The Two Hundred Years Drive

It's official: 'The Tim Show" has started. We're north of Edmonton, Alberta, tired as hell and still have a long way to go and a really short, cold time to get there; we've just driven through two days of prairie, we have to be in Wasilla for our vet check on Monday, March 1 (2?), it feels like we've been driving for years and the cold snap doesn't make it any easier. But as we bump along, scraping frost off the windows and wondering who has poop on their boot THIS time, my mind wanders off to the folks who live on the Canadian prairie, their beautiful desolation a palette of black and white, an occasional yellow school bus violating an otherwise Ansel Adams showpiece. What are these people doing in their lit-up, far off kitchens? Where do they get groceries? Who were their ancestors? How did their little ones get to school over acres of snow, sandblasted into a helmet of impenetrable ice? How did they do it all without Tim Horton's?