A few years ago it so happened that my work--teaching school--kept me
during the week in a small country town in the centre of one of the
prairie provinces while my family--wife and little daughter--lived in
the southern fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very far
from the western shore of a great lake. My wife--like the plucky little
woman she is--in order to round off my far-from-imperial income had made
up her mind to look after a rural school that boasted of something like
a residence. I procured a buggy and horse and went “home” on Fridays,
after school was over, to return to my town on Sunday evening--covering
thus, while the season was clement and allowed straight cross-country
driving, coming and going, a distance of sixty-eight miles. Beginning
with the second week of January this distance was raised to ninety miles
because, as my more patient readers will see, the straight cross-country
roads became impassable through snow.
These drives, the fastest of which was made in somewhat over four
hours and the longest of which took me nearly eleven--the rest of them
averaging pretty well up between the two extremes--soon became what made
my life worth living. I am naturally an outdoor creature--I have lived
for several years “on the tramp”--I love Nature more than Man--I take to
horses--horses take to me--so how could it have been otherwise? Add
to this that for various reasons my work just then was not of the most
pleasant kind--I disliked the town, the town disliked me, the school
board was sluggish and unprogressive, there was friction in the
staff--and who can wonder that on Fridays, at four o’clock, a real
holiday started for me: two days ahead with wife and child, and going
and coming--the drive.
I made thirty-six of these trips: seventy-two drives in all. I think
I could still rehearse every smallest incident of every single one
of them. With all their weirdness, with all their sometimes dangerous
adventure--most of them were made at night, and with hardly ever any
regard being paid to the weather or to the state of the roads--they
stand out in the vast array of memorable trifles that constitute the
story of my life as among the most memorable ones. Seven drives seem,
as it were, lifted above the mass of others as worthy to be described
in some detail--as not too trivial to detain for an hour or so a patient
reader’s kind attention. Not that the others lack in interest for
myself; but there is little in them of that mildly dramatic, stirring
quality which might perhaps make their recital deserving of being heard
beyond my own frugal fireside. Strange to say, only one of the seven
is a return trip. I am afraid that the prospect of going back to rather
uncongenial work must have dulled my senses. Or maybe, since I was
returning over the same road after an interval of only two days, I had
exhausted on the way north whatever there was of noticeable impressions
to be garnered. Or again, since I was coming from “home,” from the
company of those for whom I lived and breathed, it might just be that
all my thoughts flew back with such an intensity that there was no
vitality left for the perception of the things immediately around me.