“Main Street, Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, August 18, 1974”

I know this town, though I’ve never been there. It’s Clinton, or it’s McBride, it’s small-town rural Canada, where the snow piles high each winter, layered with industrial grit that gets deposited on Main each spring and never swept. There are no street cleaners in these towns, and years after paving, the road again looks like dirt, like it always was. I can feel the heat in this photograph, oven dry, the sun burning from above, the sidewalk from below, scant relief in the shade. The air smells of straw and manure, of melting blacktop, of tractor diesel and the exhaust of old cars, blue and loud as they pass. I sat outside that liquor store, in the back of my parents’ Chevy, back in 1959, with an Orange Crush and a bag of chips. We ate burgers in that yellow cafe with the rippled linoleum floor and smudged corkboard walls, the grey formica and chrome tables, padded plastic chairs tippy and fun for small girls. We angle parked and bought bandaids and aspirin in the drug store, apples in the Co-op Grocery. And drove on, through land flat and amber, watching the watery mirages ahead on the pavement miraculously evaporate with our approach.


photograph: “Main Street, Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, August 18, 1974” by Steven Shore