Photo credit: Gerry Feehan
Runnin’ back to Saskatoon
Singin’ out a Prairie Tune (with apologies to… Guess Who?)
Every summer my brothers and I would take the train from Edmonton to Saskatoon to visit grandma and grandpa. There were seven of us. My mother would stand on the platform wishing us a tearful farewell. She’d pat us each on the head and tell us to be good boys. When the train pulled out she’d wave a final goodbye. We’d be gone for a week. As she turned and walked away there was a discernable lightness to her step.
My grandparent’s house on Avenue H was a modest bungalow with a dirt basement. There wasn’t room for all of us so the older boys were put up down the street at the Parrots’ place, a big wooden two-story with gables and a wrap-around porch. Straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life — or The Munsters.
‘Pops’ had had a stroke and wasn’t able to speak much but he had a mischievous eye and a contagious smile. My only recollection of grandma Jo was her stoic head shake when we’d emerge from the dark dank root cellar covered in dirt.
Edward and Josephine Feehan both died when I was pretty young so we stopped going to Saskatoon. A few years later they named a high school after my grandfather — and the Trojans at ED Feehan are still a perennial force to be reckoned with on the football field.
The drive to Saskatoon this June was nostalgic. I don’t live in Edmonton anymore but the two-day journey across Alberta and Saskatchewan was reminiscent of those long-ago train trips. Ripening wheat and canola fields. Alkaline pothole lakes more white than water. Birds scattering from man’s unwelcome incursion into their boundless aviary. On every quarter-section a house, a barn, an outbuilding. Today abandoned, bleached, sagging. These small farmsteads were alive and thriving when last I sailed through by rail; now usurped by mega-farms that in turn reside in the shadow of gigantic potash plants.
Driving, I was able to pull over stop and feel the rich brown soil, smell the dry prairie air, commune with solitary pronghorn grazing in the blue-green alfalfa — and admire the endless horizon.
A fine quiet solitude before steeling myself for the comradery — and cacophony — of TMAC.
On Sunday morning after the conference I drove down Avenue H looking for my grandparent’s house but nothing looked familiar. Idling past a fellow cutting his lawn, I rolled down the window and was tempted to ask if he might know where the Feehans used to live — or maybe the Parrots. But I knew he would just shake his head. So I turned up Avenue M to ED Feehan. At the school entrance the Canadian flag snapped briskly in the cool morning sun. No one was there. Nobody to tell, “Ya know this school was named after my grandfather.” No one to talk to about the train rides in the ‘60s.
Nostalgia is a lonely solitary journey. I took a quick picture, got in the car and headed west on Hwy 7 for the 10-hour drive home.
