Our driver, Joe, has been with the company for fifteen years. As we get underway, he gives a cheerful, polished safety talk over the PA. I wonder how many times he has delivered the same speech. Joe will be let go from Greyhound as of tomorrow too.

The place names on my itinerary read like accidental poetry. Elstow, Colonsay, Plunkett, Foam Lake, Insinger, Minnedosa—pioneer surnames and plain-spoken settler descriptions punctuated by Indigenous terms, filtered and distorted through generations of colonists.

The view beyond the window is a mottled blur of browns and greens, like military camouflage come to life. My city-trained eyes struggle to make sense of it all, and I find myself in a landscape-induced fugue state. Details begin to resolve from the relentless, side-scrolling scenery, though. Haystacks, hydro wires, grain elevators. Ponds and trucks and tanker cars resting at railroad sidings.

There is a grand total of eleven of us on a bus with fifty seats. Shawnie is heading home to Dauphin after visiting her daughter. Austin, from Dakota Plains Wahpeton First Nation, is travelling to visit family in Portage la Prairie. Lorraine is on her way back to Yorkton from a funeral in Saskatoon. Many have ridden the route before, in some cases for years—although this is my first ride. Austin is in the same situation. “First, and last now, I guess.” he says, laughing.

At our stop in Yorkton, Joe is replaced with Darren, another driver, who arrives in a vintage grey uniform. He reminds me of John Candy—cheery but wistful.

Buses are cheaper than air travel, more direct than the train. Taking them can be easier and safer than driving your own vehicle. One particularly passionate advocate affirms that what she loves best is the connection she feels to the terrain when travelling at ground level. “You can’t see the land from the air!” she insists. I watch the prairie undulate around us, rumpled and furrowed, wet and alive. She’s right.

As the day wears on, the windows grow more and more dusty, and the view outside becomes increasingly impressionistic. We cross the border into Manitoba, and the prairie sky changes from bright blue to a bruised, angry yellow green to featureless grey in less than an hour. The landscape transforms, too, from flat tableland to rolling foothills. We enter Riding Mountain National Park, high atop the Manitoba escarpment, and as the light begins to dim, a bright, clear ribbon appears at the western horizon—a fierce sliver of sunset, flickering through gaps in the low cloud cover. It eventually fades away.

We roll into Brandon in darkness. The terminal is empty save for some plastic seats and a vending machine. I am the only passenger getting off. The ceiling lights cast an aggressive, sodium-vapour glow over everything, like an old, sepia-toned photo that wasn’t processed properly. The place feels like a memory already.