Canadian Disconnect

Roncesvallles, or déjà vu all over again…part duex Eight years ago when we walked the Camino of Santiago we trIed to get to St. Jean Pied de Port in Spain, but through a vast series of circumstances/karma we never made it there…we started our journey where we were supposed to start…in Roncesvalles….Part Duex is that we are now in Flin Flon, Manitoba for another night rather than going to Thompson, our original destination. And again it seems that this is how it was supposed to be. It was planned as a 4 day road trip starting in Saskatoon to Flin Flon, to Thompson, and then two days to go down to Winnipeg, but………..after checking out of the hotel, I got turned around and had to go to another gas station much further away…while paying my bill and talking to the owner about young people staying/leaving such a remote place as Flin Flon, a man chimed in and asked where I was from: I caught your accent,” he said….The nerve of these Canadians…saying we have an accent… After pleasantries he asked where we were going and responded “Why?” to my answer…We’d heard this before about Regina, so we had a tendency to ignore it and say, “Well, we’ll find out.”…but further discussion and confirmation from lots of different sources indicated that we had better options…We were warned by many people, Anglos and Native first nation people who said you don’t go out at night, that all the stores have bars on their windows and there’s nothing to see except rock…. I try not to give into the “fear factor” in traveling…I adhere to the theory that nothing bad ever happens to me when I travel…just things I didn’t expect. But, in truth I wanted to go there because it was basically the end of the line here in Manitoba…you can fly or take the train to Churchill to see the Polar bears, but that’s a VERY high-end ticket, and besides, it ain’t snowing yet…the bears are elsewhere. So it also seemed stupid to go somewhere just because I picked it on the map…Carol will go anywhere with me, just as I will with her, so she had no objection, and willingly was into seeing what we would find. So, Greg, our naysayer told us to come to the “Orange Toad,” the local be-all, end-all for coffee buffs in Flin Flon and it indeed was a booming place…more or less the morning watering hole for lots of the 5,000 denizens of this border town with Saskatchewan. It’s called Northern Manitoba, and it certainly feels northern, but in truth, it is only half way. Greg knows everybody….he’s the town crier, booster, entrepreneur, and general font of local knowledge…without prejudice, he told others at the OT of our plans, and they all shook their heads in a disapproving manner or rolled their eyes, or just said: “Don’t go, it’s not a nice place.”…Others gave the same sentiment by saying things like: “Don’t go out after dark.”…. it is a frontier town in all sense of the words…it is the end of the line for the road, which is why I wanted to go, but it is so isolated that there’s very little to do in a positive manner. It is populated by first nation tribesmen who have too much money (government stipends) no work, too much alcohol, and people with an ax to grind…. With this knowledge we went to the local first nations tribal center, and they basically confirmed everything we had heard…..so these are the facts…now we get into the real dicey part…WHY?....and in all such instances…it’s complicated…leave it to say that there is enough blame, animosity, ill-will, and general tension between the first nations peoples and the European settlers to satisfy anyone’s desire for bad feelings…Whites are bitter that the natives get money for doing nothing, so why should they work….natives feel that they’re stuck on reserves with little incentive to improve and their heritage and lifestyle was taken from them… My Canadian friends will have a much better handle on all this of course, but every time I go to Canada, I am confronted with the same dilemma in the social structure of Canadian society…I asked several individuals whether there was a difference in attitudes toward the problem in the population centers like Calgary or Saskatoon as opposed to the areas where the problem is closer to hand…they all said yes…City dwellers see it as an intellectual problem, whereas those who live more closely with the situation see it up close and personal….It would take far more time than I have to really sort this all out in my mind, and I present it here, only in the spirit of telling you what I see….with no bias in any direction. But, in the end, we decided not to go….Greg had a friend who had a wonderful lodge overlooking a beautiful lake…I posted a photo on my facebook page….it was so incredibly picturesque and everything that Canadian scenery was all about….it’s so easy to see these kinds of places and forget the problems that I wrote about in the early part of this letter….He invited us over to his place for dinner and we had a wonderful evening talking and discussing many of the subjects that are very touchy to Canadians…social structure of Canada….Quebec separatists….vis-a-vis the U.S….it was a very informative and interesting evening….we were glad that we’d stayed the extra night and had the opportunity to meet Greg and his wife Jan….I want to add that Jan is a retired social worker and Greg has an adopted first-nations brother who is mentally challenged…so we’re not talking some red-neck lumber guy with an agenda…they are very open and accepting people…it just shows the depth of the problem. Flin Flon itself was an amazing town of 5,000 people…it’s a mining town…nickel, zinc and now some gold…but it sits on what is known as the Canadian shield…the area where mother earth burped and left her deposits directly on the earth’s surface…the town basically sits on one huge pre-cambrian rock. To build the town, they had to dynamite the area so they could build on it…still water and sewer pipes run on the surface since it is impossible to get them underground….they have several pumping/heating plants in the city where the water is heated and continually circulated through the pipes because the winter temps get to -50 degrees…take your pick, Fahrenheit or Celsius…it’s just plain cold…We went to the hockey arena because, as you might guess, this is a hockey-mad town…and women were walking around the ice rink on the inside of the building…it was warmer in the building than outside. I missed a game by one day…drats…I love hockey and many BIG names were Flin Flon Bombers early in their careers…Bobby Clarke, Cam Neely to name a couple. I had a very cool flash back when I was here…we went a round-about way to get from point A to point B….we wound up by this lake (what else?) and there were float planes being loaded with supplies…I flashed on the time when my two drinking buddies, Duane and Bob, and I hatched a plan to go fishing in Alaska via float plane….and here’s the deal…I had just gotten my pilots license and it was decided that I would learn how to do float plane and we’d go do some more wild stuff….Obviously, it never happened, because if it had, I wouldn’t writing this…I’d have flown us in to some fog-shrouded mountain and we’d all have been killed…No Carol, No Marta, No Janet….I talked to the pilot who was from Belgium and there are all kinds high end hunting and fishing back in the real boonies that the big dogs fly into all year long…. Every time I had the opportunity, I asked people about the Thompson question, and were told over and over the same sentiments…”Don’t go there.”….So, instead we sat on our balcony….watched eagles soar, saw the beaver lodge under construction, watched the sun set and rise over the lake and simply had a wonderful extra day…It felt a little weird…as if I was just turning a blind eye to real life in favor of the beauty of Canada….my mind just does that….. Being in the hotel was a little strange…we were given the key to the front door by the owner…told where to get our room key and feel at home…there was nobody else in the hotel…I felt a little like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” as I wandered through the kitchen and lounge areas….nary a soul was to be seen….Luckily I was with Carol and not Shelley Duvall, so I kept what’s left of my sanity. Greg and Jan are going to become Servas Hosts and so we felt that we had made some very good connections, and as Carol continually reminds me…things work out as they are supposed to….it’s always been a hard concept for my Gillett mind to wrap around…but I’m always trying But now comes the rub…We arrived in Winnipeg and met a lady at an information booth in a mall and had a long conversation with her about Thompson…she just scoffed at the naysayers…she has a daughter who lives there, her grandsons go out at night and play hockey and she said it’s a very interesting place…..so once again I am confronted by the limited amount of real understanding I can gain about the places I visit in the short time I am traveling in/through them….I am totally dependent upon the people I meet, the experiences I have, and the conditions that exist in a given place at a given moment…I never try to state things as fact, I only try to record my experiences and how they play inside my head…. I’m not unhappy we didn’t go to Thompson…thoughts keep rolling through my brain which say…”this happened because for whatever reason you weren’t supposed to go.” We had a different experience with Greg and Jan, one that we wouldn’t have had if we’d gone to Thompson…but I’m again bedeviled by how much perceptions can differ when looking at the same situation…How could so many people of different persuasions….Anglo, First nation natives, women, men, young and old…see things so negatively if the truth of the matter was otherwise… I try really hard to discover the nature of the places I visit…but I’m often made painfully aware of the fact that, in the end, I know nothing. It’s a humbling experience, but I will keep asking questions, searching for answers, observing my surroundings, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get a picture of a very small piece of a very big puzzle.