cups, a lot of home made
Forty-eight families at the site called Auspania
Built temporary shelters
One by one by one by two metres
By the river and by a spring
Where they washed clothes with rocks
They hauled in wooden trunks from Russia
Filled with rocks
Later used rocks to make sauerkraut
Sixty-seven sites in Saskatchewan
Thirteen in Blaine Lake area
Verigan, Saskatchewan
Demos a Duchhobor village
Wedding tradition; parents give away children
Wedding re-enactment will be on you tube
420 square foot home housed nine families
Of forty people for five years
We went inside it
Dirt from the hill on the back
Yard is a national and provincial historic site
Tours only four Saturdays in July each year
We had a plow the land demonstration
With a plow master, one holding down the single plow
Back then twelve women plowed
Side by side
Using their stomachs to pull
The stick holding the rope
And they sang as they worked
Men were away
Working to build the railroad
From Winnipeg on
Today the tour of eighty of us
Ended with the prayer home
If we wanted
Guide said their belief is
You don’t need church or structure
God lives in each and every one of us
Prayer home had a library, kitchen and a place
For their leader Peter Veregin to stay
Back in the day
Sunday school and a prayer service
With bread, water and salt
Singing and a sign saying to read the psalms
We enjoyed the tour
The homemade bread
A two inch slice with butter and jam
Could choke on the dust
Heading back to the highway
Thoughts
Not much different than my grandparents
Homesteading homes and life.
July 26, 2019
ellensagh 