Walk to Pense

Yesterday’s walk–the last “training” walk before we leave for the UK and the Cotswold Way today–was a 30-kilometre hike to Pense, a village west of the city. I’d heard that there was an operating bar there and I thought I could have a beer while I waited for Christine to pick me up. Besides, I’m still thinking about Trevor Herriot and the idea of making this landscape walkable, as it once was, so rather than walk inside the city limits I thought I’d strike out for somewhere I’d never been before.

The first leg of my journey was along the creek side path I’ve walked along so many times before. I thought about the post here where I complained about boredom and looked for differences or changes on the path. One was this little fellow, a fledgling barn swallow who was sitting on a railing. I hope he doesn’t fall off into the creek.

Soon I was walking down a grid road heading out of the city. I walked past baseball diamonds where teams were getting ready to play in the North American Indigenous Games, past the northern end of the airport and a factory that makes farm equipment. Then I turned south and walked along a road used by truckers to get to the new Global Transportation Hub. What a name–both hyperbolic and banal. These days, what transportation hub isn’t global? When I turned west again, I discovered that a four-lane highway is being built across the fields to provide access to the GTH.

What that will mean for the grid roads it crosses–roads that are essential to local farmers–is unclear.

From here, the road headed west, a straight line across the landscape, bisecting fields of wheat and canola that stretched to the horizon.

The road deviated from its path only once, when it intersected with another straight line, the main CPR tracks. I passed a village-turned-suburb (no store, nothing to attract a passing traveller) and decided that, since I was at the halfway point, I could rest for a while and have a snack.I stopped again an hour later and sat on a bridge to eat lunch. Otherwise it was six hours of steady walking. There were lots of ducks and coots in the sloughs, but aside from the birds and dragonflies the only other wild creature I saw was a muskrat in the creek while I was eating.

No angry dogs this time, just an old yellow lab that came up behind me to see what I was up to. He was friendly, though. I was so surprised by him that I forgot to take his picture.

I could see Pense on the horizon–its grain elevator, anyway, which for some reason escaped the orgy of demolitions of smaller, local elevators 10 years ago when the grain companies built a handful of concrete inland terminals to replace them–for a long time. When I finally got there,I discovered that the bar/coffee shop/motel is closed, presumably forever. So I bought a Coke at the gas station and waited in a park beside the railway tracks for Christine.

Would I walk this way again? I’m not sure. I loved the wind and the trance-like state I was in after five hours of walking, and walking around here always reminds me of walking the meseta in Spain. Pense, though, turned out to be just a spot on the map within a day’s walk. There’s no reason to go there, unless you live there. Is that necessarily a problem? Maybe not. Maybe I need to focus less on the destination and more on the journey. Or maybe there’s some other place within 30 or so kilometres of my front door that will prove to be more worthy of the journey. I don’t know.

And that was the last training walk. We fly to Heathrow this afternoon, and then next weekend we begin our Cotswolds sojourn. WiFi willing, my next blog post will be made from there.