Neubergthal

Last weekend, I took the train from Chicago to Grand Forks, North Dakota and then crossed the border into southern Manitoba. Because I have been trying to make this trip for eleven years, the journey had the feeling of a pilgrimage.

(My first attempt to go to Manitoba was aborted at O'Hare when I realized I had left my passport back home in Leadville. My second attempt was also aborted at O'Hare when I got word of a family crisis. Would the third time be the charm?)

When I finally crossed the border with my friend Rachel, it was dawn and the sky was clear, enormous and just turning pink. The fields of corn, soybeans, canola and sunflower had been turned over, for the most part, and the leaves on the few trees were brown or fallen. The grasses in the ditches and along the river were spectacular brown, gold, pink and orange.

One of our first stops was in Rachel's favorite little town in Manitoba, Neubergthal, where many of the houses still have their barns attached, in the traditional Mennonite way. Neubergthal is a little stretch of highway, without a commercial location of any kind. It was early morning, and a few children were waiting at the end of their driveways for the school bus.

"I would love to live in Neubergthal," Rachel said. At first, I couldn't imagine why. As I looked around at the leaf strewn lawns and the roughly hedged yards, I had a hard time understanding Neubergthal as a place. It had, on the surface, so little to define it. There was no river, no forest, certainly no buildings that hemmed it in to create what I thought of as a sense of space. I realized that I was looking at Neubergthal and wondering where, under all that sky, would I hide?

Rachel saw it differently. In the city, she feels boxed in by the houses; everyone's boundaries end too soon. When her sister lived close by, she could hang a towel out her window to signal how the night had been. That helped Rachel feel that she could extend herself a little bit beyond her own particular box. But in Neubergthal, she imagines that she could live expansively against the sky.