Sault Ste. Marie, St. Joseph's Island and Sudbury

I started out east early in the morning. Since I had skipped dinner, I treated myself to a filling breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and home fries at Barsanti's Small Frye, 23 Trunk Road. The home fries were excellent. (Author: I must have liked it a lot to record the address. But it seems from a search in 2013 that it's remembered in nostalgia as there are auctions for postcards of it.)

A billboard exhorted Americans, Join us against acid rain. Acid rain is a burning issue for Canadians and a source of acrimony between the two countries. There is little doubt now that the oxides of sulphur and nitrogen come from the exhaust towers of the midwest and blow northeastwards to descend on the forests of Ontario and Quebec. The soils there have insufficient capacity to neutralize the acid and the pH of the soil drops. Lakes become acidic and aquatic life dies.

I didn't have to travel far, only 300 km to the next hostel at Sudbury, so I took a side trip to St. Joseph's Island. This island is located between the mainland and Lake Huron and has a national historic park, Fort St. Joseph. After the American revolution, the British needed a base to maintain links with Indian tribes loyal to the British. So Fort St. Joseph was built. In those days there was no Transcanadian highway, of course, and the line of supply was long and tedious, wending through Ontario canals and Lake Huron. The St. Lawrence River was obviously unusable because of the Americans on the other side. So Fort St. Joseph had the distinction of being the most distant outpost of the Canadian colonies. Life was harsh. Today, the ruins are very peaceful. There is an excellent Parks Canada display about the history of the fort. It was 2 pm before I finally left St. Joseph's Island. I wondered if I would make it to the hostel by 5 pm.

The idea of living out in the Canadian country is always tinged with romanticism. When one mentions the Canadian wilderness, images come to mind of settlers holding out against the elements in the deep of winter, huddled around a log fire, kept from starvation by a well-provisioned pantry. I used to have such visions whenever I looked at a map of western Ontario with its sparse network of roads. These ideas came back to me as I considered how far I was from major cities. But this was not the reality. Although serious settlement is restricted to a thin strip around the main road and around country roads, the connection to civilization is firm. Dozens of trucks must traverse this Transcanadian highway every day, bringing supplies and mail, and social amenities were probably adequate, though far from what a urban dweller has come to expect. I presume that if one cared to wander away from this thin lifeline on any of those side roads branching out from the Transcanadian one would find the afore imagined wilderness.

A sign proclaimed This is Indian land. Obviously a protest from the natives, tired of the broken promises of white men. I saw cyclists now and then. Some looked like they were outfitted for a cross-continent trip. A side road was named Seldom Seen Road. Maybe it disappears in winter?

I thought I had wasted too much time at St. Joseph's Island, but I had plenty of time. At Sudbury I visited Big Nickel, a demonstration mine. They took us down the elevator for a tour of the galleries and explained how the ore is blasted out and then hauled out on rail cars. It was fascinating how the charges have to placed in the rock in a specified pattern and the charges have to be set off with precise timing. I didn't know before that the fertilizer ammonium nitrate is a perfectly good explosive. I must remember that next time I plan a revolution. No nickel was ever extracted from Big Nickel, it was just a demonstration mine. There was a project in the mine that grew vegetables under artificial light. A gigantic Canadian nickel stands outside the mine. Tourists take pictures next to it.

The landscape around Sudbury consists of bare, dark rock in many places. It looks like the mines are partly responsible for stripping the soil. Then again, Sudbury is located on the Canadian Shield, a mineral rich area and the soil was probably thin to begin with.

The Sudbury hostel had moved and I had to get directions from a friendly clerk at the railway station to find the new location. It turned out to be a boarding house with permanent residents, in addition to travellers like me. While I was making dinner, K, a Japanese hosteller walked in. He arrived on motorbike, all the way from Japan, via Asia and Europe. He had been travelling for a year already. He crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls and hoped to arrive in Alaska in a couple of weeks, before the summer ran out. Then he would head down the west coast of the US. Then home to Japan, I asked? No, he'll go to South America or Africa, if the money lasts. I admired this guy. He used to work as a programmer for a big corporation but found the logical thinking required beyond him, so he set out on his travels.

Where had he been to in Europe? He talked about Berlin, both East and West. He stopped for two months in Amsterdam early that year. I was in Amsterdam too, I exclaim. I pull out the American Discount Book Stores bookmark from my book. He laughs. He knows the store. He stayed at the youth hostel on Vondelpad and went each day to the Yamaha bike shop to work on his bike while awaiting a new engine from Japan. He also travelled to Belgium slowly, with a lame bike. Very cold, he says. Indeed, gray skies intensify the cold in one's bones.

How far is it to the next hostel, he wanted to know. I told him it was only 300 km to Sault Ste. Marie. But the next hostel, in Thunder Bay, was 800 km away. Too far for a day's journey. But the forecast predicted sunny weather the next day, a welcome change from the constant drizzle since the day before, so he might sleep in the open. He was caught in the day's rain too.

I asked K some questions about Japanese culture. How did they get their surnames, for instance? He said that long ago the Japanese didn't have family names. When the order went out for every family to get a surname, people adopted place names as identifiers. Matsushita, for example, means beneath the pine tree. Kinoshita and Suzuki are two of the most common family names in Japan.

I had wanted to see the slag pouring at the blast furnaces, said to be dramatic at night, but I decided to turn in early.