THIS OLD HOUSE
Visiting his abandoned home on the prairie, Kevin Mitchell finds it `well and truly broken'
SASKATOON I head home — or what used to be home — one late-summer Saskatchewan day. It's a very prairie drive, deep into the heartland.
Wheels crunch gravel. Fields flash past.
My old house sits down a quarter-mile lane, 20 minutes out of Birch Hills. On the other side of that lane is a curtain of choking growth. Trees, bush, brambles. It's a prairie jungle.
I exit the car, and gape.
It's a fight to reach the hidden house; a push through nature's bounty. A sunny day gives way to shadow as the structure gets closer.
I find this, in my house, on this buzzing summer day: Front door gone. Bird nest in the only light fixture that hasn't been ripped out. Human waste (or so it looks) piled with other debris in the middle of the living room. Two busted and jagged front windows. Glass embedded in the carpet. Collapsed ceiling in my parents' bedroom, and insulation all over the floor. Cracked walls. The scent of mouse urine. The deck outside has disintegrated, and trees are growing through its rotting slats.
I decide not to walk across the part of the house that sits over the cellar, in case the floor collapses. It probably won't, but I don't feel much like tumbling headfirst into the pitch-black potato bin down there.
From a safe perch in the living room I can see my bedroom, a small slice of it, down a hallway and to the right. The door's gone. It's dark in there, but a dab of sunlight illuminates the curtain over the window. That's my curtain, from when I was a kid. It's the one thing in this house that looks fresh.
It doesn't take much inspection to confirm a terrible truth: My little farmhouse, apart from that piece of fabric, is well and truly broken.
My place. My sanctuary. My home sweet home.
Farmhouses and old yards, just
like this one, sit abandoned all over Saskatchewan. Some hide in seldom-travelled nooks; others sit along rural roads. We pass them by as a matter of routine. Perhaps we engage in idle curiosity.
We don't generally ponder the
very human story attached to these places. They were built for a purpose, and filled with daily dramas and forgotten conversations. Slept in, loved in, fought in, grown up in, eaten in, lived in, died in.
Saskatchewan tales, big and
small, remembered and forgotten, were spawned in these now-abandoned homes.
My family discovered this particular piece of land in the fall of 1922, when Saskatchewan was a decidedly rural population: Just 29 per cent lived in urban areas, a number that has since been flipped. My great-grandfather acquired it, and cattle and chickens were included in the deal.
Then they commenced clearing, chasing back the growth that pushed near the farmhouse. They created a large living and work space that stretched over several acres and many decades.
I moved in, with my parents and two siblings, in the 1970s, from B.C. It was a homecoming for my mother, who grew up across the road. We took the house (which was built in the 1940s, replacing the previous structure) and expanded it. My widowed aunt Sylvia and her brother Leonard, who had been living in the house, purchased a new mobile home and placed it in the yard, 20 seconds away. We built a communal life.
I call it my house, but it's really not. Not anymore. Not in the most literal, technical sense.
Around 1992, my parents sold the property — house and 10 acres — to a cousin who already owned the adjacent farmland. They moved into Prince Albert.
The land around the acreage continues to be worked, but the large yard site was abandoned.
Apart from a small, fenced-off bee collection just off the lane, nobody needs it. It's gone back to nature, which has reclaimed it in dramatic manner.
Scavengers have picked the place clean, and what's left is either decaying or greening.
On the day I visit — long before the snow flies — it's big, green, growing, vibrant, overwhelming, intimidating, and a little bit menacing. A scythe would be handy.
Old barns, which stood tall when I lived there, have collapsed and lie rotting in the jungle near the back end of the yard site. They're nail-ridden lumps.
A large and beautiful fruit orchard is gone — swallowed up, and impossible to get to.
But small reminders of the people who loved this land remain. Century-old farm implements rust near flattened barns; we find bicycles and a big white tire my mother planted flowers in, and an old chair leaning against a tree.
And as I crawl over acres of choking growth and feral land that once harboured a living space, I discover — in a ramshackle structure near the house, formerly occupied by a very smart, curious and hunchbacked man — a jar. It's a sealed jar, filled nearly to the brim with tiny objects, including carefully-folded handwritten notes and seed packets. It was left by a long-dead uncle, and untouched until now. My Uncle Arthur.
He fell down a well as a child, leaving him with a deformed back. He was overlooked by many, but the smartest person in any room he was in. In family pictures, you see him standing off to the side, usually on the far left or far right.
He rode his bicycle across the countryside, seeking his own adventures. He usually wore overalls. When he made the lengthy bike trek into Birch Hills on summer Saturdays, he donned a suit and tie, and clipped his pant-leg to keep it free from the chain.
Once in town he'd visit the second-hand store, hand out gospel tracts on the street, drink tea and eat pie at the café. Then he'd bike home down rural gravel roads, mile after mile, often under the stars.
He was an amateur scientist, fascinated by the world around him. He studied crops and seeds, devised plant hybrids, and built a shortwave radio, pulling in signals from across the globe. He scoured the land for arrowheads, axe heads, stone hammers.
He was also an athlete of sorts. One family photo shows him doing a handstand on a wood chair, feet straight up, face lit with a grin.
The property was his palette, a place where he could indulge both his horticultural passions and his eclectic imagination.
He worked out of a wood trailer 100 feet from the farmhouse. It was his sanctuary and his laboratory, filled with the things he loved. When he died in 1973, aged 68, his sister — my widowed Aunt Sylvia, a saint of a person who also lived in that farmhouse — insisted that everything in the trailer remain untouched, as a memorial to this bright and curious little man.
Scavengers have looted the trailer nearly empty over the last couple of decades.
I saw him just once. It was during a visit there, when I was a toddler, and I remember being scared at his unorthodox appearance. I stood behind a chair, peeking at him. One of my earliest memories.
If I could have known him, I'd have loved him dearly. And now I have his jar, with its contents waiting to be explored ...
But before we get to that jar,
another man enters this story. He's my Uncle Leonard. Arthur's brother. He, too, lived in the farmhouse, before I moved in and they shifted a hundred feet away. The previous winter, he and my Aunt Sylvia had been stranded for a month when a terrible blizzard blew in, and they needed our help.
My Uncle Leonard spent several difficult years at Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford in the 1940s, and he made it clear he never wanted to return. He got back to that farmhouse and stayed. He refused to get into a vehicle, right up until his last couple of years, when medical emergencies required that he go into town. He would travel only as far as his legs would carry him, and that consisted almost entirely of the land this house stood on.
He was a gentle man who loved travel and geography books, and reading about birds and animals. He studied places he'd never go, poring over maps with a magnifying glass. He knew Venice, Rome and London. He read his
Bible cover to cover, then started again from Genesis 1:1, building a mental library of places, mapdots and theology.
And then, when winter gave way to spring, summer and fall, he worked that land.
He cut the grass in this large place with hand clippers, inch by inch and foot by foot.
We took over that job when we moved in, but the rest was his domain, his labour of love. He worked that beautiful orchard, and a massive vegetable garden that provided a winter's worth of food, and big flower beds.
When we walked down the quarter-mile lane after school in the spring, we'd see him in the garden, hoe in hand, talking to himself in a gruff voice that carried across the land.
He beat back nature for four decades. He bent it to his will. The land fed and nourished him — he was a vegetarian, living largely off food from that garden — and he loved this place with a passion I've never seen duplicated, anywhere.
You would never know, looking at the growth-choked place now, just how deeply it intertwined with this man named Leonard.
It was the only place he felt safe, in this whole great big world.
So I think of him, and Uncle Arthur, as I trip over thick growth. I think of the energy they poured onto this land, and the lives they lived here, and their stories.
I think of my own wispy existence here, once upon a time. I slept here, ate here, built a life with my family here. But apart from that bedroom curtain, there's no sign of me now.
I passed through this house, then disappeared.
I'm as much a ghost as my great-grandparents, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles who lived here once upon a time.
Neighbourhood gatherings were held in that house. Jokes were told and laughed at. Days and weeks, insignificant and long-forgotten, drifted past and faded into nothing.
But if I'm a ghost, I'm a ghost with memories.
Waiting for that first school bus, after we moved in from
B.C. — I was eight, my brother five, and his mittened right hand slipped inside my left as the driver steered around the curve of our front yard. My mom and sister watched. Strange kids peeped at us from the windows. We were scared.
I mention this now, because my teenage nephew Jordan is on this trip to the farmhouse. He's an aspiring and talented photographer, and my brother's son.
I ask Jordan if he'll take pic
tures for me, and we'll get them into the paper, along with this story. One generation writing, one generation snapping.
I tell Jordan about waiting for that bus, and place my feet in the exact spot we stood. I picture it as it was; open front yard, one big maple tree in the middle, a view 10 miles long. He sees it as it is now; choked with bush and trees, chest-high weeds and grass, no room for a school bus or two kids waiting.
At the house, I show him the place on the deck where his 10-year-old dad jumped his bike and landed badly, breaking his collarbone. He's heard the story. Now he sees the deck, the scene of the crime, and it's a pile of wrecked and rotted lumber. Who could jump off that?
In the house, I notice a charred log in the fireplace, evidence of one final, forgotten fire.
I stood in front of that fireplace with my other grandmother from Saskatoon, the day I graduated from high school. She never visited us; we always visited her. It was a big deal to have her there — me, awkward teenager, gangly and long-limbed, wearing my first suit, wrapping my arms around her for photos.
The light fixtures have been ripped off that fireplace, and the spot where we stood is buried in debris.
The place we set up our Christmas tree every December, where I sat cross-legged with my brother and sister, is now littered with shattered glass from the front windows. The carpet is swollen and pungent, exposed to the elements.
Those two scenes — the house as a living space with a sense of permanence, and then as a decrepit shell, ravaged by time, elements and invading interlopers picking the place clean — compete for space in my brain.
Jordan says it's weird to be there. His ties to the place are a generation removed, but he feels a little tug. He's aware of his roots.
“It's kind of cool hearing him talk about everything, how it all was,” he tells me, referring to his dad, as we wander the back part of the jungle. “I couldn't imagine you growing up here, having it be all civilized and normal, and now it's all overgrown. What a contrast.”
“It's crazy, ” I tell him. “It's unbelievable.”
But it's really not unbelievable, because nature is doing what nature does. All you can really do, after the shock wears off, is to shrug your shoulders, shake your head, and acknowledge that this, too, is life on the prairie.
The land is wild. People tame it for a while and build fresh structures. Then it's wild again. Those structures slowly rot.
It's a picturesque spot to photograph, mind you. This wild and invasive growth has its own form of beauty. Jordan and the SP'S Michelle Berg, who's along to shoot video and has a sharp picture-taker's eye, agree about the raw splendours of the land.
It's so raw and splendid, in fact, that near the end of our visit, we spot — in a grassy patch in front of the house — two very large and fresh animal droppings. Perhaps a bear, we think. And a few minutes later, we hear a noise in the bush that sounds louder than a squirrel, and just a little bit scarier.
It's the same bush we'd fought through, seeking old memories.
After more lingering, we get back to the car and head onto those gravel roads. We're halfway to Birch Hills when I remember that I left my Uncle Arthur's jar on the remains of our deck.
I'd opened it briefly in the trailer, and want to drive it to my parents' place in a few days. Take off that lid with them. Examine what's inside.
“Go back,” I'm urged by the others, so we swing the car around. I return to the farmhouse.
I fight the few hundred metres back to the house alone, grab that jar, start down the side of the house ... and hear more noises from the nearby bush. I try to calculate who would be quicker getting to the car from the house — me, or what my suddenly-vivid imagination pictures as a hungry and motivated bear — and swing around, heading with what I hope was a casual meander to the other side.
I remember that I left my cellphone in the car, and I'm sauntering a little quicker now. The hardy country boy has been replaced by a sissy city kid. I hear one faint, final rustle before breaking clear of the growth and walking into the open.
So I don't know.
Maybe a bear lives there now. I hope it gets as much from the place as it needs, just like I did. Like my Uncle Leonard did. Or my Uncle Arthur, whose jar I clutch as I approach the car and those waiting photographers.
I don't like that my very last memory of the place is me, looking over my shoulder, slightly elevated pulse, as I slash through a jungle landscape to get away from an invisible bear.
This is home, for crying out loud, and it gets a man to thinking.
I need a different last memory. Closure for the inner ghost. Perhaps I should go back down that lane and create a new final impression in this unpeopled property, stuffed full of stories.
Maybe someday, I thought, and then a few months later, a massive November snowstorm barrelled across most of Saskatchewan. As the storm raged, I thought about my house in the country. I pictured drifts piling up in the living room, blown in through the missing front door and busted windows.
Those drifts in my brain will still be there on Christmas Eve, big white mounds on the carpet where the tinselled tree used to be, in an empty, windy, dying old house I remember well and fondly.
You would never know, looking at the growth-choked place now, just how deeply it intertwined with this man named Leonard.