Lindsey Nette: Lost in the empty

We came to the park to get lost – I wanted so badly to be the people in the poster, our tent pitched at the centre of all that space, nothing around us but sky and grass. I’d been daydreaming of this place where I could pick a point on the horizon and walk, aimlessly, into open space. I wanted the thrill of discovering my own sense of place. Among others, I hoped to find it in the park.

When Grasslands National Park opened in 2001, it set out to return its visitors to the experience of discovery, as unprescribed and unpolluted as possible. They wanted the public, both local and far-removed, to learn to see the grasslands as a place in itself, rich with complexities to be explored. But restoring this kind of emptiness is no small feat. One of the park’s leading staff members explained it like this:
“It’s as if you built a building, something so bewildering people didn’t know how to access it. They couldn’t find the entrance. They think, it’s not for me.”

In that soft-spoken candour I was met with throughout Saskatchewan, she admitted that even she’d struggled with the place. It seems there is some primal human skill we have forgotten — to its guests, the park was empty, and we felt out of place. As a result, park management was implementing a grab bag of interventions, including signage, an expansive network of paths and a new fully-serviced campground. This saddens me – after the landscape is framed, its uses and meaning set in place, there won’t be anywhere left to get lost.

All this has happened here before. The struggle to make and maintain a sense of place has been at the heart of prairie landscape-making since the whole region was (wrongfully) deemed ‘empty’. Grasslands National Park lies deep inside Palliser’s Triangle – a vast wedge of prairie from the Rocky Mountains eastward along the 49th parallel to southwestern Manitoba. In essence, it’s the land that Palliser bypassed in search of more favourable conditions, establishing a void in our historic consciousness.1 He warned of an empty and barren desert, useless and unfit for settlement.2  But only one idea rang in the ears of those pressing west. It was empty.

What followed, in the name of place-making, erased deeply rooted cultures, eradicated entire species and remade one of the largest ecologies on earth. An elaborate spatial and political toolkit to carve up and harness empty space was unleashed on the prairie. The transformation unfolded from something seemingly benign: a post. From east to west, the Dominion Land Survey painfully marked out the prairie in posts – each driven into the ground and left there like a magnet to draw in motion and change. Every two posts drew a line to be staked out with fences and trees, a shoreline where the prairie’s ongoing motion would lap up against a relentless grid. And every four posts made a square – an island to be claimed, absorbed, abandoned, re-made. As an act, to survey is to look closely at something, examine it and understand it. But as a thing, the survey is a rigid and unforgiving geometry laid out over land that will never conform. The survey looks at nothing but itself – blind to the underlying forces that define the place. Over time, its incompatibility with the grassland revealed itself.

We came to the park with our own survey in mind, with a compass for finding our own sense of place — it was a homemade kite camera, an old technology new to us. A compass refers to a device used both to draw geometry and to find direction. Ours did neither; more importantly, it gave us a sense of purpose in our explorations. We went out looking for something, even if it was something as elusive as wind, to which we developed a heightened awareness, learning to distinguish wind from a breeze and gusts from steady gales. Here, against the empty space, wind has a presence that is tangible.

When we arrived, the ranger was retrieving a shredded flag from a puddle some thirty feet from the mast. We parked and started loading up our packs. He wandered over to welcome us. “Ontario eh?” he smiled, looking at our license plate. He told us about a family, also from Ontario, that had set up camp here a few nights back, then packed it in with the sound of coyotes. “They followed me back to town,” he laughed and shook his head, “Couldn’t take the open space.” We talked about the park, about quicksand and fossils and crested wheatgrass. He kicked at the stuff, “We can’t control it. It crowds out the native species.” Crested wheatgrass is an invader from Siberia, a trace of the cattle ranches that had been here before. It is the antagonist to his native prairie, which that morning seemed to disappoint him. Everything was out of place. The grassland wasn’t familiar enough for the young family, and it was looking far too familiar to him. It is a landscape in flux, like the noise between radio frequencies. It isn’t exactly domestic, but not yet all that wild; it isn’t native grassland, but isn’t still a farm. This transformation too, has happened here before.


It didn’t take long for the grassland to infiltrate the grid – to prove how ill-suited it is to an ecology built on motion and change. The lines of the survey are wearing away, trees dying and fences leaning in the wind. And the squares are dissolving, its owners abandoning them to large-scale farm enterprises or near-worthless hay. The park itself is an archipelago of abandoned farms and ranches interspersed with those still in operation. And everywhere the two uses overstep their boundaries. The thing is, grasslands are indivisible.3 It’s like trying to carve an ocean. Grass is a relentless current that floods every isolated vision of place. It grows in every crack, dominates every void. It thrives in the margins between the places we force, and those that evolve. The park, just like every ranch or farm, is fighting the current – nobly trying to throw a net around its vision of prairie.

It  finds itself in a moment where not only its guests struggle to find a sense of place, but it too struggles to hold on to one. It has an opportunity that is hard come by today – to re-survey, rediscover and remake a place.

Our trip lasted a few weeks, and when we returned home we printed 300 photos from the kite camera. Flipping through all those aerial shots, I started to see a landscape very different from the rigid lines of the grid. The camera had been tossed around in the wind, capturing disorienting images at random. There was no horizon, no sense of scale – only texture, colour and motion. You can get lost in this landscape. The photos reveal something else too – something about us. Our little blue tent, which looked so surreal against the open grass, was pitched next to a tree – next to a patch of trees growing in mowed grass. We hadn’t made it to the middle of all that space with nothing around us but sky and grass. We’d held fast to the familiar and hovered at the edge of all that emptiness. The park management had been right. The park does need something to mediate between guests and the place. The question isn’t whether to intervene, but how. How can they make lines that move, paths that change, boundaries that breathe? What are the tools of their survey? I don’t have an answer. But I have a compass. And I think that’s where I’d start.  

1 John Palliser was an Irish geographer that led a western Canadian expedition for the British government in 1857. Palliser’s Triangle is the region roughly outlined by his route.
2 Palliser, John. The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-1860, edited by Irene M. Spry, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1968.
3 Manning, Richard. Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Lindsey Nette is an architectural designer based in Vancouver BC, where her studio, The Offsite Project, explores small projects and vast contexts. She holds a BAS and an MArch from the University of Waterloo.  www.theoffsiteproject.com