Week one

PLACE.

Some of us get a chill when we hear this word, during my last semester of classes I did as well. However my opinion changed as I felt a real chill, sitting out on the ice, during a cold winter day in central Saskatchewan. As the wind howled out side my shack I sat in silence, dancing my jig and minnow in attempted to attract a walleye and coax him to take my lure.

It was here when I started to think and reflect. Place. Many lectures, speakers, friends and books that I had been exposed to through the last four months of my life, as a student enrolled in an Environmental Science program, touched on this topic. A speaker from the Arctic, Shiela Watt-Cloutier talked about it. How a loss of connection with place, the land, the animals and the tradition, was effecting society today. Suicide rates have risen and it seems individual happiness has fallen as tradition fades.

I will skip over some of the other examples to a recent experience that triggered me to revisit the concept of place. I had a deep conversation with my Grandma, now 87, about the past depression. Times were tough, life consisting of long, hard, physical days and wages of $5 a month in the early 40's. It was mind blowing to think of how little they lived off that back then, before I enrolled in school I was making $30/hr, which seemed hardly enough. The following day she made a statement, "people have too much money these days. A few decades ago they were much poorer, however happier."

This lead me to think of when I lived in Alberta, I worked the patch as did many of my friends. Everyone was making good money, 80 to 100g/year, although I saw it multiple times. People were unhappy and many turned to alcohol and drug in pursuit of happiness. Everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere, to make more money, to spend more money. The streets of Lloydminster, a booming oil town, were full of big trucks, with lifts and rims, all driving fast. If anyone slowed down a minute to look around, to think for a minute, they were bound to be honked at and flipped off.

I wonder, when was the last time people went ice fishing? Sat down and thought of place? When did they last hear the wind howl, when did they last sit and watch the birds, when were they last in touch with the mother of our earth?