Most of my adolescence was spent on long
excursions across the western Canadian north,
accompanied first by parents (in my salad days)
and later by friends, and finally by myself but
for voices on radio broadcasts that would fade
out of range fifty kilometres north of High Prairie.

I don't live there anymore—on the prairies,
I mean—and I haven't for a very long
time. But my memories of it haven't faded
in the least despite years of absence: the north
is just within arms' reach of my hometown, but
though I only ever spent four or five days

at a time there I haven't forgotten a moment. (The day
that I do is the day that I go back to the prairies
and stay there until I remember again.) But
all the same it feels as though it has been too long
since the last time I ventured into the north,
with a backpack full of woollen sweaters and faded

jeans in the middle of last August, as summer was fading
into autumn, the nights getting longer and the days
shorter and colder, unsummerlike: a brief northern
sojourn away from the scorching heat of the prairies.
The bus ride to get there, armed with books and a friend, was long
and almost too exhausting to be worth it, but

upon arriving in La Ronge late at night (with no lights but
for the moon and stars and tail-lights on grid roads) my tiredness faded
and was replaced with something approaching serenity, and I longed
to be able to stay there forever. The town and the area by day-
light were no less astonishing in their peacefulness; the prairies
I grew up on (so close, only six hours south) pale in comparison to the north.

God was in the west too, at one time, but He packed up and moved north—
you can tell by the way the sun sets each night in every colour but
the dull greenish taupe that hangs over cities in the prairies
at dusk as one calendar day turns into the next and never quite fades
into black. In the north I looked forward to the end of each day.
Before I saw them for myself, I didn't believe in sunsets that lasted this long.

Now there is nothing left of the me that was then but
for a handful of still-vivid dreams about the prairies
and of how the days took long hours to fade into nights in the north.