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         Having spent a year in the desert Southwest, I understood how he felt, how one can become spiritually addicted to the endless, visually soothing views of the Big Sky Country.

        “It’s grey out there, isn’t it ?” Frank observed. The weather was raw and a biting wind was sweeping over the steppe. But every so often the sun broke through a dark,  steely cloudbank and lit up a golden field. The entire prairie was under cultivation. Most of it had been sewn with Durham wheat, but some of it had been planted with flax, just as in Ukraine (my grandmother’s English tutor, Miss Whishaw, wrote a delightful novel about her years with the family called Rolling Flax.) The  flax had been swathed (cut down and lined up) but not yet combined (threshed, had its tiny  seeds taken out and the straw spit out to eventually be burned, because it doesn’t decompose). The flax grown in these parts is oil or linseed flax, not textile flax, which doesn’t do well so far north. The main producers of textile flax are France, Belgium, and Holland. Linseen oil used to be the base of most paints, but now synthetic acryllics have largely replaced it, and the market is much smaller. The new niche for linseed is as a trendy new grain in the health food market. The straw is burned, although the possibility of using it as an alternative to fiberglass is being explored.

    Every mile or two there we passed a farm compound whose buildings were protected against the wind by a square shelter belt of trees. One had an antique thresher at the entrance to its driveway which reminded me of the stranded fishing boats I had seen along the New Brunswick and Maine coast. Both were relics of a bygone era, when it was possible to make a living as a small, independent farmer or fisherman. There were also natural ponds, known as sloughs, and little water-filled ravines and crevices called coulees, in many of which ducks, geese,  trumpeter swans, and  other migrating waterfowl were feeding. The sky was filled with bleating skeins of snowgeese. This was an unexpected bonus. We had hit the fall migration, when the northern plains are filled with thousands upon thousands of large birds migrating south. October is an iffy month in terms of snow, but I was now glad we had not come a few weeks earlier.

      We passed a big dead porcupine on the road. Deer and moose are common on the prairie, as are raccoons and gophers, a generic term embracing several species of rodent, including the prairie dog (which you’ll be hearing a lot about soon) and Richardson’s ground squirrel. Every two miles a gravel road shot off to the right and left, but the distances were measured in kilometres; prime minister Pierre Trudeau had decided in the seventies that Canada should go metric, like most of  the world. This was typical of Canada’s Euro-American schizziness.  “I like traveling in kilometers,” Frank remarked. “It makes your journey go by more quickly. You get sixty percent more bang for your buck.”

       Smuts  was named for Ian Smuts, a general of the Boer War. The road off to the left went up a slight rise, and there was the Ukrainian Catholic Church of St. John the Baptist. It was one of the most beautiful we saw on our entire trip (see the first photograph). An otlychnaya terkovka, an excellent church, Natasha and I agreed—the highest rating in the ranking system we had devised. The next best was prekrasnaya, beautiful; then preatnaya, pleasing; then horoshaya, pretty; and finally ladno, okay, but not worth traveling any great distance to see. The domes were covered with tin sheets, the walls with vinyl shingles simulated to look like wood shingles. We couldn’t get inside, because we hadn’t been able to find anyone to let us in, and we couldn’t see inside, because the windows were shaded. There was a separate, freestanding belltower—the old style, which most of the Ukrainian prairie churches have. It had been constructed in l926 on the site of an earlier church that burned and had been restored with the help of Grant #372. Down the road was the smaller, preatnaya Holy Trinity church, the other church in Smuts, which has only three members, all of whom live in Saskatoon. We peeked through a window at the elaborate interior. There was nothing left of Smuts. All the farmhouses and outbuildings and farm machinery had been abandoned and were returning to the elements, but the surrounding area was all still being cultivated. Wheat tops were dancing violently in the wind. 

        Across the highway, down the same gravel section road, was the preatnaya l936 Peter and Paul church. We continued up 41 to Alvena, where there were two churches in town and one we spotted southwest of Alvena—St. Mary’s, a new one to Frank. It was much like the excellent one in Smuts. “The more you get off the beaten path, the more churches there are to see,” Frank said. “If you really want to inventory all the churches in the provinces, the best thing is to work off the topo maps. Every church and cemetery is marked, but the maps don’t tell you what denomination they are.”

         At Wakaw there was a truck stop where we stopped for lunch. There were several kinds of  Ukrainian sausage, one more tempting than the next,  in the display case. We continued north up Route 2 and turned right at the sign for Nickorick Beach, on a lake to the left, and reached Lapine, a community that no longer exists and is no longer on the map, but the church is still there, nestled among some confiers, and a prekrasnaya one it is, St. Michael’s Ukrainian Greek Orthodox, started in l917, with seven domes and a rather schlocky modern glass front door and vinyl siding. Two old men were waiting by a pickup to let us in, Victor Oleksyn (cell 233 7082) and Peter Huziek (233 4446); both are real friendly and  delighted to open the church for visitors. The interior, particularly the iconstase, as Victor pronounced it, was dazzling. At the top of the inside of the dome a large eye, symbolizing the Holy Ghost,  had been painted. Victor had a huge belly, like the one I am trying to get rid of. There is a certain body type that is common among Ukrainians, I  realized after this trip. It is known as zhivitovsky, or big-bellied. A few years ago,   in the Jewish cemetery of Kiev, I found a headstone where someone called Zhivitovsky had been buried. This was a nickname that became a surname. In French the term would be ventripotent.  I am beginning to think that there is not much I can do about my own glutinus maximus. It’s part of my ethnic heritage. 

        Victor and Peter  I connected immediately. I felt once again among paysani. “My dad came in l900 from Bukovena [in western Ukraine],” Victor told us. “He came for better land.” “My dad came in l912 from the tselo [rural muncipality] of Toporyuche,” Peter said.  “Many people came from there. Our district was Sniatin. My mother went back twice. I went back in 94. I had the privilege of being in the birthplace of my father. I even got a piece of soil  The Russians had knocked down the  churches  or had used them to store grain, but by l994 they had  all been restored. They were stand and kneel, no pews, like old times.  Before the collapse you weren’t  allowed to talk to the locals. I had 32 siblings there left, and what they told me made me realize that we were lucky to get out.” 

      “I went back, too,” Victor told us. “We stayed  5-star hotel in Kiev. It was see five stars through the ceiling.” He and Peter took us  into big assembly hall, which the parish  rents out for weddings. A photograph of  Taras Schevschenko, with a beautifully embroidered cloth draped over it, and lines from one of his poems, hung on the wall. Victor told me  an off-color Dukhobor joke. The sense of humor, full of bawdy puns, reminded me of the Navajos’.  There is a Dukhobor colony west of Aberdeen, near the Petrovka bridge. They settled near the river so they could get water for irrigation.  The Lapine parish has forty members and eight services a year, not necessarily on Sundays, performed by Father Roman, the batyushka in Wakaw who conducts a total of eighty services in thirteen parishes. Lapine is in the r.m., or rural munipality, of Hoodoo.  The Heritage Foundation was giving the parish a thousand dollars to keep up the church, even though Frank was dismayed about the vinyl siding, and Kaplan another thousand, which the parish was matching. 

      Shimmering lines of snow geese, with a few blue-phase ones and speckle-bellied geese mixed in, followed our route east. We stopped to admire an old farm building whose mud walls had washed off, exposing its post-on-sill construction. The  posts had been set every two feet  and filled with small, vertically notched logs that fit into a vertical groove scored in them. An alkali lake came up on the west. In Cudworth, there was an orthodox church, in Dana another small one, in Peterson, east on Highway, a Catholic church, but  they were all nothing to write home about. Then on to Bruno and Humboldt, named for one of my heroes, Alexander von, the great explorer of the Amazon with his buddy Bonpland. There was a nice mural of Humboldt on a wall beside the convenience store. We were in a German pocket, a break in the pervasive Ukrainiality. Humboldt has a stately but derelict water tower, constructed between 1909 and 1914 along with ten others of the same design in the provice, that may get a Kaplan grant. But it was surrounded by a rash  of the little ticky-tacky mass-produced houses that most rural Saskatchewanians live in these days. The old stuff, like Humboldt’s water tower, the post office, and the railroad station, was built to last and it is often the only construction of any interest or grandure. 

       In Muenster we checked out the three-story brick St. Peter’s Benedictine Abbey, which has the highest concentration of windows in the province but is generic institutional, like a dorm in a New England prep school. This is one of the three Benedictine abbeys in North America.  The others are in Minneapolis and Memphranagog, one of Quebec’s eastern townships. Much more interesting was St. Peter’s Cathedral, built in 1920.  Its exquisite interior iconography was painted by Count  Berthold John Von Imhoff, who by the time of his death in l939 had completed the interior décor of more than a hundred churches of all denominations in the United States and Canada’s western provinces. One could do another tour of just the Imhoff churches in Saskatchewan. Von Imoff’s studio was on a small farm five miles west of St. Walberg. 

    On to Watson, then north on Highway five for five clicks, and right on a gravel road that says 49 k. to Fosston. St. Michael’s was schlock restoration but still beautiful. A new church for Frank, in the r.m. of Winner : The Holy Ascension  Ukrainian Orthodox church, built in l924 with an unusual dome, bellcast instead of onion, and yellow-painted clapboard with white trim and green-painted wooden shingles. We stopped to check out some abandoned but still restorable grain elevators. “The elevators are going down like flies, and we’re losing to find our way around the geography,” Frank said. “You used to see an elevator and know a town was coming up. Each company—Reliance, UGG (United Grain Growers)—had its own design. There were dozens. These are Pattersons. They have a signature extra cupola [as Frank called it, but it was not a dome, it was a small box].”  Another tour of the elevators of the plains could be arranged. A fence with boots and shoes on its posts ran along us to the left for a mile or so, then there was a small Anglican church. “If it has a small porch and apse, smaller than the main body of the church, it’s probably Anglican,” Frank explained. “If it has a steeple or spire with a witch’s cap, it’s probably Lutheran.” Crossing Highway 645, we rounded a speed curve, designed so you don’t have to slow down at an intersection, in this case with the road to Claire, and stopped to admire to the small St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic church in the r.m. of Ponass Lake. Built in 1990-11, had a sided-log belltower and both were white with green trim. Green is very Ukrainian. The last service here was in l975. In l995 the church was hit by lightning and restored with a Heritage Foundation grant.  An application to reshingle the roof with asphalt shingles in l992 was rejected. “We don’t do asphalt,” Frank explained. 

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