Monday, May 17th
The Triangle
Thirty-two men on a Great Lakes boat
Quit the pier at Thunder Bay,
28,000 tons of coal,
On a cold November day.— Paul Gross, Robert MacKenzie
There is two things I need to do this morning before I can take off. First, Thunder Bay has a Chapters book store in a mall somewhere. It only opens at ten, so I take things easy. As usual, I end up spending a lot of money at the book store. I finally pick up my copy of the aforementioned ‘Under Heaven.’ As for guide books, the next province they have one for is Alberta. But since this covers the Rockies as well, I go for it. Finally, I stumble across Alan Rayburn’s ‘Place Names of Canada,’ which lists the origin of the names of over 6200 places in Canada. So from now on, I can torture you with little fun facts. For instance, lovely Florenceville was indeed named for Florence Nightingale. Before, it had the even more romantic name Buttermilk Creek.
That finally done, I have to get the oil in the car changed. Yesterday it started complaining that it wants new oil. The people at the roadside assistance said I should just go somewhere and have it changed. Feeling the desire to pay back the Silver Avenger in kind, I do. This seems to be an easy enough operation, done in about ten minutes, though I confuse the people at the shop by not knowing the details of the car, not to mention my Swiss address.
One more stop at the petrol station and I am finally ready to go. I have as much as two choices to go further west: The northern route via Dryden or the southern route through Fort Frances. Both routes meet in Kenora from where on there is exactly one route into Manitoba. They form an orthogonal triangle with Thunder Bay, Fort Frances and Kenora as the edges. Thus, the southern route is a bit of a detour and hence my choice.
The random music selector has decided to make this an eighties morning. It starts with Eurythmics only have it followed by Depeche Mode. Strange how these things sometimes work.
A road sign announces Canada’s largest Adult DVD Superstore. Unfortunately, whizzing by, I can’t catch its location and thus cannot report how big exactly Canada’s largest store of such type would be. How do you research this sort of claim, anyhow. Sounds like a rather sad trip. I think I stick to the beer of the day thing.
Off in the south, probably somewhere in Minnesota, are a couple of table mountains. The ice age must have been fun around here. But now they are very green. They positively beam in the sun of yet another beautiful day. Rain has been announced for later, but no sign of that so far.
A discarded shopping cart lies by the side of the road. Now, this is taking littering a bit far. How do you get to throw it out ten kilometres out of town, anyhow. Does it take that long to argue whether you want to keep it? ‘All right, hon’, you win. We throw the shopping cart away.’
The two routes finally part ways at a place called Shabaqua Corner (disappointingly, not named in Place Names of Canada). The southerly route from now on carries the nickname Mom’s Way. Which isn’t a Futurama reference but rather MOM is the acronym for Manitoba, Ontario, Minnesota, the three provinces or states the route goes through. The geographically correct acronym should be OMM, though, or possibly MMO.
About ten kilometres further and seemingly without any good reason, a sign announces that we cross into Central Standard Time. There is a reason, though, which is that we also cross ninety degrees west, which marks the switch in Ontario. Incidentally, ninety west is also the main meridian for CST, which means we are actually already halfway in.
A little fox-looking animal wanders at the roadside. It is smaller than a fox, black, and a lot more scrawny. No idea what that could possibly be. I don’t know much about European fauna, but next to nothing about American animals.
Ahead, big would clouds are brewing up. There is some upshoots here and there. Looks like the promised rain is being made.
Yet another sign, and thank God there is so many, announces the Arctic watershed. Aha. So that is the other side. ‘All streams from hereon run north into the Arctic ocean.’ The backside indeed has the Atlantic watershed. Very sneaky. The elevation at this point is 1660 feet which is roughly five hundred meters.
Next event is the east entrance to Quetico Provincial Park. It features a bit of a camp with two outfitters and some cottages around a lake, presumably Eva Lake. At Niobe Lake, there is another settlement.
At Armiss Lake, a rest stop has been build next to the road. It has a couple of pick-nick benches and fire pits. I stop for a bit of a break, make a few pictures, and then sit down on the grass to browse a bit in my new acquisitions. But very soon I am driven away by a very large and very inquisitive presence of flies and retreat to the car.
The next settlement of any larger size is Atikokan, population 3300. It lies about three kilometres off the highway to the north. Like most towns here, it has its origin as a railway stop. Now, it is another small town out nowhere. But it looks rather more poor than previous examples. The cars are all a bit older and more derelict, the houses all look less in shape. Scrap metal heaps dot the landscape. But people are friendly and the weather is extremely nice, well in to the centigrade twenties. Which also explains all the towering clouds showing up everywhere.
Driving in front of me is a pick-up truck with a boat loaded on its back. It turns into the yard of The Beer Store. Guess how he is going to spend the afternoon.
According to Wikipedia, and I only found that out now, otherwise I would have checked, Atikokan is still on Eastern Time. This is just the first of some more time zone turbulences I will encounter during the rest of the trip (unless you count Newfoundlands half hour as the first turbulence).
About fifty kilometres outside of Fort Frances, we join Rainy Lake. The lake goes on for quite a bit. Right outside of Fort Frances, we cross it on a causeway and bridge. The railway a bit off to the south has a drawbridge, whereas the road bridge is just very high. It appears that there is some boat traffic on the lake.
Beyond the bridge lies the land of the Couchiching First Nation, which features the Heron Landing Golf Course. Well, better than a casino, I suppose. The second largest building is the bingo place, only trumped (a very appropriate term when speaking of buildings) by the administrative centre.
Fort Frances, population 8500, is yet another lovely small town. It stretches along the Rainy River on the other side of which lies International Falls, Minnesota. It is dominated by a gigantic lumber storage area and a big processing factory. The town itself is surprisingly green. There are parks and gardens everywhere. The road from the bridge is decked out with ‘Welcome to Canada’ flags. Even the commercial strip outside of town has grass and trees by the side of the road and in between businesses.
Now, here is my theory (and I know you didn’t ask for it): The North American system of placing more responsibility into the hands of the community, rather than having a government taking care of things, works extremely well at the smaller scale. This isn’t actually surprising, as it can only work if there is a functioning community, a group of people having a sense of belonging. So this works well in small towns and suburbia. But it is doomed in places where there either is too much anonymity, such as big cities, or where people don’t really have a tie with the place, such as the commercial strips outside of town where people mostly just work and their sense of responsibility ends at their shop’s door. It also has to fail in problem areas, but there a European-style governmental approach also has to fail.
After the exit from Fort Frances, the cascade of traffic rules welcomes drivers to Ontario. There even is a helpful signs for Americans pointing out that 90 km/h is roughly 55 mph. A bit further on, I turn north again. The road passes through an area called Finland. It may even be of Finnish origin, as there are Korpi Road and Lampi Road. But Wikipedia is strangely quiet on the matter.
Around here, we finally have left the mountains behind and are now in a very lake-y and green lowland. It starts raining once or twice but gives up again each time. Shortly thereafter, we leave the clouds behind and are back in bright sunshine.
Nestor Falls is a lovely little tourist community at a point where the highway crouches over a small land bridge in between lakes. Along the shores, there are motels, resorts, and cabins, some shops and services. A water plane is parked by the docks. Within the lakes, there are little islands. One of them even has some cabins on it. I don’t know about you, but this qualifies as rather romantic to me. I wish I had someone to take to that little island. Having to row back from the restaurant over a moon-lit lake. Ah well. Be still my heart.
Sioux Narrows is pretty much the same setting except more flat and open and thus not even remotely as nice. Nestor Falls had a certain cradle-like quality, very safe and cosy.
Finally, we re-join the northerly route for the last couple of miles to Kenora. If you don’t want to see it—apparently, it has a bit of a reputation as stereotypical small-town, slow, even dumb Canada—you can use a bypass route and go on directly to Manitoba.
But frankly, why would you. Screw stereotypes. Kenora lies on the northern end of the Lake of The Woods, which actually goes all the way down to the Minnesotan border. Its town centre sits right at the waterfront. Even more on the waterfront, practically inside the lake, is Lakeside Inn, a blue seventies tower of a hotel. Strangely enough, I totally like it, and immediately book a room. The hotel is round, about then storeys high and has the restaurant on the top. I pay ten dollars extra for a lakeside room which is worth every penny. The view over the lake and the town with its two churches is fantastic.
I go up to the lounge for a nightcap. As I sit there, sipping my beer, the sun sets in yellow, red, and blue over one of the islands. A boat comes in drawing its v-shaped wave over the otherwise still lake, disturbing the jetty in its quiet slumber. Above, the contrails of passing aeroplanes glitter brightly golden in the dark blue sky. Yet further above shines the moon in a children’s book crescent.
Beer of the day: Alexander Keith’s Indian Pale Ale (bit tame for an IPA, but the only thing they had on tap in the lounge. Keith’s slogan is ‘Those who like it, like it a lot.’ Gets you thinking for quite some time, doesn’t it? But still better than Carlsberg’s.)