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    We could see in the distance, still thirteen miles west of Fosston and half a mile to the south, the silhouette of an unpainted, abandoned church which is Frank’s favorite in the entire province. He  discovered it twelve years ago and hadn’t been back since. Its condition was unchanged, derelict but still basically solid and restorable. It had  a beautiful truncated hip roof. The glass was gone from the windows, and as we unraveled the wire holding the two sections of the front door together, dozens of pigeons flew out the windows. The floor was caked with their poop. The inside had never been finished. You could see the boards used to frame the basement, to hold the cement that was poured in for the walls of the foundation, had been reused to frame the church itself. The year l949 had been etched into one of the concrete steps. “There’s got to be a story to this place,” Frank said. “The congregation moved away, or it was cursed. It’s in remarkably good repair for something that’s in disrepair. Maybe it’s cedar-sided. Cedar is much more rot-resistant than pine. It’s one of the last of the old-time design churches. After the war the style degenerated into small, squat churches with little cupolas. I can’t see anything happening to this church because there is no one who cares about it. I don’t even know its name. We may be the last visitors.” As soon as we left St. Genericus, as Frank dubbed it, a  wind  capable of inflicting frostbite on uncovered digits  smote us, and the pigeons returned. The fields around the church were still being cropped. We flagged down two men in camouflage outfits in an approaching pickup to see if they could tell us anything about the church, but they were hunters who had come up from Montana and were looking for geese to shoot. We stopped at the farmhouse across from St. Michael’s where the man we had seen on a tractor behind the church lived, but he wasn’t there. He had stripped off his coveralls and boots in the front hall and jumped in his pickup and gone somewhere. Maybe to the Fosston bar, or a-courting. There was several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of machinery in the yard. It was hard to see how they could be paying for themselves. We passed through the smoke of burning swaths of flax. Frank showed us the minicule seeds of the plant, six to a pod. If you fall into a bin of flax, you can suffocate, he told us. You sink like quicksand. This has happened to several children in the province. 
 
      Darkness had fallen by the time we reached Fosston. “I think we’ve run the sun right into the ground here,” Frank pronounced. “We did four hundred kilometers today--  not bad considering we haven’t got anywhere. We won’t be making Yorkton tonight, as I had hoped. We’ll have to stay in Wadena.” Fosston had just a few streets lined with trailers and old buildings in disrepair and need of a paint job. It was very bleak, like a Steven king or Russell Banks novel, like “being stranded on a desert island,” Frank observed. “Nobody new comes, and there’s a lot of inbreeding. The whole province is slowly losing population.” 

       Wadena was on  Highway 5, a secondary east-west artery paralleling the Yellowhead, and it was considerably larger than Fosston, but it was still  like the Australian outback, or a  cowtown in the Wild West with tumbleweed skipping down its main drag. We overtook a bent figure in a baseball jacket making its way down a dark side street  and inquired where the best place to stay in town was. The figure belonged to  a cheery young man, who came up to the window and told us the Blue Willow Inn, just north of town. This was a motel run by a wonderful hospitable couple, Earl and Vie Haugerud. Staying there was like being taken into the family. The other guests were all U.S. duckhunters. One group, from Illinois, had bagged its quota of six hundred waterfowl, which they had packed into a freezer trailer and were driving back home with. One of them said that not only trumpeter swans pass through on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, but a few of the very rare whistling swans, and not only sandhill cranes, but a few whoopers, as well as white pelicans.  Hunting is these guys’ religion, I thought. There are three escalating seasons here : bow-and-arrow, powder, and semi-automatic.  The locals were happy to have the hunters blast away at the birds because they devoured their crops, and the hunters brought yankee dollars. Our appearance on the scene—people who were touring the province looking at the Ukrainian churches—was a first, and so unusual and represented a possible new source of revenue that is was worthy of a write-up in the local paper.  Vie alerted one of the gals who wrote for it, and she came the next morning and interviewed us. 

            Posted on a wall of the Haugeruds’ cozily cluttered kitchen  was a map of the local sections. St. Genericus was on Dennis Plyatuk’s quarter section. 

         We checked out Wadena’s horoshaya, vinyl-sided Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada’s (wondering what is the difference between this group and Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church), whose cupolas were gleaming in the cold morning sunlight. Big skeins of geese were on the move. It was too cold now, time to pick up and fly a couple of hundred miles south. 

       Karoki, the next stop, sounded Japanese, and it was. The Japanese were briefly allies of Canada, during the Russo-Japanese war, which precipitated a little flurry of Japanese names on the northern plains. There is also a town called Mikado. Later, during the Second World War, Japanese-Canadians were kept in internment camps like Japanese-Americans. Just off the right was  the St. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church, also vinyl-sided and, built in l952, ladno. Inverny had the l953 St. Vladimir and Olga church, which was typical of the new generation that don’t do the big dome. 

        We passed a house on the move to a new location. “People love moving buildings in Saskatchewan,” Frank told us. It’s a favorite passtime. Grain elevators are always coming over the horizon. Some houses have been on highway three or four times. The relocation of a three-four story house is not unusual.  Saskatchewanianis don’t waste anything. They have a strong belief in recycling. Reduce, reuse, recycle—these are the three axioms of Canadian green movement, and nowhere are they observed more than here.”

      Rama, a tidy little town down to a hundred souls, is named for a river and a village in Yugoslavia. On  Second Street North is the Ukrainian Catholic St. Peter and Paul church, built in l936-9 and vinyl-sided. It has seven domes, the third church we had seen with so many (St. George’s in Saskatoon and St. Michael’s in Lapine being the other two).  The still wood-sided St. Michael’s a few blocks away was much more interesting, indeed otlychnaya.  Built in 1926, it had received a Heritage Foundation grant and had the most stunning interior yet, with, with beautiful stenciling around its wainscoted walls and marbled columns. There was real artistry in the detail. (see the second photograph). The icons which paneled the iconstasis (locally known as iconstase)  had been painted by Paul Zobolotny, a religious artist from nearby Canora, in l950-1, and were of genuine artistic merit, standing out from the others we had seen for their simplicity and grace. Zobolotny had lived in the church while doing them. Two were in need of restoration. “We normally don’t do interiors,” Frank said, “but here we may make an exception.” Zobolotny’s bill had come to $900—a lot in those days.  The rayed doors,  (rayiskii dveri) had a lovely motif of gentian-blue grape clusters (the food of Christ) and  had been done in Winnipeg; each grape had been handcut and painted. This church, and St. John the Baptist in Smuts, are musts.

       Rudolph Kresak (cell 593 4944), a local farmer and the president of the church as his father had been before him, had let us in and was telling us about these details. “The altar doesn’t have a single nail. It’s all done with wooden pegs. The whole church was done on donations. This person or that  gave $25. Dances and bazaars were held to raise money. The lumber was salvaged from a Lutheran Church seven-and-a-half miles away. The whole thing costs $117 to build. I remember when the church started there were families with five-six-seven kids and it was standing-room only, and a big overflow outside. Confession lasted from nine to two. Now we have only nineteen members, and ten services, performed by Father Pete Vascelenko from Canora. When you get somebody good you have to hang on to him, and now good or bad you hang on to him. We’ve only had four cantors in seventy-five years.” 

         Rudolph was sixty-seven but looked fifteen years younger. He was still a handsome, hearty, virile man in his prime. Two of his five sons were still farming with him, which was rare (His son Trent at 593 2173 is also available to visitors). “My grandfather came in l905. The people of different religions in Rama get along real well today, but it didn’t used to be that way.  It was a bad place if you were a minority. The people here are mostly Ukrainians and Poles. The Poles learned to speak Ukrainian, and many can’t speak Polish.” On another street was the Roman Catholic Church, which had its own, cemented-stone grotto of Lourdes, with stations along the path around it. There was a lot of religious energy in this little town.

        East of Rama, the Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic  shades into Dukhobor country. The Dukhobors start in Buchanan and Canora. There was a hint of resentment in Rudolph’s description of how “they came in droves and picked up the good land. But now everybody gets along. Dukhobors will tell jokes about Dukhobors.” 

          Buchanan boasted the smallest orthodox church in the province, only 8 x 8, just room enough for an altar and two worshipers, but it seemed to have been put on skids and taken away somewhere because it was not there any more. Canora takes its name from the first syllables of Canadian Northern Pacific Railway. It was a fairly large town, and a really nice one. The streets had names like Schevschenko and Dnieper. This part of Saskatchewan has the greatest percentage of seniors in the province, and Canora seems to be mainly inhabited by retired farmers. The modern St. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic church had  double (one over the other), slightly bellcast black half-domes, similar to the ones at St. George’s in Saskatoon, and Romanesque arched windows. The front steps were covered with red carpet and the front door was modern wood and glass door, giving the entrance a My Big Fat Greek Wedding kitschiness that undermined the delicate, baroque beauty of the cupolas. (Not that the parishioners probably even thought of their lovely church in these terms). The pièce de résistance in Canola was the otlychnaya orthodox Holy Trinity, built in l927-8. Doroty Korol (563 5211) let us in. The interior decoration and iconography is by Zobolotny, and the windows have lots of stained glass. The church is seldom used, except for summer vespers and by old couples renewing their marriage vows. The orthodox worshipers of Canola go to the new, much larger Holy Trinity church, built in l962, whose brochure spoke of “copulas” instead of “cupolas.” (Is this a new branch of khlysti ? I jokingly suggested to Natasha.) 

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