“ ‘Three days and nights of dry suffocation; gasping for breath in the stinging, scorching, withering, enervating heat; days of shrill, shrieking, moaning wind that smites you hip and thigh; of excruciating and shriveling blasts from the blistering pit of that vast shameless inferno, the deadly desert, where dead things lie and bleach, and poisonous reptiles bask on the sun-baked rocks; days when your skin is pelted and prickled with invisible bullets of alkaline dust; when depression reigns, vitality ebbs, and nerves are set on edge.’
“Every climate may have a fit of sulks or temper now and then; but ours at its worst never inflicts anything like that. It may put an extra edge on our appetite, but not on our nerves. It is a magnificent nurse of hardy, healthy men and women.
“We can always find plenty to grumble at, if we [a]“Get out of the Rut”] think grumbling will improve our digestions, wherever we go. You remember the sporting offer that the Premier of this Province made to one of his people who said he was ‘fed up and wanted to quit’—‘Tell me when you’ve found a better place and I’ll lend you the fare.’ When the man had studied up conditions in every country in the geography, and taken a glance at Mars, he turned back quite cheerfully to his own Western farm and hitched up his team for the fall plowing.”
“Yes,” says our friend, “the man who stayed, or came back as I did, and took pains to learn what the earth really wanted, is the happiest man to-day.
“We learned to select and test our seed grain, and that accounts for the high proportion of number one wheat that makes the Canadian West famous now. We learned to summer-fallow a third or a half of our land every year, to preserve moisture for next year’s crop. But that’s a terribly wasteful plan, besides turning the fibry soil into dust that blows off and takes the young crop with it. We’ve got to go on learning, that’s all, and get out of the old rut, and go in for regular rotation of crops, or at least lay down the fields in pasture, turn and turn about, to give the land a chance to recover. That means more livestock, and some of us won’t take the trouble. But it has to be done, for the sake of those who come after us. The country won’t die when we do.”
“True for you! Fortunately we are getting ashamed of the old false idea that when a man has bought a piece [a]Automobiles and Extravagance] of land, or got it as a homestead, he has a right to do as he likes with it. That land is a piece of Canada. The land of Canada is all that the people of Canada will have to live on, to the end of the world. Who are we, that we should dare to spoil it for all who come after us, taking out of it in thirty or forty voracious crops of grain the plant food which nature has taken thousands of years to accumulate?”
From the Russian Oven
At the Spinning Wheel