WARBURG, Alberta - For young people in this pinpoint on the vast Canadian prairie, the landscape has always revealed their futures.
They can work, as locals have since homesteading times, the grain and cattle farms that reach forever across an impossibly flat terrain. Or, if times are good and fuel prices high, they might land jobs in oil, a fickle industry whose presence is marked by the ubiquitous drilling pumps that, like packs of feeding birds, peck constantly at the rich Alberta soil.
But from his family's farm, five miles outside of town, Dave Hakstol saw something else, something more.