David Collier is author and artist of the comic book Collier’s and several book-length graphic narratives, including Just the Facts, Portraits from Life and Hamilton Sketchbooks.
When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor. The people and the media in Saskatchewan regard farming as a deeply interesting subject. I myself, with my jaded big city upbringing, always found my attention shifting to the more offbeat aspects of the agricultural life. Like the farmer whose tractor flipped and pinned him flat one day in the 1940s. As he lay dying under the tractor, he managed to scrape on the fender with his knife: “Leave it all to my wife.” Later the fender was removed and presented in court, where it was accepted as the farmer’s last will and testament.
In 1982, a few months after I moved out of my parents’ house, my dad asked me if I wanted to go for a drive down to Key West at Christmas. I said sure.
A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.
