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Reflections from the lone traveller for whom a highway was never the intended destination
Walking the Bypass recounts Ken Wilson’s singular experience of walking alongside the decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly Regina Bypass, all while situating the highway within the ongoing history of settler colonialism in southern Saskatchewan.
Through a series of ambitious and unconventional walks, Wilson sets out to understand the arrival and significance of the new (and politically contentious) highway encircling Saskatchewan’s capital as well as the Global Transportation Hub, a sprawling warehouse park the Bypass was intended to serve. He offers a new perspective on these heavily travelled yet untrodden spaces in a region dominated by industrial agriculture and high-speed transportation. Reflecting on the profound transformations to the land since the arrival of settlers in the 1880s, he wonders whether it’s possible to form a connection with the land through walking—even on the gravelly edge of the freeway.
In vivid and sincere prose that captures the thoughts of a man trudging along the roadside, Walking the Bypass explores how walking can transform non-places into places and enable settlers to forge a relationship with the land around them.
— Louise Halfe-Sky Dancer, author of Burning in this Midnight Dream
"“Original, unsettling, and provocative.”"
— Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood
"“This book is an eyes-wide-open trek through a landscape almost entirely subsumed by the extractive forces of late-stage colonialism, but there is a much more beautiful pathway here, too—one worn by the steps of the author and other settlers looking for ways to walk side-by-side with Indigenous Peoples who are calling for land justice and an end to the racist and systemic inequality that remains Canada’s festering wound.”"
— Trevor Herriot, author of Grass, Sky, and Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds
"Seeking 'the sacred in the stubble,' Ken Wilson parses the movement of place to non-place and back again by walking the route of the Regina Bypass. To map the beginnings of connecting where you are with how you got there, read this book about roads, ecologically sensitive areas, and the ruderal on the desire path to decolonial thought with Wilson as your companion, one (sometimes blistered) step at a time."
— Tanis MacDonald, author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female