Last night our motel hostess told us about the extreme rains Saskatchewan has been receiving; today we saw the results as we drove through the southeast quadrant of the province, and, indeed, for much of southwest Manitoba. Many, many fields are unplanted, and more have small ponds. A welcome lady at Moose Jaw said that farmers can't even collect insurance because they couldn't get their crops in at all while it was raining. The area specializes these days in pulse crops -- chickpeas, lentils, all sorts of peas, canola, alfalfa, and other things. Farmers have switched to dry farming and crop rotation. Then, we discovered another new source of landuse: oil digging. More and more small pumps appeared as we drove east, looking like small, clean dinosaurs monotonously bobbing. Maynard told me that a huge oil field has been recently discovered that starts around Bismarck, ND and extends into Canada. It just started opening up several years ago. He thinks it's a very deep field. Some people feel that it's has the potential that Texas oilfields had. We've ended the day a tad southeast of Winnipeg, no longer feeling at all prairie-ish or even plains-ish. The truly strange experience these days is the lack of light in the evening. Why isn't the sun still out at midnight?
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