BLOGG # 82 "THERE ARE NO MEADOWLARKS THERE"

"There are no meadowlarks there"
-I borrowed this phrase -a version of the famous quote of Gertrude Stein's "There is no there there" to express my deep disappointment at not hearing one note of my favourite bird during the entire trip to Alberta and Saskatchewan.
There is no doubt ,my faithful readers , that you will have to often read  my indulgent reminiscing of my nostalgic trip to the Prairies and I beg your patience as I  rhapsodize now  about  one of my  favourite prairie sounds- the warbling of the meadowlark.
As soon as we decided on this anticipated prairie trip,my thoughts flew to the precious memory of the yellow and black meadowlark and his glorious song. My traveling companion went on  the internet and found several recordings of this elusive bird. There were examples of the warbling of the Eastern meadowlark and the western and also the mid western one. We voted on the mid western one as the most similar to the meadowlark sounds we remembered from childhood.
The minute we drove into the prairies we started looking for the distinctive markings of the meadowlark and strained our ears to hear it's song. I also looked for the fence post or low bush where it usually perched-there were no fence posts-and few bushes.
We weren't discouraged and expected to hear it while we rambled through our childhood places. We did not hear it at my isolated schoolhouse, nor around the abandoned house where I grew up,and surprisingly, not down in the coulee by the creek that ran through our pasture where I spent hours playing on it's bank and remembered vividly the sound of the meadowlark's lonely song piercing the hot summer mornings. We did not hear it either at the derilect grain elevator  by the small village of Bruce or even in the "ideallic in my eyes- village of  Innisfree where I was born.
We did not fare much better in Saskatchewan. We did not hear it as we walked around the lot where my traveling companion's house used to be,nor in the fields stretching on either side of the road  where he skied down the hill in the winter. We visited his favourite quiet charming coulee where there were lots of bushes, a little slough and even fence posts, where he used to look for robin's eggs and collect gopher tails for money [I will not inflict on your sensitive ears his method of catching gopher tails- a common prairie pastime for boys in the depression.] We did not hear the meadowlark in this idyllic spot either nor in the old local grave yard going back more than a hundred years. While I was reading the grave stones I did hear the red wing black blackbird's song cutting the silence and I did hear the rustling of the sage as the wind gently caressed it. We also did not hear  meadowlarks at his abandoned school house or the schoolhouse where his mother taught in 1915, even though we picnicked there amongst the lilac bushes.We didn't even hear it at "Buffalo Jump" in Alberta  where I spent a long quiet hour painting on the edge of the bluff.
As we continued down stretches of secondary roads we talked about the inability to describe the meadowlark song and decided one could describe a lovely coulee, an Alberta rose,a Saskatchewan wheat field resembling for all the world a vast green ocean as the wind blew over it, but we could not describe a sound. And then I found the perfect description of the meadowlark song. My constant reading companion on the trip was O. W. Mitchell's "Who has seen the wind" the great classic prairie novel and there,at the beginning of a chapter near the end of this enchanting book, I read the description of the meadowlark song and as I read it out loud, we heard it's song. "the soaring lilt of his song rising up high until it pierces the hot,still vast prairie sky and then an abrupt silence." Yes ! that was it! That was the wonderful sound I heard years ago while playing alone and  lonely  by the river. 
As we came to the end of our journey and rolled towards the foothills of the Rockies,  I suddenly realized we hadn't worn our hearing aides the whole vacation, so of course  we didn't hear the meadowlarks!  There may have been hundreds of meadowlark songs that we missed. It wasn't because there were no fence posts, too much pollution from oil rigs or pesticides. They were there after all!  We just didn't hear them and my heart lifted- I am after all an incurable optimist.
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