Where in Canada: Surprising Saskatchewan in Rick Hillis’ A Place You’ll Never Be

What: A Place You’ll Never Be (Coteau Books)Who: Rick Hillis was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and a Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellow at Universal Studios. His previous works include The Blue Machines of Night and Limbo River, which won the Drue Heinz Literature prize. Hillis taught at a number of universities in the US before his death in October 2014. Where in Canada: Most people, when they hear “Saskatchewan”, think of flat prairie, skies that carry on for days, and wheat fields that blow tantalizingly in a cool breeze. But, if you keep driving north – past Saskatoon, toward Prince Albert and beyond – you hit forest. And not just a few trees, either. Prince Albert and area is a part of a National Park for a reason. The lush firs, lakeside cottages, fishing, canoeing, and hiking that you can do while you’re up there, entice crowds year ’round. This forested area is a completely different part of the province, and, surprisingly, actually makes up almost half of Saskatchewan; while the north is a much less-populated area, it does not get the attention it so deserves.   This is the area that Rick Hillis describes vividly in his posthumously published work, A Place You’ll Never Be. The novel takes place over the course of six days, as five inmates and a guard, as well as a mother and son along for the ride, chart a course through the river systems in the north as part of a “pilot project” run by the prison, one that hopes to prepare the future ex-convicts for life outside of prison. All seems fine (or as fine as could be hoped) in the beginning, as the narrator Quinn attests during the first few days of the trip: “The wind ripples on the water were mesmerizing. The sky was a clear, deep, endless blue. The spiked fir trees that lined the shore and rose to the horizon smelled fresh, green. The river had its own smell. Quinn couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about his sense of smell.”But what follows is mesmerizing in a completely different sense. There are hints of the destruction to come as the convicts and guard make their way north:“As they travelled, Quinn began to notice patches of deciduous trees virtually denuded of their broad leaves by some sort of blight. Their thin leafless branches all but invisible now, the trunks stabbed upward like power poles. The further north they travelled, the bigger these patches got, the worse it got. They were heading into nature and nature seemed diseased. Nobody else seemed to notice this, or care.”And it only gets worse from there. These mysterious insects that have appeared – which begin as caterpillars but transform into something much more frightening – consume everything in their path: plants, animals, even humans. One might even see them as a comparison to the destruction being wreaked on these beautiful, untouched lakes and forests by clear-cutting and climate change.This work is a literary thriller – an adventure novel – and the action takes place solely in Northern Saskatchewan, where the forests and lakes the convicts paddle through play an integral role in shaping the action that follows, even as they themselves are destroyed. 

Lake Waskesiu, Prince Albert National Park. (Photo credit: Paul Gierszewski/Public Domain)* * *Thanks so much to MacKenzie at Coteau for taking us somewhere down the crazy river with A Place You’ll Never Be. For more Where in Canada, click here.