A trip out below Saint Adolphe, below Ste. Agathe, but above Dominion City, MB.
On the St. Vital side of the Red River, heading south.
I still don’t know how to pick roads that are consistently paved: sometimes, at the edge of a town, the pavement vanishes, as if it was only there for show, and behind the car, a rooster-tail of dust rises. Other times, the asphalt stays, but the pavement gets more decrepit and ragged at the edges with every kilometre, suggesting the road less travelled without ever deigning to say it out loud.
To the west, the sky is the colour of a bruise, the left-standing last-year corn stalks the gold of bright blonde hair, and the overriding sense is of the impending.
In some of the valleys along the river, yellow warblers fly straight up, wings cocked against the wind, flashing their bright undersides and alighting again in the tops of the new bright green river willows. Singing single sharp notes. There is no explanation for their behaviour. It is the blind bravado of paper airplanes, flying purposefully into a deliberate stall. Because they can.
Then I find the Marsh River. Riviére Marsh.
The bridge over the slow-moving river is in the same condition as the face of the sign: still straight and true, but well aged. The wind is steady and hard, left to right, south to north, but warm.
A beaver has left a cut-off poplar as thick as my wrist on the edge of the water, the gnawed wood bright and fresh, the leaves hanging in the water, as if it had been startled away from the task only moments ago.
Red-winged blackbirds, as they do, sing their clear pure notes. Theirs is the song that you forget over winter, only to hear again in the spring and recognize as an absolute singularity. So sharp — so clean. The lesser chorus — house wren, song sparrow, cowbirds — fill in the background, an acceptable tonal tangle in the area back behind, but the blackbirds are the soloists, on point and on their game.
The river’s been high for a good long time, and now it’s low again, but the foreshore hasn’t gotten used to this new state of affairs. The banks are beaten like battlefields, waiting to come into their own fresh green. That green is close, even though the brush is bruised and bark-cut by ice, drowned more than watered.
And all of it right there is enough, absolutely enough, for a perfect day.
The smell of the heavy moist air, the ding and clink of the nearby car’s exhaust as it cools, the climbing-step grumble of a farm truck up the road as it climbs through its gear register, the way everything pours out, all at once and all so rich.
But wait.
Stand on the bridge. Stand perfectly still until the barn swallows nesting under the bridge calm.
And wait for the mosquitos.
Don’t slap. Don’t wave your hands to keep them away. You will get bitten: it will be worth it, even when the itching starts.
Beauty, they say, takes a pinch.
And presentation is everything.
Dark grey-blue backs, bellies the colour of bright drying clay, the chittering swallows will then boil out from under the bridge as if hearing a singular invisible signal and dive all around you like fighter pilots showing off their skills, cutting in fast and low and tight.
The more still you can stand, the closer they will come, picking off the mosquitos that are focused on the lure of your exhaled air, mosquitos not expecting anything like the swallow air force.
And there you are, at the centre of a kiting, swirling barn swallow universe, your arms at your sides, your hands out and palms turned up as if you are trying deliberately to catch the spitting rain that has started to fall.
As if you are trying to catch some small sample, some shred, of the things of value in this world.
Silently, motionlessly, delighted.
Heading back, in the brightest light of the day, and the Louis Riel Bridge in Ste. Agathe is lit funereal.
There are garage sales up and down the river road, there’s traffic and the smell of spread manure, there’s even a highway road crew dropping a precise range of highway cones as they scissor off a part of the road for coming construction.
The drive home, as always, is shorter than the drive out, and filled with fewer wonders.
But you?
For one small part of the day, you were — you were — the swallow king.
*Rodgers
To quot Stan Ridgers;
🎵 Watch the field behind the plow...🎵
It gives one hope that, eventually, there will be new life. That field of pale gold corn stalks from last years crops will soon be plowed under...
...and there will be new life. New hope.