the hythe life

I am entering the last week of my rural rotation in Hythe/Beaverlodge, and I confess that I am eager to return home. The rural life probably isn't ideal for me, but I have tried to expose myself to some of its (more stereotypical) elements...

1. Guns: It seems >50% of the people around here hunt: rifles, shotguns, bowhunting (no jokes, Napoleon Dynamite). Not just men - the women too, and then they eat what they hunt. Cheap way to have some game meat, mind you. I had the chance to go shooting with an RCMP officer, a very nice fellow married to one of the nurses int the hospital. We shot clay disks with a couple shotguns, and boy they do have some recoil, and then we put up an upper torso target and used a scoped .22 to snipe at it. A pretty fun experience, all-in-all, something that I wouldn't do much of in the city...

2. Farming: I've been staying in the basement of an older couple who own a farm. We've had quite a few talks about farming - a really interesting field that I would imagine the average non ag-for college-educated student knows nothing about. Today, Mr D. took me out to the farm and gave me a bit of a tour. I must say, I was pretty amazed at the array of the machinery he had. Mechanization for the win. We sat in the combine, took a ride in the tractor, drove down country roads in a large trailer truck, and quadded around one of his eight quarters (a quarter is 0.5 mile x 0.5 mile parcel of land). 8 quarters apparently produced something like 900 tons of grain and 600 tons of canola this year. What surprised me was that he mostly works by himself, except during sowing and harvesting season, when he hires some help. He also seems to repair most everything by himself, which is amazing considering any given piece of farm equipment easily costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. What a world of knowledge there is out there!

3. Country bar: This one didn't seem much different from a regular bar, although I did end up seeing some of my patients there, which was a bit of an odd experience. Everyone really does know everyone when the population is low enough. This would have been better if I was drinking, but alas I was being a responsible lamer.

4. Stars: So this might not be stereotypically rural, but the stars outside large cities are absolutely gorgeous. You an actually see thousands upon thousands of stars, so many that the constellations get a little confusing. Even the milky way forms, well, a milky band across the sky that is quite visible - gorgeous!

All-in-all a bit of a cultural immersion that I am unlikely to repeat with any regularity in the future. Still, it's good to see a slightly different way of living that's not all that far from home.