A Yankee in the Canadian Bush - Bad Ice

My mom, Del, and me on the ice in Trout Bay, 1961

Chapter One

The little Cessna 180 fired up, turned abruptly and blasted my mom and me with its propwash. Then the pilot gunned the throttle and the little aircraft quickly left us behind, its metal skis clattering along the uneven lake ice. In a minute it was airborne and after gaining altitude banked around and came right back over us, hundreds of feet in the air now. The pilot wagged his wings back and forth, a friendly gesture. In minutes the sound of the aircraft was gone and we were left in absolute silence, alone in the middle of a frozen lake in Northwestern Ontario. It was 1,300 miles from the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where we had started but it might as well have been the far side of the moon.

 At age 8, I was thrilled at the adventure that lay before us. I’m sure my mom, Del, was praying, “Dear God, please bring the plane back with Don.” That would be my dad who was left back in the little town of Red Lake, Ont. There had been no room for all three of us and our gear in the little ski plane.

There was nothing to do but sit on our suitcases and look at the dense forest on the shores a half mile away in any direction. A couple of ravens flying over a ridge was the only movement. There wasn’t a sign of human life anywhere.

“How’s Silky?” my mom asked.

I unbuttoned the quilted cover on his Brownie camera-sized cage. My green-and-yellow budgie or parakeet was firmly grasping his perch.

“He’s fine,” I replied, not even aware of how incongruous it was to be sitting on a sheet of ice in Northern Ontario with a tropical bird.

With these possessions we were ready to start a new life in the wild

In an hour the plane returned, unloaded my dad and the rest of our possessions and departed. We took stock of our things: there were many boxes of groceries -- enough to last a month -- one piece of mis-matched luggage each, a home-made box of carpenter tools, a tiny box crammed with mechanic tools, a Second World War portable typewriter and a make-up case filled with half-empty bottles of medicines and bandages. It wasn’t just the stuff we had brought for the trip, it was everything we owned in the world and with it, plus a walk-behind Lawnboy mower, a propane fridge and stove and a couple of things salvaged from the dump still back in town, we began what would become a 56-year life in Ontario’s North.

In the fall of 1960 my parents had signed an agreement to purchase Bow Narrows Camp. It was a new beginning for them. Two years earlier they had lost everything that they had worked for their entire lives: a construction business, a dream home, their car and truck, all of their possessions. Everything had been foreclosed upon and confiscated by the IRS and the bank after a series of home buyers reneged in purchasing homes my father had built for them. When money was running out, they had paid their life-long employees, not the big guys. They hadn’t declared bankruptcy but there was absolutely nothing left.

Instead of seeing it all as a crushing blow, these two who had been a young couple in the Great Depression decided it was an opportunity to try something new. So they left their lives of football booster clubs, PTA meetings and Boy Scout fundraisers behind and now were walking across the ice with their youngest child, suitcases in hand, refugees in a new land.

It must have been an especially daunting experience for my Mom. Not only was walking on a frozen lake a first for her, so was the flight. She said later she had been tempted to get out of the plane back in Red Lake after the pilot had got in, seemed perplexed and then opened the door to yell at the ground crew.

“How do you start this thing?” he asked.

Someone came over and pointed to a spot on the newly upholstered dashboard. The starting button was hidden behind the fabric. It had not yet been cut out.

It had taken 20 minutes in the air. Now we had a mile and a half to walk to the camp. The temperature was in the 50s F and the ice was in bad shape. That is why the pilot had set us down so far away. Out on the big bays the ice was still sound. Closer to camp where it was shallower, there was open water around many of the islands and the shoreline. It was nearly the 1^st of May.

As we walked my dad kept reassuring us that the white sections of the lake ice were good. There were also dark sections.

After awhile we came to a two-storey log building. It would eventually become part of the camp but at that time it was privately owned and was a relic from the famous 1926 Gold Rush. A beaver had cut down a large poplar tree right in front of the cabin and the tree laid across the top of the ice, spanning the moat of open water between the ice sheet and the shore. We used it as a bridge.

We found a faint trail leading to the camp which lay through the dense forest a couple of hundred yards farther.

Stepping out into the clearing of the camp, it became obvious that no one was there. The owner, Bill Stupack, had said in a letter that he would make sure to be at camp around the first of May. Bill was a trapper and a prospector and apparently was off pursuing those activities.

On the door to his private cabin was the message: “Back every other day.”

It wasn’t clear on which day we had landed.

“I bet Bill has a toboggan around here somewhere,” mused Dad. Sure enough, he found a toboggan hanging on a shed.

“I think I’ll stay here, in case Bill comes back,” said Mom who I think had been unnerved by the deteriorating ice.

Dad and I took the toboggan and started back toward Trout Bay. We would make three trips before all of our possessions were back on dry land.

Sunset at that time of year in the North doesn’t come until late. When it was drawing near it became evident that this must be the day that Bill wasn’t coming back. All of the cabins were locked. Dad inspected them all to see which could be broken into the easiest and settled on a log cabin next to Bill’s. Using a crowbar from the carpenter box, he pried off the hasp and padlock.

Inside was a room with a table and chairs and a counter with pots, pans, plates and silverware and a Coleman stove. There were two bedrooms, each with a double bed and on each bed was a single, cotton blanket. We had not brought blankets since we knew each cabin was furnished with them. But Bill had locked the blankets up in a cabinet in his cabin to protect them from mice over the winter.

Fortunately, there was a tin wood stove in the kitchen area and nearby was a woodshed. The temperature was falling rapidly. It would go below freezing that night.

Dad got a fire going in the stove, a bucket of water from the lake, and in short order the cabin was toasty. There was fuel in the Coleman stove and Mom cooked up supper. We laid down in our beds with our single blanket and quickly fell asleep while outside the horizon stayed light for hours after the sun set.

...to be continued      

Other postings in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft