When I woke up and stepped outside that first morning in Canada, it was to a very satisfying realisation: that for the first (and perhaps only) time on the trip, I was somewhere obscure.
Magnetewan, northern Ontario, qualifies as pretty obscure. It has a population of three hundred and something. The general store sells T-shirts that read 'Downtown Magnetewan.' Standing in downtown Magnetewan you can throw your voice about as far as uptown Magnetewan.
Standing on the road outside Ron and Ann's house, surrounded by a tableau of pine trees, and timber houses, I had no doubt that I was somewhere else; somewhere other than the America I had spent the past two weeks in. The air was a little chillier, sharper, the horizons felt a long way off; it was Canada. Whether it was typically Canadian I might never know. I am perversely pleased to say that Magnetewan is virtually my only experience of the country, apart from the apparition of Toronto as we sped past it late at night.
Prior to our arrival there had been some anxiety about whether the cottage at the lake would be available. Fortunately Ann's parents had vacated it, and we were free to use it. This involved a short drive down to the jetty and then a twenty minute powerboat ride across Amik Lake (I've seen that spelled at least two different ways, and I'm not sure that I've remembered either of them correctly.)
First though, I stopped off at the bank, and got some Canadian currency. Like us, they've replaced their $1 and $2 notes with coins. The latter are silver on the outside, with a bronze centre, looking a bit like they might have chocolate in the middle if you unwrapped them. On one side is a bear, and on the other is the Queen of England. It seemed odd to have come 10,000 miles to find another place at the end of the world, where once again I ended up walking around with this strange woman in my wallet. Canada, like the US, has 25c pieces, though I don't know if they're called 'quarters'. Here, we have 20c pieces, which I suppose Americans would call 'fifths'. We used to have fiftieths and hundredths, but they went out of circulation some time ago.
When I told the woman in the bank who I was staying with, she responded with an expression which I couldn't read. I wouldn�t read too much into my not being able to read her, because, as was to become apparent at the Magnetewan pie cart (or whatever it's called), being members of the same commonwealth doesn't apparently render us wholly intelligible to one another. Hence, no matter what I asked for at this place, I'd end up with black coffee, no sugar. This was actually a welcome bit of simplicity for me, because even in somewhere as provincial as Tasmania I find the modern business of ordering coffee increasingly daunting. "Coffee, please." "Would you like cappuccino, espresso, flat black, tall such-and-such, cafe late'..?" Bugger me, I don't know - whatever happened to a cup of COFFEE? It's alive and well, in a little shed on the side of the rod in downtown Magnetewan. Just don't ask for anything else.
Despite being quite some distance inland from Lake Huron, Parry Sound, or whatever it's called locally, Magnetewan has a sort of maritime feel to it, by virtue of being plonked down beside Amik Lake.
Crossing the lake in the family runabout with Ron, Ann and the girls, I began to experience the awed feeling one gets in the presence of natural beauty; indeed I began to appreciate that the Orrs had themselves a pretty special bit of the world up there in northern Ontario. The lake conforms so closely to the picture postcard mental imagery I had of Canada, that it seemed a little improbable. Its thickly wooded shores enclose it in green folds, frequently sprouting into fingers of land, at the apex of which a cottage nestled attractively. The whole foreshore of the lake gives the impression of a wilderness studded with the occasional holiday shack. Being accessible only by boat, or by snowmobile in winter (a somewhat hazardous means of transport; I gather they occasionally crash through the ice) - there are no roads into the area - these dwellings are quite isolated from each other, except via the lake itself.
Eventually our destination hove into view (pardon the nautical preferences; perhaps I've been called 'mate' too often). This was almost too perfect: too much beauty; too perfectly Canadian. A green timber boat house (I thought it was the cottage itself, till we drove into it), sitting against the foreshore, surrounded by pines, between a pristine blue sky, and the deep, blue of the lake. A maple leaf flag flew beside it. We pulled up beside an impressive, 1960's style runabout (launch?) with polished timber panels. I'd never seen a boat like this in real life. It looked like something out of an early 60's James Bond movie, and indeed for a moment or two the whole scene took on a Dr No-ish quality.
The cottage itself was set back a little way up the hill from the boat shed, on a point of land surrounded on three sides by water, and on the fourth by a superb forest, which retreated mysteriously and intoxicatingly into somewhere nameless.
The cottage possessed a distinctly different atmosphere to its Tasmanian counterparts. Here a holiday shack is usually a casual, if not outright ramshackle affair, filled with 30 year-old furniture that Auntie so-and-so donated (perhaps I'm superimposing some childhood memories here. I have seen some alleged holiday homes built recently, which look rather ostentatious from the outside.) In any event, this cottage exuded a relaxed, but pristine ambience, as if it had a very professional attitude to being a holiday shack. The effect was such that had Dean Martin materialised, he might have blended in quite seamlessly. (I don't really know where this is coming from, but the interior of Ann's parent's cottage, at least for the present, seems to be occupied by Dean Martin, surrounded by a lounging bevy of bikinied women, who might shortly joining him on the launch for a boating accident. I'm sure none of this occurred to me at the time.)
Ron and Peggy played a game of somethingorother, which I observed, and which I think Peggy won. I gather this was not at all unusual. Soon the pull of the forest became irresistible though, and I set off in the late summer afternoon to do some modest exploring.
Tir' had mentioned to me that pack of wolves roamed in the forest behind the cottage; that they could be heard howling sometimes at night, and that the stripped carcass of deer were sometimes found nearby. I didn't really expect that I would see a wolf, but then again I had no idea just what the chances really were. Certainly I could _imagine_ such a meeting, in the quiet deep of the woods, in a break where the late afternoon sun pushed through the boles of the trees, creating a spotlit stage for such an encounter. Not surprisingly it didn�t happen, and nothing was heard from the local pack for the three nights that I was there. Still, this was a forest where wolves came, and that was something. That was certainly something. It was a marvellous walk.
The forest is also somewhere mosquitoes come, and they deserve a separate mention. For all that the Australian bush is deservedly known for its rich pageant of insect life, I hadn't encountered anything like these mosquitoes before. Evidently raised on the resilient hides of grizzly bears, my clothing proved no hindrance to them, and I managed to get punctured all over my torso, with the consequence that I spent the rest of the night in a state of considerably itchiness (mosquitoes, and all blood-sucking things have a particular fondness for me, so it seems. If you want to clear an area of leeches, just send me on ahead.)
Just before I returned to the cottage I noticed a flurry of motion in a tree, quite near the water. IT was a red squirrel. He zipped about acrobatically, in sudden, sinuous flourishes, while I looked on admiringly. "Oh, him", Ron and Ann said, when I told them.
It was a fitting end to a wondrous day. My room, like the launch, was timber panelled. That night I luxuriated in a double bed, and my own room: the first of the trip. Dog stood on the bedside table, facing the window, waiting for dawn over the lake.
