Clouds of the Cultural Desert: The Canadian Story

Although Canada is a country with a huge variety of geographical regions and ethnic diversity, Canadian colonial culture is a soothing, nearly featureless blanket spread across a largely misunderstood terrain and people. From the distance, the blanket appears homogenous, but a close examination reveals the many different threads that make up the whole, and its patchwork nature is more diverse strands than grayish mud, blood, and granite.
This homogeneity is less a trick of the eyes than it is a reflection of the publicized nature of blankets in general, but this stark land of extremes erupts through the soft billows created by Ottawa's colonial version of Canada's natural environment. From its barest geological beginnings to the many stories its people use to reinvent themselves, Canada is a land at least as much fictional as it is sand and lake and rock and city.
Textbooks of survival, Canada's stories are best read while cozied up next to a fire with a howling wind outside. Unravelled from the sleeve of care, their characters have stepped off the path and are exploring an environment which is not quite city and not quite bush. Collapsing onto the stained bricks of a patio or alley, hungering by a highway in a storm, calculating their wealth by another's poverty, they little realize they are waiting in a vast, drear and howling wilderness to be given an ordinary name.