Windsor Park to Viking via the Poundmaker Trail

Photo: Few of the old wooden elevators remain. This one, near Tofield, is deserted. Once the landmarks of each prairie town, they are being replaced by modern metal loading tanks.

I woke in Edmonton to the most spectacular summer day, and looked out of my friend's window at the garden. A glorious mountain ash laden with orange berries dominates the fringe of trees around the garden, while petunias and geraniums add brilliant colour.

We drank coffee outdoors in the sunshine, talking and laughing as old friends do. Then we got out her family bikes and rode along the river. The trees that edge the deep gorge of the North Saskatchewan are protected; we had to climb up and stand on a wooden bench at the view point in order to see down into Mayfair Park and across the ravine to where the Alberta Museum and Archives building stands on the brow of the hill.

Around 3 pm, I headed out of Edmonton on Highway 14, called the Poundmaker Trail after the revered nineteenth century Cree Chief. My destination was a complete unknown, little more than a familiar word for a town I knew existed near my hometown when I was a child.

I stopped for gas in Tofield, where I was born, since our town, Ryley, had no hospital. I left the highway there too, but it looked only vaguely familiar. Haight School is now a museum. I went briefly to Grade Two in that building for a couple of days before being summarily promoted to Grade 3, because there was more room in the Grade 3 building, Bathgate. Along with six other Grade 2s, I was deemed able to skip.

Haight and Bathgate were two former one-room schools which had been towed to town to augment Ryley School enough to accommodate the wave of post-war baby boomers then in elementary grades.

Today I left Ryley quickly and got back on the highway, cranking the windows wide to smell the country air with its alluringly familiar scents. After checking in to the Viking Lamplighter Motel, I tucked into a Ukrainian special dinner at the Caledonia, the other motel in town, which has a restaurant.

Then I met with a local contact who told me about the town. By the time I left her, darkness had fallen and the prairie wind had begun to blow. "They say there's a storm brewing tonight," she said. But so far it's only wind. The stars are winking overhead and there's no sign or smell of rain.