Last week we did most of our shows in Moose Jaw and ended the run with the smallest show on the tour – 67 kids in Morse, SK ranging from kindergarten to grade 12. It was a little hard to get them going but we were assured that they were stoked. The coolest thing about the week was before an afternoon show on Thursday when a teaching assistant brought in a small boy – maybe 9 years old – who was completely blind. We introduced him to the instruments and he had a better appreciation for the show for having encountered the tools of noise making prior to the experience. The least cool part of the week was when I took a metal bedpan to the head and bled profusely in front of hundreds of school children.
Between Moose Jaw and Swift Current there’s a little town called Chaplin which has two main industries – the harvesting of salt and the harvesting of brine shrimp from the local salt lakes. Chaplin lake is on an important, protected, waterfowl migration route and there’s a whole big area of salt lakes where the birds rest on their journeys between the spring countries of the north and the southern climes where they winter. We drove throught the salt pans and marvelled at
the way the crystals climb the hardy grasses. We also found a cow skull and pelvis and some rib bones and vertebrae which we are now hauling around with us.
We spent the bulk of the weekend at a little bed and breakfast out in the middle of the vast prairie. You can see for miles in any direction from any of the small rolling hills which comprise the landscape and the sky out here dwarfs everything. There’s a river running through the property and, most exciting, a big heap of disused farm equipment which we spent hours today photographing and hitting. We’ve made some preliminary recordings (audio and video)
and there might be some fresh goodies up before too long.
Today we started the second leg of the tour which begins in Gravelbourg (a French enclave with a big brick cathedral) and ends in Saskatoon (home of Paddock Wood brewery, my new favourite).
