Old Roads: Alberta Homestead
I spent two weeks in July with my family up at my in-laws’ ranch up in the Peace River country of Alberta, about an hour from Dawson Creek, BC. My father-in-law came up to the Peace River and homesteaded with his dad at the the ripe age of seven years, back in 1929, to settle on this very spot. He speaks casually of trappers, of delivering mail by snowshoe, wild people, horse thieves, stolen cows, and hunting and tracking moose through hip-deep snow. At 85 he still cuts his own wood with a power saw, an expert log splitter.
My mother-in-law grew up a few miles away, and along with endless chores she works every day on her childhood homestead running the post office. They’re a hardy pair.
I’d only been there in December’s subzero temperatures for about ten years.
Minus 40 isn’t pleasant. I remove my glove to take these kinds of pictures, and my fingers begin to go numb in less than a minute.
But this was summer at 75 degrees. I saw things I hadn’t seen in ten years - a stern bald eagle standing at its nest, watching us, in a tall dead tree on the edge of the flat field above the river. My boy wanted to build a raft, so I gathered and sawed logs while he built a wickiup and my daughter sank her feet into the deep and squishy Peace River mud.
The lake up on the next level was serene with floating deadwood and a beaver dam. The old log cabin, dating probably from the 1930s or 1940s, was overgrown and fallen in much more than I remembered. 
My son and I built a lean-to out of big poplar branches, spruce boughs, and twine.
Tracks were all over the ranch - bear, moose, and beaver tracks at the river, wolf tracks out on Moonlight Canyon, and deer tracks everywhere.
It is so still and serene there. God’s creation is; it’s just simply being itself. There is an immutable silence in nature that mere noise and activity can’t eradicate; the silence is always there under the noise, patiently waiting.
On the ranch there is no noise. Out on Moonlight Canyon, or by the lake, or out on the big flat, the silence is tangible. It pours in your ears and digs deep into your soul, bringing forth things long forgotten.
There is something I recovered there this summer, a boy I used to be, barefoot, fishing, swimming, or digging clay out of the hillside to make model dinosaurs. I lived a Huck Finn existence that was mostly lost when I turned thirteen and moved to middle class suburbia; playing music and escaping into books took Huck’s place, and life was never the same.
Plenty of good things happened in my teens, of course; waterskiing trips, playing banjo and guitar, working at my Dad’s music store, and eventually bluegrass festivals, bands, and more. Without these things my life’s track would have been radically different.
But Huck Finn, that kid who lived every day by dirt and creek and frog and catfish, he had to shut his eyes and sleep for the eighties and nineties and beyond.
Something in us gets cooked by microwaves, drowned by iPods, blinded by laptops, a thing recovered outdoors in the cool morning air, in the heat of a sun that makes us feel so small but so alive. 
At the edge of a cliff, looking over an ancient river rolling for centuries to the sea, a truth in us wakes up. This inner truth is fed and watered by nature, by fresh air, by silence; technology and hustle-and-bustle and malls and traffic seem to starve it.
There is an aspect of self-importance and self-absorption in modern life that is wonderfully crushed by nature. Hills and rivers and trees and grass make me feel so humbled and awed and yet significant; they’re immense and soulful, and artistic, God’s gift to man as a sign of His love.
Something came alive in me during those two weeks that isn’t going away.
A.S. Peterson has crafted a work of compelling historical fiction which begs the question, “Can this really be a debut novel?” With dogged fidelity, Peterson captures the spirit, manners, and social conditions present during the American Revolutionary War. We meet colorful, credible characters who navigate the high seas of life and love, dependence and independence, war and peace, truth and consequence, and despite forays into dark places, The Fiddler’s Gun is beautiful, lyrical, and redemptive.
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up.
I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul - my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder.
11-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute.
I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson.
Eric Peters’s body of work addresses a diverse range of topics, but hope is a recurring theme that gently percolates in the midst of it all. And yet, somewhere between the 2001 masterpiece Land of the Living, and Scarce, the flavor of hope that Peters’s work emits has evolved closer to a tone that is more resolute than what came before. And though the complexion of hope has a broad range, the lyrics from Scarce–while intermittently contrite and timorous as in previous efforts, are now strengthened and bolstered by roots that have grown deeper, radiating an underlying grit and security.
Having read The Great Divorce many times over the years, I’ve found this classic from the great C.S. Lewis to be full of startling clarity and depth on the differences between Heaven and Hell. The only thing both have in common is that both begin in the human will; we can either let Heaven enter us and rule in us to blossom into love and goodness, or allow Hell to infect and reign in our hearts by the daily refusal to submit to Heaven.
Even if you haven’t heard Room to Breathe, its still likely you’ve heard Andy Gullahorn. He’s what I’d call a heavy lifter by trade. He writes lyrics, plays guitar, arranges vocals and adds production help to the work of artists like Jill Phillips and Andrew Peterson.
Allow me to preface this by telling you that I am a great despiser of gushing reviews. I’d much rather write (or read) a scathing dismemberment of the latest Brett Ratner film or Terry Goodkind book than suffer through four hundred words of overblown hyperbole about even the best of things. But when asked to write some thoughts on Frederick Buechner’s Godric, no amount of distaste for high praise was able to intervene. I hope you’ll take what I say with the understanding that I do not say it readily or lightly.
“There is an aspect of self-importance and self-absorption in modern life that is wonderfully crushed by nature. Hills and rivers and trees and grass make me feel so humbled and awed and yet significant; they’re immense and soulful, and artistic, God’s gift to man as a sign of His love.”
Wonderful words. So true.
Thank you Ron.
Ron, your beautiful post made me think of something John Piper said:
“Do people go to the Grand Canyon to increase their self-esteem? Probably not. This is, at least, a hint that the deepest joys in life come not from savouring the self, but from seeing splendour.”
I’m picturing a Rabbit Room retreat on the banks of the Peace River. Do you think your in-laws would mind?
Reminds me of the Oklahoma sky when I was a boy during harvest time. 20 miles away from any natural light… and the stars so bright and so close you can reach up and dip your hands into them.
We really do forget those things too easily.
Thanks Ron, lovely post.
Fantastic, Ron. Great evocation of time and place.
I need to go find some peaceful creation untouched by busy life. It’s been far too hectic lately.
Ron,
This is excellent. The commentary is enough to not even need the pictures, so they are a wonderful added bonus. I have a soft spot for old barns, so that one is my favorite by default, though that winter landscape is breathtaking. I’m glad there are folks in this world willing to not only go out into that, but will even remove a glove to share it with the rest of the world. Much like a certain percentage of wildlife, I go into hibernation when the leaves start to fall. That’s why I’m enjoying a Quarter Pounder lunch right now in preparation.
When I think of my childhood, I mostly remember how I spent my days in the holler where I grew up. My neighbors consisted mostly of family members and during the summer, I was outside with the holler, creek, and mountains as my playground basically from about 6 in the morning to well after dark. We had a willow tree in our front yard so grand that the branches seemed to scrape the sky and cascade all the way down to my toes. My sister and cousin were only a month apart and older than me, so they tormented me relentlessly. I’d hide from them among those branches for hours on end playing with my Barbies and baby dolls, all the while hearing them looking for me and plotting what they’d do when they found me. I never knew at that time what it would mean to me as an adult to look back on that life God gave me up in a holler in WV. A couple decades later and I’m still taken by the beauty of it on a regular basis.
Dad and I have a date to get on his Polaris Ranger and go riding in one of the mountains around his house and take a stab at writing a tune and seeing what God’s creation will inspire in us - snacks, guitars, a notebook and pens, and a couple cameras in tow. There’s absolutely nothing else that will lure you into those parts, but Ron, I think you’d love some of the spots he and my mom have found while exploring the mountains. A lot of folks come to my home and can’t believe how rural it is. I say, “You ain’t seen nothin’, yet.”
Stacy
Ron,
Being immersed in a very suburban lifestyle has me longing for the type of experience you describe. It seems an almost necessary pathway to becoming human. With no real opportunity available to immerse myself in nature I am all the more thankful for what you have shared.
Oh, and I’m glad you didn’t leave all the technology behind, the pictures are beautiful.
In the words of Liz Lemon, “I want to go to there.”
Isn’t it ironic how we all get SO caught up and busy in this world that we can’t slow down enough to really experience and appreciate what you’ve hit on in this post?
We are in a race…a self created one..each day to accomplish X, Y and Z..and IF we don’t accomplish these things…then or tomorrows are even more busy and consumed.
We are driven by our own motives……and once we realize that WE really cannot accomplish much on our own ….we begin to see how HIS motives and agendas are more important than anything we ever thought was a priority.
I have prayed SO many times for an answer to a certain prayer..to only realize that MY agendas, and MY impatience was what was standing in the way of hearing HIS answer.
If we take time to experience this silence and peacefulness…we can hear what HE has to say, no interruptions, no excuses……..
Thanks for the reminder! I’m glad that you’ve reagained that lost portion of your youth….and got to experience it w/your son. What a blessing that is! Something that you will always remember!
thank you for sharing! so true…your finishing sentiments! i loved reading about the rugid beauty of that part this continent. thanks for sharing the pictures, too!
What Steve said. Achingly beautiful.
Yes.
Six miles from the middle of nowhere, in Manitoba. A sandy track up a ravine hillside under poplars and oak. And the wild things watching from the quiet places.
I hear you.
Your minus 40 panorama is tiny on this old screen, but still sent a shiver down my spine. I’ve been across Canada twice, but never made it up there. I think I should.
A wonderful post. Thank you Ron. I love the line “the silence is always there under the noise, patiently waiting”. I long for that quiet. Some of my favorite times with the Lord were absent any conversation. He sure does Love us.
By the way, what are “wild people”?
Joe,
I might have also said, “lawless, self-willed,” like some of the cowboys in the Clint Eastwood movies.
Good one, Ron.
I think there is a collective remembrance of Eden, if I can say that without being called a weirdo. We may not be aware of it, but it’s there, telling us that things are not as they should be, something has been altered, kinda like that cat thing in the Matrix. We feel it in the city because more of nature has been shifted. Asphalt, concrete, plastic, etc. has it’s own wonder, but it’s just not the same.
And when we find places like where you summered, there is a soul-soothing power in the untouched creation, kind of a “Yes, this is what should be” feeling. The world un-manned has a different beauty because it’s first art, truly original, truly creative. Someone with infinite power and infinite creativity thought this up and painted it. (And dare I say infinite sense of humor? ie: Possums, moose, platypus, lemurs…)
Quiet, rest, a pace-slowing are all draws to the Wild for us, but I think the chewy center of this hard candy is that we are forced, knowingly or not, to see God’s beauty, and that’s a void that wants a fillin’ in everyone’s life.
PS- what kind of critter was in that first picture?
Kevin,
It’s a wolf hide.
I think it is also the is-ness of the creation. Something immutable, going on and on whether or not we perceive it, always there, century in, century out. First art, yes. When I look out over Moonlight Canyon I think, “There’s no way this happened by chance; no way do I just happen to be a collection of proteins with a brain that is moved and inspired by a chance, meaningless arrangement of rocks, dirt, and trees in a universe devoid of meaning.” I don’t actually think that, but that’s the feeling I get. “God is real.”
The quiet is more than pace-slowing. It is recovery. We recover our real selves in places like that. All the frenetic windings of a great ball of string, winding round and round in our modern world, are unwound; we get back to the center. And for a believer, that center is Christ in me. By seeing the transcendent God through His art, we see the God who loves us, and who has chosen to be immanent, God with us - in us, in Christ.
And the best thing is, sitting there on the edge of Moonlight Canyon with my daughter, I don’t have to try to figure it all out. That feeling of peace, of real spiritual quiet, that feeling of awe is enough to bring me back to what is important. One real “wow!” is worth a thousand explanations.
[...] people whose abilities with prose are just… above average. Far above average in the case of this post over at the Rabbit Room by Ron Block. It is so still and serene there. God’s creation is; it’s [...]
Thanks for this.
Yessirree, Ron, I entirely agree with you. You writer types express yourselves so well. I was TRYING to say that the most basic way that we should think about it is the “isness”, the awe and the recovery is not from the creation itself. I think it’s innate, hardwired, whether a follower of Christ or not, whether we bend the knee or not, whether we know it or not, and that creation spackles a hole left by the fall, however temporary the fix might be.
There’s a spiritual aspect to it, methinks, and we certainly don’t have to figure it out, we can just enjoy it. I hope I didn’t muddy the waters any, it was a beautiful post, lovely pictures and well written. It just got me thinkin, that’s all.
PS- Here in New England we only have one kind of wolf (the two-legged ones), and they don’t let us shoot ‘em, if you know what I mean. That’s some beautiful fur right there.
Kevin,
Definitely - at the back of creation is Creator. God loves symbols, and I think of creation as a symbol or picture of various aspects of who God is. The workings of a beehive show God’s energy; a seed shows life coming out of breaking and death. The big view and the quiet and solitude of the ranch show God’s calm and peace within His activity, His be-ing and resting while doing.
Creation, of course, is amazing in and of itself, and people are fed on it without knowing God at all. But they’re also fed by eating an apple, even if they don’t know God. God made something that works on principles regardless if anyone knows how it is working (and none of us really do, I suppose, as much as I like to try to explain things…).
What a stirring post.
It was good to taste that bit of nature even through your description. I spent several of my most formative years on my grandmother’s ranch in TX (heat and bugs are not my favorite part of creation, but hey, at least I got to be outside all the time!) and I think the chance to roam wild all day, catch bugs and butterflies, watch storms, shaped an immense part of my soul. It’s far too easy, living more of a city life now, to forget the awe that came to me so often in those outdoor days. Thanks for inspiring it all again.
Kevin, I really like this idea of a “collective remembrance of Eden”. That we all have a subconcious longing for the intimacy with God that was lost at the fall. And that the peculiar spiritual quiet, and deep emotions that we experience in nature, are a little taste of what was, and what will one day be again.
My favorite quote about this is from Madeleine L’Engle:
“When I look at the galaxies on a clear night–when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then instead of feeling intimidated and diminished by it, I am enlarged–I rejoice that I am part of it.”
Wonderful, wonderful, Ron. Your written picture brings to mind one of the many observations written by one of my favorite writers, W. Phillip Keller about beloved creation: “The great cycle of the seasons goes on year upon year, enacted against the giant backdrop of the sky edge. We watch in humble awe and spellbound wonder as moon after moon the pagentry of the planet is played out upon the earth. The sublimely orchestrated script of the
Divine Director is acted out in incredible detail by ten thousand participants. Each is directed by His will, guided by His genesis, moved by His inspiration.”
from : Skye Edge
I met a man on the Chattooga River in Ga who told me the River was his church. I balked but wondered why it could be so. Where else would God be but in His Creation? This is beautiful Ron.
that sounds like a beautiful place to see.reminds me when i was in the mountains in west virginia when we were visiting.it was so beautiful when the sun was setting.a beautiful sunset.and so peacefull.that was a nice story thanks for sharing it with all of us.god bless you and your family.
Ron,
What is so wonderful about what you wrote is that it speaks to anyone and everyone regardless of what label they might have. Real truth is universal in scope, and that is why nature is such a good tool to use in relating spiritual truths. The same goes with the “ISNESS” of God. It is there within us and without us at all times regardless of whether we are aware of it or not. This post is a beautiful example of Eden. Adam walked with God in the cool(spirit) of the day before he fell asleep. It never does say that God awakened him. Could this be because we all “awaken” individually in our own order and time? Metaphorically interpreted we can relate the garden story to what happens to each and every one of us. The spirit part of us “dies” in a sense the longer we are here in this world…and it takes the Spirit of God brooding over us to bring us back to that place of stillness and ISness where we once again…walk in the garden with God. Remember the song…I come to the garden alone…while the dew is still on the roses, etc. And He walks with me and He talks with me. Your post is a beautiful example of death, burial, and resurrection.
[...] Enjoy Jump to Comments I found this lovely blog post over at The Rabbit Room. Contemplative, convicting, comforting. Read it here: Old Roads: Alberta Homestead [...]
Thanks, Ron.
Though my family and I don’t live *that* far out, we’ve recovered a small bit of that unwound-edness out in the country and away from the suburbs.
Development will catch up with us eventually, but for now the peace, the quiet does restore something to the soul that is hard to explain.
“On the ranch there is no noise.” Love that line. I had the same experience in East Texas standing on my grandparents land when we went out to their homestead after my grandmother’s funeral. It was a “sound” and experience I’ll never forget. That place was my “Huck Finn” territory as a young lad.
Thanks for sharing and giving me pause to remember.
Thanks Ron,, what a great piece of writing. Really makes you stop and think. Reminds me of the summers I spent on my grandparents farm in Dyer Tn..
Beautiful! Thank you so much for sharing this.
What a beautiful thing to see and read on this Lord’s day. Thank you so much for blessing me with the gifts of your words and pictures.