"We lose and find all the time. We can forget, apprehend or comprehend our surroundings several times each day. Both losing and finding, forgetting and rediscovering the natural and human traces on the prairies might seem like an impossibility. Have we not recorded our impressions and images of prairie life faithfully? Are we not standing on the shoulders of (prairie) giants? One kind of prairie, grain elevators, have been disappearing from the North American prairies for about a generation, and yet they have become (I would argue even more vividly than in the days before they started to disappear) an iconic symbol of a place which is less and less like its imagined past. Our memories (both individual and collective) adjust to such absences by canonizing vanishing saints before it really is too late. We lose the thing and find – we like to think – its essence. We remember artistic renderings of prairie people, landscapes and stories, reading Margaret Laurence’s novels or W. L. Morton’s history, but we cannot reproduce the pictures and words at will. We know the countours of their labours just the same. We forget, or at least under-advertise, the fast that the Prairie (however it might be divided by provincial or international borders) is also an urban place. We think less often of the fact that we have a transantional prairies, in which an awareness of divergent national pasts and presents is necessary. To acknowledge these complexities is to know, to reclaim and indeed to find the prairies."--BOOK JACKET.