Over Prairie Trails

Over Prairie Trails

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Title: Over Prairie Trails
Author: Frederick Philip Grove
Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6111] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on November 10,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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PRAIRIE TRAILS ***

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OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS
By Frederick Philip Grove

Contents
Introductory 1 Farms and Roads 2 Fog 3 Dawn and Diamonds 4 Snow
5 Wind and Waves 6 A Call for Speed 7 Skies and Scares

Introductory
A few years ago it so happened that my work--teaching school--kept
me during the week in a small country town in the centre of one of the
prairie provinces while my family--wife and little daughter--lived in the
southern fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very far from
the western shore of a great lake. My wife--like the plucky little woman
she is--in order to round off my far-from-imperial income had made up
her mind to look after a rural school that boasted of something like a
residence. I procured a buggy and horse and went "home" on Fridays,
after school was over, to return to my town on Sunday
evening--covering thus, while the season was clement and allowed
straight cross-country driving, coming and going, a distance of
sixty-eight miles. Beginning with the second week of January this
distance was raised to ninety miles because, as my more patient readers
will see, the straight cross-country roads became impassable through
snow.
These drives. the fastest of which was made in somewhat over four
hours and the longest of which took me nearly eleven--the rest of them
averaging pretty well up between the two extremes--soon became what
made my life worth living. I am naturally an outdoor creature--I have
lived for several years "on the tramp"--I love Nature more than Man--I

take to horses--horses take to me--so how could it have been otherwise?
Add to this that for various reasons my work just then was not of the
most pleasant kind--I disliked the town, the town disliked me, the
school board was sluggish and unprogressive, there was friction in the
staff--and who can wonder that on Fridays, at four o'clock, a real
holiday started for me: two days ahead with wife and child, and going
and coming--the drive.
I made thirty-six of these trips: seventy-two drives in all. I think I could
still rehearse every smallest incident of every single one of them. With
all their weirdness, with all their sometimes dangerous adventure--most
of them were made at night, and with hardly ever any regard being paid
to the weather or to the state of the roads-- they stand out in the vast
array of memorable trifles that constitute the story of my life as among
the most memorable ones. Seven drives seem, as it were, lifted above
the mass of others as worthy to be described in some detail--as not too
trivial to detain for an hour or so a patient reader's kind attention. Not
that the others lack in interest for myself; but there is little in them of
that mildly dramatic, stirring quality which might perhaps make their
recital deserving of being heard beyond my own frugal fireside. Strange
to say, only one of the seven is a return trip. I am afraid that the
prospect of going back to rather uncongenial work must have dulled
my senses. Or maybe, since I was returning over the same road after an
interval of only two days, I had exhausted on the way north whatever
there was of noticeable impressions to be garnered. Or again, since I
was coming from "home," from the company of those for whom I lived
and breathed, it might just be that all my thoughts flew back with such
an