Grasslands

By Maryanna Gabriel

       "I  must not rely on what I read was the correct thing to think or do, or on what people told me
        was right, but instead, I must base my decisions about life and how to live it on my own
         experience and my own ideas about that experience."

                                   Sharon Butala -When the Wild Comes Leaping Up: Personal Encounters with Nature

Val Marie

The quality of my life has improved considerably since I found the air conditioner switch. I am developing a Clint Eastwood squint and feel I should be humming the whistle from "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly".  I am supposed to be in Grasslands but I seem to be in a Grasslands of my own making.

I came to Val Marie, the gateway to this famous park, after hours, the highway a little alarming, grabbed a pamphlet outside a park office, and wildly searched for a gas source. There wasn't one. A big truck pulls over. In answer to my query she says, "The gas station has been closed for years but we are thinking it will reopen next year. Gosh, you don't have any mosquito repellent on? Go spray yourself girl. How much did you pay for that thing anyways?" I thank her and wonder about a town that is in a god-forsaken nowhere without a gas station and then I see it. It is a kind of a private Esso station, you have to be a club member or some such thing, or maybe they just enjoy seeing the whites of the tourist eyes. I felt like my presence was an event and that the town tom-tom was beating. I am not comfortable. I hear a yip in the distance. Was that a coyote? I hear it again. Yes, it most certainly is. I decided to leave and I try to find the park entrance and in doing so I miss the turn. Roads here are on grids in vast landscapes and it seems to be a general policy to have either no signs, or sporadic signage, and never with distances. I ended up very close to the American border in a vast emptiness. Spotting a cottonwood tree I hugged the van up to it and parked uncertainly in front of a cattle guard. I was on a road but whose? It certainly felt out of the way. A pick-up pulled up. "Am I on your land?" I ask as I roll down the window. I look at the couple,  he with an Amish type beard and she with a kerchief with black and white polka dots, on a broad head of hair parted down the middle. "It looks like road allowance to me," came the answer and somehow I knew I was accepted.

Slowly I took in the vastness of the place, such huge sky, and I listen to the sweet sounds of red winged blackbirds. The sun sets and I whisper to myself when was the last time? Queenstown, New Zealand, I answer back. Far too long ago I think to myself. I grab my pamphlet trying to make sense of where I am and I see this is a federal park and that the pamphlet is helpfully in French. I read that the black and white antelope-creature is an antelocapre and that I can "picque-nique au bord de la crique." You have got to be kidding me. Quelle crique? Vaguely I wonder what cattle-guard camp dress protocol should be. After some deliberation I decide on a pariah, a kind of wrap in case I have to get up suddenly. The coyotes are silent. The sun sinks on the horizon on a vast landscape that is magnificent.