A Yankee in the Canadian Bush - Why here?

Bow Narrows Camp, 1961, was a pretty modest place

Chapter Two

Why this place?

My Dad had found it by chance. He and a friend, Milt Young, had set out in the spring of 1960 determined to be partners in a hunting and fishing lodge, either in Canada or Alaska. For years my parents had been going fishing to Eastern Ontario at the camp of my great uncle, Bill Baughman. Rainbow Lodge was on the Pickerel River, a tributary of the more famous French River that drains Lake Nipissing into Georgian Bay.

My mother, father, sister - Sandi - and I had become landed immigrants or legal residents of Ontario in 1959. I obviously had not been a planned child. Sandi was 11 years older than me and my brother, Bill, was 14 years older. In 1959 when I started Grade 1 or First Grade as they say in the States, Sandi graduated from high school in Willoughby, Ohio, and Bill graduated from Marietta University. Bill was also married to my sister-in-law, Ann, by this point and they were both enrolled in masters programs at the University of Michigan.

In a quirky turn of events, Sandi became my first teacher. Several years earlier Dad and Mom had bought Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty’s winter home in the railroad community of Pickerel River and had been using it as a summer cottage. The community of Pickerel River was where the Canadian National Railway crossed the river and was an official stop for the train. This meant it had a post office, a general store and a one-room school. Population might have been 100. The nearest highway was 10 miles upriver.

Dad had worked in the summer of 1959 as a carpenter building and repairing cottages on the river, right up to near-freeze-up. When September came around, the community still didn’t have a teacher, so they hired Sandi who was only 17 but with her high school diploma met the qualifications at the time.

There were about 10 kids in the school; the oldest was Sandi’s age. The school had a pot-bellied coal stove and a water pail for drinking plus some desks and chairs and a blackboard. It looked out at the river and the scenic CNR bridge. I got to take my Dick and Jane reading book home at night since we lived right next door.

A frequent task of my Dad that summer was replacing cabin foundation posts that had been gnawed in two by porcupines which were very abundant in that area. Porcupines were frequently at odds with cottagers and residents. They would eat the seats off outhouses, axe handles, shovel handles, porch railings and anything else that humans had touched, apparently craving salt.

It was in 1959 that I became an ace rock bass fisherman.  The dock in front of our house had a hole, probably three inches square, and by laying on my stomach and shielding my eyes, I could see the swarms of rock bass hiding beneath. Using a piece of line and a hook laced with a bit of worm, I would catch these little fish by the hundreds. Seeing the fish grab the bait was a particular thrill. I would put the “whoppers” on a stringer for supper. When Dad came back from work each day he would release all but one.

I would be on the dock right after breakfast and stayed there until dark except for a few forays back to shore looking for bait. I turned over every rock and log looking for worms and also grabbed any grasshoppers I could catch. Sometimes I ducked inside for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to take along. I came to know individual fish by their size and marks. There was Scarface, Stubby Fin, and Fat Lips. I realized that after I released a fish, it wouldn’t bite again for days. On cloudy days none of the fish would bite. Sometimes I would be watching the school and it would vanish just before a northern pike came swimming along. There was lots to learn here.

While I was pursuing the little fish under the dock, my Mom was after bigger game in the deep water. She would throw out a bobber with a minnow and let it move downstream with the current. Mostly she caught northern pike but sometimes walleye too.

One time she had to run up to the cabin for cigarettes and asked me to hold her rod. She had reeled in her line and pulled the minnow into the shallows between two docks. I was watching the struggling minnow when suddenly an enormous shadow moved across the bottom.  I ripped the minnow out of the river and ran to shore. No way did I want to hook this monster. A day later my mom tied into it. Using her baitcasting reel she fought the fish for a half hour. Finally, Yorky, the owner of the general store, saw what was happening and came running with a large net.

“You’ve got a big musky,” he yelled.

He just made it to the dock when the line broke. He figured the fish might have weighed 50 pounds.

My parents’ rule was that I must always wear a lifejacket when outside. There were no exceptions. If ever I set foot on the ground in front of the porch steps without the life jacket I was grounded inside for the rest of the day. That would have been torture for me so I didn't argue about the lifejacket.

One night my parents were holding a party. They were laughing, dancing and singing to guitar and accordion music. I was out of bait and the best time to replenish it was at night when I could catch nightcrawlers using a dim flashlight. So, I put on my lifejacket, picked up the “worm light” and a can and went outside. It had rained recently and the worms were out in force in the bits of soil between the half-buried boulders that were all over the front yard. Besides the laughing and music I could hear whippoorwills and buzzing insects. I was making a killing on the worms. The trick was to train the light to one side. If you shone it directly on them they vanished down their holes. I worked my way in between the boulders, getting closer to the noisiest insect, then moving farther away. Finally I had “picked” every place but where the bug had been buzzing the loudest. I slowly moved my light between the tufts of grass, my finger and thumb ready to pounce on the first thing that moved. And there it was, a really fat worm or even better -- two worms intertwined. Two for the price of one! My finger and thumb were just about to close on it when the worm began to vibrate intensely. I moved my light slightly to illuminate what was going on. It was the rattle of a rattlesnake. That was what had been making the buzzing.

I ran inside and told the grownups but no one but my Dad believed me. He got a brighter light and came with me outdoors. The snake was gone.

Our cabin at Pickerel River railway bridge

“It was right here!” I told him, pointing to an area next to the skirting below the cabin. Because of the incline this side of the cabin was about six feet off the ground. There was an access door to a storage area where Dad kept a stack of lumber. He shone the light all around under the cabin – no snake. He then unstacked the entire pile of lumber. Sure enough, there was the snake which he killed with a stick. It was a Massauga rattlesnake, now an endangered species.

The final thing that happened before we left the cabin that fall was that Dad shot a deer. He had been walking the railroad tracks hoping to see one when he heard a dog barking. It sounded like it was trailing something so he waited. Shortly a whitetail doe came out of the sparse bush and he shot it dead. Right afterwards the dog came out of the trees, sniffed the deer and ran back into the woods.

I was sitting at the kitchen table that afternoon when I was astonished to see a deer with a red-and-black wool shirt go by the window. Dad was carrying the deer over his shoulders and had buttoned his shirt on the animal so some other hunter wouldn’t shoot at it.

Dad had earlier shot a bear as well. He skinned this and sent the hide away to be tanned and made into a rug to hang in the lodge of the fishing and hunting camp he planned to find with his friend, Milt, the next year, 1960.

… to be continued

Other postings in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice