By way of Biggar

The pilgrimage to Moose Jaw takes place during the second week of November. It has been going on for longer then she can remember, so long that she is not even certain of why. Nevertheless, it does not occur to her to do anything but.

Moose Jaw in November is despairing. The prairie stretches as far as the eye can see without suggestion of divulging a slightest hint. One can easily forget where they are in Moose Jaw, and perhaps that is why it is here that has been chosen as the destination.

On a rare year the land is already white with snow, but more often the fields are bare with brown and stubble. They have pillaged some months before and now they are left abandoned, soon to be victom to the strangling ice of winter.

And thus, it is into such a land that these five transverse, first on the highway, to the western limits of the small city, and then by way of gravel to where the road ends, and finally on foot, turning up the dirt of where the city has yet to reach.

It is there that they begin the fire, and there that they grasp hard at each other, and hard at the flask, and there that they shout the obsenities to that heartless beast that lost from them their eden, and transport them here, to this prairie, where another winter will soon commence, and all that it touches will wither and die.

- posted by Sigurd11/21/2004 07:00:00 PM