10:6

Just east of Medicine Hat the land flattens out. For a few hundred miles across the southern Alberta landscape, there had been nothing but slowly rolling prairie devoid of anything but chugging pumpjacks, abandoned farmsteads and giant metal microwave towers that thrust up above the horizon and marked off the lengths of constantly retreating horizon like giant milestones. But after climbing out of that last deep valley that marks the last of the mountains’ fluvial bounty as the watercourses all turn north towards far off Hudson’s Bay and then leaving the wishful metropolis of a small prairie city behind, the land starts to feel like it’s had every last feature scoured away. The hills disappear, the signs of human habitation fade and the vista soon becomes nothing but miles and miles of flat, grass covered sea.

In this absolute emptiness even the grass remains short and sparse and, son after crossing over the Saskatchewan border, even it begins to give way to dried out nothingness. The unsuspecting traveler often opens his eyes and finds himself transported to far off Sahara, watching the whistling winds shape dunes of drifting sand, trying to build up or dig dig down, trying and failing to add some sort of texture or dimension to this arid and bleak landscape.

The pervasive howling wind constantly buffets vehicles side to side, constantly reminding the itinerant traveller that it reigns supreme in this wild and empty place. Gone are the doubled lanes, and all hint of fellow sojourners; it is as if the land itself has deliberately separated all the wayfarers, leaving them to transit the uninterrupted space with only their own fears and doubts to accompany them.

The ash grey ribbon of road flows straight and unswervingly between the sentinel towers — the sole indications that that man has passed this away before and has somehow marked the passage — with no towns nor crossroads to break up it’s progress. By now even the ubiquitous fences have disappeared as if the inhabitants had long ago given up hope of ever containing or even cataloguing this vast expanse of nihility.

It is a prospect that seems designed by the gods themselves to empty the mind and drain the soul.