Given the complexities of making a living and a life in the rural West, farming and rural habitation can’t be thought of as “the simple life” anymore. Contact with two very different books caused me to ponder this in more detail last week.
The first was on a bookstore sale table. The book featured Canadian photographs arranged from west to east. First came British Columbia, depicted with a shot of Vancouver, cradled between mountains and ocean. Salmon and totem poles made up the provincial ensemble.
Alberta was exemplified by the Calgary skyline, complete with Saddledome and Calgary Tower, plus photos of Lake Louise, craggy mountains and grazing cattle.
Read Also
Crop insurance’s ability to help producers has its limitations
Farmers enrolled in crop insurance can do just as well financially when they have a horrible crop or no crop at all, compared to when they have a below average crop
Segue to Saskatchewan, summarized in two scenes: the sun-scorched Great Sandhills, bereft of life signs; and a broken-spoked wagon wheel in the foreground that framed a dilapidated granary.
Apologies to Manitoba, but I slammed the book shut before discovering the photographs it inspired. Is this how fellow Canadians view Saskatchewan – a beautiful yet desolate place nostalgic for an earlier century?
True, one can’t expect a single book of photos to depict the full diversity of rural Western Canada. And should we even think in terms of rural and urban when we examine the West?
Which brings me to the second book, The Trajectories of Rural Life: New Perspectives on Rural Canada.
In it, editors Raymond Blake and Andrew Nurse deliver on the title. They weren’t envisioning lichen-laden wagon wheels when they wrote this: “Nostalgic ideals of rural Canada do a remarkable disservice to rural life and culture in that they reduce the lived experiences of rural Canadians to a bare and one-sided essence …. Nostalgia, in other words, has not served rural Canadians well in that nostalgic images of rural life as somehow less complicated than urban life mystify the concerns and experiences of rural Canadians.”
As for the rural-urban dichotomy, here’s a snippet from a Roger Gibbins essay in the book: “…it is increasingly difficult to see the urban and rural Wests as distinct social, economic or political communities.
“Therefore potential policies to protect a distinctive rural community beg the question as to whether there is much left that is truly distinctive about that community. It may no longer make sense to rhapsodize about rural values, or to seek the protection of rural communities.”
Agree or not, mere excerpts don’t do justice to the concepts. For details on Trajectories, see www.producer.com.
