Walking, Trailing Shadows — Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road by Ken Wilson

Ken Wilson’s Walking the Bypass is a redemptive journey through some of the least redeeming landscapes an urban walker might visit. Part of what makes the book compelling is how well its style matches its subject. As with many relationships, the author’s familiarity with the Regina Bypass and the Global Transportation Hub – political boondoggles and scandal-ridden developments – develops with time. Wilson’s “Notes on Place” begin with jumbled first impressions and slowly gain coherence. He’s careful to allow the reader in on his initial uncertainty about both land and project. He does so explicitly, but also through his style of writing. 

That latter hook is perfect. Wilson frequently uses strings of incomplete sensory descriptions to build deeply satisfying impressions: a child’s lone shoe in a ditch, a grackle’s “rusty hinge sound,” someone cutting the grass, a shredded and abandoned tire, a desiccated jackrabbit run over by traffic, the sound of one man shouting instructions to another through a sewer hatch. His treks on the decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly Bypass are strangely devoid of personal human contact, which one comes to realize is the point. The feelings of alienation we share are a fitting accompaniment to the netherworldish spaces through which the author takes us. “All these doubts nag at me;” Wilson writes, “they are shadows trailing behind me as I walk” (188).

The book begins with more questions than answers. Gradually, as in a slowly unravelling mystery, we are introduced at a walker’s pace to solid details about both land and author. “I’m not a patient person; maybe walking will eventually help me develop that virtue…” (165). “It’s as far from a national park as you can imagine, but [the Bypass] still has its rewards: the immense, cloudless sky, the meadowlarks singing joyfully on the other side of the airport fence” (105-106). 

“All these doubts nag at me;” Wilson writes, “they are shadows trailing behind me as I walk” (188).

The walk – and the book – form an existential experiment. Wilson wants non-Indigenous readers to ask themselves the same question he starts with, even if its answer isn’t clear: can a Settler descendent such as himself develop a good (in all the manifold Indigenous understandings of “good”) relationship with the land, including heavily transformed parcels like the Bypass? In other words, can he and others (his readers) “find a home” through walking? 

The land Wilson has chosen is not an easy test case. He could have hiked the splendours of the open short-grass prairie as Trevor Herriott did in Towards a Prairie Atonement (URP, 2016) or taken the half-forgotten Indigenous and Settler trails that were the focus of my book The Good Walk (URP, 2024). Instead, Wilson chose a path less trodden, one both unloved and hazardous: the newly asphalted wastelands on the outskirts of Saskatchewan’s capital city. 

Carrying his food, water, and a sleeping sack along the shoulder of a highway, Wilson makes us face the ongoing consequences of colonization and development. Neither city nor country, the Bypass and its half-empty Global Transportation Hub come across as misused and transitional. It’s land that is liminal – a special category in pilgrimage studies. Wilson employs the academic distinction between space and place: a “place” has meaning, memory, and connection, while the Regina Bypass and its associated territory have been intentionally rendered empty except of commercial and speculative value. The routes in Walking the Bypass are stripped of their memories. (Wilson’s frequent authorial asides do bring some of them back, for instance, for the Regina Indian Industrial School.) He witnesses land severed from both city and prairie and made into what some theorists call “junk space”: bypasses, ditches of roads, undeveloped lots, and half-abandoned or as-yet-undeveloped commercial properties. 

But this highway, a non-place that people pass through instead of spending time in – can it be loved?…I’m convinced that as I walk I’m turning this non-place into place, at least temporarily… (157-158).

As he plods the circumference of the Bypass, Wilson certainly walks the talk of the Indigenous knowledges he tries to honour. The chapter headings – West, East, South, North – form the cardinal directions Wilson was taught to turn for putting down tobacco to start a journey. He notes that, as in previous walks he’s taken, he sought and received guidance from local Elders prior to beginning the project that led to the book. At the same time, he constantly – at times obsessively – questions whether a Settler-descendant still benefitting by default from the theft of Indigenous land can really utilize Indigenous protocols without tainting them yet again in unwitting acts of colonisation. Many kilometres later, he comes to a tentative peace: “Maybe this kind of walking could be a way to have a non-extractive encounter with the land…Perhaps the self-reflection such walking might occasion could play a role in processes of decolonization” (188). By trusting the advice of his Indigenous interlocutors, then setting out, Wilson eventually finds he has gained a “kinship relation” (230) with the land, even the unlovable Bypass. And we have the privilege of being along for the journey.

In the end, Wilson’s gruelling and lengthy circumnavigation results not just in a conclusion, but also a transformation. This may have been his motivation from the beginning, or perhaps he arrived at it as a result of his remarkable project. “Despite my settler origins, I’ve been allowed to become, however tentatively, part of something else, something better” (229). 

Wilson states that he’s “not suited, temperamentally or by experience, to collaborative political work” (188). Yet by chronicling his journeys he ensures he has not walked the Bypass alone. True to the Indigenous counsel he received, even though he generally avoids the spiritual, there is something sacred about his final conclusion: that the land “waits for us to recognize that we’re its kin” (230). As readers we receive his epiphany by proximity. It’s a reason to be thankful for this extraordinary book, and for the fact that Ken Wilson brought us with him when he first stepped out his Regina door.

True to the Indigenous counsel he received, even though he generally avoids the spiritual, there is something sacred about his final conclusion: that the land “waits for us to recognize that we’re its kin” (230).

Matthew Anderson

Hi! I’m Matthew Anderson, a writer and professor living and working in Mi’kma’ki, on Nova Scotia’s North Shore. I’m the author of six non-fiction books and numerous short stories. Two recent award winners areSomeone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia(2025, Pottersfield) andThe Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails(URP, 2024). I blog atwww.somethinggrand.caand produce a podcast atPilgrimage Stories From Up and Down the Staircase.