Reflections from the lone traveller for whom a highway was never the intended destination.
Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road 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.
Praise for Walking the Bypass:
“Original, unsettling, and provocative.”
Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood
“Walking the Bypass reminds settlers of the need to remember intergenerational responsibility, atonement, and decolonization—words that might describe a path forward. Let us stay the course.”
Louise B. Halfe – Sky Dancer, author of Burning in this Midnight Dream
“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 and Mobile
“This is a book fashioned in epic proportions. Partly because it is the narrative of a walk around the hard shoulder of the nearly fifty kilometres of the Regina Bypass in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. Partly because it concerns the undoing and redoing of a being, and of a way of being, and of a physical entity untrained for distance walking, often limping on blistered feet, being reformed by the exigencies of a thin strip of the world made without thought for pedestrians. . . . This is a tough read, of a story that may one day be told by other voices, some of them more-than-human, but it begins to ask questions and celebrate a relationship with fragments. It ends with the opening of a door to take the inside outside.”
Phil Smith, author of Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, Rethinking Mythogeography in Northfield, Minnesota, and (with Helen Billinghurst) The Pattern: A Fictioning
“What is Canada, if not a shady land deal? The travelogue portion of Walking the Bypass is sutured to a history of the Crown’s abuses of Indigenous peoples. . . . [Wilson’s] guilt is the most affecting, visceral aspect of the book, and it kept me turning the pages. . . . I see why he wants to make amends, find kinship with the land. But, in the Enshittocene, trading utility for futility is a form of resistance.”
Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine
“Walking the Bypass is a work that proceeds at the pace of walking, and holds in its gaze the places that we’ve learned to look away from, to pass by quickly without noticing—real places like highways, industrial parks, and fields of monoculture crops, and through them locations within our colonial history, including the treaties still meant to govern the Regina region. This book is important.”
Sadiqa de Meijer, Governor-General’s Award-winning author of alfabet/alphabet: a memoir of a first language and In the Field
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Reading and Walking:
An occasional blog
Since 2014, Reading and Walking has been a place where I write about books I’ve been reading and walks I’ve been making. I post photographs of those walks, too.
About the Author
Ken Wilson
Ken Wilson is a settler-descendant who grew up in the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario, Canada. He lives on Treaty 4 territory in oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada), where he is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. His poetry and creative-nonfiction essays have been published in The Goose and Queen’s Quarterly. Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road is his first book; its manuscript won the 2022 City of Regina Writing Award. His second, Walking Well, is slated to appear in 2026. He blogs about books he’s reading and walks he’s making at readingandwalking.ca.
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KEN WILSON 