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Walking the Bypass

by Ken Wilson (Goodreads Author)

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Phil Smith said: " Walking The Bypass Ken Wilson University of Regina Press

This is a book fashioned in epic proportions. Partly because it is the narrative of a walk around the hard shoulder of the nearly fifty kilometres of the Regina Bypass in southern Saskatchewan, Walking The Bypass Ken Wilson University of Regina Press

This is a book fashioned in epic proportions. Partly because it is the narrative of a walk around the hard shoulder of the nearly fifty kilometres of the Regina Bypass in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. Partly because it concerns the undoing and redoing of a being, and of a way of being, and of a physical entity untrained for distance walking, often limping on blistered feet, being reformed by the exigencies of a thin strip of the world made without thought for pedestrians. No shelters, no food stops, no cultural comforts.
The abject asceticism of Ken Wilson’s walk is all the more bracing for the relative under-use of the road system it follows; the Global Transportation Hub for which the Bypass was built lies mostly empty at the time of Wilson’s walk. The Bypass itself is not filled by a bumper-to-bumper stream of vehicles, but is a marginal void punctuated by occasional trucks and cars. Despite its apparent utilitarianism, the road seems to owe more to financial speculation (and probably theft) than the economics of production and distribution. Indeed, it is what Wilson sees at work beside the road, and records with elegant precision, in ‘Walking The Bypass’ that better represents the ‘logics’ of the social system that has produced the Bypass: a settler agriculture of extraction and pesticides, ploughing out any marks (“tipi rings, medicine wheels”) of First Nations culture and the removal of the grasslands that once supported herds of millions of bison, reducing their numbers to hundreds.
Wilson describes an attrition upon the First Nations people of this land every bit as vicious and organised as the violence to the bison: the conniving theft of so-called Treaties; the manipulations of translation at negotiations; the murderous, incarcerating and culturally-corrosive regimes of the Indian Industrial Schools (the book begins at the cemetery of Regina’s School); private property rights that undermined the fishing and hunting of First Nations people; the official indifference to the murder and disappearance of women and girls. Where First Nations farmers competed with settler farmers, the railroads and the churches suddenly required their land; after the First World War more of their land was grabbed to give to veterans.
In response to his study of colonial theft and displacement, Ken Wilson consults First Nations scholars and activists on how to appropriately and subversively walk in relation to this stolen land. A Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe colleague, Vanessa Watts gifts him the term “Place Thought” to address the land as “alive and thinking”. From Elder Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, he learns the obligation/privilege – even when walking alone – of being “part of a community; because walking involves developing relationships with everything around us: plants, animals, the land, the sky”. Throughout his walk along the hard shoulder, always vulnerable to a wayward truck or something flying off a vehicle, Wilson repeatedly ponders what relation he is making with this land; he is not always convinced that he makes any relation, let alone a good one. Such is the austere nature of what remains of the land, at times it seems that the extraction has gone in on Wilson as much as across the grasslands. While the narrative is far from self-absorbed, the walker here is subject to an existential depredation, not so much a crisis of being as a vanishing in the landscape.
Nevertheless, despite the erosion (maybe partly because of it), in repeated encounters with tiny absurdities and wondrous details, the monotony of the Bypass bursts in small flashes of colour and strangeness. Hallucinating a passenger in a junked car, a pelican gliding overhead, a piece of Venetian blind lying on the roadside, an evangelical church demanding “Picture / Plan / Pursue / Prosper”, a void left by the missing sign to the CINEMA 6 drive-in, “ruderal” spaces defined by disturbances, damaged billboards “speaking gibberish”, the ashes of a campfire, a quartz crystal “discarded, perhaps, because its curative powers were exaggerated”, a pile of human hair, a broken padlock, singing crickets, a mask, landfill on the horizon, a gas flare from a distant refinery, an abandoned railway line, dark chemical bins… the wonders of detritus bending the walker on the Bypass back to their origins of production.
As Ken Wilson arrives back home, limping, he ends his journey as he begins it. As taught by an Elder he puts down a line of tobacco and steps over it. It is hard to know what his walk has “achieved”, and yet maybe it is in its very non-instrumentality that there is something of the “non-extractive encounter with the land” to which Ken Wilson has aspired. It is in keeping with the hard ask of this book – in the attrition on the walker-writer and in the engagement with a shameful history – that it ends in paradox. In an ambiguity from which there appears to be no escape, either by truck or by slow pilgrimage upon the hard shoulder. This is a tough read, of a story that may one day be told by other voices, some of them more-than-human, but it begins to ask questions and celebrate a relationship with fragments. It ends with the opening of a door to take the inside outside. ...more "

Sep 28, 2025 03:50AM · see review