On the Road: Early morning

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Basically, I got up early because I was planning lunch.

Yes, that’s right, I left the house at 2:30 a.m. because I wanted to be in a lovely little restaurant somewhere around noon but I wanted to make an adventure out of getting there. So off I went into the night.

OK, there was a little more to it than that. I’d checked the aurora forecast and saw there was a pretty good chance the northern lights would make an appearance but even if they didn’t, it was going to be a moonless night and the Perseid meteor shower was happening. And if none of that worked out, at least I’d be out of the city as dawn broke and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

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By a quarter past three I was east of Strathmore, well beyond the town lights and down in the valley where Crowfoot Creek gets its start. The sky was clear, except for an orange haze of forest fire smoke along the horizon, and the sky was filled with bright stars. Two dazzling meteors streaked by as I was getting set up. Great start to the day.

The meteors kept coming as I shot my long exposures though nearly all of them were just faint lines against the dark sky. That’s the thing about meteor showers. You might see a hundred meteors as you look up but only one or two will be streaky and bright. And they will inevitably happen the camera isn’t ready.

The aurora put on a better show though it was confined to the area just above the horizon. A few streaks bounced around in the pinkness between the orange smoke and the starry, cobalt sky but it wasn’t quite as active as I had hoped. Maybe if I’d been out early but that’s just how it goes.

The temperature fell as dawn approached and I drove through layers of mist as I continued on east. Most places it hovered in ephemeral sheets that I drove underneath but by the time I got to Hussar just after 4 a.m., it had thickened into an actual fog that softened the glow of the lights on the elevator and along the streets in town. The temperature on the dash read a chilly 8C as I drove over to the shore of nearby Deadhorse Lake.

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The stars were starting to blink out as the eastern sky brightened and the dome overhead was turning from nearly black to a softer blue. Jupiter still shone bright high above but there was a reddish glow on the eastern horizon and a bright band of clouds above it. The trees that I had in the foreground of my photos were still mighty dark, though, so I flipped on the headlights to help with the exposure.

And, of course, the last visible meteor of the day slashed by well out of the camera’s field of view. Next time, I guess.

Dawn seemed reluctant to appear as I drove on. At Crowfoot — halfway between Cluny and Bassano — it still hadn’t arrived at a quarter to six and though the morning was considerably brighter along the road to Makepeace, the sun was still below the horizon at 6 a.m.

Which worked out fine for my sunflower pictures. They and their insect friends were turned away from the brightening sky so I lit them with my headlights and camp lantern against the sunrise glow. Not bad.

Sunrise was just minutes away as I stopped by the old Makepeace school to shoot a reflection of the glow in one of the windows but as I switched over to the video setting to shoot a couple  clips, something occurred to me that I hadn’t paid attention to earlier.

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And that was how quiet the night had been.

When I’d gone out adventuring back in June and July, there was always some sound coming out of the dark. Cattle mooing, night birds chirping, rustling in the grass or among the branches. But on this night, except for a coyote chorus by Hussar and a bit of distant plane and traffic noise, the night had been nearly silent.

It certainly wasn’t silent now. Magpies were yakking, a flock of blackbirds was chittering and mourning doves were cooing. I could even hear barn swallows, like the one on the school window’s frame, chirping away from under the eaves.

On top of that, the roar of engines came from a construction site down the road that had chosen dawn to begin their day. It was a real cacophony but it illustrated just how quiet the night had been.

The sun rose, a bright orange ball behind bearded heads of grain, and warm morning light spread across the land. The sunflowers slowly rotated their faces toward it while grasshoppers climbed up the canola stalks to soak up its radiant heat. Blackbirds took advantage of this to throng the fields and feast on the torpid bugs while doves did the same thing with the insects that had crawled onto the warming surface of the road.

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Back over by the Crowfoot Creek valley, I found a Swainson’s hawk perched on a sign and down along the creek itself, I put up my little drone to get some pictures of the creek’s undulations in the morning light. I love how these prairie streams swing back and forth across their valleys.

The birds were out in force now, little savannah sparrows on the fence wires and meadowlarks singing from the patches of sage or hunting along the roadsides. I found a little whitetail buck peeking out of a ripe canola field. Hawks were everywhere, too, the young ones just learning to fly and hunt for themselves while the adults screeched from their perches or high in the air to, I guess, let the babies know where they were.

It was still several hours to lunchtime but I was feeling a bit peckish so I stopped at Cluny to get something to ease my pangs and then headed south across the Siksika Nation and the Bow River toward Milo. On a windless morning like this, I was hoping nearby McGregor Lake would be calm and quiet.

And it was.

A couple of folks were fishing from the dam and there were a few boats out on the water but otherwise all was tranquil. A loon popped up right below me as I parked on the dam to take it all in and then dove again. I could see its feet propelling it as it headed down.

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On the small slough just to the north, I watched avocets hunting in the shallow water while a squadron of young Franklin’s gulls paddled around behind them. Along the shore I came across a snipe poking around in a puddle and a dozen ring-billed gulls perched on the roof of a picnic shelter. From the look of the white-washed shingles around them, it was a popular spot.

The morning was lovely and I was getting tired of sitting so I parked the truck and got out for a walk along the beach. A short walk, as it turned out.

I figured I was going to find some feathers and dried-out crayfish bodies to photograph on the sand but I had completely forgotten about the Chinese mystery snails — yes, that’s really what they’re called — that had somehow shown up in the lake. These invasive creatures are huge by snail standards, 10 times the size of our native snails. Some of them get as big as a lime.

I’d first found their shells along the lake late last fall but until I came across them again now, they’d slipped my mind. But the area I’d chosen to explore was littered with their shells so I flopped on the sand to take some pictures.

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Unwanted though they are, I gotta admit those big shells are pretty impressive. The spirals mound up like a miniature ziggurat and though the exterior is drab and brown, the insides are shiny with pearlescent nacre. There were spiders and other creatures inside some of them and on one, a ladybug.

One of hundreds of ladybugs.

They were everywhere, crawling on the shells, on the crayfish remains, among the pebbles on the beach and the feathers and cast-off exoskeletons of mayflies and dragonflies the waves had deposited on the beach. They crawled over my camera and across my hands, shiny little orange and black tanks that scuttled everywhere.

Why there were so many right here, I don’t know but back in the truck and headed westward, I was picking them out of my hair until I came across combines harvesting peas over by Vulcan.

Pea harvest is a dirty business. The stems and pods of the plants seem to disintegrate as the hard seeds are stripped out by the combines. Dark brown, nearly black, clouds of dust were rolling out from the backs of the combines as they chewed through the fields, so thick that at times the huge harvesters just disappeared behind them.

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The dust clouds looked even more dramatic from my drone’s-eye as I flew along above them but my eyes were burning and my sweaty neck was itching as the dust cloud rolled back over me. I landed the drone and headed toward town.

Perfect timing. Noon had just passed and Vulcan was bare minutes away.

Where Amy’s had their Chinese buffet ready and waiting for me.

I have been stopping for lunch at Amy’s Family Restaurant for years and the kind folks who run it never disappoint. The food is tasty and plentiful and the price is right especially since I am now a verified senior. But I have to admit I haven’t been there in a very long time.

Like a lot of businesses, Amy’s shut down during the plague years and though they still offered curb service, I never took advantage of it. Food aside, it was as much the ambience of the place, the old-style booths, the constant vinegary scent wafting from the buffet trays, the murmur of folks chowing down and the rattle of pans coming from the kitchen that I enjoyed. Without that, good as it was, it was just food.

But the good old pre-plague days are back now and Amy’s is open for business — except on Wednesdays — so I parked the truck, shook off the pea dust and walked in. Forty minutes later, I waddled out, belly full of salt-and-pepper squid, stir-fried vegetables, chow mien and three different kinds of ribs.

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Though it was barely one in the afternoon, my day was done. I’d been poking around for over 10 hours and now, stuffed and sated, it was time to head for home. Accompanied by a lunatic grasshopper that decided to hitch a ride on my rolled-down window — hung on even at 80 km/h — I rolled on through the ripening fields and past the drying sloughs until, somewhere near Brant, I had to pull over in the shade of a stand of poplars and close my eyes for a few minutes. A full tummy always does that to me.

A full tummy thanks to Amy, whoever Amy may be. Never thought to ask, actually. At any rate, I’ll see you again soon.

But maybe next time, I won’t leave home quite so early.

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