enRoute


	ENROUTE TV ENROUTE FM MEDIA KIT AIR CANADA LINKS WRITERS' GUIDELINES

CBC LITERARY AWARDS

For over 20 years, CBC Radio has celebrated the best of Canadian writing talent. For the past three years, enRoute has been a proud sponsor of the CBC Literary Awards / Prix littéraires Radio-Canada by publishing the winning texts in English and French. Watch for award-winning travel literature, short fiction and poetry in our next six issues.

The views expressed by the writers do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax or Air Canada. Certain readers may be offended by the contents.

First Prize
Travel Literature

GIRL AFRAID OF HAYSTACKS (A STORY OF TRAVEL AND EXILE)

Text: STEPHEN OSBORNE

1 | 2 | 3 | MAR

A girl in Wisconsin who used to have nightmares about haystacks would have to crouch on the floor in the back of the car whenever the family went for a drive in the country. She was seven years old and her older sister and her younger brother would keep a lookout and tell her when the haystacks were out of sight and she could get up on the seat again. The family often drove from their home in Waukesha, through the rolling countryside of dairy farms and grain fields and frequent hay fields, to Rockford Illinois where her father’s older brother lived in a tiny house with his wife Eleanor. Aunt Eleanor was a large woman of whom the girl’s mother disapproved for her lowbrow habit of showing family snapshots on a projector in their tiny living room, and she kept a family tree that went back to the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620. The mother of the girl in this story disapproved of family trees as well as the public display of snapshots and she was unable to reconcile herself to Aunt Eleanor’s largeness, which she interpreted as a failure of character. Before driving home, they would load up the trunk of the car with packets of oleomargarine to distribute among friends back home in Wisconsin, where dairy products were protected by a law that defined oleomargarine as contraband.

The town of Waukesha took its name from a fox in the language of the Potawatami nation, and shortly after the Civil War, when a Yankee colonel cured himself of diabetes by drinking from a mineral spring on a nearby farm, the town became famous for the miraculous power of its healing waters. Among early patrons of the luxury health spas that grew up in Waukesha were Ulysses S. Grant and the grieving mother of Abraham Lincoln. The classical period of Waukesha history lasted for fifty years, during which time the waters of Waukesha were promoted to the world as God’s elixir of life and the hope of the afflicted. Today history in Waukesha is an extravagant dream glimpsed in photographs of women in hoop skirts and parasols and men in top hats and frock coats promenading on the boardwalk and congregating in the elaborate lobbies and on the verandahs of grand hotels and posh sanatoriums. The girl in this story lived in a boxy new house with a picture window instead of a verandah and she could look out the picture window in her house at the picture windows in similar boxy houses across the street and wonder what the people inside were doing. Each new house had a patch of lawn in front and a dirt yard in back and a driveway of gravel and sand waiting to be paved over before the garage could be built and the backyard seeded with a mixture of Kentucky bluegrass and phosphates, and then a year or two later the neighbourhood would be filled with the sound of lawn mowers on Sundays.

Her father had served in the army in France and Belgium during the war and before that he had been a statistician for the Chicago Cubs. In a photograph taken when he was twenty-one, he looks like T.S. Eliot in round eyeglasses and crisp suit and tie. He was an appraiser for a company in Milwaukee and after the family moved to Waukesha he drove in to work early in the morning and drove home after rush hour to beat the traffic. Eventually he became a man who drove only Ford cars and no others; her brother remembers them clearly: a pale yellow ’57 Galaxy, a cream-coloured ’61 Fairlane and a robin’s egg blue ’64 Fairlane powered by an engine 390 cubic inches in volume, a true land yacht in the classic age of the automobile. Her father had been divorced once and her mother had been widowed when her first husband died of diabetes in Rockford before the war. When the girl in this story was five years old, the family moved from Milwaukee out to the new housing development twenty miles away in Waukesha; in her memory of that journey she and her brother and her sister sit on the long bench seat in the back of the family Plymouth, an automobile that seemed to glow in a colour named in long syllables, perhaps maroon or burgundy, and in the front seat her mother, a woman who always loved pets, holds the goldfish in its bowl on her lap all the way out to the new house in Waukesha without spilling a drop.

1 | 2 | 3 | MAR