Date traveled: July 8-11, 2019
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced worse bugs in my life.
The word ‘deerflies’ entered my vocabulary, and I wish they hadn’t. The constant sweat without a shower, the poorly-applied sunscreen on my back, the heat only silenced by a dip in the private entrance to the lake, the too-high anxiety to feel like I could take psychedelics safely, the difficulty in paddling a rowboat without instruction or expertise.
By this buffoon’s grinning face, you can tell it wasn’t all bad. I have a bad habit of going on trips with Justin when I have next to no money, so renting a boat or doing a tour of the lakes in the area seemed like an unattainable plan. Luckily there was a rowboat tied onto our dock we weren’t aware would be there, so we took it out one of the days for a long spin to a small island we noticed off in the distance.
After a couple hours of rowing and the growing burn on my back, we took a break on a small sand beach and went swimming. On our way to the island, we kept seeing a float plane flying around, land on the water, and take off again. The plane ended up getting to the island a bit before us and parking there. Two older guys talked to us for a bit about flying around these lakes. They told us we were paddling the boat backwards, too.
On the other full day we were there, we drove in near the town and went on a couple hiking trails. We didn’t see a single other person on those trails, probably because the number of bugs made it extremely unenjoyable. The more challenging and less travelled path we went on was difficult to navigate because of the lack of markers, and there wasn’t much to distinguish the path from the not-path. After going in circles a couple times, we gave up from completing the hike and went back to the car.
Near the hiking trails, there was a narrow beach that was a puzzle to find. We could see it from a lookout on one of the hikes, and saw some people walking along the main road in beach-wear. We parked near some cars and found a little path, followed it for 500 metres or so, and found an odd mix of sand and trees. I don’t think I’ve seen trees sprouting up completely surrounded by sand much before. It might have been the most unique thing I saw during the trip.
When I don’t get too in my head about it – imagining accidents, swerving into oncoming traffic, having a panic attack behind the wheel, etc. – I can really enjoy driving. When I’ve had recent practice, it can be thrilling to weave in and out of busy downtowns. It used to freak me out to drive on highways, but for most of my life highway driving meant the 401, or maybe single lane highways in a straight line with nothing around.
Now I love driving on dirt roads, winding around trees and looking out for holes in the ground, feeling alive with the fresh air smell, giving the SUV a dirt bath. It’s not as nice as hiking but it’s a lot easier.
It’s a lot easier to explore rural Quebec from Ottawa than rural Ontario. I don’t think to go to it as much, at least I didn’t before, because the other side of the provincial boundary always felt like an unknown. Since I’ve worked in Quebec, I think the separation has become less distinct in my mind. I’ve always said, in my latest tour of Ottawa, if I were to buy a house in the area, it would be on the Quebec side, deep into the woods, within a 45 minute drive of Ottawa. You can’t get that deep while being so close to the city on the Ontario side, and certainly not as affordably.
Aside from our hike and boat excursion, we spent a lot of the rest of our time around the fire. There was no electricity, so when the sun was on its way down there was no real reason to be in the cabin, provided we had doused ourselves in bug spray. We began to grow proud of ourselves with our ability to maintain a fire that was big enough that it took multiple pisses to put it out at the end of the night.
We smoked a lot of small cigars from Portugal (the perfect size), weed, and drank bargain blended scotch for hours. One of the nights we recorded an interview next to the fire about Justin’s photography work, which is much better than the cell phone picture you see in my posts. The start of the recording you could hear the crackling fire, but that was drowned out by our half-drunk digressions as the 30 minute episode progressed.
I like camping, but unless I’m on a super remote beach, I hate sleeping in a tent. I don’t sleep well on a good day, so sleeping while I’m all dirty and uncomfortable can be next to impossible, then I’m tired the next day and irritable, and on and on it goes. For a bit more money I’ve discovered I can rent a cabin with a bed and no other people around. Unless I’m doing a multi-day back-country hike, cabins are now my preferred place to sleep when camping.
My favourite part of this spot was probably the private dock. We jumped off it to go swimming, tied up the paddleboat, and sat on the end with our legs dangling while writing. The view was great – one of the trip’s best. One of the evenings we tried walking there from the fire pit and back, which in the light was a 30 second walk, but in the pitch black took more like ten minutes of careful, precarious stepping. Even that walk was pretty, surrounded by tall trees and down a little hill.
A couple times I used the rowboat as an extension of the dock. I used the seats as a makeshift desk, letting myself drift a couple dozens metres to find a little more quiet and a different angle.
I remember in grade nine geography, we learned about rocks. I hated that class, and it was during the worst semester of my school career. I remember the teacher asking the class a question one day that no one would answer. That was always painful for me, especially if I knew the answer. I felt a responsibility to say something. The question was: what are the oldest rock formations in Canada, the rockies in the west or the Canadian shield in the centre-east? He had just talked about weathering. I raised my hand and said the Canadian shield because they were smoother and not as tall. I think this park was on the Canadian shield.
It’s funny what we remember and why. Without that anecdote, I don’t think I would remember what weathering is, or perhaps even the Canadian shield. Now I assume that everything in this general area is the Canadian shield because that’s all I remember about rock formation in central-east Canada.
It’s going to be awhile before we can do much travelling, and thus awhile before Justin and I have an excursion like this. Three days was a good amount of time – you have enough space to find depth of topics, and at the end you feel sufficiently exhausted and ready for home. One day I’d love to do a week-long excursion, but the way my body feels these days even after sleeping in my own bed some nights, it does feel far away.
This isn’t the sort of place you’re going to travel far and wide to see. Even for people in the Ontario-Quebec area, from what I could tell, most other people there came for fishing and were very old. Most people haven’t heard of it. It goes to show that, at least in this part of the world, there are still places nearby that haven’t been overrun and over-popularized, so it’s possible to relax somewhere that hasn’t already been photographed to death. At least not yet.
describing space 
Awesome adventure
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