Regina to Banff

July 12, 1983

After all that prairie, rolling, stretched, the sudden mountains are a change of mind. How many stolid, bovine faces, chewing, I had seen, blocky behind those fences one chance hoof would easily remove, grazing and resigned to their flat square of all that vibrant space. Here spruce ranks climb the rocks, stand high astride the saddles bright with snow, deep green vigor, unimpressed by cold attempting soon to colonize the sky, like some thinkers I have met, unfenced, inclined to raise considerations where newly focused cloud forms flow, where new ideas change their shapes, gather implications, ride gently off, define the continent traversing wind.