Kakabeka Falls, Ontario June 31-July 1, 1978

Manitoba, 'the forgotten province'.  I drove through it in less than a day, not stopping to take even a photo, not even stopping for lunch.  I wonder how often this is Manitoba’s fate.  Cross-Canada travellers west to east have had enough of the flat, monotonous prairie landscape by the time they’ve driven through Saskatchewan, and just want to be done with it.  Well, that’s my excuse, and now I’m in Ontario, where there are trees, and hills, and .... bugs.! 




At the first opportunity I drove down a dirt track and stopped for lunch.  A giant horsefly (they are so aptly named), crawled up the passenger seat of my car and slowly turned to peer at me with his yellow slitted eyes.  His long thin tongue dropped down obscenely between his legs.  He started using his tongue to clean his head – well, that’s what it looked like he was doing, I couldn’t be sure, and didn’t ask.  He continued his climb and I watched, enrapt as he repeated this procedure five or six times.  I wondered if this might be his pre-bite ritual?  I see him as a high priest of insects – decadent, totally abandoned to excesses of primping and preening – and then... the bite...and ecstasy! (for him, not me!)  Actually I didn’t give him the chance, having been bit by a horsefly when I was a kid in a canoe on one of BC’s Chilcotin lakes.  I can still remember the pain, and the big hole in my arm where the horsefly took a big chunk of my skin.  So I ushered this interesting, but ugly, black prince out of my car, and ate my lunch inside my hermetically sealed box.  Ontario.

 

Back on the road, the scenery was magnificent – lodgepole pine and aspen (or is it birch?) forests with carpets of long-stemmed white daisies and fabulous outcroppings of orange and yellow rock.  





Every now and again a little lake, such splendid little lakes.  I had to stop myself from venturing down the many access roads marked 'Silverline Camp' or 'Lake of the Woods Camp’.  They sounded so bucolic, but they all looked very private and very touristy. I was looking for a nice place to camp, but every time I stopped I was assailed by a variety of insects.  More horseflies, and also wasps, mosquitoes and no-see-ums.  So I kept driving.  At sunset I stopped to take a photograph in Kenora.  




And kept driving.  It wasn’t until 9:30 or so, when I was having difficulty staying awake at the wheel, that I finally stopped at a small, rather run-down looking (so cheap) motel in Kakabeka Falls.  I was just 30 miles west of Thunder Bay – a stone’s throw from the shores of Lake Superior.   


I woke up late the next morning and jumped into the shower – a luxury and my first in several days (I’d been too exhausted the night before even to shower!).  I was washing my hair when I heard pounding on my door.  Someone was yelling that it was 11:30!  11:30?!  Somewhere I’d ‘lost’ an hour (somewhere I've undoubtedly 'lost' plenty of hours, but that’s another matter).  And it wasn’t just the time change – I’d slept for over 12 hours!  I put it down to the fatigue of long-distance driving.  Too many hours, too many miles.

 

I found a little café in town for breakfast.  So here I was on Canada Day, in Kakabeka Falls Ontario where there was no sign of celebration – no flag-waving, no parade, not even a ‘good morning, happy Canada Day’ from the waitress.  Just business – tourism – as usual.  I peruse my map, looking for likely camping spots on the lake, and settle on one that sounds promising: Killbear Provincial Park.  Wonder who killed the bear?  And when?

Location: Kakabeka Falls, ON P0T 1W0, Canada

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