September 2024
Helaine Ortmann

I love car rides. 

Some of my fondest childhood memories are being packed into the backseat on summer evenings (in pajamas) and winding up at Hutch’s on the Burlington Beach strip for French fries; or Stoney Creek Dairy for my one and only favourite, a single-scoop chocolate ice cream cone. 

It must be one of the reasons I married my husband. 

He is at home in a moving vehicle. He raced hobby cars in his 20s, drove vans and pick-ups as a tradesperson, and before he retired, he steered 18-wheelers on long-haul stretches as far away as California.

Over the years, the car has helped us escape stressful and unhappy times, provided an intimate space to be together, and transported us to diverse landscapes near and far. 

This summer, however, we experienced the trip of a lifetime: “The Big Ride” to Saskatchewan to see the prairies (my first time), reunite my husband with stepfamily he had not seen in 40 years, and trace the footsteps of his grandparents who emigrated from the village of Zichydorf in Austria-Hungaria to homestead in south-central Saskatchewan.

Unlike his intrepid and pioneering forbears who voyaged by ship from the “Old Country” (not English speaking, a young family of nine in tow with only the barest necessities), we picked up the trail in Qu’Appelle that in the 1890s-1900s was a terminus for arriving eastern Europeans.  

Modern-day adventurers in our 2011 Buick sedan (jammed with suitcases for our clothes and my hair products and a backseat filled with snacks), we travelled south, the same direction that the Ortmann family travelled in 1902, by horse and wagon, to get to the barren, wind-swept rural municipality of Francis (then unincorporated) to build shelter (a sod dwelling with an earthen floor), acquire equipment, break land, and make a life in this brave new world.

By good luck (my husband’s), our visit to Francis—population 182 as of the 2021 census—coincided with a vintage car show that Saturday afternoon, attracting most of the town to Main Street; wide enough to allow a horse and wagon … in the 1900s … to rotate a full turn. Parked in the centre was an imposing if not pristine tractor and truck attended by its owner. 

What began as a conversation about the state of farming in the rural west, the cost of his equipment (the value of our downtown Hamilton house) and property size (his 10,000 acres in contrast to the 160 acres my husband’s grandparents were government granted) turned into an introduction to Reggie, the town historian, comfortably ensconced in a golf cart, holding court with a number of locals. 

One thing led to another as Reggie ushered us into Francis’ administrative building, as unassuming as the town itself, where he asked Mel, the clerk, for two archival publications. Leafing through them, we spotted whole stories and photos about the immigrant Ortmann family, matching the memoirs (and filling in spaces) my husband’s father wrote in 1968 at age 66. 

So emotional and deeply personal was our visit to Francis, deemed by my husband to be the “epicentre” of the Ortmann family—where they homesteaded, farmed, and where his father married his mother in 1947—we could have easily called our trip a success then and there.

But it was only Day 8; and we still had stepfamily to visit in Regina as well as the 12 prairie towns that my husband’s father and his family had lived or worked in from 1902 to 1950. Some, vibrant and bustling like Francis; others, like Hardy, Khedive, Peebles and Ceylon, bereft and quiet, as lonely looking as their abandoned grain elevators and railway tracks that once sustained them; still others, as verdant and panoramic as Viceroy and Horizon, where we left stones on the graves of my husband’s grandparents.

Seventeen days and 7,070 kilometers under our (seat) belts; bedazzling views north to Thunder Bay and west along the Lake Superior Circle Tour; acres of newly-planted wheat, mustard, canola and flax fields anchoring the province of the living skies where we were often the only car in sight for hours; we two accomplished The Big Ride, a trip back in time that left us breathless for the future.