1. In which the Eastern Bastards are shown to have it wrong: the prairies are beautiful.

Sometimes when you open one book, you unwittingly find yourself with a month of reading in front of you. That's what happened when my brother-in-law, a transplanted Brit, told me about Jonathan Raban's Bad Land: An American Romance (Pantheon Books). "Sounds just like Mac," he said, tossing me the copy of The Economist, which had a review. "You girls should read it. Ask your mum if it's like what she remembers."
Raban, another transplanted Brit, had written about his discovery of eastern Montana in a graceful memoir which was the New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice of the Year in 1996. Following the path of the Milwaukee railroad, which cut into Montana in 1907 and 1908, he investigated the abandoned houses that today are scattered over the countryside. He found account books that show debts piling up from a seemingly manageable $2.54 to an enormous $5,688.90. He read weather-ruined grade school texts on American patriots. He haunted cemeteries, reading headstones.
"An emigrant myself, trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West, I took the ruins personally," he writes. "Faith in the future was written in to the carpentry of every house. To lay such a floor as that, tongue in chiselled groove, was the work of a true believer. Looking now at the fleet of lonely derelicts on the prairie, awash in grass and sinking fast, I could guess at how that faith had been shaken."
Eastern Montana. My mother has stacks of two-inch by three-inch photos taken there. The sod house in the town of Opheim where she boarded so she could go to school; Mac, my grandfather, in the Overland touring car he used as a livery service; my grandmother in front of the two-room house they called home on the prairie. We girls-my sister and myself, Mac's fifty-something granddaughters-remember well his tales of homesteading-or trying to-between 1912 and 1917. The land is just a little north of the country Raban writes about. It is just as dry, just as unsuited for farming, and just as heartbreaking.
So I read Raban's book and then I went looking for more, partly because I wanted to know more, and partly because I was curious to see if things were any different on the Canadian side of the Line, the 49th Parallel, that "twelve-hundred-mile-long figment of our collective imagination", as Marian Botsford Fraser calls it. The books I found, taken together, are a summer's-worth of reading which offer a trip in time as well as space.
Fraser's book Walking the Line: Travels along the Canadian/American Border (Douglas & McIntyre, 1989) deals with the Line itself, as does a more recent book, North Country: A Personal Journey through the Borderland, by Howard Frank Mosher (Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Ronald Rees's New & Naked Land: Making the Prairies Home (Western Producer Prairie Books, 1988) is a straight history that allows for comparison between the factual aspects of the settling of the prairies in the two countries. Sharon Butala's The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature (HarperCollins, 1994) is a mystical account of coming to terms with the land, and with one's life.
But it was Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, & a Memoir of the Last Plains Frontier, by Wallace Stegner (Viking, 1962) which seemed the perfect complement to Bad Land. Stegner (who was born a year before my mother) and his family moved to Eastend, Saskatchewan, in 1914, when he was five and the town was under construction. They had a homestead right on the Line. There they spent the next six summers, until, defeated by drought and land that should never have been ploughed, they went looking for another beginning.
A tough country. Dry and flat and-just ask anyone who lives east of the Lakehead or on the West Coast-mythically ugly.
The people who wrote these books don't think so, however.
Here is Stegner coming back to Eastend (which he calls Whitemud) after forty years' absence. The land "is a long way from characterless; `overpowering' would be a better word. For over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on the range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set the painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent."
And Raban on an afternoon: "The smell of red dust, roasted, biscuity, mixed with the medicinal smell of the sagebrush that grew on the stony slopes of the buttes. I thought, I could spend all day just listening here-to the birds, the crooning wind, the urgent fiddling of the crickets."
And Butala on the end of the day "when in the wash of golden light all blemishes fade and disappear and peace descends over the yellow grasses and the luminous sky.. Then, too, there is such perfection that all desire for heaven is absorbed in the glowing, fragile plains, the radiant hills."

2. In which it is seen that the Line does not affect
geography.

But in all its beauty the land is dry-most of the time. Not all of the time-if it were it would have been harder to loft such hopes as were sailed across the prairie sky like great cumulus clouds.
The 98th Meridian, which the American geographer Walter Prescott Webb defined as the eastern edge of the dry West, runs just east of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. At the American frontier it lops off the eastern quarter of the Dakotas and Nebraska before plunging south to bisect Kansas and Oklahoma. Precipitation maps show that rainfall in this vast region ranges from 10 to 20 inches (40 to 80 cm) a year. At the high end you can get good crops if you use the right techniques. At the low end you get nothing.
At first, though, it seemed that the settlers here had stumbled on an overlooked paradise on either side of the Line. The CPR spur through south-eastern Saskatchewan and the Milwaukee Railway through the middle of Montana were constructed about the same time during wet years.
The family that Raban follows most closely staked their claim in 1911, a year when "day after day it rained, and every day more pallid, wormy things broke out of the damp ground, straightened up, gained color in the light, and added themselves to the amazing green welter of that spring.... The serried wheat went on climbing and, when the wind got up in the afternoons, it passed through the grain fields like a deep-sea swell."
Similarly in the summer of 1915, when Stegner's family broke the sod in Saskatchewan, "rains came every few days, and were followed by long hot days with sixteen hours of sun.... We looked away from the field for a minute and looked back to find the wheat ankle high, looked away again, and back, and found it as high as our knees.... At the end of that first summer...my father, who was just six feet tall, walked into the field one afternoon and disappeared. The wheat overtopped and absorbed him. From a field of less than thirty acres he took more than twelve hundred bushels of Number One Northern."
And in the mid-1970s, when Butala moved to the edge of Cypress Hills: "It began to rain, wheat prices soared-durum went to an all-time high of over eight dollars a bushel-and the Wheat Board was able to find markets for all of it. Farmers, our neighbours, suddenly had money, some of them a lot of it, and for the first time farm families were able to enjoy some of the amenities of life that urban people had been taking for granted for years."
Not having "the amenities": that was the legacy of the dry years. "When you have stood for three summers in a row turning from the rainy east to the windy southwest," Stegner writes, "and propitiated one and cursed the other, and every time, just when you have been brought to the point of hope by good spring rains, have felt that first puff out of the southwest, hotter by far than the air around you, you are not likely to require further proofs" of the near-impossibility of farming this land.
So Stegner's family crossed back across the Line, looking for some new opportunity. The Line itself was extremely porous at that point, as befits something that is merely the embodiment of men's agreements.
The Convention of London, signed in 1818, set the boundary as the 49th Parallel from the Lake of the Woods west. Thomas Jefferson had had hopes for a more northern border when the young United States bought the watershed of the Missouri-Mississippi system from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase. But the Lewis and Clark expedition, sent out to explore the territory, failed to go up the Frenchman River, which drains the Cypress Hills, and so reported that no tributary of the great rivers went further north than 49 N. Because the Americans could see no hope for claiming the more northern boundary, they didn't push the issue.
(There was never a question of including all the Hudson's Bay watershed in British North America. If there had been, a great swath of America's heartland might now be Canadian, since the Red River flows from a source deep in Minnesota.)

3. In which the Line is shown to have become real
over time.

Both Fraser Walking the Line) and Mosher (North Country) have travelled the Line from the east to the west. Fraser's journey began as research for a series of Ideas broadcasts on the CBC, while Mosher, based in Vermont, was exploring both the country and his own development as a writer. Their accounts are anecdotal, and pleasant reading in short doses. It's easy to imagine the voices in Fraser's book coming at you out of a radio. Mosher quotes people at length too, but he is the person you learn the most about. Neither he nor Fraser draws any conclusions about national character, or makes many judgements about either country. For both of them, the Line, even where it follows natural geographic boundaries, has something arbitrary about it.
Of course, it is arbitrary, but just because it was there, things have developed differently since it was surveyed during the 1870s. Stegner writes that the most immediate effect was on the Native population, who found that they were generally somewhat better treated on the northern side of what they called the "Medicine Line": "The Mounted Police had more authority and were generally more to be trusted and easier to get on with than the blue-coated American cavalry, and much more to be trusted than Montana sheriffs or marshals or posses," he writes.
Firearms were more closely controlled on the Canadian side, too: he tells of the general shock when as a child he pulled a hidden-and illegal-revolver from under the coat of an American cowhand travelling with the Stegner family in a stagecoach. "When Montana cattle outfits worked across the Line they learned to leave their guns in their bedrolls," he writes. "In the American West men came before law, but in Saskatchewan the law was there before settlers, before even cattlemen and not merely law but law enforcement."
That distinction appears not to interest Raban at all: he doesn't even mention the Line, although he is a man who knows borders. A clergyman's son who fled England to become a travel writer, he bases this book on his outsider status. He writes about how he is recognized as a foreigner as soon as he opens his mouth, he uses British spelling and terms: "judgement", not "judgment", "boot", not "car trunk". This could be part of a ploy to make the book an easier sale among Anglophile Americans and in Great Britain, but this distance also allows him to approach Montana more or less objectively, almost like an anthropologist.
And what does he find? That the people who homesteaded came from families not unlike his, and that the families who toughed out the droughts, or who have moved back in search of some new dream, are distrustful of government. Even those farmers who owe their recent success to government-funded irrigation projects don't have much good to say about government. Raban postulates that this is the result of the great trick played on these people's ancestors by leading them to believe that they could make a go of homesteading on dry land.
Stegner and Butala would agree about the disastrous effect of the homesteading strategy. "We were not farmers, but wheat miners, and trapped ones at that," Stegner writes. But neither he nor Butala writes about the kind of deep-running antagonism toward government that Raban found rampant. The Klein experience in Alberta and the Reform Party movement elsewhere in the hinterland pale compared to Raban's right-wingers, his Aryan Nation types.
Indeed, Butala adds: "Much of this land, that which should never have been broken because of its marginal agricultural value, needs to be put back into grass and to do so will require money, time, and a love of grasslands for themselves. Because of the extreme fragility of this landscape, any such project would require many years, probably more than one lifetime."
She doesn't say it but the implication is that doing this should be a collective action, at least in part. It is an echo of the kind of collective populism that made Saskatchewan the birthplace of the CCF and the cradle of Canadian Medicare.
What a contrast with Montana where the word "liberal" can start a fight!

4. In which the circle turns back on itself.

Mac and his family gave up on the dry land about the time the U.S. entered World War I and he got a job on the Great Northern Railroad working out of a section point in the Rockies. He had stories about that time too: of express trains filled with the cocoons of silk moths, of the bears in Glacier Park, of the night the wind tore the roof from a box car and he just missed sailing off down a canyon.
But after the War they moved on, all the way to the Oregon shore of the Pacific Ocean before they bounced east again to settle in the fertile (but still relatively dry) Walla Walla valley in eastern Washington State. That's where my parents met and my sister and I were born, although we eventually chased a dream down the Pacific Coast to San Diego.
But my sister lives in Vancouver now, our mother is in a nursing home just south of the Line, and I'm an Eastern Bastard, having lived in Montreal more than half my life.
I get out West maybe twice a year, and last time I visited, I read part of Raban's book aloud to Mom. She doesn't hear too well any more, and I'd look up from the page I was reading to discover that she had dozed off. Well, at eighty-eight she'd got a right to rest. She knows all about it, anyway. She was there. For those who weren't, Raban's book, as well as the others, is worth reading. 

Mary Soderstrom's first novel, The Descent of Andrew McPherson, took place in part on a Montana homestead during World War I. It was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award the year that Carol Shields won for Small Ceremonies. Soderstrom's most recent book is Finding the Enemy, a collection of short stories published by Oberon Press.