By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
In midsummer a granddaughter - the first to take the plunge - was married to a native of New Hampshire, one of the states in the northeastern corner of the United States known collectively as New England.
I took it as a given that there might be differences between Saskatchewan and New Hampshire. Naturally, our countries have some differences too, but there are variances that go beyond that. (As a matter of fact, in my judgment, almost every place in the world is different from Saskatchewan.)
To narrow the focus, however, New England was settled and a part of the eastern colonial maritime area of North America in the early 1600s. New Hampshire declared its independence from Britain in 1776, and was the first colony to adopt a provisional constitution and government. Auto license plates still bear the proud old motto, "Live free or die." Settlement of Saskatchewan, for the most part, began chiefly in the last quarter of the 1800s, so by most standards, ours is still pretty raw country.
The young couple came to Weyburn in early June to introduce my granddaughter's betrothed to the clans into which he was planning entry, and to the part of the world in which they had emerged and developed.
To contribute to the introduction I took the young pair to Regina to introduce the young man to our provincial capital and some of its important features, and to afford him an eye-taste of the countryside which, like it or not, was destined to become part of his heritage.
To his credit, he made no disparaging remarks, but I caught in his eyes a look of disbelief and wonder as we passed the vast farms, with a paucity of buildings for miles. He was properly appreciative of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, our fine Legislature and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police depot, but he never quite lost the look of someone suddenly finding himself down Alice's rabbit hole and not quite knowing what sights to believe or not to believe.
My granddaughter tried to clarify her fiance's obvious wonderment at the wide open spaces by explaining that on leaving a town in New Hampshire, the spaces between the houses just become a bit wider. I had trouble assimilating that, but I had to see it for myself during the few days we visited the area prior to the wedding about two months later.
At that time, after a foray into midstate, we headed for Nashua, where we were spending the last few nights. We chose, with trepidation, a road dignified on the map by a number but assigned only the weight on the map we would use for a fifty-fifty road. It turned out to be a heavily travelled four-lane highway, and took us through a number of towns identified on the map by dots we would use for McTaggart or Halbrite. As forewarned, between some of the communities the lots were noticeably wider, and only the names of business places we passed hinted at municipal change.
The following figures, all from the CAA-AAA tour books, lend
logic to the difference in density of Saskatchewan and New Hampshire.
Our province has a population of about 1,015,000 against 1,236,000
in New Hampshire; areas, 251,700 square miles and 9,024 respectively.
Adjusting for the fact that only half of our province is populated,
the state has 1/12th the size of Saskatchewan's inhabited portion
and a population one-quarter greater, or 137 people per square
mile as against our eight. That's got to show somewhere. Highway
traffic certainly is one of them.
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