Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Coulees to Muskeg – A Saskatchewan Environmental History series. This series is a partnership between NiCHE and the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society (SHFS). All articles in the series appear on the NiCHE website and are published in SHFS’s Folklore magazine.
Ken Wilson Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. University of Regina Press, 2025, pp. xiii-337. ISBN: 9781779400765 $27.95 softcover.
Years ago, maybe while reading Emma Marris’s 2011 book Rambunctious Garden, I first came across the idea that nature doesn’t have to be a placid lake or a seemingly untouched forest. Marris (or whoever I was reading) reminded me that the raccoons I was trying to keep out of my urban garbage during those years, or the ants I put down silicate against at my door, represent the natural world just as fairly as do prairie sunsets or the coyotes heard from our tents during SHFS-linked long walks across the prairie in 2015, 2017, and 2018. The difference lies in us, in our perceptions and our relationship to that “nature.”
Ken Wilson’s remarkable first book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road (URP, 2025) is a testament to this same truth. This is a beautiful work in many, many ways. The University of Regina Press cover, using one of Wilson’s walking photos, is striking and original. Even more, the book is beautiful inside for the introspective intimacy of Wilson’s prose, stunning for his fleetingly evocative descriptions of Regina life during the height of the COVID pandemic (124), haunting in its few photos, and noteworthy for the author’s political honesty and his historical asides. Walking the Bypass is quite simply a wonderful read.
But the trail Wilson decided to walk – the politically-troubled Regina Bypass circling the capital, and its associated Global Transportation Hub – will certainly never be featured on any Saskatchewan tourism brochure. For too many people, southern Saskatchewan is already and quite wrongly a “drive-through” space. Within that, the Bypass is definitely not appealing, especially for the traveller on foot. Yet Wilson hoists a backpack, water bottle, food, and sleeping sack, and through the notes he keeps while trudging the perimeter of the Queen City, lets us in on his growing appreciation for these utilitarian, commercialized, and seemingly ugly spaces. “I realize that I am learning about these roads by walking on them,” he writes at one point. “Each time I come here I see new things” (108).
“What kind of pilgrimage can one make on the side of a highway, surrounded by asphalt, industrial agriculture, and the sound of air brakes from semi-trailer trucks?”
What kind of pilgrimage can one make on the side of a highway, surrounded by asphalt, industrial agriculture, and the sound of air brakes from semi-trailer trucks? It’s telling that even on pedestrian-hostile gravel, after enough time and distance Wilson discovers splendour: “It’s as far from a national park as you can imagine, but [the Bypass] still has its rewards: the immense, cloudless
As we walk with him, the author situates the land speculation and the industrial development of the Bypass within the longer settler-colonial narrative of southern Saskatchewan and Treaty 4 history. Wilson’s goal is not just distance. He wonders whether as a Settler-descendant, even one trekking with the blessing and guidance of Indigenous Elders (xxiii), he can walk himself “into a kinship relation with the land” (230) and perhaps model that decolonizing path for others (122). His descriptions of the nêhiyaw (Cree) concept of wâhkôhtowin (15), and his asides on Treaty (176, 179) and especially Treaty 4 (195-212), form the heart of this meditation.
“The fact that he manages this even for such intentionally-emptied and exploited land is extraordinary. A place means something to us because we have a relationship to it.”
I titled this reflection “Making Something Beautiful of a Roadside” because that’s the alchemy Wilson performs in Walking the Bypass. The fact that he manages this even for such intentionally-emptied and exploited land is extraordinary. A place means something to us because we have a relationship to it. All good relationships involve stories (131), memory, commitment (13), shared experience, and hope. Readers of Folklore magazine, who remember and repeat so much of what makes every corner of the province special, will resonate with the task Ken Wilson set himself. In Walking the Bypass, Wilson proves that we too can reverse the dehumanizing of land if we pay close enough attention to it (37, 49), taking time to call back its stories, and encountering it, if not on foot, at least with open and critically appreciative eyes. This is an inspiring book.
Feature Image: “Hwy 11 Regina Bypass” by Masterhatch is marked with CC0 1.0.
Matthew R. Anderson
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- Making Something Beautiful of a Roadside - May 14, 2026