September 14 - Volksmarch in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario

Starting off the morning with a shower and blueberry pancakes made with freshly picked wild blueberries was just wonderful. I had brought the low-sugar blueberry, raspberry, and cherry jams that we made at home, so we used those as toppings for the blueberry pancakes. I was curious if the rather tart fruit jams would taste good on the somewhat sweet pancakes, and it turned out to be a great combination somewhat similar to the taste contrast of Lingonberry topping used on Swedish pancakes in some restaurants. The blueberry jam augmented the blueberry pancakes, of course, but even the raspberry and cherry jams blended well with the taste of blueberries in the pancakes. I have also noticed when making jams from mixtures of fruit like the plum-blackberry jam I made on Wanderung 6, that natural fruit flavors seem to almost always blend well. I didn't think that would be true for artificial flavors, and I wondered if there was any scientific reason for that. My supposition would be that the artificial flavors are somewhat simplified approximations of the natural flavor compounds, and these approximations do not meld in the same way the more complex natural flavors do. A rough analogy would be the lack of overtones in synthetically produced music compared to music derived from real instruments. In any event, we had a really mouth watering breakfast and were ready for the day.

The blisters on my feel were healing fairly well, but I still took the precaution of putting Band-Aids around 4 of them before we hitched up the trailer and drove into Sturgeon Falls to walk the other 5 kilometers of our Volksmarch. I parked our rig with a row of "Alouette" school buses in the recreation center parking lot and we started our walking tour of the town. Along the first leg we stopped off in a Canadian souvenir store for a bit, and I found a small handcrafted kayak that I decided to purchase as a memento, which naturally meant we had to carry it along for the rest of our walk.

Our fist stop was a rather graceful bridge over the Sturgeon River, and from there we had a nice view upstream to the old falls area, now dammed up, and downstream. The downstream river meandered through trees and the city and ultimately emptied into Lake Nippissing, I think. I couldn't quite tell if the upstream dam was a very small hydroelectric power generating station or a dam used by the old pulp mill that we saw on the western bank. If you ever get this way you might not see that pulp mill, however, because workers were energetically demolishing it as we passed by and it looked like they would complete the job in the near future. Since that land was smack dab in the middle of town, I was curious if they would rebuild a newer pulp mill or just convert the property to other uses like retail shops, but of the future there was no hint in the signs around the site.

Re-crossing the river a block or two upstream on another bridge, we zigzagged through the main commercial section of town to the north. Everyone we overheard while walking was speaking French and I had the general impression that the French Canadians were predominant in this area. We saw other subtle clues to the French influence such as the bilingual signs on the nature trails the previous day putting the French version on top of the English version. The situation was reversed from Sudbury, where English was predominant; one of the walking club members had mentioned that Sudbury was 30% French Canadian. Our impression was that the Sturgeon Falls area was majority French Canadian. You could use cues like the bilingual signs to construct a "dominant language" map of Canada that would have zones like "English Only", "French Only", "English Predominantly", and "French Predominantly". That kind of a map might be useful for travelers who only knew French or English and wished to avoid communication difficulties.

In any case the downtown appeared economically quite active and socially very pleasant. That is, there were far more people walking the streets at about 11 o'clock in the morning than I would expect in similar towns in the U.S. These were folks of every age, not just school children, so it wasn't just kids playing hooky. Possibly it was some aspect of the French cultural influence concerning social life, I'm not at all sure, but it certainly created a pleasant ambience for that part of our walk. Just north of the downtown area we passed a very pretty old Roman Catholic church with two graceful bell steeples on either side of the nave. I resisted the impulse to walk inside and see if the interior was equally graceful because I am not, after all, Roman Catholic, and the church was, so to speak, their turf. We continued north to a small park on the river with an even smaller bathing beach, and then curled back east and south toward the center of town past a couple of schools.

When I saw a small panel truck with "Joujoutheque Ambulante" and "Traveling Toy Library" on it in front of a day care center, I had one of my "Sacre Bleu" experiences. A Sacre Bleu experience is like a Deja Vu experience except that instead of "Haven't I seen that before?" it goes "Doh, that is such an obviously good idea, why didn't I think of it first?" What a wonderful way to distributed some great toys around to needy kids and at the same time ease the kids into contact with books and the idea of lending books from the library! I would equip such a traveling toy library with the best (and sturdiest!) toys I could find, along with the basic young child oriented books like "One Fish, Two Fish", "I am a Bunny" and that kind of thing. I suppose the very best thing would be to have a connection between some of the toys and the books that could be read to the child. You could, for example, have a stuffed bunny rabbit named "Nicholas" or have a wooden airplane to go along with the book "Mr. Small and His Airplane". I was so excited about the Toy/Bookmobile possibilities, such as using a trailer awning as a makeshift theater to give dramatic skits using the toys and the books (visualize Mr. Small flying his wooden airplane in a loop together with the appropriate sound effects), that the rest of the walk kind of went by in a blur. As I recall, the final segment of the walk was another set of zigzags through the residential area of the town back to the recreation center. There we jumped back into the truck and slowly lumbered eastward on Canada 17.

The drive to the town of North Bay where we had found another Volksmarch was quite short, only about 40 kilometers, which was just fine with me. I'm happy whenever the time we spend driving is less than the time we spend walking, biking, or museuming. The directions to the campground guided us right through the middle of the town, and that was unpleasant driving as the streets were narrow and there was a significant amount of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, the latter mostly school children dressed in white shirts or blouses with black pants or skirts, who seemed to be taking a lunch break. I didn't get the chance to see anything else, but Monika spotted the cathedral near which the starting point for our walk was located. We continued on to the south side of town and ultimately found our campground in what appeared to be nothing more than a driveway for a house. Fortunately, the driveway opened out onto a very nice, wooded campground in back that abutted a small park on a little creek that fed into Lake Nipissing. So we had a very pleasant and isolated campsite.

After we set up the trailer, Monika fixed a nice lunch and we ate in. That huge Canadian tax on eating out seemed to have noticeably shifted our lunchtime pattern from an "eat out whenever we can" to an "eat in whenever possible" strategy. So I settled for Rice-A-Roni rather than a Big Mac, which was probably all to the good, cardiac-wise, and during lunch we discussed what food supplies we would need for next year's planned trip to Alaska based on our current rate of consumption of foodstuffs. I figured the last couple of weeks when we were not eating out would better forecast our rate of food consumption in Alaska than trips such as Wanderung 4 or 6 in the U.S. where we tended to eat out for the lunchtime meal.

After lunch we turned on the air conditioning while Monika selected pictures on Daddy and I brought the journal up to date on Baby, and finally took a nap to round off the afternoon. This was positively, definitely, NOT life in the fast lane. To end our minimalist day we biked over to the beach in the park adjacent to our campground, and there we watched the sun set. A stone pyramid at the beach commemorated Canadian explorers from Samuel De Champlain to the voyageurs who all traveled from Ottawa over to Lake Nippising on a chain of rivers. From Lake Nippissing the French River leads down to Georgian Bay that connects to Lake Huron and Sault St. Marie, so that area was on the main route west for over 200 years. Having a beaver on top of the pyramid was appropriate in some sense, I suppose, because the fur trade fueled the traffic for most of that period. But I nevertheless had my doubts about how the beaver would feel about being thus immortalized; after all, beavers were nearly wiped out in large areas of North America due to the fur industry. In my humble view, it was ironic in the same fashion that having a Native American on top of a pyramid commemorating Columbus would be, although that may also exist someplace.

The views of the sunset out over the lake were, in fact, quite pretty. The sun reflected off the gentle little ripples on the lake's surface like liquid gold. Occasionally a boat would leave harbor and cruise by rather far off shore. We discovered why the boats were so far out when we saw a young man go in swimming, or wading more accurately. He was at least 100 yards off shore and still in water only up to his knees! That really shallow shelving must make that beach a great swimming/wading beach in the summer time, I would imagine.

As the sun finally set in the layer of mist that seemed to hang over the lake almost like a light layer of fog, a family with a black retriever named "Shadow" came down to the beach. To give Shadow some exercise, the mother and two children took turns throwing sticks in the water and instructing Shadow to fetch them. The dog was willing enough, and after giving the stick back he especially liked to shake the water out of his fur and get it on the person! Here I go anthropomorphizing again, but I would almost say that the dog had a sense of humor about all this.

Anyway, some ducks worked their way past our vantage point and the sun finally set into the haze layer, so we called it quits and headed back to the trailer for the night.

It started out to be a quiet night, but around 1 a.m. I felt a fly or gnat of some kind crawl deep into my ear and start buzzing like crazy. He seemed to be trapped and when he turned in a certain way his wings would hit my eardrum and boy was that loud! Very odd having direct stimulation of the eardrum like that, more like feeling an earthquake in your head than the normal process of hearing a sound. Well, I certainly couldn't sleep like that so I woke up Monika to see if she could pry the little guy out with tweezers, but no luck. Also, I was kind of reluctant to do anything that might get the critter too excited lest he start, say, nibbling on my eardrum in desperation to find a way out or something like that.

So off we went in the wee hours of the morning to sample the Canadian health care system first hand. Fortunately Canada uses the same system of signs that have a big white "H" on a blue background to signify where the nearest hospital is. Once we arrived, I found the Canadian nurses, office workers, and doctor were cheerful and efficient. After a wait of at most half an hour, the doctor flushed out my ear with water and washed the little gnat out, and that was the end of the problem. However, the Canadian system is not, of course, free to non-citizens so I had to pay a hefty $220 Canadian. The first $150 was a basic Emergency Room charge and the other $70 was the doctor's charge for diagnosis ("Yup, there's a bug in your ear!") and flushing the critter out. That ER charge is noticeably more the $80 for the basic Emergency Room charge when I pulled my neck muscle in Leavenworth, Washington (see Wanderung 6), which is a pretty apples to apples comparison in my opinion. The thought suddenly occurred to me that I was becoming accident prone, and I heartily wished I would stop visiting Emergency Rooms. In any case, the bug was out and we went back to the trailer for what remained of a night's sleep.