Wednesday, May 19th
Bug Country
And when it all becomes too much
I’ll pretend I don’t care …
I don’t care … I don’t care … anymore— Tom Cochrane, Song Before I Leave
‘You are a long way from home,’ the lady at the motel reception said. She is right, but where the hell is home? Not home as in ‘Screw you guys, I’m going home.’ No, that other place which Merriam-Webster, never at a loss for a definition, describes as ‘congenial environment.’ The place your roots are, the place you belong. Having grown up in the faceless outcome of communist city planning with the extended family a days train journey away, it certainly isn’t there. Instead it has turned into a mythical place; the place where it all finally comes together and the soul finds peace. This compulsive travelling might just be the search for home. Except that mythical places hardly ever exist. I may forever pull stunts like crossing the world’s second largest country without ever getting home. Or I will eventually realize that home is not necessarily a place at all. But I suppose you have to get there. And that is a journey, too.
The car’s tank is still rather full, but I nonetheless stop at a gas bar, as petrol stations seem to be called around here. The wind shield is crusted with the worldly remains of an army of insects and the best way to clean it is a petrol station. I should probably also have the car washed, the front bumpers look rather filthy. Some bird has used the bonnet for target practice.
It seems to be the time the school buses return to town. Around here, they have a flashing white light on their top. With the long, somewhat boring roads, the attention they generate seems a good idea. Just big red blinking lights may not be enough.
Northwest of Dauphin are the Duck Mountains, one of only three mountain ranges in Manitoba. However, the term mountain range needs to be applied rather liberally. The highest peak in all of Manitoba is Baldy Mountain with a mere 830 metres. There is a Duck Mountains Provincial Park, but it doesn’t feature any paved roads. So instead I choose to go alongside the shores of Lake Winnipegois further east. As I drive north, I can’t even see the so-called mountains, even though they are only a few dozen kilometres away.
More straight roads. I may have mentioned this yesterday, but these roads are really fun to drive. Overtaking is never an issue. And because you can see the next intersection or turn marked on the map miles away already on the horizon, it doesn’t feel so far. Sometimes, the road shifts a bit to the left or right, not enough to be visible on the map. Little surprise turns to keep drivers awake.
The landscape is rural. Fields, small woods, rivers. The villages are mostly churches, farmyards, and cemeteries just outside.
Winnipegois, on the southern shores of Lake Winnipegois, is just another prairie town. It has a very nice beach complete with camp site and a children’s playground. Unfortunately, it is completely unusable on account of a gazillion of mosquitoes. I only open the car door twice to get out and in again but have to kill five of the buggers afterwards.
Outside of Winnipegois the road crosses into Mountain Municipality. Which bears the question: Which mountain, exactly? It certainly doesn’t cover Duck Mountains.
At Camperville, the road turns west. The town has its own little lake in addition to being on the shores of Lake Winnipegois. The centre seems to be a power station. It also has a large, ugly school with a large, ugly arena to its side. There are an Esso and a Texaco petrol station, the latter looking rather closed. One or two houses are flying flags with a blue infinity symbol on white ground. The same symbol is painted on the school wall.
This is the flag of the Métis, an indigenous people descending from intermixing of European settlers and First Nation people. Because of their exposure to both Christian and aboriginal traditions, they formed their own culture, distinct from the First Nations and Inuit.
West of Camperville, a deer or possibly caribou crosses the road. In the south-west I can now see the Duck Mountains. They don’t appear to be very high, barely reach over the treetops. I have to pass an incoming farming machine, which is one-and-a-half lines wide and has lots of sharp, pointy spikes on its side. It looks like a chariot dreamed up by an overly ambitious AD&D player.
Shortly after Cowan the fields give way to forest as we are passing the south-westerly corner of Swan-Pelican Provincial Forest. Once that is over, the fields and farms return again. Somewhere off in the middle of a field stands a little brown church. On the horizon appears a huge beige factory. It turns out to be a mill of Louisiana Pacific, a manufacturer of building products originally from Tennessee.
A strong wind is sweeping across the plains. It constantly tries to push my car off the road, trying to trick me with unexpected gusts. This must be really bad in winter, when this wind comes straight from the North Pole.
I am crossing Roaring River, but it doesn’t look very roaring. The fact that the road actually has to go down and up again for the crossing the river’s gorge suggests that maybe it is roaring at occasions.
The town of Swan River begins with a two or three stores displaying combine harvesters and other large farming machines. Other than that, there are the usual chains. You know you have arrived in Canada’s west when every town has an A&W. There are hardly any fast food restaurants of this chain in the east. While they may be a symbol of Canada (at least to this author), the company was actually founded in California. The Canadian operation started in 1956 and later split ways with its American mother.
I mention this mostly because during the course of the morning I seem to have developed a bit of a headache and believe that having lunch may be a good idea. So I stop and have a burger. They also do root beer, but the taste of the stuff is unbearable (much like the Swiss institution of Rivella). But they do rather good burgers for a fast food enterprise.
North of Swan River, outside the village of Bowsman, a sign announces SS Outfitters. A bit of an unfortunate choice for a name, if you ask me. Which reminds me of a program on one of the more dubious TV channels I witnessed last night. Their mission was to find out who would win in a fight between Waffen-SS and Vietcong. They went about this with a fake science modelled after Mythbusters (there seem to be quite a few programs trying to cash in on the phenomenon, all of which fail bitterly). Fortunately, I can’t report who won. After the first pig carcass falling on spikes, I rather went to bed.
The road has returned to the Mountain Municipality, which still fails to have any mountains. This time, it stops just short of the second of the three mountain ranges of Manitoba, Porcupine Mountains. My map rather calls them Porcupine Hills which sounds altogether more appropriate. We are also slowly getting under a cloud cover. At the village of Birch River, the sun is gone.
Off the road lies the village of Bellsite. I feel the usual sting of guilt for not turning off and having a look. But what are you really missing? It most likely is yet another prairie village with two-and-a-half shops and some houses. Mafeking, which lies directly on the highway, has something special indeed: the tiniest little post office or, rather, post shed.
Once more, the highway leads into an area with dead trees. A sign says ‘Dawson Bay fire, we all paid the price.’ So apparently these dead trees really are leftovers from a big forest fire. The news are full with fires currently raging in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
North, we cross over Red Deer River which then turns north itself before flowing into Dawson Bay of Lake Winnipegois. There supposedly is a provincial park at the crossing, but they are a bit cheap with signs around here, so I miss it. The red-shouldered birds have been replaced by crows again, which have an unnerving habit of waiting for the last moment before flying off. But at least they always fly in the right direction.
I pass a Greyhound bus going south.
The forests turn more and more coniferous, indicating that we are returning into the great Boreal Forest of northern Canada. Just the other day, the logging industry and environmental groups announced a deal whereas new logging would be stopped in 29 million hectares and more sustainable practices would be developed for another 72 million hectares. The goal is to save the woodland caribou.
A sign indicates that we are entering Norman Region which my map knows nothing of and Google and Wikipedia only identify as a health service region of Manitoba. Would that really be worth a sign? And who is this Norman, anyway? An altogether more clear sign states that we cross the 53rd parallel. The road puts aside the ruler for a while and follows the shorts of Lake Winnipegois. Unfortunately, there are always bloody trees in the way so you can’t see anything of the lake.
The next river crossing is Overflowing River, which isn’t. Besides the bridge it has a camp ground, a petrol station, and a miniature golf course. It is supposed to have a provincial park, too, but there is no sign of it either. The mythical parks of Manitoba.
I have a little rest stop a bit further on. Off to the west I can hear frogs croaking somewhere. Still a lot of mosquitoes. I might actually have gotten a bite or two. (Shouldn’t have mentioned that. Starting to itch everywhere as I write. Excuse me for a second.)
We join the highway forming the eastern route north. I could have taken that one, but it looked a lot more lonely and didn’t feature a convenient overnight stay like Dauphin did. At a place called Westray on the map but being nothing but wilderness in reality, we also joint the railway coming up from Winnipeg which took an even more westerly path through Saskatchewan. We will cover the last few miles to The Pas together.
The town starts off with a sign declaring that Subways now is serving breakfast while at the same time (presumably) being open late. The welcome sign declares The Pas a tourist paradise and home of the Trappers Festival. Thereafter follows a chain motel boasting both a water slide and new management. And then comes the Good Thymes restaurant. Across the road is a drive in restaurant, a real one where you get your food brought to your car on a little tray, perhaps even by waitresses on roller skates.
The road runs along the railway yard. The yard marks the end of Canadian National, the two lines further north are owned by the Hudson Bay Railway since 1997. One line goes to Flin Flon, the other all the way to Churchill on the Hudson Bay, otherwise known as the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Every summer, hundreds of bears are lurking in the area to wait for the bay to freeze over so they can go back hunting seal. The railway line even features a passenger service, the twice weekly Hudson Bay from Winnipeg.
The buildings in The Pas, meanwhile, look all very new and modern. One has a mural of geese flying over a lake painted on its wall. But there are old buildings too. I counted three: the courthouse, the post office, and another one without any labels. The municipal centre is a concrete and sheet metal monstrosity. Across the street from it is le Hôpital Saint-Antione, which, admittedly, is the fourth old building.
Road and railway cross the Saskatchewan River which up here is rather wide. Beyond the river is a mall. So, let’s go to the mall. It turns out to be a bit sad. It had stores for most needs, electronics, clothing, furniture, stuff, but all are of the bargain variety. It also has an IGA grocery store which so far I have only seen in Quebec. Upstairs, the mall has offices of various Cree institutions. Which proves that The Pas has a large indigenous population. In fact, the name The Pas is Europeanized version of the name of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation.
Shortly after The Pas the sun come back out again, there are still clouds but they are rather thin now. A sign now claims that we are crossing the 54th parallel. Travel is fast in Manitoba.
The road travels along the west side of Grass River Provincial Park through the town of Cranberry Portage, of which I have no notes. Baker Narrows, a narrows of the Athapapuskow Lake has the usual tourism services and also Flin Flon’s airport. It has a five thousand feet runway and regular scheduled services to Winnipeg.
It is very rocky up here. Only a very thin layer of soil covers the rocks which often stick out. The road has been ruthlessly cut through, so there is rocks everywhere. Flin Flon itself seems to be build on a collection of really big rocks. It was only founded in 1927 as a company town of Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting and to this day is dominate by a giant smoke stack of said company.
It also is the only town whose name is derived from a character of a dime novel (although the hotel brochure uses the more grand term science fiction novel). The novel in question is ‘The Sunless City’ by one J. E. Preston Muddock in which a character named Professor Joseph Flintabbaty Flonatin discovers a city of gold underground which apparently is a rather unhappy place as he flees through an extinct volcano. Meanwhile, in the real world, the prospector Tom Creighton, searching for gold in the area discovered a large copper supply at the bottom of a hole. At the time he was reading the novel and so claimed that his must have been old Flin Flon’s hole.
There are a few more versions of the story (which, by my account, isn’t a really good one to begin with). In any case, the city is named after the professor a statue of whom was designed by cartoonist Al Capp and can now be admired at the city museum, together with various old railway stock.
Beer of the day: Fort Garry Dark Ale (Fort Garry being a microbrewery in Winnipeg. Unfortunately, the MLCC only had twelve packs, but at least that had a mix with four different brews. Not sure what I’ll do with all this beer.)