Techniques I'm using to build cabin alone

Walk-behind Billy Goat brush mower is my tractor

Garden cart fitted with 2x4 braces carries 4x8 sheets

Two-wheel dolly lets me move a bunch of 2x4s at one time easily

 We started from absolute scratch at our retirement cabin on Red Lake. As Brenda likes to  relate, we had to machete our way through the bush just to get out of the boat. This wasn't a previous cabin site that had some cleared land. It was virgin land, and as far as I can see, was never even a campsite by any of the First Nations that lived in this area for 10,000 years.

It took us two weeks just to clear a place to pitch a tent and make a trail leading to that spot. We then lived in the tent for two summers while we brought in a dock, made a secure landing on shore for it, and built what we call a Dockhouse, since it is near the dock, but will really be a guest cabin. It gives us a comfortable place to live while we build the main cabin, something we could have completed last summer had we not got run off by forest fires for nearly a month.

I have done all the carpentry by myself so far and probably will finish the project the same way. Ironically, one of the reasons I am doing it like this is because I have a bad back. You would think that would make me want to lean on friends and relatives all the more but the truth is I can work without hurting myself best when I'm alone. I go at my own pace which is admittedly slower than other people. 

One of the big considerations in avoiding back aches was how to get all the building materials from the boat, up the hill and 200 feet to the cabin. It started by making a plywood sidewalk to level the area nearest to the dock. From there our son, Matt, with a shovel and wheelbarrow, two summers ago excavated a bit of the hillside where the cabin was to be located and used that material to level an equal distance with soil and rocks. So, we have a pretty level trail all the way to the cabin site. That means we can roll things, rather than carry them. In fact, after bringing in an estimated seven tons of building material for the entire cabin last fall, I can say I never carried a single thing other than a short distance from the dock. Lumber, 4x8 sheets, I-joists, steel roofing and siding, windows and doors, all were rolled. The only exception was the 32-foot roof trusses. For that I had the help of Stan, Jan and Ben from Eagle Falls Lodge who had brought these ungainly items out to us in their 40-plus-foot pontoon boat. Thank you, my new friends!

We also got a big help from our friends the Moningers when they let me use their approximate 26-foot pontoon boat to bring out the lumber and sheeting. Thank you, Bob, Rosalie and Tom!

We've also had help bringing things up the hill from our cabin neighbours, Lee and Dale, and from Brian over at the camp.

And finally, thank you to Northwest Timbermart who not only loaned me a work boat to start the summer but also brought their Zoomboom machine to set material from the lumber truck directly onto the boats. Wow, what a time-saver!

The actual building, however, I have been doing alone. I'm finicky about the foundation. If that isn't right, nothing above it will be either. Our cabin site is sandy and for those conditions I hand dug holes for 18 foundation posts set two feet deep. Eighteen-inch foundation pads were put in the bottom of each, all leveled. Above this I placed 6x6 preserved wood posts, with a nub carved at the end to fit into the foundation pad depression. I wrapped the posts with heavy plastic that prevents frost from gripping on the sides and also stops bugs like carpenter ants from climbing up. The pad depth is shallower than what I would do when working in clay. There I would have gone 3-4 feet. Clay is known for spectacular heaving by frost.

People wonder what the frost depth is at Red Lake. In cleared-off places like a street, it is about nine feet! But under a cabin, especially one where the snow will be undisturbed (we won't use the cabin in the winter) it is just a couple of feet. In sand, which drains easily, it should be even less.

Brenda has said she has stayed married to me for the past 47 years because none of my buildings have mice! I thought that might be a good name for a construction company: No Mouse Cabin Construction. The trick is to have a secure foundation so the building doesn't "walk" with the frost, pulling wall plates loose from the floor. 

Another trick I have learned is to skirt-in the foundation so that all the foundation posts are hidden from the sun. In the spring, the warm sun will melt the ground on the south side of the building first. If any heaving has taken place over the winter, the south side will drop lower than the north and the building will start inching downhill. I have seen buildings without below-frost foundations move about a foot per decade. 

My foundation should be below-frost but just to be sure, I skirt everything as well.

I-joists in place

Completed cabin floor and roof trusses are covered for winter. Sides have temporary skirting

Also built a shed last summer. It will become the site for solar panels and batteries, as well as generator seen here under overhang

Who's responsible? Who's to blame?

The answer to the first question is, "I am." It's the answer for me and also for you, no matter who you are and, curiously,  no matter what the question is. It is also the key to living a full and contented life. Intrigued?

We all feel the most positive about those things in our lives that are under our control, when we are the "captains of our own ships."  We feel negative when things are out of our control, when we are "victims." 

Now let's look at what responsibility means: response-ability -- the ability to respond. No matter what the situation is that we are confronting, the ability to respond is under our control, and that's a positive thing. When we accept responsibility for everything in our lives, we are sitting squarely in the captain's seat.

So, I am responsible for climate change and I am responding by replacing fossil fuels with solar electric as fast as I can, by telling my auto dealer that I won't buy another car from her until she has a suitable all-electric model, by preparing for the forest fires that climate change is bringing with increasing frequency and ferocity to my region. I have also written my Member of Parliament and told him we need the same bold action on climate change that we saw his government take on the pandemic. Let's go!

Oh, and what about that second question? Who's to blame? It is a meaningless concept and an utter waste of time. Blame is the assessment of guilt for something that happened in the past. Guilt is the cesspool of human emotions and the past is gone.

Yesterday's history.

Tomorrow's a mystery.

Today is a gift.

That's why it's called The Present.

How do you get a cat out of a tree?

 

And what do you do when that cat is a full-grown lynx?

This beautiful cat was patrolling around the bush line by our house today looking for rabbits when he spotted a red squirrel beneath our bird feeder. Squirrel and cat went 30 feet up a birch tree in a blink but then the squirrel leapt to a larger poplar tree nearby where it flattened itself and remained motionless on the opposite side from the cat. Eventually the lynx backed down and went on its way.

'Don't choose extinction'

 

That was on a sign that was carried by one of the thousands of young people who traveled to Glasgow, Scotland, last week for the COP 26 summit. It pretty much sums up the situation: change our system of energy consumption in a big way starting right now or perish. There is just no time left.

The world leaders at the conference seemed to recognize the gravity of the situation but the young people were skeptical and for good reason.  The same politicians have said the same thing many, many times in the past and then did nothing. 

Our choice couldn't be more simple: Do we want to start an Age of Enlightenment or a Dark Age?

If we choose Enlightenment the world as we have known it will be saved. We will begin to live within our energy means and eventually the atmospheric heat storm we unwittingly ignited with the Industrial Revolution and the internal combustion engine will subside. 

If we choose the Dark Age our world will be run by Feral Morons who will always act with mankind's worst inclinations. We will spiral ever-faster into the abyss.

Solar water pump worked perfectly

 

We connected the solar system to our Shurflo water pump this year and it worked perfectly, despite the dismal skies due to forest fire smoke.

The photo shows the solar panel fastened horizontally to a wood stand. The inverted black plastic tote contains a charge controller, 12-volt battery and the pump. The black box seemed at first to be too hot for the charge controller so we added some ventilation holes that let the heat out. We also put the charge controller under another smaller inverted box just so water could not contact it. Both boxes are simply set on the dock where incoming air can come easily through the cracks between deck boards.

The suction pipe shown here is one-inch but it had to be necked down to 1/2-inch to fit onto the pump fitting. Outlet is also 1/2 inch, Pex.

There is no pressure tank to this system, although it is possible to add one later if needed. The pump just has a built-in pressure switch. The pump instantly turns on when a tap is opened and turns off when it is closed. The pump provides four gallons of water a minute which will probably be adequate for the big cabin without needing a pressure tank. The shower, for instance, will require no more than 2.5 gallons a minute and we will likely use a water-saver shower head that uses just 1.8 gallons. 

The line from the pump to the dockhouse is 100-feet and there is lots of pressure at the single tap we have inside. It remains to be seen if the pressure will be the same at the big cabin when it is finished next year. It will be about 200 feet from the pump and, more importantly, will be perhaps 10-feet higher than the dockhouse spigot. The height from the pump to the final destination, called the head, is critical for pump performance.  If we find the pressure is too low at the main cabin we can always install a pressure tank somewhere in between -- like in the dockhouse or maybe in our new shed. Then the pump just needs to replenish the tank which provides its own pressure. It would be lovely if we didn't need the tank. It's just one more thing to have to plumb and to drain in the fall.

Our other solar appliance -- a Unique fridge -- didn't work as well as the water pump. We simply couldn't get enough solar charging through the heavy smoke for it to run without some generator assisted-battery charging. Two hours a day of charging seemed to do it. Early in the summer when there was less smoke the solar system worked fine. A lot of the problem is simply the orientation of the dockhouse and its position among the trees. The new main cabin will be in direct sunlight most of the day.

Wild things big and small seen this year

 

We had some interesting wild visitors at the cabin this summer, including this Goliath of a caterpillar. 

We also saw two black bears, a cow moose, a whitetail deer, a lynx and several grey-cheeked thrushes which used our clearing for a stop on their migration to the Far North. 

A really unusual feathered visitor that we heard, but didn't actually see, was a whippoorwill, right next to the cabin.

Before anything else, buy a fire pump

 

For sprinklers, attach pump to a large gas tank that will last days

We started planning for our cabin five years ago by buying a fire pump. It wasn't just a hedge against climate change but a tool that we would never think of being without in the Boreal Forest. We are in a sea of fuel and it can only take a spark to set it off. That spark could accidentally come from us -- from a chainsaw or other machine. And, of course, it could come from a lightning strike. The pump isn't for fighting a major forest fire; it's for preventing a little blaze from becoming an inferno.

Sprinklers at work on our dockhouse

We set up our pump on the dock as soon as we get to the cabin in the spring. I pile the hoses on top and cover the whole works with a plastic garbage can to keep everything dry. If the weather gets hot and dry I attach the hoses and stretch them out with the nozzle on the end hose. If we're past danger of frost I go ahead and prime the pump. We can be spraying hundreds of gallons of water a minute with one pull of the recoil rope.

After the fire flap of last summer we also have added a sprinkler system. We have two sprinklers on the gable end of each building. These are attached to garden hoses that are in turn attached to a fire hose fitting called a water thief. This fitting goes between the lengths of the canvas fire hose and has two places to attach the garden hoses. A handy configuration is to have 50-foot lengths of fire hose and 50-foot lengths of garden hose. 

When we fire up the pump the rotating sprinklers soak everything for about 50 feet around the buildings. It would be best if there were no large trees in that radius, especially conifers. It will be years before we achieve that but in the meantime the sprinklers give us some chance of surviving a forest fire.

During our years in the camp business we were fortunate to get some fire survival tips from NOTO, our industry organization that held an annual conference and trade show. A group called FireSmart had some eye-opening videos of how cabins ignite from forest fires. It happens well in advance of the actual fire. Embers from the main blaze come blowing along the ground at great speed caused by the wind that the fire generates ahead of itself. These glowing bits of wood go beneath the cabins and build up in the floor joists. If there is firewood or lumber piled down there then the embers ignite that as well.

They also hit the walls of the cabin and are funneled by the wind into the eaves and gables. They accumulate there like a glowing pile of barbecue briquets until the building ignites.

The lesson here is to enclose your buildings with skirting all the way to the ground and with metal fascia on the eaves and gables. 

This is what we are doing on our cabins and shed. And as an added precaution we are using steel siding and roofing as well. 

Here's what it is like to live near two half-million acre fires. It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon on what would have been a bright sunny day except for the dense smoke

 

Fishing was spectacular, at least for me

 

Here's what mega-fire Red Lake 77 looked like July 6, the day after it started

I was so intent on cabin building that I took little time off to fish; however, Brenda and I were also hungry for some fish dinners. On my first cast from the dock I caught about a 24-inch walleye. That's too big to keep for eating so I kept tossing out my 1/8-ounce Beetle Spin. Pretty soon I had two smaller walleye and kept them for the frying pan. Four or five days later I tried the same thing. In quick order I had a nice eating-size walleye and a northern pike -- all we needed.

After a week I tried again and this time got one pike. We needed another so I got in the boat and headed down the shoreline. To my surprise I caught an enormous smallmouth bass. I think it might have weighed four pounds.  I released it. Then I got the pike I was looking for and headed home. 

Another week passed and I decided to try fishing for pike right where I went daily to get cellphone messages, on the way to Trout Bay. One cast and I had a 24-inch pike -- all we needed. The next time we wanted fish I made a bunch of casts with the Beetle Spin and didn't get anything so I switched to a 3/4 ounce Five of Diamonds spoon. One cast and I had my pike. I started for home but part way back slowed down and thought I would troll back to the dock. I just let out the spoon behind the boat. I was in about 50 feet of water and didn't expect a bite until I got nearer to shore. Almost immediately I hooked something enormous. It was fighting like mad and with the deep water and all I figured it must be a lake trout. When I finally got it to the boat I couldn't believe it but it was a whopper of a walleye.

I carefully measured it without lifting it from the lake. It was 32 inches, by far my biggest. It had bit a five-inch long spoon on a six-inch steel leader. Without a weight to sink it the spoon probably was no more than six feet from the surface in a spot that was 50 feet deep. I let it go, of course, and just to see if this had been a fluke retraced my path and started trolling the spoon again. I was still letting out my line when another fish hit. This one seemed much smaller but I measured it anyway -- 26 inches. 

I only fished one more time after that, again in my cellphone bay. It was evening and the water was still so I tried a handmade jerk bait. I did so reluctantly because every time I have used these lures by Dwayne Kotala, my neighbour in Nolalu, I have caught a lunker of a pike. This time I wanted a smaller pike to eat and didn't want to risk killing a trophy-size fish. I picked a small version of Dwayne's pike-musky wooden bait. One toss and I had my eater pike but I wanted to fish a little more so I cast it out again. Sure enough, I tied into a 45-incher. It would have been over 20 pounds. Fortunately, I was able to release it OK.

All told I fished about four hours last summer and in that time I caught my largest-ever smallmouth bass (also my first from Red Lake), largest walleye and largest northern pike.

A summer of heat and fire but no sun

 

The dark clouds on the evening horizon, as late as Sept. 29 when this photo was snapped, were still smoke clouds

As I plugged away on building our new cabin at Red Lake this summer, the thought occurred to me that I might have made a mistake. Maybe we should have bought an RV for our retirement instead, something that we could roll to a more habitable place. This was the second time in three years when summer at Red Lake was something to endure, not enjoy.

Baking heat and choking smoke from forest fires -- again --seemed to say, "Welcome to the ghost of future climate change."

A million acres were on fire to our west in Woodland Caribou Provincial Park and just a bit farther, in adjoining Atikaki Provincial Park in Manitoba and areas to the northwest, a similar area was ablaze. These were the colossal fires but there were many others as well. In fact, at one time there were 100 fires going just in the Red Lake district. It was like Armageddon.

Remote northern communities were being evacuated everywhere. These were mostly First Nations. Summer evacuations have become so common for them it is getting hard to remember when they weren't forced to spend months in a cramped hotel room or on a cot in an arena. Red Lake was put on evacuation notice. Seniors and hospital patients were taken elsewhere. Sprinklers were put up completely around the town's perimeter.  Many residents stayed inside much of the time to escape the heat and smoke. The hardware stores brought in window air conditioners by the pallet-load. 

As bad as it seemed we knew we were fortunate. Out in British Columbia people were dying by the hundreds from the heat. One mountain town -- Lytton -- set a heat record for Canada at  49.6 C or 121.3 F. That was just before the whole place caught on fire and burned to the ground.

The fire season in Red Lake began in May and just got worse and worse. It was hot and dry from the get-go. By mid-June the smoke was so thick boaters were finding their way by GPS to the west end of the lake where we are building. You couldn't see the shoreline. It wasn't obvious where the fires were because we couldn't see a darn thing, sometimes not even a pale sun.

And in a really weird weather phenomenon, there was no wind, day after day, week after week. When you looked at the smoke forecasts on weather sites like FireSmoke.ca the smoke blob over the Red Lake area moved around like a lava lamp. The smoke blanket prevented the lake water from warming up as much as you would expect from the 36 C (97 F) daytime air temperature.

The smoke was so thick that water bombers and helicopters couldn't fly. Those enormous fires just west of us us went untouched for about a month, from the time they might have been extinguished until they had grown too large to control. It is a policy in Woodland Caribou that forest fires which start naturally from lightning should be allowed to burn. At least, that is the policy for some areas of the park. In other areas the new fires would be extinguished by the MNRF. As it turned out this year, the two mega fires began in areas that could have been fought. They weren't, apparently because firefighters were overwhelmed by all the other blazes. And it was too smoky to fly as well.

We never saw a water bomber this summer. Once the crisis had abated, at least somewhat -- we had one pretty good rain -- helicopters attacked the fire just beyond Trout Bay from before sunup to nearly dark for weeks. 

It was obvious to me that the situation this past summer represented a paradigm shift in fire intensity and in weather. We now need a similar paradigm shift in firefighting strategy. For starters, now that climate change is happening exponentially from one year to the next, we need to scrap the policy that lets fires burn anywhere in Northern Ontario, be they in the wilderness park or in the Far North. We just can't be sending billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere any more. This means a war-like expansion of our firefighting capability. We don't just need a dozen more water bombers and fire crews, we need hundreds, and they need to be positioned way up North as well as in road-accessible communities like Red Lake. 

Besides the CO2 liability, forest fires are killing us with their smoke. It isn't only people with asthma; it's all of us. 

Is this going to cost money? Of course, but there is no alternative. We have done nothing about climate change up to this point and this is the price we must pay. The Amazon Rain Forest was found this year to be a contributor to CO2 rather than a sink. The Boreal Forest is about to do the same and then we will have hell to pay.

Evacuated due to forest fire

We bugged out Monday due to heavy smoke and an evacuation order. There are two large fires in play, one coming from the southwest and the other from the northwest. 

A Yankee ...Hard Work and Ingenuity

John Gustafson and family bring us a load of lumber to build the dining room

Chapter 15

 There was so much to improve at camp that I'm sure my parents didn't know where to begin but safety probably dictated one of the first moves. Those naptha Coleman stove and lanterns in the cabins were accidents waiting to happen. Customers were unused to the dangers that came with pouring a highly volatile fuel into a device, then striking a match. If any fuel was slopped on the outside of the tanks, the whole device went up in flames. The lanterns were especially hazardous. If you didn't adjust the regulator properly flames shot high overhead. Here is where those gas lights from the Revolutionary War soldier's home came to the rescue. The problem was they were made for natural gas, not propane.

"We've got to make that little hole -- the orifice -- even smaller," said Dad as he clamped the first S-shaped light into a vice. "Propane is a much higher pressure than natural gas. Fortunately, these lights are made of brass, a soft metal."

He took his nailset out of his carpenter's tool box. With the light held in a vice, he placed the end of the little tool near the hole and angled it inward, then gave it a tap. He then did the same all around the orifice. The metal punch pushed the hole close, a little.

"Let's give this a try."

The next thing was to put fittings on some copper tubing that would screw into each side of a regulator and then into a 20-pound propane tank. This type of connection is done by sliding the fittings onto the tubing, then flaring out the end of the tubing so that when the two fittings are screwed together the flared tubing seats exactly against the contours of the fitting. There is a tool for this, called a flaring tool. We didn't have one of those.

"Here, you hold the tubing tight against the sawhorse and I'll put my plumb bob into it and whack it with the hammer," said Dad. He did and the tubing started to spread. After a half-dozen strikes the soft copper looked like a little horn. We slid the fitting in place and it was really close to being right.

"It will seat better when we screw the fitting together." He connected everything tightly with a wrench and turned on the propane. He sniffed the joints -- nothing. Then he took out his lighter and waved the flame beneath. Nothing.

"We're good," he said.

He then tied a silk mantle on the light and lit it on fire with no gas. It went out in a few seconds. The mantle needs to just be ash to make bright light, he explained. Dad turned on the gas and opened the  control on the light. He lit a match. The flames shot six feet above the light. The orifice was still too large. 

We repeated the above process a couple more times. Finally, the light glowed a brilliant white. One down and eight more to go. Within a couple of lights he could make the orifice the right size in a single attempt.

Hundred-pound propane tanks were brought from town and the lights fitted on the walls of all the cabins. Next, he went looking for cheap propane hotplates. A classified ad from a surplus store in Winnipeg led to getting several cast-iron models. We were in the propane lighting and cooking business.

Our favourite newspaper was the Prairie Farm Weekly from Winnipeg. It had all sorts of helpful articles and advertisements for affordable products, including paint. We got five-gallon pails of it and my Mom and I painted the interiors of all the cabins.

The interior walls were made of pressboard -- like a thick cardboard -- that soaked up paint like a sponge. There were no ceilings in any of the buildings except Bill's old house which we now lived in. Dad would add them as fast as he could over the years.

We needed a dining room in the worst way, so that first year, Dad got a barge load of lumber from John Gustafson in Red Lake and within a few weeks he and Adam Paishk built an addition onto Bill's house, off the kitchen. That 24x24 room became the dining room. Now we had a lodge.

It was near October and we had dozens of moose hunters coming. Mom cooked on the four-burner propane stove we brought from the cabin. It was small but over the years she would turn out pies and biscuits in the oven by the hundreds. Eventually she found a used larger, six-burner commercial stove and the small model went to one of the cabins.

Following Adam's advice, Dad hired a bunch of Ojibwe guides. They had all been born at the west end of Red Lake and knew the area intimately. They also knew something that we didn't know -- how to hunt moose!

The guides were all placed in one of the small cabins since there still was no bunkhouse for them.

The first thing they did was jump in a boat and go looking for birchbark to make into moose calls. It took a wide piece of bark from a big tree. This was folded into a cone and held in place with electrical tape.

Dad sent the guides out in a couple of boats to find dry firewood for the camp. They were back shortly with the boats piled high with cross-loaded dead jackpine. This they cut with a bucksaw in the front yard. The tempered blade of the saw with a man pulling on each end would sing through the dry wood. The two sawyers, kneeling on either side of a sawhorse could cut wood as fast as four men could split it and haul it to the cabins where it was piled in immense rows. We cut wood this way for nearly two decades. 

Two nights before the moose hunters arrived, it looked like one of the guides, Tony Paishk, was on death's door. Adam came to the lodge late at night and said something was wrong with Tony's heart.

Dad went with Adam over to the cabin. He wondered if it might be heartburn. Tony, and the rest of the bunch, had been drunker than skunks when they had come to camp.

Adam said something to Tony in Ojibwe. Tony shrugged and said something back. 

"Maybe," said Adam.

Dad had a small paper roll of Tums in his pocket. Tony unrolled the entire pack and ate the whole works in one mouthful.

"Let's see if that works," said Dad and went back to the lodge. He was wakened an hour later by Adam. Tony seemed worse.

Dad got a can of whole tomatoes from the lodge. "Have him eat these. It might help." Adam didn't come back.

"We've got to get this Tony back to Red Lake," Dad told Mom. But the next day was too windy to make the 20-mile trip by boat. Tony stayed in the cabin while the others worked.

On the second day the moose hunters arrived by floatplane. Dad wanted to send Tony back on one of the planes but Adam said he was feeling better and wanted to guide. Since every guide was needed for each two hunters, Dad reluctantly agreed but secretly vowed to get a replacement the first time he went to town. That never happened.

Tony and his hunters were back before lunch with a moose. A couple of days later they got another. By the end of the two weeks that we offered hunting, Tony accounted for seven moose. He was the best of all the guides.

At the end of the hunt, Tony floored Mom and Dad when he came into the lodge. "Hey, Del and Don, I want to go to town now." After speaking through Adam as an interpreter for three weeks, Tony had finally decided to speak English!

In the next 20 years, Tony would prove himself an exceptional guide although he frequently ended up shooting the moose himself. He had extraordinary eyesight and could spot moose noses looking out between branches of spruces from hundreds of yards away. When he couldn't get his hunters to see the animals, he would say, "Gimme gun!"

The rifle could be bolt action, pump or semi-automatic, open sights, peep sights or scopes, it didn't matter. Tony never missed. This fact was made all the more remarkable by the fact he shot left-handed and his left arm was impaired, the result of being struck by an airplane propeller when he was a firefighter. Tony couldn't wrap his hand around the pistol grip with his finger on the trigger. Instead he held his arm beneath the gun and pinched the trigger against the guard with his finger and thumb.

Tony always shot until the gun was empty. One time, after unloading at something in the vast distance, he reached out his hand and said, "Gimme more shells." The hunter gave him his second clip. Tony blasted away but then stared for awhile at the bush two hundreds yards away. "Gimme more shells," he said. The hunter reloaded the first clip. Tony shot some more. The hunter said later there was absolutely nothing he could see that Tony was shooting at. 

After waiting a bit, they went over to the spot. There were three dead moose, a bull, cow and a calf.  Party hunting was legal in those days so all the moose were legally claimed by the party of hunters.

...to be continued

More in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here? 

A Gold Mine

Talking Bill into Selling

Red Lake in the '60s  

First Winter

Bullies
Wolverine

Roots 

Racism 

Animals 

Mentors 

School

Lots of Bugs

 

 

Rainbow Smelt and Aurora Borealis

 The frailties of the human mind are revealed in these two stories.

When we came to Thunder Bay in 1979 I was eager to try smelting in the spring. With the first warm nights, everyone, it seemed, would stay up late at night along the shores of all the rivers and creeks and dip out the small silvery fish that had come ashore from Lake Superior to spawn. They were so abundant that in our first smelting trip, Brenda, our four-year-old son, Matt, and I discovered that one swoop of the net got more smelt than we had use for.

They made a good fish fry when fresh but weren't our favourite after they had been frozen. In the couple of years that followed we just kept those fish that Matt could catch with his bare hands. He would stand in the creek in his little rubber boots with me steadying him while the fish flashed by him by the millions.

By the time Matt was 6, however, we just couldn't repeat the performance. The smelt only run for about a week, so we thought we had just picked a bad night. However, when he was seven and eight, our bad luck continued.

I was an outdoor writer for the newspaper at the time and so asked the fisheries biologists if they could shed light on the subject. Actually, they said, there were no smelt runs occurring in the Thunder Bay area at all.

The runs take place in a pattern that circles the big lake about every 10 years. So, there might be a small run one year in Thunder Bay, followed by a tremendous run and in the third year, a small run. Then nothing for about a decade while the fish made their way around the world's largest lakeshore. Even though I reported all of this in the newspaper, most people seemed to not have gotten the news. They went smelting every year.

"Hey, Dan! Are you going smelting this weekend?" they would say, during those years when the run was happening on the other side of the lake, in Michigan.

Uh, no, I would reply. Are you?

"Absolutely! We go every year. We just love it!"

How did you do last year? I would ask.

"Last year? Hmm, I think we missed the run."

And the year before that?

"We seemed to have missed it that time too," they would say.

But the fact that they didn't catch anything, anything at all, hardly seemed to matter.

The banks of the creeks were lined by laughing, drinking revellers, dipping the empty water by the thousands, night after night, year after year. What great fun! Getting wet in the icy water, then drying off by a bonfire with a beer in hand.

It just never occurred to any of these people that there actually weren't ANY smelt out there. To them it just seemed chance when they "hit the run." They never noticed that event was 9, 10 and 11 years apart.

Now, what about the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights?

I grew up with the Northern Lights overhead at night. Not every night but frequently. Sometimes they were spectacular; sometimes they were faint. But they were fairly dependable at making an appearance.

Not any more. I saw a faint display a few nights ago and that was the first time I have seen them in about three years. People just refuse to believe this is so.

"Oh, you are just getting old. You go to bed early before the Northern Lights appear," they say. Or, "when was the last time you had your eyes checked? Maybe your eyesight is failing."

I do go to bed early but I also get up early, frequently before sunrise. There are no northern lights out there. Not here in Northwestern Ontario anyway.

If you want to see what northern lights look light, watch the flames flickering in the wood-burning stove while the Steel Drivers sing a bluegrass song. That is about as close to the real thing as you are going to get.

How can this be? The Aurora Borealis are gases at the outer edges of our atmosphere that are energized by radiation from the sun and fluoresce. That particular ionizing radiation is released when there are lots of sunspots which are storms on the sun's surface. Guess what? There are no sunspots occurring!

This isn't unheard of. In fact the sun goes through regular 10-year cycles of high activity and lulls. Incidentally, besides intense Northern Lights, the highs are marked by hot weather extremes here on Earth. These often mean bad forest fire years in Northwestern Ontario.

We are currently in a lull but it is not the usual 10-year doldrum. It's a multi-decade lull of near-historic proportions. The last time the sun was quite so quiet was during the last mini-ice age. In other words, the climate that we are currently experiencing -- the climate that is getting dramatically warmer -- is actually taking place during an exceptionally cold time for the planet.

Wait until the solar activity returns. "We ain't seen nuthin' yet."

 

 

'I Saw the Light'

 

What a tremendous amount of sunlight the days are bringing now

It is the coldest morning of the winter, -32 C plus enough wind to make the weather service sound the alarm about -40 C windchill.

The winter, the cold, the pandemic and just the uncertainty of things make us feel like we are bearing an enormous weight. For me, those symptoms of depression mean it is time to do something. For starters, let's just look where I am right now -- sitting in our sunroom at 9 a.m. and the sunlight is flooding me with its warmth. The days are much longer now and even though it is cold outside, the sunlight feels great.

Sunlight is such a wonderful thing. I heard someone from England on TV refer to places around people's homes that are sheltered from the wind and that face the sun as "sun traps." I like that. Even here, with the -40 C temperature, if I put my hand against a dark object that is facing the sun, the object is warm. I like to find our "sun traps" and stay there as long as I can with my face beaming back at the mother sun.

Lots of our friends and family in the States now report getting their covid vaccines. Way to go! That is tremendous news. It is slower for us here in Canada because we don't have any vaccine makers in the country; however, some vaccinations have already taken place. A real surge in vaccinations is expected to begin within a week or so. Everybody is supposed to get theirs by September. My guess is it will actually happen several months sooner. That should mean the border will open again. Hurray! 

Probably preventative measures like mask wearing will continue for awhile but so what? I've got no problem with it. The quicker we pound the virus into submission the better. Let's hit it with everything we've got.

I look at mask wearing-rules the same as those for public nudity. It just helps things run smoothly.

Incidentally, here in Canada we are not as uptight about nudity as people are in the States. I think the reason for that is our climate and bugs. Anyone who goes nude here deserves some admiration just for their toughness although their intelligence is, of course, suspect.

Anyway, cheer up everybody! Spring is just around the corner!

What a simple cabin water system

 

Tiny Shurflo pump produces four gallons per minute

When we were planning our cabin for Red Lake a few years ago I talked with a merchant in Red Lake who sells solar products. I was planning on mounting a big water tank on the hill behind the cabin that would feed by gravity. I wondered if there was a solar pump that would fill that tank. If not, I would use my Honda fire pump.

"Please, don't do that," said the man. "Try this system instead."

So last year, even though we only have the smaller "dockhouse" finished, we bought his system. It consists of the little pump shown above, a 12-volt battery, a small solar panel and a small charge controller. The whole thing, except for the solar panel, will fit inside of a plastic tote. The solar panel can be mounted to the top.

We hurriedly installed it, just to save carrying water pails from the lake to the dockhouse. We just have a single water tap inside. 

It worked like a charm although we were never able to connect the solar system. We were missing electrical connectors and the wire we had was too heavy to wrap around the little screws on the charge controller. So we just attached the pump to the battery. It has an automatic pressure switch built in. The pump comes on when we run the tap and supplies four gallons of water a minute. That's enough even for a shower. When we get the bigger cabin finished it may be necessary to add a pressure tank to keep up with demand but right now, that's all the water we need. 

I charged the battery with our generator only twice during the time we used the pump. It ran about two weeks between charging. The battery charger showed the battery really hadn't discharged very much in that time.

I was stumped when I went to attach the intake and discharge lines. None of my half-inch fittings would work. Finally Brian from the camp looked at it and realized it actually was made for Pex pipe. He gave me some clamps and his Pex tool and we were in business.

 

 

A Yankee in the Canadian Bush - Bugs

Old Cabins 1 and 2 surrounded by long grass

Chapter 14

Job No. 1 when my parents took over Bow Narrows Camp was to deal with the bugs. The black flies and mosquitoes in the yard were intolerable. It was impossible to sit outside without being devoured. So what to do?

The answer was to create those conditions that the insects avoid and eliminate the ones that they prefer. Small insects like black flies and mosquitoes fear drying out. They avoid bright, windy areas and hang back in the shade.

Bill Stupack would cut the grass around the cabins once or twice a summer with a scythe. That long grass was a bug heaven. So was the dark bush which surrounded the camp. 

The Lawnboy lawn mower we had brought from Pickerel River was a godsend. It was exceedingly sturdy, suffering strikes against hidden rocks and stumps without bending the driveshaft. Dad was meticulous in cutting as close to the cabins and trees as possible, eliminating these small but important shade spots.

Next, he started clearing land. Eventually, after he had bought the property all the way down the lakeshore to Cabin 10, he opened up everything as much as possible, letting the west wind sweep down the peninsula from Trout Bay. The difference was like night and day. Having a shade tree here and there was fine, as long as we were able to cut the grass beneath it regularly. You didn't want enough trees to make a windbreak as that would become a bug breeding ground.

Before the clearing program, Dad and I went outside the old lodge -- now Cabin 3 -- one evening just before dark. We were still right at the door when Dad spotted a really big bear (another reason to keep things open -- you can see the bears). The immense bruin started right for us, its head low to the ground. It was the most blatant example of predatory behaviour I have ever seen.

"That boy's got to go, right now," said Dad. "Quick, get back into the house."

Mom and I closed all the windows, even though it was July and stifling hot.

Dad loaded his .308 and doused himself with Off, then stepped outside the door to wait for the bear. He was back inside in just minutes; the mosquitoes were so thick he couldn't breathe. They droned so loudly you couldn't hear anything else.

Dad got a can of molasses which he poured on the ground right in front of the window in the hallway where I slept. He slid the window open.

"You get up on your bed with the flashlight and when the bear comes to get this molasses, I'll give you the word. Shine the light over my shoulder, across the gun sights and onto the bear. I'll shoot right through the screen. It will just make a little hole that we can patch with a piece of tape."

Even with a big nasty bear at hand, Dad realized the importance of the screen against the bugs in the hot weather.

We probably saw the bear a dozen times, his long legs letting him stride quickly around all the cabins. He never stopped moving, probably because of the mosquitoes. It was dark now but there was a bit of moonlight.

There was no one else in camp but Dad, Mom and me, which was a blessing.

At long last, the bear came right to the molasses and Dad shot, never telling me to turn on the light. The bear was only four feet away, he said later. He couldn't miss.

The sound of the gun inside the little room was incredible. There were two guitars hanging on the wall behind me and they were ringing like the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral.

The bear ran and Dad opened the door and went after him. I was right behind with the flashlight.

We found the bear, dead, at the bush line. I could still hear the guitars ringing. Dad opened his mouth but couldn't make any sounds. 

"What?" I tried to say, but I couldn't make any sounds either. I saw Dad mouth the word, "What?"

We were both totally deaf.

The mosquitoes were eating us alive so we hurried back inside. Dad grabbed a roll of electrical tape to patch the .30-caliber hole in the screen. To his chagrin he found that in addition to the little hole, the muzzle blast had blown three sides of the screen off the window. It was hanging like a flap. It wasn't until midnight that the guitars stopped ringing in my head.

The next day we went to look at the bear. It looked like a black polar bear -- very long body and neck and a small head. In the middle of the summer like this it's hide was worthless. There was nothing to do but throw the bear away.

We wished our guests could have shot it during hunting season but we had no other choice.

It was the most dangerous bear I have ever seen.

 

Following the trail once most-travelled

 When we retired five years ago after operating Bow Narrows Camp for 26 years a lot of our friends thought we looked forward to finally being able to go fishing. I do like fishing a bit but after cleaning about a million of them in my time and listening to our guests talk about fishing continuously for years, it was really the non-fishing things I wanted to do. I think Brenda feels the same.

Like what? you might ask.

Well, I would like to find and put on a map some of the First Nations trails that once crisscrossed this country. When I was a kid growing up at Bow Narrows, the native people could walk from place to place just about as fast as they could paddle a canoe.

One time Brenda, my Dad and I had just come into Red Lake in early May, ready to fly by floatplane from open water at the Chukuni River to a hole in the ice at the narrows in front of camp. It was warm and sunny and the ice in the entire lake was probably only days away from disappearing. 

Ed Paishk, who along with his brother, Tony, worked about every fall at camp as moose guides, kept following my Dad everywhere he went in town. Ed was drunk and was slurring his words so badly none of us could make out what he was saying. In all likelihood, he wanted to bum some money for more drink as this was the custom of most of the guides.

We were in a hurry as the plane was waiting over at the river. It was about 9 a.m.

"Ed, we've got to go but you can tell me all about it next time I see you," said Dad, getting into his car and driving off, leaving Ed weaving down the street.

We got out to camp by about 10 and slowly worked all of our possessions and food boxes up the hill into the lodge. Around 4 p.m., Ed came walking out of the bush from behind the camp.  He might have gotten a ride out to Madsen, but would have had to hoof it from there. This was before the Suffel Lake Road had been made. It was at least a 16-mile walk and would have meant walking completely around Trout Bay, then down the four-mile peninsula that has camp at its tip. Ed had made the trip in about six hours and had sobered up on the way.

"Hey, Don," said Ed. "I was charged for a sleeping bag last fall but I left mine in the bunkhouse."

Ed had his payslip from last fall in his hand. Dad would buy all the guides sleeping bags and charge for them only if they took the bag with them at the end of hunting season. Dad owed Ed $16. He took out his wallet and paid him.

"You want to stay here overnight..." he began to ask but Ed was already disappearing back into the trees.

Another time Dad had all the guides into camp the week before moose season and wanted them to scout around for moose sign. Some of these men had never been to camp before but finding their way just didn't seem a problem for the Anishinaabe.

There was a big map on the wall and Dad pointed to a lake on it and asked two of the newbees to go check it out. A creek ran about a mile from the little lake into Red Lake. One of the guys was tracing his finger along the creek, making a mental picture of the map, when Tony Paishk spoke harshly in Ojibwe to him. I think the gist of what he said was, "Only a dumbass slogs through the swamp and tag alders. There's a ridge right over here. Follow it north until it ends, then go east to the lake." The man nodded.

Tony had been born not too far from this place and probably had been to this and every other lake in the whole region from every direction many times in his life.

I was probably 13 or 14 at the time and somehow managed to weasel my way onto the scouting trip.

When we put our boat ashore at the end of the creek, the two men and I climbed our way up the rocks to the top of the ridge. We hadn't gone far, just picking the easiest places to walk when we hit a trail worn into the moss. The trail would disappear at times but we would eventually pick it up again. Finally we came to the end of the ridge and the men looked around until they found the trail down. From there it was nothing but swamp and tag alders a couple of hundred yards to the lake. It would have been a miserable place to hunt. We retraced our steps and this time, found the easy trail off the ridge, not far from the boat.

Dad asked me later what the trail had been like.

"I'm not sure it was even made by humans," I remarked. "I think it might just have been a game trail."

"Well, they're not mutually exclusive," said Dad. "Everything takes the easiest route."

That lesson came to mind one time when I was hunting with my brother-in-law, Gord, down near Thunder Bay. We were going to take a compass route back into a lake. I was following Gord because he was a whiz with a map and compass, having done it all over Canada since he was a high school kid working for a mineral exploration company.

We were heading straight south when we came upon a moose trail. Gord immediately followed it. It was easier walking for one thing. The problem was it was headed more or less west, right-angles to where we were going. After awhile it swung south again. I was getting worried. I caught up to Gord.

"Gord, I thought we were heading to that lake," I said.

"We are. I think the moose trail is going there," he replied.

"What makes you think that?" I wanted to know.

"Where else would it be going?" he said. "Moose have some place in mind when they make these trails."

Five minutes later we came out on the lake.

Just call this the predator crossing

 

Two timber wolves

Coyote

Lynx

Gray fox

A warming scene this winter

 

'The tracks of my deers'

 

Every mark in this field was made by whitetail deer

Winter has been easy on the woodpile