Photograph by David Anthony Hohol

The Canadian Prairies are as beautiful as any place on the planet and Alberta may epitomize their essence. Alberta is where the Great Central Plains meet the magnificent Canadian Rockies and contains awe-inspiring mountains, wondrous rolling hills and mystifying flat lands. The altitude provides Alberta with month after month of star-filled skies to wish upon and dream under.The golden fields of wheat and barely that dance in the wind and the grasslands that sparkle with wolf willows or prairie sage make Alberta a place of amazing beauty.

The picture above is a recently turned field of wheat soon ready for harvest centered by a former homestead since abandoned and left to only remind us of a lifestyle that seems so long ago, but in the annals of time is only yesterday. We have come so far, so fast and sometimes we forget as a result; forget that simplicity is the truest form of beauty.

From David Anthony Hohol…

The summer, for most of my life, has always meant time on the family farm. Sitting in the same house where my father was raised, the same house in which my grandfather was born, and the same house my great grandfather built with his own hands with timber from the trees atop his land, always grounds me to the world beneath my feet in a way no other place ever can. The sense of lineage is so thick, there are times I almost have to reach up to brush it away from in front of me so as to see the present more clearly and than days past.  While always close to my grandmother, since my grandfather’s passing, she has become my life’s matriarch and a living piece of my soul. I am so very blessed to have reached middle-age and still have her there to greet me with a warm hug and kiss on the cheek, as I pass through the only door that has always been there for me to open. I cherish every minute of our time spent chatting over breakfast or watching old movies like tiny gold coins falling into my open and waiting hands.  Now in her eighties, she still provides me with the only home I have ever known and for that I am a lucky man indeed.

From the second I return from my latest trek across the globe, I see my grandfather everywhere; sitting in his chair that still graces the rustic farmhouse living room, in the corrals behind the barn rolling out hay bales to his cattle, or out in the fields as I drive across the family land in my 1973 Chevy Scotsdale. Perhaps, most of all, I see him alive and well in my uncle, the only of his four children to carry on the tradition of farming and now the fourth generation to do so.

I hear my grandfather’s voice sometimes; sometimes in the wind, sometimes in the rustling of the towering poplar tress that surround the home quarter, but most often when passing through the ever-present herd of cattle grazing the pastures for yet another summer under the golden Alberta sun.

One thing my grandfather and I always did so easily was just talk. The flow of conversation between us was effortless and I’ve often thought it was simply because we loved talking to one another. We could easily talk our way through entire ball games or even a Hockey Night in Canada double-header, but it was while working out in the fields when the conversations between us became somehow special.

Working together with our hands and our backs, we would talk all day long and in turn we each learned about the kind of men we were; the kind men we wanted to be. Two men in the throws of physical labor, working side-by-side, is a very primal, very masculine ritual. When the two men are grandfather and grandson, the undertows of blood and family only serve to heighten the tribal nature of the experience.

Perhaps we never talked more than while hauling hay bales together. Stacking 50 bales in the back of a half-ton is like completing a puzzle, with each bale sliding into its specific place and in a specific position, until the load is complete. Afterward, we drove the load back to the farm for unloading, to then start all over again. During hay season, my grandfather and I would haul thousands of square bales back home from the fields to the northeast corner of the barn, where the stacks would sometimes reach 30 feet high. With my grandfather being in his mid sixties and me in my early twenties, I was often amazed at his stamina. The young strong man that I was was dog-tired after a day of hauling bales with him. Farm work is a good tired though. It’s not nerve tiring, but physically tiring. After a good supper and a solid nights sleep, one wakes up the next day feeling ready for more. Regardless, when hauling bales back and forth all day long, for days at a time, all there is to do is talk. Our topics of conversation were all over the scale and talking about anything and everything slowly turned grandfather and grandson… into friends.

The conversations we had are countless, but two always stand out in my mind and in the end, reveal the genuine friendship we shared with one another. One summer as we were stacking bales out behind the barn, I began to get on my grandfather’s case for not taking his blood pressure pills. He eventually he got irritated and told me I didn’t understand his situation. I then said, “What do you mean, I don’t understand? I understand you need to take the pills to stop yourself from having a heart attack for Christ’s sake. What else is there?”

It was then he angrily replied, “Dave… If I take these pills,” but then paused for moment before he continued.

“If I take this fucking pills, I can’t even get it up… I can’t even be a god damn man… do you know what that’s like?”

I didn’t know what to say, so quietly answered him as honestly as I could. “No.. I don’t.”

After a few minutes of silence, he then said with a smile, “Don’t think I still don’t give it to your grandma once in a while, Dave” and let out a laugh and I couldn’t help but follow suit.

Like I said… we were friends. Beyond the conversations we had were his stories, and boy oh boy how I loved to hear them. Although he would tell me about painful and disappointing times, more often than not his tales were filled with laughter of life. Whether it was the one about a guy he once knew that would shit his pants for a beer or the one about the farting horse, he always had a great punch line. The stories he told about he and his older brothers and their days as boxers however, stand above them all.

Because a farming community could not spare a lot of money for sporting events and because distances were long a far from major centers, small towns depended mostly on themselves for entertainment. It was for this reason that boxing, for a time, was very popular in small towns across the country. I knew that there had been a lot of boxing in the area, but until my grandfather told me stories I had no idea just how incredibly popular it was. The entire town, as well as others from neighboring communities, would pack the town hall to watch professional boxing cards on a regular basis.

My great uncle Albert told me that it was the high school principal, Jack McLaughlin, a boxer of some note in his day, who started the Two Hills boxing club. Boxing became popular not only in Two Hills, but in towns like Vegreville, St.Paul and Bonnyville and it was not difficult to line up a good card, because some of the men in the area became name fighters. My grandfather told me that he and his older brothers, Albert and John, would all appear on the same five-bout fight card sometimes and they would always win, as the Hohol boys had a tough as nails reputation throughout the county. The oldest brother John became a ranked fighter and was an Alberta welterweight champion. My great uncle Albert was also a good fighter, but told me himself my grandfather was the best fighter out of all three brothers. He described him as a natural who surely would have become ranked nationally if he had continued to fight. Sometimes I think that If I could have one wish granted to me, I would choose to go back through time and be there at ringside to see the three Hohol boys all fighting on the same card.

With that said within only a short time all the fighting in the area came to a tragic end. On a hot summers night back in 1944, Two Hills Hall was standing room only. After my grandfather and his older brothers all convincingly won their bouts, all three stood ringside to take in the main event. Two men who had become well known fighters, St. Paul’s George Werenka and Cyclone Fred Taylor from Gibbons, were about to clash in a heavyweight battle. My grandfather told me there had been several weeks of build up for the fight and the winner was expected to move on to the national boxing scene. According to my grandfather it was a hard, tough fight and Taylor landed more punches, but Werenka landed the much heavier ones. At the end of the eighth round Taylor walked over to his corner and sat down. Suddenly he went limp sliding off his stool and laid unconscious on the canvas. Taylor was taken to Edmonton, but died at the entrance of the University Hospital. My grandfather said it was a shaking experience for he and his brothers, as well as the whole town. Werenka was not held responsible and went on to become the Canadian Navy’s heavyweight champion. Shortly thereafter, the Edmonton and District Boxing Commission tightened requirements for staging professional boxing and fairly so. The changes were of a nature that made it impossible for small towns to afford to promote boxing and as my grandfather said, it was as it should be.

This was one of only countless stories he told me over the years and these stories of his youth and his days as a young man were magical to me. They always whisked way to another time and another way of life far away from the world that is today. Even more importantly, his willingness to share not only the stories of his life but his emotions, his feelings and his dreams led me to get to know the man as well as I have ever known anyone in my life, and in return he got to know me. The connection was felt by us both. We were friends and like old buddies we would argue about sports and politics, pissing each other off at times. At the same time we would share the most intimate and personal feelings with one another.

My grandfather passed away on January 20th, 2003. I think of him 10 seconds out of every day and afterward, always think of how lucky I am to have had in my life. Then I realize he’s still right here with me and I journey back into the big wide world, my wings lifted once again by his ever-present memories, and above above all else by the living monument to his life that is the family farm.

Yes. I am indeed a lucky man.

Most of us go through life searching, our lives a contstant quest for all we want to have, to be and to feel. In our search for more, however, we sometimes get lost in a thickening fog of self-doubt, unable to trust our own programming. RELATIVTY OnLine’s David Anthony Hohol shares with our readers his own origins and in doing so demonstartes how the life from which we came will always ground us to world beneath our feet. For him, rebooting our souls, wiping the hard drive clean, and heading back to the simplicity of our own internal default settings provides us with both direction and strength. This month Hohol sets aside politics, culture and religion and takes us back to the basics of being.   

When we search for those things that make us who we are, we often miss what’s right there in front us. Those pillars of time and circumstance, standing in the murky shadows of our highly-divided souls, often blend into the matrix; an indistinct hue of experience known, but not thought about- a life felt, but never seen. 

I was raised in a prairie village nestled in a set of rolling hills that slowly build into the magnificent grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. I am a farmer’s son of a farmer’s son, and to this day call our family’s cattle ranch the only home I have ever known- the only door that has always been there for me to open.  I never had to read books in order to know the stories of breaking in wild horses, or building homesteads and towering barns from the very trees that surrounded them.  I never had to flip through a book to see pictures of vast fields of wheat and barely, a stoic hawk perched on a set of finely stacked hay bales, or a deer and her new fawn drinking from a fresh water creek. I never had to watch a nature program to see a new born calf struggle with its first steps of life or a freshly hatched chick fight its way out of its shell and into the waiting world. I simply had to open my eyes and breathe in all that surrounded me. I simply had to be.

Growing up around a farm I became a part of a self contained community of family and often felt as though I was living in an established, safe and uncomplicated world. Life was simple and by extension, issues of right and wrong were not complex. Those around me stood for what was moral and hard work was always readily rewarded. What results, is a situation in which a child growing up has the constant opportunity to observe, and be a part of, the ongoing work of a farm. Watching my grandfather pull a calf from its struggling mother or my uncle stack a perfectly packed load of bales atop his trusty half-ton, instilled within me that looking up to feeling. This produced the kind of a respect and admiration that turns role models into heroes. There are always exceptions in terms of urban careers, where growing children can watch what their parents do everyday, but this simply not the norm. Whether it be offices, factories, corporations, hospitals, schools or the countless other occupational structures that insulate parents from their children, today’s young have little, if any opportunity to see what it is dad or mom do at work. I see this as a glaring weakness in today’s society. This limitation has greatly contributed to weaker family units and a more fragmented social construct.  

Unfortunately, this is less a criticism and more a comment on the natural state of things in today’s world. Urban centers continue to swell at a record pace. The slow death of the family farm and rural living in general is a fact of life unfolding across the globe. This is why I’m lucky. To this day, the family farm is the only place where my feet truly feel as though they’re firmly planted beneath me. And while under the soft and comforting wing of my humble beginnings, the rest of the world often seems like a noisy, cluttered and fast-paced dream.

The first book I ever read straight through, from cover to cover, was a Louis L’Amour novel called Utah Blaine.  It was my grandfather’s who, despite having only a ninth grade education, was a voracious reader. On the farm, fourteen years of age meant it was time for work and not school, but I always admired his never-ending thirst for knowledge and count him as one of the most intelligent men I have ever met.  Utah Blaine is the story of a strong and brave rancher-turned-marshal that grabbed hold of me right from the start.  

When a gang of ruthless ranchers tries to hang an innocent farmer, Blaine is there to stop them. The gang of free range thugs is determined to scare off any farmers, but Blaine is there to save the day, again and again. The story was exciting, but what drew me to the book was its setting, as page after page described the very place I grew up in. My family’s farm, the prairies around it, the horses out by the barn and the fields and fences that made a checkerboard of the land beneath our feet, prosaically came to life before me eyes. I had never seen my life, so to speak, work as the co-star of a novel and for that reason I couldn’t put it down. I pictured my grandfather, or even myself, in the many situations that L’Amour was describing. I went on to read several Louis L’Amour books throughout junior high school, with my favorite being Lonesome Gods. The story of 6-year-old traveling across the desert to California with his dying father, so that he can live with his rancher Grandfather is a powerful tale of identity. As they reach the edge of the desert and before arriving at the ranch, a group of outlaws kills the boy’s father. The young boy is then taken 40 miles into the desert and left there to die.

Determined to survive, the boy begins walking through the desert alone. After two days and nearing death, he is finally picked up by a lone cowboy riding the trail. He takes the boy to an abandoned log cabin and there he begins his new life. I read Lonesome Gods again only last week. It had been more than twenty years since I’d first flipped through its pages and I so loved re-visiting a part of my youth I very much enjoyed.

Growing up in the setting I did, reading Louis L’Amour books and watching John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns greatly influenced me. On a grander scale, the Western novel, and the many Hollywood films that followed, have left an indelible mark on the entire world. Virtually everyone knows the ingredients of the Western – the rifles and Colt .45s; the long-horned steers and sprawling ranches; the stagecoaches and the cowboy hats; the outlaws and the lawmen. All many have to do is close there eyes and the settings of the Western will also come to mind. The awe-inspiring structures of Monument Valley, the treeless expanses of an open and rolling prairie and the snow capped vision of mountain ranges in the distance are all inseparable parts of the Western motif.  

With that said, the true allure of the Western has always been its acute simplicity. Everyone wore a gun on their hip and moral conflict could be resolved certainly and concisely. Right and wrong were always clearly defined and this decisive nature allows the West to take on mythical proportions, to become a place where legends are born. These legends were embodied by Western heroes such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok, Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane. For me, as a young boy living on the prairies, it was my grandfather.

Perhaps what’s most amazing about the Western is the infinite number of tales drawn from such a small stable of situations. Virtually all conflicts grow out of three main archetypal circumstances: homesteaders vs. Indians, farmers vs. ranchers, and outlaws vs. the newly forming laws of civilization. These conflicts, although moral at their base, are often brought to their rightful conclusion via physical action. Gunfights, stagecoaches, Indian raids, bank holdups, lynch mobs and posses chasing down a wanted man all sit at the heart of the Western. The Western resolved its conflicts through violent brawls and gunfights, reestablishing the moral order with the cathartic fire of a pistol during the final scene. For the Western, simple was truly beautiful. 

I sometimes forget the simplicity is the truest form of beauty. I forget to think about what I have and what’s good in my life; I forget to appreciate all the things that make me smile, that make me feel good inside, that make me feel free. When I do, I know its time to go back to basics and remember just who I am. It’s been awhile since I’ve done so. But as I type out these last words and ready myself for bed… I know tomorrow will be a better day and time will pass more simply.