So, of course, it wanders back a month and a half ago...
I'm traveling down Highway 3 in southern Ontario, towards Leamington. It's a bit of a detour, but I'm going to see if I can meet up with a friend's wife's sister. I can't think of who else I know in southern Ontario, and, hey, we had fun once. I found her favourite sweater after she left it at a bar in Edmonton when we were all out for drinks at Christmas. I stayed later than her, and kept it, and gave it back the next day when I went over to see my old pal Nathan at his mother-in-law's/her mother's. She was happy to get it back.
So, long, boring story short, I figured that was reason enough to explore the area around Peelee Point and Leamington. It wasn't that much out of the way.
Unfortunately, it was almost 1:00 in the morning when I crossed the border from Detroit. Driving catatonic down the two-lane highway, I looked around hopefully, wishing Leamington would sort of move towards me at the same time, getting me somewhere I could sleep sooner.
I get into the little town in pitch darkness. The cute little streets are lined with little old two-story houses, some brick, most wood. The only thing open, though, is a Macs convenience store. I park perpendicular in front of the gas pumps and over a ton of parking stalls, and walk in through a cloud of mayflies (no, wait. That's the next store). Behind the counter, there's a grumpy-looking Fred Penner lookalike. I wander over to the cooler and pick a disgusting processed meat sandwich and a chocolate milk.
"Where's the campsite in town? I saw a sign on the highway saying there was something in Leamington."
"You're in Leamington," he replies.
I know that.
He continues. "If you go two blocks straight this way," he says, pointing in some non-direction, "you'll get to the Leamington one."
"Is that the one in the park?" I want to go to Peelee. I assume he'll know what I mean.
"Yeah."
So I buy and the food and a lighter so that I can light my campstove, and get back into the truck. Famished, I open the sandwich, devour half, then open the chocolate milk. I should really get moving, I think, so I put the chocolate milk on the dash of the truck, peel out of the parking lot, and fire chocolate slime all over the place. As it drips all over the maps and other garbage on the passenger side of the truck, I devour the other half of the sandwich while listening to the glug glug glug of milk dumping out. I can't reach it. And I'm too hungry. It's not leaking too fast, anyway.
Driving around like a stoner, I don't see anything resembling a campground. I go to a second Macs' Store a few blocks away, and get completely different directions from an unhappy-looking clerk. I follow her directions through downtown Leamington, past the huge brick Heinz Ketchup plant, past the little brick buildings on the main street, into another rural area. I go far, far, far. Nothing. I double back, turn at a different place, and get lost. I double back again, look around, and finally find a tiny sign for a campsite. It sits behind someone's house. I have no idea how to check in, or where to park, so I follow some signs to the office. But I don't see an office, so I go further, and turn into a dead end. I can't back up the trailer for shit, so I spend about ten minutes in the middle of the night in this quiet campsite backing up, stalling out the truck, backing up more, going forward, revving the engine, and accidentally honking the horn trying to get out of that little spot. Finally, I escape. I turn back towards the entrance, where I see a clear grassy patch across from what looks like a house, and some other trailers, near a row of tall trees that blocks in the edge of the campsite near the campsite's messy work area. I pull the trailer in parallel to the road, unhitch it, crank it up, and go to bed. When my head hits the pillow, I'm out.
The next morning, I wake to absolute silence. Well, there's regular sounds, like wind, and some birds, but really, nothing really loud. I think it might be 6:00 a.m. Peeking through one of the slots in the trailer towards the campsite, I see a beautifully-tended park full of trailers. There are still no sounds. Looking right a little, I see a little bug tent to the left of the closest trailer. Inside, there are two chairs. One is empty. In the other, there's something. I'm not sure what, because it's not moving at all. It has all the features of a regular human--eyes, legs, shoes, and so on--but it's sitting absolutely still, with its eyes open.
I get some cleaner clothes on, and step outside. The sky is almost blue, and the grass is amazingly green. I look around the trailer at the little tent. There's still no movement. I look for something in the truck, then look up. Stillness in the tent.
I start to cross the street, to go find the office, when a hand lifts from the arm of the chair.
"Hello!"
"Hi," I answer, startled at all this sudden activity.
"You must have gotten in last night."
"Yeah. I wasn't sure if that's a campsite, but I parked there anyway. I didn't want to wake you up. Are you the manager?"
Here began the longest pointless story of whose trailer it was he was staying in, how his sister let them stay there because of something they had done, how they were originally from the Lake Michigan area, how his wife was from Space, and they didn't have a dog anymore...
But it started like this:
"Come in! Sit down here a spell, if you want."
So I did. Then I got that story. I tried to tell a story equally as dull, and kept failing. I was driving across Canada for the first time, and had had some adventures. They cringed at the Detroit part. They marvelled at the abandoned town part. They snored at the part where they fell asleep. They came back with something about Arizona, and the other half of their year, and something about tent trailers, or something...
Finally, I took my leave. He finally got to the part about where the office was (right around the corner, in a trailer), and so I walked over there. I was passing deep little lakes, placed four-by-four, regularly spaced, and surrounded by trailers on the outside, and criss-crossed by a road on the inside.
I walk up the the trailer office, and it's pretty much the same as the rest of the trailers--except there's some movement. A weird, not-fat '70s Canadian Rock-looking man comes out, and tells me a much better story.
He used to have a whole bunch of record stores in Toronto, and he made enough money to get by and save some more, and so on. It was a fine business, but stressful. When the ass fell out of the music business around 2000, he packed it all in, had a talk with his aging father-in-law, who owned a gravel pit and some greenhouses just outside of Leamington. He planted some trees, laid some sod, and put a few fish in the spring-fed pits left by years of gravel-digging, and started charging people to camp there. Old people. Quiet people. Retired people.
Some of the ponds had the fish he put in there. Others had had fish dropped there by birds--he'd never put them in there. You could fish if you wanted, but it was all catch and release.
As we stood there, talking and looking around, I realized that he had the best job in the entire world. There were no public toilets to clean--everyone had their own, and there were no noisy teens to police--nobody in the park was under 55, except me, the squatter. He got to sit around and read books with his wife next to a pond full of fish, and walk behind a lawnmower once in a while. He didn't even have to do that all the time, he said, because one of the old guys had his own lawnmower, and in his post-retirement boredom, he'd just push it all over the park along the roads, and further in, if people wanted him to, for free, and fairly often.
While we watched the massive bass and sunfish swim up to the shore expecting a handout, he said he really didn't mind that I'd shown up when I did, or that I'd parked in the grassy spot that he didn't really use for anything anyway. He said I could use the shower if I wanted, and that he'd only charge me $15 because I didn't use power or water. I fished my last 13 American dollars out of my pockets, and he shook his head when I offered to get the other two in town.
So I cleaned up, packed up, waved to my motionless friend in his tent across the road from me, and drove into town. I looked around for a while, and once I'd seen what I needed to see in Leamington (I actually wrote one of the earlier posts in the Leamington Public Library), I headed down to Point Peelee Provinicial Park. I stopped at Paula's Fish Place, across from the shore, had a fishburger, and enjoyed the progressively less subtle advances of the near-cougarly waitress. At one point, she said "I can't wait to get home and get drunk. Sure wish someone was there with me."
But, as Jack White sang, "I'm lonely, but I ain't that lonely yet."
Which wasn't exactly true, but I had other fish to fry, as they say. And I chickened out, of course.
Before I left the restaurant I made two calls to the Peelee Island Duck Counting Facility, to see if my friend's wife's sister had brought any ducks back to the office to count. There was no answer, so I left an inane message saying she'd missed her chance, as though it were her fault I hadn't bothered finding her number earlier and calling her sooner.
With that done, though, I drove down to Peelee Point Provincial Park.
The woman at the gate said it would be $6.80 to come in and take a look, so I parked half a block outside the park gates, crossed the road to a public beach access path, and walked onto the shores of Lake Erie. I walked into the park on the beach.
The sand was soft, and the weather was a hazy and calm and warm. Healthy trees and bushes skirted the upper side of the shore. There were a few tampon applicators and dead fish and seagulls on the shore, but not too many. Keep in mind that in Halifax, dead and dying gunk washes up all over the place, since the city has NO sewage treatment at all. In the distance, two teenagers were looking at the bottom of one of their jet skis, which they'd dragged onto shore. With the wind and the waves crashing, and with me getting progressively more deaf, I couldn't hear what they were saying at all. Finally, when I got close enough, I heard.
"Have you got a knife?"
They were in wetsuits, and really didn't look threatening, but I don't usually get asked what I'm packing.
He motioned me to look at the bottom of his jetski. Somehow, he'd gotten one of the ropes he had tied to his handlebars tangled around the driveshaft of his machine. It wasn't really affecting how the machine ran, but it was wedged into the seal that kept water out of the works. He wanted to cut it out. I told him I didn't have knife on me, but that I had a jackknife and a machete in the truck. He looked at me funny when I mentioned the machete, but wanted the knife.
"Do you want a ride back to the truck?" He motioned at his still-functioning jetski.
"Um, sure." It wasn't all that far to the truck. I'd never been on a jetski before, either, and though I knew I'd like it, I was leery. He didn't have a lifejacket for me, and I don't do well in water since I almost drowned a few summers ago at a beach in Nova Scotia. And by almost, I mean, I panicked.
But I thought, "I have to stop being such a fucking baby!"
So I threw all my water-damageable crap into the sealed compartment. Then he'd get onto the jetski, I'd try to get onto it and tip him into the water, and then he'd tell me to get on first, and I'd tip it over, and then I'd get on, and balance it the wrong way so that he'd slip off while trying to climb on, and fall on his ass back into the water. But the water was warm, and I kind of wanted to go swimming anyway, so I really didn't mind. Maybe he did, but I didn't care.
Finally, we got on and went about 100 feet to where I'd hopped onto the beach. I fell off the back, revelling in the warmth of the water, and collected the knife from the truck. I got back on, fell off, got on again, let him accelerate, got thrown off by the force of the acceleration, and finally, we made it back to his friend and the other jetski. While two of us held it up, he hacked at the rope, dulling my knife on the driveshaft of the propeller. I'm certain it didn't do too much damage, but it's a nice knife. Who cares.
Finally, they got it all cut, but one piece was still jammed into the seal. So, teenager two started it up, and just roared around in the water until the piece fell out. We realized afterwards that he probably could have just pulled it out by turning the driveshaft a little bit by running the starter a little while pulling the rope, but since it all worked out in the end, it really didn't matter.
So, as Teenager One sailed me back to the truck, apologising for dunking me, I looked out over the water. It was blue and went on forever, and I couldn't see Peelee Island. I wondered what it looked like. The roar of the little motor in the jetski was surprisingly relaxing, considering how loud it was.
As I was about to hop off, I told the kid that this was the first time I'd been on a jetski. I couldn't tell him why that was--I really didn't know--so he offered to take me out for "a rip" or something like that.
I thought about it briefly. I didn't have a lifejacket on, and I didn't want to drown. I thought I might enjoy it if I were driving (maybe it's a control thing, or maybe it was the fact that I kept falling off when he was driving), but I declined. Something was pushing me onward, compelling me to move eastward. I didn't feel like spending any more time with these guys, for some reason, and I wanted to escape. I would have liked to stay longer at the beach, but it was a little lonely, so I changed my damp clothes in the bush, tied them to the metal loops inside the box of the truck to dry, and drove up highway three a little more, watching the sun go down as Lake Erie followed along.
1 comment:
good one.
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