Road Trip

On my family farm is an outbuilding we call “the school.” About twenty-five feet wide and twice as long, it’s used for storage: gardening equipment and the farm truck, a rotation of tractors and other machinery. When I was very young, it held, for several calving seasons, a maternity pen into which cows would be brought to give birth in the relative warmth. The only physical evidence of its past function is a long greenboard that bears a few faded chalk markings.

As its name suggests, the building had been, from 1939 to 1967, the schoolhouse in nearby Helston. Very little remains of that Manitoba town, which was never much of a town to begin with. (It was described in 1925 by one railroad agent as only “a little jumping-off place on the C.N.R. out east of Neepawa.”) At its peak, after the Second World War, it had, besides the school, a few houses, a post office, a general store, a dance hall, separate rinks for skating and curling, and a grain elevator to service...