Esk

The old church in Esk   ©Chris Attrell

In Canada, The Yellowhead Highway runs from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Graham Island off the coast of British Columbia. Please note that that island is not named after Mr Graham Edwards who resides on The Isle of Lewis which is not named after the F1 driver Lewis Hamilton.

The Yellowhead Highway runs for 1800 miles and right across the province of Saskatchewan through Saskatoon and on to Yorkton. Between those places there are numerous little settlements close to that vital connecting road including Elfros, Mozart, Wynard, Kandahar, Dafoe and Jansen. Between Jansen and Lanigan you will find what remains of the village of Esk.

Esk was never a big place but it grew into a farming community as the great prairie lands of North America were opened up and made profitable. At first there were small, labour-intensive farms where mechanisation was limited and horses, oxen and mules were still used by farmers. 

This was where Mr Keith Kline was born in October 1939. He is a fellow blogger known to most of us as Red and he is the author of "Hiawatha House" which has been running for sixteen years. Red now lives in Red Deer, Alberta with his Yorkshire-born wife, Jean but he grew up miles from anywhere in Esk where he attended the local school with a handful of other farming children.

To celebrate Red's recent 85th birthday, I thought I would use Google Streetview to see how Esk looks these days but I am afraid that those Google camera cars have so far avoided Esk. The best I can do is show you The Yellowhead Highway at the point where it passes by Esk...

Just five miles along the road heading west you come to a bigger settlement called Lanigan which I am sure that Red was familiar with in his early years. I asked Google Streetview to take me there. On Main Street, Wong's Chinese Restaurant is still operational, serving "Canadian" food alongside  the Chinese fayre. What is "Canadian" food I wonder? 

Lanigan is a town of only 1400 people but it has its own high school - no doubt serving other settlements in the region and bussing many children in...

Travelling three or four miles east of Esk, you come to a pretty big glacial moraine lake - Big Quill Lake which is seventeen miles long and eleven miles across. We don't have any lakes in England to compare with that. This Google view may give you a sense of its size. It's like an inland sea!

And so here's that Saskatchewan farmboy himself with his birthday doughnut, having made it to 85 just last month. Belated Birthday Greetings Red and I hope you liked this Esk-related blogpost.