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    We retraced the four miles back to Inglis, where we had left Highway 83, and stopped there to admire the last row of old-style grain elevators in the province. “An elevator is essentially a big wooden machine, a perfect form-and-function thing,” Ed explained. “The old ones are being replaced by round concrete towers of no aesthetic pretensions or value into which the grain is sorted and spewed into different sections and is more  easily accessed. These five are being restored at great expense—three million dollars, some of which is provincial money, some federal, some community, and some from the Thomas Sill Foundation, through which the Kaplan dough is flowing, but not to this project. The mascot of Inglis is the prairie rose, and there was a big painted metal rose in its entrance. Many towns in Manitoba have theikr mascot. One could do a kitschy coffeetable book, The Mascots of Manitoba. 

       Driving back down to Russell, we headed east on Highway 45 (as this section of the Yellowhead is numbered) to Birdtail. There was nothing left of Birdtail. Just an elevator and a boarded-up old boomtown-style general store. The few people in the vicinity do their shopping in Russell now. We could see the gambling hall, recreation center, and hockey rink at Waywayseecappo, a mile or so in the distance on the Lizard Point Ojibway reservation. A native teenager passed on a bike as we headed up a dirt road for three miles, then turned left. The snow was burning off. A duck was standing on the thin  ice of a newly-frozen slough. We arrived at the Ukrainian Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, known locally simply as St. Mary’s, built in 1905 and restored ninety-one years later. Bill Wasyl was waiting to let us in. His grandparents had come in l901 from Ivano Frankirsk oblast, but his English still had an accent. The belltower had its own banya. It is the only domed bell tower in the prairie. Inside the décor was spare and austere.  Bill had been baptized here, with six other children, in l928. He had heard of the khlysti and was about to say more but stopped himself. This was not something one talked about with strangers, not something to put in the tourist brochures. 

       The rural distrinct in which the church is located is called St. Elmo’s (the Scottish saint who gave his name to St. Elmo’s fire, a beautiful, eerie form of atmospheric electricity that usually appears in stormy weather around church spies, sailing masts, and airplane wings) to see St. Mary’s Orthodox church. The farmers around here had not yet gotten all their crops in. “When it’s harvest time, you don’t stop for supper,” Ed, who had first-hand knowledge of this, said,  “If you have a breakdown it’s panic time. You rush to town for parts. Now all the machinery is computerized, so you can’t fix it self, and you’re screwed.”  We passed copses of black scrub poplar, and another, lighter species that looked like birch, and maybe was (we had a running argument about this, Ed and Natasha voting poplar whenever we saw a stand of these trees, and I voting birch. There was definitely another, white type of birch, and I think these trees were grey birch, or something similar, with more black lenticels than paper birch,  and not poplar.) 

      Next stop was the Ukrainian National Home of Ivan Franco in Angusville, an assembly hall with three little domes built in 1923. Franco was a contemporary of Schevschenvko who tried to get Ukraine independence from Russia. There were portraits of both heroes inside, as well as of King George and his wife, a stage with a brocaded curtain and other memorabilia from bygone days, old typewriters, tin boxes and collectibles. It was all very colorful and old-timey and had a very Ukrainian feeling. 

     Then on down Highway 45 to Oakburn, turn left in town, three miles up and across to the rural district of Dolyny, where we reach the St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in time for the ten o’clock service, attended by twenty or so oldsters and performed by a young priest who came from Ukraine six months ago and doesn’t speak much English yet. The service is warmed by a big potbelly stove. An octogenarian cantor leads the singing. Afterwards cookies and apples are passed around, and the parishioners tell me about the leak in the dome which they all chipped in $12,000, a huge sum for them,  for a local contractor to fix, but it still leaks and is ruining the finely detailed wall stencils, and the contractor refuses to come back because he says he fixed it. Ed listens to their sad story and promises to see what he can do about it. 

     We visit the Ukrainian Pioneers’ Mass Grave heritage site on Patterson Lake, where in l899 two hundred settlers who had just walked thirty miles up from the train station at Straithclair were caught in a freak late April snowstorm, and in their cramped, cold  quarters, weakened by hunger,  42 of the 45 children died of scarlet fever one of them had picked up from a kid he had been playing with  at the station. The three who lived were scarred for the rest of their lives by survivor guilt.   There is a monument commemorating the suffering, courage, and perseverance of the immigrants, and every year there is a well-attended commemorative religious service at the site, followed  by dinner at the nearby community of Oakburn.  On to St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Olha, which the survivors built five years later. Families are visiting the graves in its cemetery. Lunch of sausage and Ed’s home-made pickles at a small general store, one of the last of its kind still in operation. Then to Michael Swistun’s farmstead to see the faithfully restored buddas, or pithouses, that saw many of the settlers in the region through their first winter. They consist of  nothing more a pit several feet deep covered with a a-frame of thatch. Swistun also built four or five churches in the area before leaving to eventually become the world’s strongest man in the Barnum and Bailey circus. A prairie chicken scuttles into the underbrush as we drive out. The settlers would have set snares for these birds. Ed’s grandfather went two years before he could afford a gun to hunt game for the newly-arrived family. 

         It is more forested and lake-pocked here. Passing a large stand of tamaracks that have turned gold, we head down a mile-long little road through the forest which brings us to the Marconi School, a one-room schoolhouse on the edge of a large, rush-fringed,  secret lake in the forest and another protected and restored heritage site. It is an extremely beautiful spot, tucked away in the deep woods, the kind of place where I could see myself building a little cabin and communing with the life of the lake à la Thoreau. The school was operative from 1921-58 and the original desks, books, and schoolwork are still there. during class was forbidden. The handsome, hip-roofed  building was divided into a large  classroom and a cozy three-room  apartment where the teacher lived. The facilities was an outhouse overlooking the lake. It was the 2085th school district. In l967  all the rural schools in Manitoba were closed, spelling death to communities, where the schoolhouse invariably served as the community center for the district. 

       On to St. Peter and Paul’s Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church  at Seech, whose belltower has two stories. The lower one is a small assembly hall. The land rises a few hundred feet, and we enter boreal forest with the same basic composition as my land in the Adirondacks : balsam, spruce, and white birch. We are now in the parkland, the transitional area between the plains and the boreal forest of South Riding National Park, which is like an island in the prairie. We stopped at the otlychnaya St. Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic church, on a little road through the woods. The wrought-iron crosses marking the graves of  many people in the Peech family, among others, have a crescent under their crosses, symbolizing the victory of orthodoxy over Islam. (One wonders why a Star of David wasn’t added. The Orthodox view of Jews as “Christ-killers” helped created the racist climate that produced the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement  around the same time as the Ukrainian migration, a diaspora that had much more impact on North America. Despite its deep spirituality and mysticism and extraordinary chanting, and the devotion of millions, I confess to having some problems with  the Orthodox faith, particularly the Serbian Orthodox Church’s condoning of the massacres of  Muslims by its Bosnian Serb faithful. But then, what faith hasn’t done similar things ?  One shudders to think what has been done in the name of God around the world. And the Orthodox have been on the receiving end of much suffering, during the Soviet era, and the Armenian genocide of l915, during which a million or so Armenian Orthodoxes were killed, the subject of Atom Egoyan’s superb new movie, Ararat.)

      The ride over Riding Mountain, past a succession of lakes and beaver ponds amid tall, first-growth spruces is beautiful. A thousand feet below on the other side, the Dauphin region spreads before us. The Anglos got the good land and left the bush and swamp for the Ukes, but after the Ukes who came to Dauphin (pronounced DAWfin) cleared their quarter-sections they found that they had very fertile cropland, and many of them prospered. But the typical Ukrainian homesteader was just eking out a living during the early decades after settlement. In the winter the men would work in bush camps, cutting railroad ties, or they would go east to lakes Winnipeg, Winnipegosis, and Manitoba and haul fish for the Icelanders and net thirty dollars by spring. 

      Dauphin is the main trading center for this region. Its mascot is the beaver. It has a big Ukrainian Festival during the August long weekend, which spans the first Monday of the month. 

       We checked into the Super Eight motel. After three days on the road, I was euphoric from all the beauty that we had seen. In the morning—it was Monday, October 14, Canada’s Thanksgiving Day--- we started with the large Ukrainian Catholic Church of  the Resurrection in town, designed by the Very Reverend Philips Ruh, who  known for his “prairie cathedrals,” built in l936-9, and beautifully decorated by the iconographer Theodore Baran from l957-61 and is now a national historic site. But a lot of Baran’s work had suffered water damage and is scheduled for restoration. The belltower outside was a simple steel-girder structure resembling a firetower. A subsequent priest had wanted to tear down this distinguished part of Dauphin’s skyline and put up a new church on the site to attracted the youth. “He wanted to make his mark in the community and was adamant that it had to go. The people who own or are responsible for these buildings are sometimes the ones who are least impressed by them,” Ed remarked sadly. But finally a parishioner donated a lot a hundred yards away, and the new church, which I would describe as nichevo moderne, was built there. 

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