journal features

to the Great Sand Hills

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Leader, Saskatchewan, 2002.05.04

Today Charlie and I rented a car and headed to rural Saskatchewan to see the Great Sand Hills. I'd tried to book something AWD in advance as far back as Tuesday, but the people at Hertz couldn't do it. They told me the best they could do was something like a Mazda 626 or a Toyota Camry. When we got there, they only had one car, A Ford Focus (that's pronounced Faeces).

What a hunk of junk. It's about the loudest vehicle I've ever been in on the highway, and the brakes had a scary inconsistency. On the way back it developed a worrying vibration and a thrumming sound.

But the Sand Hills were pretty cool. Despite record cold temperatures and howling winds out of the east, we managed to spend an hour and a half wandering around admiring the sand forms. Very interesting! We spent the evening in a small bar drinking and watching the prolonged Ottawa/Toronto game.

Pronghorn sheep near Leader, Sask.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)