The Big Rectangle
Ah,
Saskatchewan. Perhaps the easiest of all
Canadian provinces to draw, being that it consists of four straight lines at right angles. (The only real competition here comes from
P.E.I., since if you draw it to the same scale it's just a squiggly dot.)
I'm from Saskatchewan, and it probably shows. I'm the grandson of German homesteaders who settled up in the northern part of the "wheat belt", so I have the farming roots typical of most Saskatchewanians. There's a certain self-deprecating, kind of
earthy sense of humour that you get, living out on the Prairies. The kind that lets you joke about grasshoppers the size of
bichon frises, about potholes the size of
asteroid craters (an exaggeration; at worst they're the size of
meteor impact craters), about a landscape so flat you can watch your dog run away for a week (exaggeration; three days, at most).
And then there's the winter jokes. If you're from Alberta, or possibly Ontario, you probably know them, or at least have heard them — "Only two seasons in Saskatchewan; winter and
road construction," "so cold during a
Prairie winter, politicians keep their hands in their own pockets," "so cold on the Prairies most politicians can't build up enough hot air to talk until March, and even then can't manage a full-blown speech until May". Those jokes.
Saskatchewan is also known for its writers — for example,
W.O. Mitchell. Come to think of it,
W.O. Mitchell is pretty much the only author anyone remembers as coming from Saskatchewan. He's just that dominant a figure in the field of Saskatchewan literature, casting his massive shadow across a province of trembling, awed writers. Kind of like
Diefenbaker. Or maybe
Tommy Douglas if you're a Dipper.
Saskatchewan has other memorable things, though. Like a
giant Ukranian easter egg on the side of the highway. And a
giant tomahawk on the side of the highway. And a
giant metal grasshopper on the side of the highway. And a lot of
wheat fields on the side of the highway. Also some uranium mines around where Reagan's missile defense system would have shot down any Roosian nuclear warheads, but nobody cares about
Uranium City. Oh, and
potash mines. And some
hockey players' hometowns and
curlers.
Speaking of curling — you have to wonder sometimes about those curlers. Yelling things as they slide down the ice, like, "
HURRY HARD! HURRYYY!" Makes you wonder about the people that listen to
curling on the radio, too. Curling, as you may know, is very popular in Saskatchewan, because there are so many
rinks. Why are there so many rinks? Because it's so easy to build them. Why is it easy to build them? Because Saskatchewan is
so flat. Why is Saskatchewan so flat? Because of receding glacial action during the last ice age. Which makes a certain kind of sense, you know — curling is big in Saskatchewan because of the actions of ice-age glaciers.
I'm sure there are other provinces, states or territories that are
almost as easy to draw as Saskatchewan. But I can't think of any offhand. If there are, I'm sure someone will inform me of their existence.