Over the weekend, I realized that I finished Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature a month ago but didn’t post about it here. This short post is intended to address that oversight.
In 1976, Sharon Butala married Peter Butala, a rancher in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan, and left Saskatoon to join him there. She knew little about farming and nothing about the work of running a cattle ranch. The Perfection of the Morning is the story of how she came to love the rolling, treeless grassland at Old Man On His Back in the southern end of the Cypress Hills. When it was published in 1993, Butala was already an established novelist, and this memoir gained a wide audience. It’s a paean to nature, or to an ecosystem many people overlook or disregard, and to a way of living. It’s also a fish-out-of-water story, a true-to-life Künstlerroman, and a depiction of what amounts to a self-psychoanalysis, including dreams and visions. That combination gives The Perfection of the Morning its richness.
The writing, especially the descriptions of the land and of ranching, is beautiful. I open the book more or less at random, for instance, and find this:
On that day, on the far side of the hill in that slough-bottom, twenty or so cows stood grazing or lay with their calves beside them peacefully chewing their cuds. In their midst Peter’s saddle horse, reins dragging, browsed lazily too. And far off at the edge of the cluster of cattle, a couple of antelope stood, noses down in the grass. All of them were oblivious to my presence and paying no attention to each other, as if they were all members of the same contented tribe on that still, hot afternoon, under that magnificent dome of sky, in the midst of those thousands of acres of short, pale grass. About a hundred feet out from the foot of the hill, in the midst of his animals, head on one bent arm, hat shielding his eyes, Peter lay sound asleep.
Okay, I didn’t choose that passage completely at random; I stumbled across a later discussion of that moment and flipped backwards through the book to find this incident. Still, I love this paragraph: the patterns of sound, the evocation of place, the odd interspecies community of people, cattle and horses, and antelope. In 1996, the Butalas donated most of their ranch to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and if you go to Old Man On His Back, about an hour’s drive west of Shaunavon, you’ll find a stone in a pasture, close to the road, marking the space where Peter took that nap. Watch for the bison, which now share the land with the antelope and cattle.
I first read The Perfection of the Morning in the 1990s, not long after it came out, as part of a comprehensive examination in Canadian literature. I loved it then, and now, after rereading it 30 years later, I feel much the same way. I’m looking forward to reading Butala’s subsequent volumes of memoir as well as her fiction. She’s in her 80s now, living in Saskatoon again, and still writing. In a quarter century, if I make it to her age, I hope I’ll still be writing, too.