Canola Time

The heat around me was jungle-damp and the mosquitos were vicious.

They were buzzing in my eyes and ears, probing their way through my shirt to get at my high-cholesterol blood. Sweat trickled down my back and dripped from my eyebrows onto the back of my camera. The air around me felt thick with moisture and it carried a heavy, sulfury smell.

But then, canola fields are always like that in the middle of July.

I was east of Trochu, somewhere between the town and the canyon of the Red Deer River and I was surrounded by yellow blossoms. From my vantage point the bright yellow flowers stretched off to every horizon. With the cloudy evening sky overhead turning a slate grey, the glow of the canola flowers inverted the usual order of brightness making the ground seem lighter than the sky.

The day itself hadn’t been all that hot - around 27C - but the humidity coming off the chest-high plants that surrounded me seemed to magnify the temperature to tropical proportions. It was a bit hard to breath as I shot my pictures and every swipe of my hand across my face or arms left streaks of blood squashed from the horde or mosquitos around me.

But it was fascinating to be here anyway.

Canola is a more or less Canadian invention. It’s a variation on ancient varieties of rapeseed - the name comes from the Latin word rapum, a turnip - that was developed specifically for its oil production and designed to be grown in the Canadian west. 

Canola - like wheat, barley and other crops - grows in a monoculture environment. That means that ideally, there will be no other plants growing in the fields with them, no potential loss of yield from competition for nutrients by other species. Great for profits, not so great for other living things.

Certain genetically-modified versions are resistant to herbicides that kill other plants but even if there were so-called weeds growing among those millions of bright blossoms, you’d likely never be able to see them. Picking out a loose canola plant growing in a wheat field is easy. Finding a stalk of wheat in a canola field is impossible.

Standing there sweating and swatting, I looked at the plants around me. The tallest flower stalks came up to my chest level At my height of 6’1” that would make them a bit over five feet tall. But the height of the plants was less impressive than their sheer numbers. They were so thickly packed together along the edge of the field that very little light penetrated to the ground below. The dirt among the stalks was barren, not another bit of green visible. 

Getting down on my knees to poke around, I moved a few of the stalks aside to see how far I could look along the ground and as they brushed together they squeaked like balloons or chunks of styrofoam. And they smelled.

The flowers themselves actually smell kind of pleasant, a bit like alfalfa, but the green stems, leaves and seed pods give off a heavy sulfur smell. Up close, it’s powerful. The scent comes from the chemicals in the body of the plant so when I did a search to try to find out where the smell comes from, I discovered - courtesy of Wikipedia which is never wrong - that canola and its rapeseed cousins are members of the same family as mustard and cabbage as well as turnips. 

All of which are known for their sulfury smell. Especially cabbage. Yummy, yummy cabbage.

I could stand the heat and humidity at the edge of the field but those skeeters were really starting to annoy me so I packed up and moved on.

The rolling hills and valleys out here around Three Hills, Trochu, Huxley, Elnora, Torrington and other towns are lovely any time of year and I come out this way often. But I don’t think they ever look better than when they are covered with canola blossoms. I found a red granary to put in the background for a few pictures and lined up a horse and a sparrow with an all-yellow background. There was a pair of fields south of Elnora that contrasted yellow and green with canola on one side and field peas on the other.

West of there where the world heads off to the mountains on the far horizon I found wind generators cranking out electricity above the yellow fields and I used my flash to make the flowers stand out against an oncoming thunderstorm. 

As the sun dropped behind the last bank of clouds on the western horizon I came across a field with a mirror-like slough in it. A bit of rain had fallen a little while before and now in the cooling evening there was a bit of mist coming off the field. The blue light of dusk made the yellow of the canola look even more intense.

I watched a couple of willets probing in the mud along the slough’s shore for bugs and snails as the evening darkened. A motorcycle passed as I sat there and I could hear it rumbling far down the road, the sound carrying on the still air.

The scent of sulfur rolled in from the field, the buzz of mosquitos finally drowned out the sound of the bike. And the glow of canola lit up the blue of the darkening day.

Monocultures are not nature’s way. But if we’ve got to have them, they don’t get much more beautiful than this.

Dusk

There's that few minutes just after sunset where the blue light of dusk mixes with the man-made light of the city. This is a little bit of what it looks like.

Millarville Market

I'm posting this more as a test but I shot this last year at Millarville Market out southwest of Calgary and I kinda like it.  

Stampede Hipstamatic

Had some fun at the Stampede with my iPhone 5 and the Hipstamatic app. 

A Prairie Morning In June

As rattlesnakes go, it was pretty tiny.

Maybe as long as my shoe, it was just a little bitty rattler with only one button on its tail and a head the size of my finger tip.

But it was unmistakably a rattlesnake.

I was out east of Jenner heading toward the Saskatchewan border, thoroughly enjoying a day that had begun for me just a bit past 4 a.m. The light was luscious, the day warm enough to justify leaving the jacket off, the air humid and soft.

And smelling delicious with the perfume of wolf willow flavoring every inhalation. 

I’d come east along the big highway as far as Bassano and then followed the gravel through Duchess and on past Millicent. Clouds on the eastern horizon prevented the sunrise from picking up much color but as the sun rose higher in the sky it sent streamers of shadow stretching out below the clouds and patches of sunlight set the green grass aglow.

There weren’t many people up at this time of day but the birds and animals were all active. I watched a pair of bulls kicking dirt onto their backs - protection against mosquitoes, maybe? - and every bird was singing its little lungs out. Crickets were chirping. The only thing missing was frog song. Guess they’re done with mating season.

Everything is green out there. Trees are nearly fluorescent with new leaves, pastures calf-high in bright grass. I came across a horse grazing near a twisted willow tree with light streaming between cracks in the clouds. So gorgeous.

And it was just as lovely beyond the irrigation zone. I love that abrupt transition from the treed areas around the irrigation canals to the sagebrush and cactus past where the canals end. Suddenly the sky gets bigger, the horizons recede farther into the distance. 

I pushed on past Patricia and turned down the Iddlesleigh road before stopping for fuel at Jenner and then crossing the wide, runoff-brown Red Deer River. There were mule deer on both side of the bridge and a trio of whitetails bounced across the road in front of me. I saw the first antelope of the day far off on the prairie, a tawny dot on a sea of green.

But there was a surprise at the top of the river valley.

A bull elk was grazing right beside the road. A century or more ago they would have been a common sight out this way and great herds of them roamed with the buffalo that used to graze these plains. Now, though, we think of them more as mountain animals.

But for the last several years I’ve been spotting them with more and more frequency out on the prairie. I’ve seen them from the Milk River valley to the eastern slopes of the Hand Hills. I couldn’t be happier to find them back on their ancestral lands.

I cut east along the north side of the Red Deer River valley through cactus-studded pastures and stopped to photograph a pair of horses on a hill above my favorite gate posts, the entrance to a ranch that’s studded with old skulls. Gross to some, maybe, but I really like it.

As the day warmed a bit of breeze began to pick up and the wolf willow perfume really started to fill the air. Behind it was the scent of sage and damp earth. Redtail and ferruginous hawks soared along the ridge lines. I saw a golden eagle flying along high up, the morning sun sending flashes of bronze from its feathers as it banked in the wind.

I crossed the river again at Buffalo and came across the little rattler before turning again at Bindloss to recross the Red Deer. I’d yet to see another vehicle, even on the highway, and I was able to lay on the pavement photographing the little one-button for more than ten minutes. The only sound was the wind and the mosquitos. No man-made sound reached my ears.

I walked back to the truck and drove on, passing a second, much bigger rattler just down the road and spooking some whitetails on the other side of the river. Near Empress I watched horses grazing on grass in a flooded slough while a blue heron hunted near by. A coyote watched me sleepily from a ditch.

I kept going south to take pictures of the South Saskatchewan River valley before heading back west again. I saw more antelope far off - never did find any close enough for a picture - and a bunch more mule deer. Two more rattlesnakes as well, one of them as long as my leg and fat as my wrist. Such elegant animals.

I stopped for a nap in the river valley by Buffalo. I’d been on the road for eight hours now and I fell asleep to the sounds of catbirds, wrens and mourning doves mixing with the watery sound of cottonwood leaves rattling in a warm breeze. And the scent of wolf willow.

I woke up an hour later and headed home, leaving the prairie behind. But not that far behind. We are so lucky to live where we do.

I hope I see that little rattler again. What a great place it is to live.