A Yankee in the Canadian Bush -- Racism

 

Adam Paishk with leg of moose at old boathouse

Chapter 10

Editor's note: It is appropriate that this chapter appears today as Sept. 30 is Orange Shirt Day in Canada. Started in 2013, Orange Shirt Day is a day to remember First Nations children who were taken away from their parents and sent to residential schools, from the 1860s to the 1990s. The Canadian

Government program was operated by various churches with the stated purpose of forcing the children to denounce their heritage and assimilate into what was considered mainstream culture. The children at the schools were forbidden to speak their native languages; their hair was cut and they were not allowed to contact their parents. In 2008 the Government apologized for the program which was widely recognized as cultural genocide. In addition to being ripped away from their families, the children were frequently assaulted, sexually assaulted, starved and used for medical experiments. Many of the children died at the schools, were buried in unmarked graves and their parents never told what happened to them.

Although I had never heard of the word "racist," it became obvious as the weeks went by that first year at camp that Bill Stupack hated "Indians." We were with Bill every day while he and Dad built Bill's new cabin about a mile from the camp. During that time he never missed an opportunity to point out that Indians were the "scourge" of the land. According to Bill they were lazy, stupid, thieving people who you should always avoid. Most of all, they were drunks, he said. Bill himself was a teetotaler.

We were new to Canada and Bill was really our only friend so far. It would have been easy to accept his views but to my surprise, Mom and Dad were not swayed to his side.

"Why does Bill hate Indians so much?" I asked my mom one day.

"I don't know," she said while she rolled out pie dough on the kitchen table. "We may never know.

"But here is what we believe: God created all people equal and he made them in lots of colours. We treat everybody the way we would like them to treat us -- with kindness and respect. Right?"

Mom would often read the Bible and seemed more religious than Dad although every once in awhile he surprised me when he would quote some biblical passage, usually verbatim, such as, in this case: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Then Mom added something that I recognized at the time was a new life lesson and maybe not even one of the Commandments. Up until then it had been: don't lie, cheat, steal, swear or hurt other people plus five other Commandments that I didn't think applied to me yet. Pretty straightforward stuff. This new lesson took some thinking.

"We don't let other people pick our friends for us. God gave us a brain for a reason."

Huh! 

As far as I knew, Mom and Dad had no life experiences with Indians. There didn't seem to be any at Pickerel River other than the wife of the next door neighbour. Dad would surprise everyone for the rest of his life whenever mentioning the woman -- Mary -- by always immediately adding, "And she was a good woman!" as if someone was getting ready to say otherwise.

Anyway, after Bill moved into his new house I was surprised when on one of Dad's first trips to town with the boat, he brought back two "Indian" men -- Frank and Adam Paishk, brothers who lived in the old log cabins at the other end of the narrows that led to camp. Dad had hired them to help with some project. Frank, about 40, only stayed a couple of days but Adam, about 30, ended up working the rest of summer and fall. He also became our teacher about "Indian" ways. 

Frank and Adam had been born right in the cabins where they still lived. They were trappers in the winter and the area around camp was their registered trapline. It had been their father's before them.

Adam smiled any time you looked his way and finished almost every sentence with a laugh.

"He is so polite," my mom said one night after Adam had gone to one of the guest cabins for the night. There was no other place for him to sleep since Dad had not yet built a bunkhouse, and the guest cabins were nearly all empty anyway because we had so few customers.

Adam spoke perfect English and seemed well-educated. Not only could he read and write but "his handwriting is absolutely beautiful," noted Mom. "Better than mine even." That was a high compliment coming from someone whose writing was always commented upon.

"Where did you go to school?" she asked Adam. I don't remember where he said other than it wasn't Red Lake. Most likely it was Sioux Lookout, about 150 kilometers to the east or Kenora, a similar distance to the southwest. This mystified Mom.

"Was your family living there at the time?" she asked.

No, said Adam. His family had always lived at the west end of Red Lake.

"Then why did you go all the way there for school?" she persisted.

"That's where the Indian School is," Adam explained.

Oh! Indian kids and white kids didn't go to the same school! It was the first we knew about this but it would be four decades later that we learned about the horrors at those residential schools.

 We learned from Adam that the Indian people in the northwestern region of Ontario were Ojibway. 

"That's the same, I think, as in Eastern Ontario where we had a cabin," said Mom.

"Yes," Adam confirmed. "And there are Ojibways in Manitoba and even in some of the States. There are lots of Ojibway people," he laughed. "Up north, there are Cree," he added.

Mom found some Indian ornaments we had brought from the Pickerel River. One was a picture frame made of birchbark and decorated with porcupine quills and the other was a birchbark heart with two small drums or barrels and a canoe slung beneath. 

"Do Ojibway people here make these kinds of things?" she asked.

Adam said no. For one thing, there were no porcupines here. They had all died from a disease many years ago. 

In Red Lake, Ojibway women made things out of moose hide and decorated them with glass beads, he said.

Other things Adam taught us were that native people kept their persons and clothes fastidiously clean.  To a man, they were the hardest workers Mom and Dad had ever seen. They were also exceedingly clever and could make all sorts of things from the bush. Adam could make a whistle out of a poplar sapling in about two minutes. In the spring time when the sap was flowing heavily, he would cut a six-inch length and turn the bark completely off in one twist of his hand. Then he carved a notch and a flattened a stretch of the wood leading to the notch. He put the bark, which had come off intact, back on and handed it to me.

"Here, Danny, blow into this."

It tooted perfectly.

In the months that followed he made me a model Cessna 180 floatplane using bits of scrap aluminum flashing and also a large wooden plane with wheels and a propeller that would turn into the wind. He suspended the plane with three strings from a long pole. I could either sweep the pole through the air or run with it. The plane would "fly" with its prop spinning. I would pretend the grass was trees and would fly the plane into landings on the bare dirt trails around the camp.

Adam also taught me how to puncture a balsam blister with a twig, then throw it into the water. The twig will shoot forward, away from the resin exuding from the other end. It was like a boat under power.

One time Dad and Adam were cutting out windfalls across the trail on a portage lake. I would help by dragging away branches. We were hot and thirsty when we reached the lake and Adam surprised us by going directly to a small birch tree, cutting a six-inch strip of bark from it and then folding it into a cone. He then held the cone in place by splitting the end of a branch. He reached this dipper as far out into the lake as he could and passed it back to us for a drink. It was practically watertight and the birch gave the cold water a wonderful taste.

"That Adam is a quick study," observed Dad after Adam had worked at camp a couple of weeks.

He quickly put him to work making head and footboards for all the metal frame beds in camp. These were made out of three-inch diameter spruce, aspen and birch which Adam peeled with a drawknife. Dad then showed Adam how these could be fitted together by making a dowel at the ends of one piece and a hole, drilled with a brace and bit from Dad's toolbox, on another. The dowel was made by making a shallow cut with a saw around the log, then splitting the wood from the end toward the cut. Adam used his Mora hunting knife for this. When the dowel was nearly round, he could finish it with a little whittling with the knife and finally, sandpaper. It sounds laborious but Adam could fabricate the ends for a double bed in just a day. Single beds were much easier. He could produce four or five of these daily.

"Danny, do you know what Paishk means in Ojibway?" Adam asked me one day. Paishk, of course, was Adam's last name.

"No," I said.

"It means nighthawk," he said, then added. "Do you know what a nighthawk is?

I didn't.

"It's a bird that you see sometimes just before it gets dark. When I see one I'll come get you."

Sure enough, a day or so later, Adam pointed out the narrow-winged birds, zigzagging through the evening sky, catching bugs.

It occurred to me then to be on the lookout for Ojibway names of things. The first time I met someone named Keesic -- another common family name in the Red Lake area, I learned it meant "Blue Sky."

Ojibway people have really cool names, I thought. 

In the years that were to follow we learned that native people were nothing like what Bill Stupack had described although most of the men who worked at camp were indeed alcoholics. Mom and Dad didn't see that as a racial thing. They both came from large families and most of their brothers and sisters were alcoholics too. A couple of the men who guided at camp didn't drink at all and none of the few women did. We would also meet lots of Ojibway men and women who lived in Red Lake who were not drinkers.

Contrary to what Bill had told us, Ojibway people where the most decent, honourable people we had ever met. And they were scrupulously honest. I would go on to spend a lot of time with these people. They treated me like one of their own.

Nearly all the men who worked as guides and camp workers were single, homeless men. In the winter they trapped or worked as wood cutters. We didn't understand at the time why they didn't have homes but Dad recognized that they were the most skilled.

"These guys know the bush like the back of their hands. They were born there. There isn't a lake they haven't been to," he said.

We also realized that Ojibway people were almost all very poor. Dad thought it ridiculous that the government wanted them to live on reserves. Why? There was nothing to do there. We should help them build homes in town, he said.

We had a lot to learn about the history of native people, the racism that went behind segregating them onto reserves, the racism that saw them arrested and jailed for being intoxicated while white inebriates were given a ride home by the cops. We didn't know that in the past native people had been decimated by diseases brought by Europeans, that priests had told them their deaths were God's way of punishing them for "living like Indians," which is to say sustainably and with a reverence for all living things. 

We did know that the U.S. Constitution was fashioned after the Six Nations Confederacy. That was about all that was taught in our schools.

A couple of decades later I would marry a descendant of those Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee (People of the Long House.) Brenda Cooper's grandmother was a Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve in Southern Ontario. Brenda was extremely proud of her heritage and would go on to teach me things she knew about her First Nation.

Ironically, Brenda's ancestors and mine were from the same basic area. Before the American Revolutionary War, the Mohawk had lived in what became Pennsylvania and western New York. My ancestors were from the Ohio-Pennsylvania area.

...to be continued

Others in this series...

Roots

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here? 

A Gold Mine

Talking Bill into Selling

Red Lake in the '60s  

First Winter

Bullies
Wolverine

 

The Story of the Three Bears

Once upon a time there was an apple tree in our yard

Those crabapples were red and juicy and Cork's favorite

Along came a mama bear

These apples are just right, she said

But they are too high to reach from the ground

"I'll knock the apples down to you kids," she said

"Or I'll break the branches so we can reach them"

No apples, broken branches are the end of the story

What is the second right answer?

Our house and drive in Nolalu, Ontario

 Years ago I took a course that changed my life. It was called The Phoenix Seminar and the instructor was Brian Tracy. As I recall, the course took several days. I was one of maybe a dozen enrolled in the class which was facilitated by Irby Stewart, a man whom I had worked with at Great Lakes Forest Products in Thunder Bay. Irby was a fascinating man. He was a forester and was in management at the company. He also started up his own business on the side called Positive Communications.

My introduction to Irby's talents began when Brenda and I attended one of his public events which was held in the city's largest hotel ballroom. I forget the exact title of the seminar but Irby was all about the importance of being positive so that might have been it right there. 

I think we went because I had gotten to know Irby at work and a bunch of us were interested to see what his sideline was all about.

We got there early and shook hands with Irby at the registration table.We were followed by 150 others and took seats at tables all over the ballroom.

Once the doors were closed, Irby, wearing a microphone, astonished us all by going from table to table and thanking us individually, using our full names. We weren't wearing name tags. He had remembered everyone's name from that moment when he met them at the door. A few of us he knew personally, of course, but there were probably 100 or more that he had never seen before.

"You probably wonder how I did that," he remarked. "You might think I have a photographic memory, or maybe I'm a genius of some kind. Well, I'm no smarter than you. I did this because I have learned a system for remembering names. Anybody can do it."

That was the gist of his message that night: We can change anything in our lives by being positive and by seeking out the knowledge that we lack. Want a better memory? Learn how to do it. Make learning a habit. And, most of all, beware of the pitfalls that come from being negative, things like the "victim" mentality. 

I left Great Lakes Forest Products, went back into journalism and eventually back to Bow Narrows Camp. I kept in touch with Irby and when the chance came to take The Phoenix Seminar I at first balked at the cost. I think it was $500. That was pretty much my winter's spending money at the time. 

"It's not a cost," said Irby. "It's an investment."

The course was extensive, he explained. It taught how we can use personal psychology to deal with virtually everything. It taught methods for dealing with stress, memory, grief -- all sorts of problems -- and how to get the most joy out of life. The course was taught by video with Irby stopping after each segment to ask us questions and do problems in a workbook. At the course end we would be given a set of audio tapes of the seminar and the workbook. 

In the end, it was just my faith in Irby that made me sign up. I never regretted that decision and I have probably re-taken the course through the audio tapes a dozen times since. I rank its impact on my life right up there with getting married, having kids and graduating from university.

The seminar was so extensive and thorough that it is just impossible to summarize it. One thing that I use every day is its revelations into problem solving. When looking for a solution to any difficulty it is human nature to latch onto "The Right Answer." By posing the question, "What is the Second Right Answer?" we remind ourselves there are always alternatives and to explore them before making a decision. 

We should really call it the Best Answer, not the Right Answer, and we should always be aware that any answer has a time element to it. The best answer today might not be the best tomorrow and similarly answers made yesterday might not be the best today.

A neat group problem-solving technique is to write down seven solutions to any problem. This forces the group to not seize upon the "obvious answer."  It also makes us look more closely at the problem.

A remarkable young man who worked several years at camp was Ben Godin. Ben already had a lot of skills when he came but he was also a quick learner and probably most importantly, was sensitive to why other people acted the way they did.

One time Ben was helping me pull the fishing boats out of the lake for the season. These were stored upside down on a concrete pad where the old fish house used to be. We pulled the boats out of the water using a slide and the electric golf cart, then manoeuvred them by hand into a row on the pad using rollers and a rope pulley. It was tedious work.

After a couple of boats, Ben asked, "Is this how you used to pull out all the boats, with the rope pulley, before you got the golf cart?" I answered in the affirmative.

"I guess that is why you put all the boats right here next to the lake," Ben added.

Suddenly I realized this was Ben's polite way of pointing out that since we were pulling the boats out with the golf cart, we could put them anywhere in the yard and without needing to wrestle them onto the pad with the pulley. It was a slap your forehead moment. The best answer of yesterday no longer applied.

I thought of this when listening to reaction to the federal Liberal Government's Speech from the Throne the other day. The Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, was apoplectic that the government isn't going to spend the necessary billions to prop up the oil industry in Alberta. The oil business is in decline around the world. Oil prices have tanked and not just because of the pandemic. There is a glut of oil on the market because the world is turning away from fossil fuels and turning toward renewable energy sources. This is largely led by the private sector. Witness Amazon's energy plan. This retail giant wants 100,000 electric vehicles and has set a schedule for total renewable energy in all of its operations 10 years faster than required by the Paris Climate Accord.

Renewable energy is today's answer and there are limitless opportunities in this field. Ironically, Alberta is already Canada's leader in wind and solar generation and this industry is booming there. Where is it getting its employees? From yesterday's oil industry.

When I hear people like Kenney moan about not spending taxpayer money on oil, I think what he might have done back in the early 1900s. Should we all have chipped in to help companies make horseshoes when everyone was buying Model Ts?

Remember: yesterday is history. Tomorrow's a mystery. Today is a gift; that's why it's called the Present.

 

Here's to the fungus among us

 

Amanita muscaria

The Amanita muscaria are enormous this year. I have seen many the size of dinner plates. Too bad they are poisonous because each one would make a meal. They certainly are beautiful.

There are some really interesting facts and stories about this mushroom that I went over in one of my old blog postings.

A fall mushroom that I never noticed until this year is the Upright Coral Fungus or Ramaria stricta. Isn't nature wonderful?

Upright Coral Fungus

Not just the times that are achanging

 "Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way"

Joni Mitchell

 

All my life I have studied the clouds at Red Lake. Not just because they can be beautiful, awesome or menacing but because they tell the future. They are the weather forecast. As I plied the waters between town and camp, I knew what was coming: glassy calm or a roaring tempest, gentle rain or a deluge.

There was something strange about the clouds at Red Lake last summer. They didn't behave the same. For instance, weather systems have always moved from west to east. Not this year. In fact, one day there were small storms moving simultaneously in all directions. I went out fishing right after a storm had passed, moving west to east as normal, and looking north, saw another storm over Pipestone Bay, heading south. The whole storm was also rotating and had a shelf cloud in a circle that spread for miles. I went back to the cabin and watched from the dock but the storm missed us entirely, moving over Trout Bay. To the east I could see another thunderhead and realized it was headed north.

The next day I met Brian who had seen it all too. He called them mini-cyclones and said they are common in Kansas. What are they doing up here?

Reflecting on what was missing

Scene off our dock this summer

In the 56 years that the Baughmans owned and operated Bow Narrows Camps it was our good fortune to have seen nearly 20,000 guests, almost all from the United States. By comparison the Municipality of Red Lake has only 4,000 residents.

Many, many of those guests came year after year, generation after generation. Some came more than once a year. I would like to say something here on their behalf.

These people love Red Lake. They love Bow Narrows Camp. They love Northwestern Ontario and they love Canada. Their annual trips were far more than just about catching fish. They were a sanctuary from the stress and madness of modern life, a way to cope, a balm for the soul.

The ability to boat alongside loons, to see moose and other wildlife, stand in awe at night under the Milky Way, meant everything to them. 

We know how sad they were that they couldn't come this summer. We were sad too. We missed those handshakes and hugs, the jokes, the catching-up on life stories. We love you all.

We just need to stay safe. Stay smart. Beat the virus. And get back up here!

When we were at the cabin this summer we heard the Grand Old Opry one Saturday starring Molly Tuttle and Old Crow Medicine Show. Here's a link to a YouTube video with them that was not part of that night but I think you will find it particularly relevant to the posting above.

This wildlife program highly successful

 One wildlife management plan that has been very successful for me here at our home in Nolalu has been the placing of nesting boxes for Eastern Bluebirds. In the 35 years that I have placed out boxes there have been at least one pair of nesting birds each year. This year I believe we had two nesting boxes occupied at the same time and at least one of those females also had two clutches. An unusual twist to the nesters this summer was that while there were two females, there seemed to be only one male.

I place out pairs of nesting boxes, about 15 yards apart. This system allows tree swallows to claim one of the boxes. They are normally the more aggressive species and nest earlier than the bluebirds. They are also territorial and will defend their nesting area against other tree swallows. This leaves the second box open for the docile bluebirds. 

Both species are wonderful birds to have around your house. The swallows gulp down large quantities of flying insects while the bluebirds concentrate on crawling bugs. Bluebirds hunt by sitting on a perch and watching for bugs and caterpillars on the ground. They prefer to hunt over bare ground such as you would find in a garden although they will also settle for the short grass in a lawn. Our bluebirds also do well in fields where the vegetation isn't more than about six inches.

Bluebirds are fairly common in many areas of eastern North America now thanks to nesting box programs. As recently as the '80s they were considered a threatened species. European starlings and house finches (another import) had pushed the little birds out of their nesting cavities. The nesting boxes are designed to fit the bluebird but not the starling. If placed in open areas away from buildings they will also not attract the house finch. 

When it comes to attracting bluebirds three things are paramount: location, location, location. The birds want the box to be far away from forest or buildings. The more exposed the location, the better. The birds know exactly what the boxes are meant for. The farther away they can spot a box, the more likely that box will be found. They do have a couple other preferences, such as a bush or small tree 10 yards in front of the box for the young to fly to as well as perches not too far away to hunt from. However, you can decoy-in bluebirds to your property simply by putting a house right in the middle of an expanse, then let them find your pairs of boxes in other areas that provide the other requirements.

We still have the last nest of fledgling bluebirds hunting bugs at our house. This despite three nights of frost. I would expect them to migrate any day now.

Red Lake 2020 summer nature notes

 

These enormous caterpillars kept falling out of the birch trees at our cabin this summer. They were as long as my little finger and maybe 5/8 inch in diameter. I think they weighed about an ounce.

They were so large that they made a "thunk" when they hit the ground. What are they? A couple of guesses are the larva of the Polyphemus Moth and maybe even the Luna Moth.

Our cabin sits on a micro eco site. It is a shelf of sand and glacial till that extends just 150 feet along a hillside of clay. Paper birch love sandy, gravelly sites so that is why there are so many at our place.

Other creatures we saw this summer were a pine marten, least chipmunk, red squirrel, garter snake, leopard frog, American toad. We also had a Swainson's thrush that was nearly tame, a real oddity for a bird that is so elusive you can go your whole life only hearing their beautiful morning and evening serenades and never seeing the bird that makes them.

Bald eagles, with no fish guts to eat from the camp anglers, had to fend for themselves. A favourite fishing spot for them was the corner between our dock and the big hill. 

The usual pair of nesting loons was out front, without any chicks. They were out in the middle of the bay one evening when I took my guitar down to the dock. As soon as I started to play they swam directly to me, finally stopping about 15 yards away. They seemed to like the guitar and stayed around for nearly half an hour. 

We saw no moose or bears. We are meticulous about keeping our garbage inside and took the little we had to town each week. That became a problem during the evacuation and the ban on travel in Red Lake. The garbage bag was smelling and had to leave the cabin. Our best solution was to put it in the bow of the boat, covered with a tarp to keep ravens away. Fortunately, nothing found it until we could get to town.

Not sure if you heard this terrible news but a Red Lake man was killed by a black bear this summer. He was picking blueberries by himself south of town. He was a bush-wise guy who would have known all about dealing with bears. 

And of course, how was the fishing?

Matt with pike and walleye

Brenda and I were desperate to eat fresh fish when we got to the cabin in early July. There just isn't any substitute for fish caught fresh out of the lake. I had prepared for the season by purchasing a special rod to fish from the dock. A year ago I found that whenever I could make an extraordinary long cast from the dock with something like a Beetlespin, I caught a walleye; however, my 5'6" spinning rod and reel just wasn't the right rig. So this year I came prepared with a 7' Zebco Crappie rod fitted out with a tiny triggerspin reel. I figured that would let me toss a 1/8 ounce jig or Beetlespin the 100 feet needed to get into the walleye zone. On my first fishing attempt I caught about a 24-inch northern pike.

 I will let you in on a secret. Brenda and I and all of our family and even all of the staff that ever worked at Bow Narrows Camp prefer northern pike to walleye. That's not a misprint. We like pike -- jackfish in Red Lake parlance -- better than the highly coveted walleye or pickerel as they are called in the Thunder Bay area to all points east. That 24-inch fish was the perfect pike for us. I quickly filleted it, removing 100 per cent of the bones, and we were soon devouring golden brown fillets along with pan-fried potatoes and pork and beans -- a real shore lunch! Man, oh man, that was tasty!

 For the next week or so I kept us in fish simply by fishing for an hour or so off the dock in the evenings. The new rod worked perfectly and I could hook four or five walleye on each outing. Many of these were too big. We prescribe to the camp rule of letting all walleye 18 inches or longer go since these are spawning size. Anytime we needed fish I kept a couple 14-17 inchers. After a couple of weeks, Brenda gave me an ultimatum. "No more walleye! Let's go get some pike." So we journeyed out in the boat anytime we wanted fish after that. We were looking for pike, of course, and at first couldn't find any. All of our shallow, weedy bays seemed devoid of fish. My first clue was when large schools of perch followed in the lure. These little fish acted like there weren't any predators around. We changed tactics and went out into the big water. There they were!

 When our son Matt joined us in August we all went fishing in the big bays using our center-console Eastern boat. The very first fish Brenda hooked must have been 38-40 inches and it immediately sailed three feet out of the water like a tarpon. She fought it for 10 minutes or so before the fish changed directions and seemed to get the line into its mouth, cutting it like a knife. We caught walleye on all of our pike fishing trips, many of them too large to keep. Walleye have just exploded in Red Lake. They are everywhere and can be caught using just about any method.

 

 Over at the camp Brian spent many of his evenings following and studying walleye schools with his fishfinder. He was flabbergasted at how these schools seemed to defy the generally held belief that walleye don't suspend. Time after time he caught these fish that might be 20 feet off the bottom by trolling crankbaits. I'm sure he will elaborate how he did it on the camp blog this winter. 

On a sad note, almost none of the loons this year successfully raised chicks. Lee Austen pointed that out to us, blaming high water that came after these magnificent birds had built their nests. 

 "The loons are all in mourning," said Lee. "They are all silent."

 He was right. To my astonishment we went for weeks before hearing anything from the loons even though there were the usual pairs in all the usual spots, including right in front of our cabin. As time went on their spirits came back and eventually the lake started reverberating with the calls of the wild. We also eventually saw a couple of loon pairs with chicks, all out in the middle of the biggest bays. 

With the international border closed to American visitors, there were no American anglers on the lake. The only Americans allowed into the country were people like Brian and the Slaviches over at Black Bear who are owners of tourist camps. They had to go directly to their camps and quarantine for 14 days. They were allowed in so they could maintain their businesses. 

We sure missed seeing our friends who would normally be fishing at Bow Narrows. And we also missed our friends who own cottages on the lake. Lots of these people had never missed a year at camp or their cabin since the 1960s.

 There was a surprising amount of boat traffic on the lake,  however. Red Lake residents spent more time than usual fishing the lake and just touring around. I think many of these used their vacation time this summer figuring there won't be any destinations available next winter. Red Lake Marine reports their busiest summer ever!

 What will it take to open the border again? It's going to take the U.S. lowering its positivity rate. The rate in Canada is less than 1 per cent. We got there by shutting things down for many months, social distancing and wearing masks. Most things are open here again and masks are mandatory in public places. Nobody wants to go back to the way things were. A vaccine would do it too but that is not likely before next summer.

Summer of 2020 one for history books

Looking east toward town at thunderhead of smoke.

 We got back a week ago from about six weeks at our little cabin at Red Lake, exhausted from a whirlwind of building and forest fires.

Where do I start? The fire that caused the second evacuation of Red Lake in its history, I guess.

We were on our way to Black Bear Lodge for dinner Monday, Aug. 10, when we saw a massive thunderhead of smoke coming up from the east. There had been a vicious west wind all day, so windy, in fact that we delayed boating over to the camp of Jim and Jillian Slavich and considered cancelling altogether. Then the wind dropped a little and we took off in our Eastern 20-foot boat which is made for the ocean. The boat held Brenda, our son Matt, our dog, Cork, and me.

From the location I guessed the fire was near Madsen which is a few miles west of Red Lake. The smoke plume rolling many thousands of feet in the air told the story: this fire was flying at frightening speed eastward toward the communities.

There wasn't anything we could do about it, however, so Jim and Jillian went ahead and served us delicious smoked ribs and corn on the cob. As we were finishing an electrician from Madsen mine drove into camp. He had been cut off by the fire and fled up Suffel Lake Road to the camp while he waited for someone to come by boat from town to pick him up. The Slaviches sat him down to the table.

The wind had dropped substantially by the time we left a couple of hours later.

First thing the next morning Brian Spillar from Bow Narrows came with the news that Red Lake had been evacuated. We listened to our satellite radio for news each day. Next summer I'm taking the AM/FM radio as well because there was only a mention on the CBC satellite program.

No sooner had Brian gone back to work at the camp where he is finishing a new cabin when Lee Austen boated up to the dock.

"Are you going to be alright for food?" he asked. Lee and his wife, Kim, were at their cabin which is just upstream of Bow Narrows on the same side of the narrows. What thoughtful people!

Everything in Red Lake was closed, Lee explained, but they had lots of food at their home in town and would drive in and get some if we needed it. We thanked him and told him we were OK for a few days at least.

Then we heard that all travel was banned in Red Lake. 

I journeyed to a rocky point each day over by Muskrat Bay where I could sometimes get a cell signal.

One day there was a message from Jim Slavich informing that they had evacuated to Ear Falls. I answered his text when my phone buzzed. It was Jim. He wanted to know if we could go over to their camp and check their freezers. If things were OK, could we start the generator and let it run all day to cool everything down. And help ourselves to any food, he added. Hallelujah!

Lee then answered another prayer by giving us 5 gallons of gas so we could run our generator and use power tools. And Brian gave us purified drinking water! My goodness but we are blessed with such good friends.

Matt was stranded in Red Lake for nearly a week before the road reopened and he could head home again.

In the meantime we finished installing steel siding on the cabin. In fact, the little 12 x 24 cabin is completely finished, inside and out. Next year we can just open the door and start work on the main cabin which we've downsized since the little cabin morphed into what will become two bedrooms.

The fire that caused the evacuation wasn't the first we had experienced. Just two days earlier, we heard a helicopter circling just to the west. Brenda came running up from the dock to say there was lots of smoke just north of the camp.

Fearing that Kim and Lee's place might be blazing, Matt and I jumped in our little fishing boat and raced to help. We soon saw that the fire was at the end of Middle Bay and realized it was a new cabin that was under construction. There already was a fire crew and a helicopter on scene when we got there and another helicopter was coming in.

We pulled up tight to the marsh at Dean Creek so we would be out of the way when the second helicopter landed right on the floating muskeg of the marsh a couple of hundred yards away. It eventually took off trailing a large bucket but something was wrong and it landed again and flew away without it. Meanwhile several boats took a fire crew which had exited the chopper over to the fire.

Just then two water bombers showed up and we beat it figuring everything was well in hand.

The two-storey, 3,500 square foot cabin was totally destroyed. It had been under construction for two years by builders from Red Lake. The fire started on a Saturday when no one was there. It was very windy and the fire hazard was high. 

When we got back to our place I got my fire pump out of the shed and hooked it up on the dock, ready to go at a moment's notice if needed. I noticed Lee had done the same.

The MNRF aerial and ground attack extinguished the Middle Bay blaze in just a couple of hours but one crew stayed behind to keep watch. Just before dark they spotted another fire. This was a jump fire from the sparks of the first. It was burning on the Pipestone Narrows peninsula. This was put out quickly and a good thing too because it could have threatened the three cabins in Sadler Bay narrows and eventually others, including us.

More about the summer in the next posting...