On the Road: Morning light and purple gold

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I struck purple gold.

Driving slowly along Kneehill Creek through a narrow part of the valley, I was trying to spot a pair of owls that had just taken off from the shrubs on the shady side of the creek. They’d flown to a stand of trees around an old homestead and I was hoping they’d be out in the open enough to get a picture.

Needless to say, they weren’t, so I drove on past the homestead and up to the top of the coulee. But once there I thought, okay, maybe one more pass. I turned around and headed back into the valley again.

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It was a little past eight in the morning and I’d already been on the road for a couple of hours hoping to get a little adventuring in before the heat of the day. Sunrise had been lovely, a yellow and pink brightening of the sky before the fireball burned through the eastern horizon, and I spent a bit of time among the fields around Kathyrn and Irricana watching the day begin.

I’m hardly and expert on these things but, despite the heat and dryness of the last month, the crops all look pretty good. The wheat and barley are beginning to ripen and I have to assume, judging by the fat windrows, that the hay crops have come through okay, too.

But whether the grain crops are good or not won’t really be known before they’re harvested and that won’t happen for a while yet. So I’ll just say the early light gilding the beards on the wheat and the yellow stems of the barley was lovely. And the wild oats caught the light perfectly.

The light continued to glow as the day warmed but it was softened by a light haze of forest fire smoke and dust from early risers like me trundling down the roads. And east of Irricana the softness was augmented by a light mist coming off the meandering Rosebud River.

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Cattle grazed placidly in the pastures accompanied by magpies, cowbirds and grackles. Hawks perched in old trees and on fenceposts while young meadowlarks clamped their claws around fence wires.

I didn’t have much of a plan for the day, nowhere in particular to go, so I just kept angling north and east. The country out this way is open and rolling, a quilted landscape of farm fields and pastures, and it looks its best — to me, at least — in the morning light. The backlit grain, the dew on the grass, the last remaining yellow blossoms on the canola, all glow in the hours just after dawn.

And I especially like the valley of Kneehill Creek between Linden and Carbon so as I drove north past Beiseker and on toward Acme, that’s where I headed.

The creek doesn’t run very fast or very strong or even — as was the case where I headed — very wet. Here in this sage and shortgrass valley where the creek makes its bed, the flow is often down to nothing by this time of year. There are deeper pools that stay fed by the water flowing through the gravel beneath the dry surface but long stretches of the bed are dry and dusty.

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But full of life. I saw dozens of kingbirds along the fence lines and perched among the buffaloberry branches while song sparrows trilled from among the patches of sage. A pair of mule deer, a young buck and a doe, wandered through the tall grass. Cattle came over to watch me photograph a butterfly.

And then there were the owls.

The first one flew low across the road right in front of me while the second came out from the shady bushes and flew overhead. They were great horned owls, an adult and a young one and if they had just sat still I likely wouldn’t have seen them. But they decided to fly over to a copse of Manitoba maples and willow trees where I guess they maybe felt safer.

So I edged along slowly trying to see if I could spot them and try for a picture. Nope, no luck with that. But as I turned around at the top of the coulee for another try, I spotted something much better.

I honestly thought that the saskatoons would be done by now. They usually hit their best right around the first half of July and I quite often miss them as I’m usually spending a lot of time at the Stampede. Occasionally I’ll get lucky and find a patch later on but by this time of the month, they are more like raisins than grapes.

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But glancing over to my left as I headed back into the coulee, I noticed that the bushes seemed bent, the branches heavy with something dark. Could it be what I thought it was? I stopped and got out of the truck for a look.

It was, oh my yes, it was.

Hundreds and hundreds of fat saskatoon berries were bending the branches, round, succulent and ripe. They might have been past their prime in other places but here along Kneehill Creek they were a vein of purple gold.

I popped one off the stem and stuck it in my mouth. It was pungent and sweet, the skin chewy and the tiny seeds crunchy. So perfect, so delicious. I went back to the truck to find some sort of container. I’d found purple gold and there was no way I wasn’t going to mine it.

The only thing I could find was a dusty 7-11 hoagie package but it would do. Ten minutes later it was as full as I could get it, my hands were sticky and mauve and my lips — as well as a streak on my cheek, I noticed later — were purple. I’d picked close to a pound of berries but obviously I’d barely dented the crop. Lots for me and plenty left over for the birds and animals.

Back in the truck and headed down the road I was already salivating over the thought of mashing the saskatoons into a bowl of vanilla ice cream and I couldn’t wait to get back home.

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Thing is, though, it was barely 9 a.m. on a gorgeous summer morning and I didn’t want to waste the day. The saskatoons and ice cream could wait.

There were hundreds of cabbage butterflies on the sunny sides of the canola fields, mating and laying their eggs on the leaves. Flocks of starlings were deeper into the fields, too, probably eating a few of those butterflies. Over at Swalwell Dam I watched young coots paddling around and bumblebees clambering on the hawkweed and goldenrod blossoms. The sun was still low enough that it backlit the new cattail leaves. Such a lovely green.

Further west at Linden I hit the coffee shop for a couple of the sugary Danishes the ladies make there and then continued on west to the hit the Kneehill Creek valley again. There was another obscure side road I wanted to hit and maybe strike gold again but, alas, I missed the turn.

So it was on to Sunnyslope and the rolling countryside where the parkland begins to meet the prairie. Copses of aspen and poplar start to get more common and the odd spruce tree joins them. It’s not much farther up the road to the mountain-esque landscape around Pine Lake and beyond that to the Red Deer River.

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The grain crops here look every bit as good as they did further south so I stopped to play around the edge of one. Grasshoppers were jumping among the stalks and dozens of tiny flies filled the air above them. I took advantage of the bright mid-morning light to shoot some closeups of the wild oats, too.

I know farmers hate them but those seed heads have such a lovely, delicate look.

Heading west, now, I found at least a hundred cliff swallows by a farm yard, mostly young ones and parents. Why they were clustered there, I don’t know, but it was fun to watch their antics. I swear one of them was showing off for me, stretching its wings and tilting its head.

But as I photographed the swallows, I noticed that the sky was beginning to cloud over and a breeze was picking up. Thunderstorm coming? Maybe.

I was about as far west now as I wanted to go so I turned south and started making my way back to town, thinking again of how much I wanted to taste those purple morsels slathered in cold, soft vanilla goo. It was time to close the circle on the day.

But I stopped again when I spotted a twist of alkali spinning its way across a dry slough.

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Don’t think I’ve ever seen this particular slough completely dry before but today it was. Along the far shore I could see where the wind-blown alkali had plastered a lone aspen and the hillside behind it and while I was photographing that, another little dust devil popped up.

So I decided to wait for a bit to see what was happening with the weather. The clouds overhead were thickening and the wind was getting more blustery so I set up one of my cameras on a tripod to shoot a time-lapse video of the weather moving in.

It remained hot with the sun strobing between the moving clouds while dust devil after dust devil danced across the slough bed. A flock of starlings blew in with the wind and settled in a stand of poplars while the clouds churned overhead. Raindrops began to spatter the windshield.

So I gathered up the camera and rolled on though I needn’t have been so hasty. The storm that had spattered the windshield passed quickly by and didn’t dump any real rain until it was much farther east. I could see it falling like a grey curtain from a hilltop overlooking another pond just a few kilometres away.

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The main part of the front had passed me now so I continued on back toward town. A bit west of Linden I stopped to photograph feed barley being cut and chopped and then again by a dirt road — real dirt, not gravel — leading down to Lonepine Creek. More storms were rolling in, some of them looking pretty ominous, but I managed to skirt them as I went. Cool clouds, though.

But by 3:30, my stomach was telling me it needed topping up so after stopping by a couple more fields — they just look so nice right now — I booted it homeward. An hour later I was back in the city.

But I had one more stop to make.

There was no ice cream at home so I stopped, grabbed a tub at the first store I came to and pulled back onto the road again.

Straight into rush hour traffic.

Bumper to bumper, temperature 32 C outside and close to that inside. The ice cream was on the passenger-side floor but within a few minutes, the frost on the container had melted and was dripping off the sides. If traffic didn’t start moving, it would be vanilla soup by the time I got home.

Finally, things sped up and 20 minutes later, I was back at the house. Leaving the camera gear in the truck for later, I grabbed the saskatoons and ice cream and bolted for the door. In the kitchen, I grabbed a bowl.

Two scoops of vanilla, a handful of purple gold and a big spoon.

Bliss.

And brain freeze because I ate it too fast.

All that glisters is not gold, so it is said, but glister or not, it is just as precious when it’s purple.

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