Katie Ohe wrote "My early years were spent growing up in muskeg country. I understood the muskeg to be a formidable, mystical place, a place where you could suddenly sink into the unstable wetland and disappear forever. To me it was a flat, limitless distant land full of pools, lakes and sloughs of open water. It was sometimes hidden in mist and fog. The tamarack, the black spruce and willows thrive in this unstable place. Ecologically, the muskeg thrives with birth life and death-decay and new life again. It is a cycle that is eons old. Moose graze and dig for soggy sustenance around its swampy border. The muskeg in winter is forbidding. The relentless cold awaiting a forgotten spring. Our homestead was centered on a sand hill rising from the muskeg lowland. It consisted of our home, outbuildings, furrowed ploughed fields, stones, sand pits, birch and poplar trees. We could see for miles from this hill. Cows and horses grazed here. In the evenings, we could hear the sand hill cranes, the loons and the red wing blackbirds. On the hour, we heard the distant roar and whistle of the trains. The McLeod river flowed somewhere beyond the muskeg. On a clear day, the river banks were visible from our hill. The natural smells of each season were fresh and pure."