The Correction Line

Photo: County of Beaver Seed Cleaning Co-op, Holden, Alberta

It's a prairie term, and I hadn't heard it in years before I travelled to Saskatchewan in 2008 and visited a Canadian prairie farm similar to the one where I lived until I was nearly eight. The correction line evoked my early years on the prairies; I heard the words spoken inwardly, in my father's voice.

A correction line is a certain kind of prairie road. Land is laid out on parallels of latitude and longitude in square townships six by six miles, or thirty-six sections. Correction lines are additional east-west roads that correct for the curvature of the earth.

Our farm, a quarter section, was tiny by today's standards. As a veteran of the RCNVR, Dad took up farming after the war when he married and my parents started their family. Though the dirty thirties, Dad had "bummed around," as the saying went. During those years of drought and high unemployment, Dad ride rode the rails, worked in camps, and trapped in the far north.

He probably returned to farming because it was what he knew. His parents had emigrated from Scandinavia and met in the US. His mother, Hilda Haugdahl, was from Bergen, Norway and his Dad, Olaf Johnson, came from Skane, a wheat-growing province of Sweden. Around 1906, the couple and their seven children came to Alberta to homestead near Lindbrook. Following in their footsteps, Dad availed himself of a soldier settlement scheme to buy a farm near Ryley and raise wheat, rye and oats.

This summer in Alberta, re-visiting the area around Viking where the Norse first settled, I heard the words correction line again, and became aware of how it was from my father's voice speaking that I heard those words from my earliest years of language development.

An inner knowing that I can't explain tells me that one day I'm going to write a dynamite short story using that as a title; I can already feel it starting to formulate, beneath the level of my conscious mind.