Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [33]
The Canadian government waxed so proud over this accomplishment, the Treasury engraved a figure of the whitetail across a thick commemorative silver dollar. So now the biggest buck from Bigger resides on Canada’s biggest buck. And what is the town of Bigger like? Rather small, actually.
(This anecdote has nothing to do with the rest of the chapter. I just relished the way all those killer B’s tripped off my tongue while telling it to my collaborator and we could not find anyplace else in the book to fit it.)
We reached Lumsden on a Friday. One look around the place told me why many consider it to be the most beautiful spot in the entire region. The surrounding countryside resembled a Shangri-la, with the Qu’Appelle River coursing through, a weaving cocoa-colored serpent. Along its banks, a visitor could get drunk off the fragrance of fresh silt and wild roses. The wheat fields gleamed golden even under a moonless night sky, and the air smelled so clean, every breath bathed your lungs pink. And you will not find a more level landscape anywhere on this planet.
How flat was Lumsden?
This flat. A local told me he had once stood on a chair at the edge of town and watched his dog run in a straight line for five days. He did not lose sight of the pet until it dropped into the Grand Canyon. I myself strolled through one field that looked like God’s bowling alley; any ball rolling down it would not strike a bump until it reached the Rockies just outside of Calgary. On the Lumsden plains, we did not see a tree, boulder, or any other protuberance large enough to obstruct the wind. Which is why a town ordinance prohibited the people who live there from growing taller than six feet. Anything beyond that, the first stiff breeze could blow them clear to Manitoba.
If you are a Lumsdenian, you will be pleased to learn that those are all the flatland jokes I know.
The commercial heart of Lumsden stretches for only a few blocks with a general store, a feed lot, a real estate company, and a few small businesses. In the street, I saw a lot of pickup trucks, their chassis pitted by all the gravel spinning up from the roads. Men in plaid shirts and overalls walked with that determined step you see in people who know they have a hard day’s labor awaiting them and welcome it. Most of the women in town wore jeans and boots or gingham dresses for a chic cowgirl look. Everybody I met acted friendly, not just courteous but genuinely warm. You stopped feeling like an outsider the moment one of them smiled.
We could not find any high-rises in this town. The tallest building of any kind sat near the railroad tracks, a grain elevator with LUMSDEN painted across the top of it in letters so large you could read them through a haze from half a mile away. In a field near the ballpark someone had whittled a wide dirt track about a quarter mile long with two sharp curves. When I asked a customer in the general store what the town used it for, she replied, “Why, for the chuck wagon races, whaddaya think?”
“My god, who uses chuck wagons anymore?”
“Nobody,” she answered. “That’s why we have so many of them to race.”
Well, of course.
That was one of the things I most loved about the Lumsden people—their surprising taste for the absurd. Like the farmer who constructed his own unique take on the traditional scare-crow. Instead of a rag-bag figure hoisted on a pole, he dressed a mannequin in denims, a thermal undershirt, heavy work shoes, and the pointed wool cap northern Canadians call a tocque. The famer stuck a can of beer in the dummy’s hand and placed him on a worn vinyl couch in front of a TV set in the middle of his wheat field.
This bizarre figure did not frighten many birds. But the ones that lighted on the farmer’s property never even peeked at his wheat. They just sat next to the mannequin on the couch and stared at the television while waiting for the Heckle and Jeckle cartoons to start.
As I walked through town a dry, blustery wind chapped my face. A woman in the motel coffee shop mentioned that nearly two months had passed since