As far as the eye can see

For over 20 years, now, I've been fascinated with landscape and meaning: I tried to get at it from a standard academic perspective using cultural ecology in the early 1990s, I remember being fascinated by an article on the iconography of the Canadian landscape in art (my Lawren Harris obsession dates from that time), I've tried to rationalize why we are drawn to certain physical and human landcapes loosely based on Roderick Nash's ideas, and I've done my share of egghead reading on productions of meaning.

But why certain landscapes speak to us, it's not an egghead academic question. I think it's entirely an emotional one. I know that I respond to the Canadian Shield in a way that can't be reationally explained. And for some people, it's the Prairies. It's not something I can relate to, but I've heard enough songs immortalizing the flatland (e.g. Grievous Angels: "You still make jokes / about Saskatchewan / but you'll always call it home"; Connie Kaldor: "The sky is bigger than anywhere else / as far as the eye can see". By the way, all of the Grievous Angels CDs survived the latest of my semi-regular "I have too much crap!" purges, but Connie Kaldor did not). I've read enough of those starkly beautiful novels of Prairie literature to understand that people feel an emotional connection to this place too.

So, I tried. I spent a week in Regina. I climbed on a bus for a field trip - we went to to see the Gardiner Dam and the hydro station that goes with it. We had a church lady style lunch in a blink and you miss it town named Broderick (there was no pie, though, which is the best part of church lady style lunches). We bumped our way to Outlook to visit an irrigation centre/research station and look at a rail bridge converted to a pedestrian bridge over the South Saskatchewan River (what I am confused about, though, is there a rail trail that goes with this?). We visited the Craik Sustainable Living Project in Craik. But most of the time, we sat in the bus, because these sights to see are far apart, and between them, it is almost uniformly flat.

It's a whole other world for me. I knew better, but when you tell me that there is a dam creating a 44,000 acre reservoir, somehow, I expect some visible technological wonder. And perhaps it is, being the largest earth-filled dam in the world, but it still only stands 64m high. The lake it creates looked, from the dam, uninspiring - the horizon of land and water seemed to blend together, so uniformly flat were they. I liked the tail race - there were pelicans. And maybe, if you live in southern Saskatchewan, it's the biggest whitewater there is. In terms of structures which impress by their volume of concrete, the spillway most closely met my criteria.

I do know that this earth-filled dam was not that easy to construct - just think of the weight it has to hold back. The reservoir has a capacity of 9,900,000,000 cubic metres, which translates to 9,900,000,000,000 kilos of water weight if it's at bank-full. And while I know that not all of the weight of that water is pushing against the dam, it's still a whole lot of force to hold back. The dam itself is just over 5 km long, from edge to edge. And 1.6 km wide at the base. That's over 8 square kilometers of earth fill! And apparently, the dam moves downstream a few centimeters every year, and required additional backfilling after it was first constructed because it just needed more ballast.

Contrary to what you'd think, most of the water in Lake Diefenbaker is not used for irrigation. The largest single consumptive "use" in the reservoir is evaporation, and it's biggest production function is hydroelectric generation at Coteau Creek station, which is just below the dam. The station has a generating capacity of 185MW (annual output of 800 million kW.h), which is supposedly enough to power a prairie city. What impressed me was that the people who worked there seemed to spend more time giving tours than anything else: from what I could tell, the generating station is almost fully automated now. I sat in the big chair in the control room, and almost all the knobs were labeled do not operate (I swivelled in the chair and contemplated the red emergency knob while all those around me cracked Homer Simpson jokes. I demanded donuts, but none appeared. Though in Canada, we were well over an hour's drive from the nearest donut shop, I think).

The Gardiner dam is the world's biggest earth-filled dam, and the Outlook bridge (built on an old CPR viaduct) is the world's longest pedestrian bridge. I'd say they're into the Guinness Book of World Records sorts of designations in Saskatchewan: for example, the park that contains Wascana Lake in Regina is the largest urban park (bigger than Stanley Park! Bigger than Central Park!) and I'm sure the list goes on. This emphasis on superlatives is intriguing - we don't do that here in southern Ontario (though I can: most populous province in Canada! Toronto is the largest city in the nation! the CN Tower is the tallest free-standing structure in the world! Hey, this is not so hard...) But back to the Outlook bridge - it's almost 1km long, and nicely done (though it has a bit of a bridge to nowhere feel to it). What I liked best was the view.

But it didn't grab me, this landscape. I could tell you about Craik, which impressed and intrigued me far more than I thought it would (I'd been expecting more dreadlocks and tofu-making, less realistic visions), but their website tells you far more than I could. If you find yourself driving through Saskatchewan, you should stop there and spring for a tour.

And then, we climbed back on our bus and rumbled along the highway with no need for the busdriver to change gears, ever. So flat. But the sky! It's bigger than anywhere else (they even tell you about it on the license plates).

Posted by Johanna at May 3, 2006 12:41 PM