A month ago, I began a project that has been suggested by a few people in my life. “You should write a coffee table-type book. Share your stories and photos of those biking trips”
I have spent a lifetime of coming up with cool things to do that net little to no money. Authoring a book fits the bill. I’m in.
I love photography. And I enjoy writing to a degree. But I have no professional experience in either. And I have zero experience dealing with book publishing, be it a real publisher (much preferred) or self (dear god, please no).
So for the foreseeable future, I may pick at this project until it seems complete. Then I’ll cross that publishing bridge when I get there. In the meantime, this Substack account with its 15-20 readers would make a decent sounding board. As I share chapters and/or minor pieces, please give your advice on the writings, process, or anything. I would greatly accept it.
For now, the purpose of this book:
Encouraging others to find the hidden gems in your back yard?
KNOW - Knowing your surroundings beyond yourself?
SLOW - Taking life a little slower to look around and absorb?
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Preface:
It’s funny. When you live in a small community like Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, and you are seen doing a specific outdoor activity like biking, the locals assume that you are an expert in that field.
Which is flattering. Me, a biking expert? Ha. I don’t feel like an expert. I used to bike around on a 12-speed throughout the network of Northwest Houston, Texas suburbs where I grew up. But that was almost 40 years ago. Now, I’m just a regular 50-something year old guy who started riding bike again on a fluke. Over a decade ago, I found a ghetto bike abandoned in a snow bank. I used it during the summers to run small local errands.
One time my snow bank bike had a busted brake cable. So I borrowed my son’s new fancy mountain bike with front shocks and 29 inch wheels. “Holy moly”, I thought. I can’t live without this. My son’s bike made riding feel effortless. I was tempted to try it out in the less hospitable places, such as the local marshes, going up any hill from the Valley, or across rocky gravel on Saskatchewan’s grid roads.
So I bought a bike just like the one my son has: a Trek Marlon 5. Or as I call “The entry level to the serious bikes”. AKA “the gateway drug” bike. I scoped out the bike I wanted at a Regina bike store in February 2020 with plans to come back and purchase it in March. That of course didn’t happen. The pandemic changed everyone’s bike-purchasing plans for that month.
After two months of being closed due to lockdowns, the bike store reopened in May with limited customer access. I called to see if they had the size and color I wanted. “Yes. One left”. I’ll take it! I had to pay for it in the parking lot, as customers still weren’t allowed inside the store.
I soon learned that my local friend Paul also biked, a fact I somehow never knew about previously. “Let me show you a few places”, he said, taking me uphill above the southern banks of Mission Lake to a former government-run Shelter Belt experiment site. By the end of that summer, we had biked most every place that could be reached starting from town, with plans for future travel destinations to nearby areas that had rumours of interesting sites.
I work in a shop on my property. And several years earlier I had ordered online some large topographic maps to hang on my shop wall and keep track of where I had kayaked along the Qu’Appelle River. Now taking up the valuable real estate of half a shop wall, these maps have become planning strategies and highlighted documents of our biking trips, complete with color-coded map pin legends marking some interesting things we’ve found: abandoned farm houses, empty churches, dilapidated one-room school buildings and former school sites, various fieldstone ruins, and even a fake house used as a movie prop.
These biking adventures fuelled my true interest: history. I was never a history academic or even a mediocre history student. History books can sometimes be interesting to me. But I’m really excited when I SEE history right in front of my face, with little explanation. Like the remains of the numerous former communities Paul and I have biked through. It becomes an investigative puzzle to me. People used to LIVE in what seems to be the middle of nowhere. People were educated in these places. Worked, attended church, and buried in these places. I’m willing to pedal a 38 kilometre round trip just to see that.
Camaraderie with my friend Paul was also an important factor in our biking excursions. Often, our weekend biking are the only times we get to see each other. Another important aspect in our biking trips was simply being outdoors and enjoying the few warm months a year of Saskatchewan’s climate and our Province’s amazing wide open scenery.
But physical fitness and exercise? Those were merely byproducts of the historical destination fascination, friendship, and fresh air. Honest.
So, what started with a ghetto bike from a snow bank and pedalling to the post office evolved into an exploration of the seldom seen corners within the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan and beyond.
Part of the enjoyment of these trips was my sharing photographs with friends on social media. Many friends would stop me on the street and ask, “Hey, where was that one place you recently posted?”. Most of these questions were coming from lifelong locals. That was surprising to me. I mean, these people have lived here in Fort Qu’Appelle they’re entire lives. I only immigrated from my home state of Texas about a decade ago. I had assumed they would have known more about these places than me.
But maybe biking and/or history isn’t everyone’s thing. My view is: living in the Qu’Appelle Valley is a mountain biker’s paradise and a history student’s dream rolled into one. Complete with ready-made trails and human presence dating back some 12,000 to 15,000 years from indigenous ancestry. And no trail grooming or maintenance is necessary. It’s all ready to go every Spring.
So I’m not an expert on biking. Maybe I just have a knack for finding weird things: a grand fieldstone house that looks like a small castle, crumbing apart in the middle of a field. Or a one-room schoolhouse hidden in a thick unruly patch of Caragana trees. Or an unkept cemetery plot with ties to a local Native Reserve that wasn’t marked on any of the maps (unlike all of the other well-documented cemeteries).
There’s something about biking that that helps you see the things you miss from a car window. Possibly it’s the docile speed? The outdoor smells and sounds? The subtle gritty feel of the environment?
After biking with Paul for four summers and perfecting our trips with 50% preparation and 50% improvisation, I realized something: I had started doing this as a kid in Houston back in the 1980s.
My neighborhood friend David and I once left the predictable confines of our subdivision and went wandering through a patch of trees beyond the boundary fence line. We stumbled upon the remains of the original farmhouse of that area, before portions of the acreage were sold to developers for subdividing into the neighborhood we were growing up in. We were kids, and it was the era of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Seeing adventure on the big screen never really panned out into the my reality of the cookie-cuttered, sidewalked residence I dwelled within.
But when David and I found trees growing through what used to be a living room floor, something sparked. Whoa. There used to be something else here.
For now, as long as the weather is manageable, our physical health is still up, and our bikes work properly, Paul and I will continue to look for the “something else”’s out there in our Valley region. And I will continue to dismiss any expert titles.
I like this post...I think the personal approach that you have taken in this post would be great for a book. I like how it connects with your youth. Cool idea!
The Accidental Bicycling Historian?
Good on you for leaning into the writing. A blog is a great place to try things out.