It is snowing hard. I’m shirking my packing duties to huddle by the fire and contemplate the shock of snow in September. Rick scoffs; snow is late this year. There’s been snow in August up here.

Snow in August.

My grasp of geography used to consist of navigating by stores. It has improved, though not much, so it took me until last week to realize that Ireland is actually farther north than Lake Superior. Ireland and Britain would be tundra if it weren’t for the Gulf Stream. Instead, we get wet dampness for part of the year and damp wetness the rest. But I’ve never had a Snow Day, and certainly not in August.

Canada, you need to cut a deal with the Gulf Stream. Try to get a sunshine clause.

Danny at the North Gate restaurant/gas station was selling a trailer. Maybe.

The trailer was a baby-blue Howitzer down on its luck. Danny had built it himself: a tall 4 × 6 box with rounded Fifties fenders and a metal rack above. The lid was mostly rotten and there was a hole in the base. Wires trailed where the lights should have been and the paint scurfed off. Danny used it for beer runs to the Soo, but he was thinking about building a larger, legal one. So Rick said.

Ranger Tim needed a trailer to bring his gear south at the end of the season, so we headed up to investigate as an excuse for my second driving lesson. While I tried and failed to line the car up to the petrol pump, Danny scratched his chin and said he didn’t know yet if he wanted to sell the trailer, but if he did he’d want three to four hundred for it. It’d need a bit of work. This seemed a daft amount of money for a vehicle that needed to be pulled, but I stayed quiet. Tim decided to investigate more trailers.

We chatted with Danny’s three-year-old grandson, the best worker in Northern Ontario. Brandon directs operations on his father’s garbage run in the park, and even has his own work-gloves with his name across the knuckles. He is fiercely proud to heft the smaller bags into the truck. “Child labour laws don’t apply to family businesses,” his Dad says, clearly used to explaining away his son’s zeal. He is the happiest kid I’ve seen since the ragged firewood collectives in Asia and Latin America.

Tim and Rick scoured Sault Star classifieds all through August. Every trailer was either too big for the car or already gone. None of John’s leads turned up anything. Canadian Tire (a name of modest scope for a homegrown Wal-Mart) sold an assemble-your-own kit for $950 plus that whopping Canadian sales tax; no lid and no rack, either. A local dealer had a lovely little trailer, so well-balanced you could bounce it on a finger, but when he finally confessed to all the hidden charges, it came to $1400. On trips to town I learned to spot trailers from my peripheral vision as I had once spotted Prada shoes (and more recently, Peregrine falcons). There was nothing decent for sale.

So Tim drove back out to the North Gate to offer Danny two hundred bucks. Danny was busy with the lunch rush and said he’d think about it. Two weeks later, with Tim’s park contract running out, he hadn’t made a decision. He promised to stop by the ranger headquarters in the afternoon when he went to fix a downed park tractor, and Tim posted co-workers to nab him for an answer. Danny caved in the face of this campaign, and eventually agreed to sell it for two fifty, partly counted out in loonies and toonies. Then Brandon helped them unload the trailer.
    “I can do that one!” he yelled crossly when Tim poached a small box. Then he trotted back to the trailer with it and proudly carried it back the shed.

The trailer looked unpromising, but Tim had faith. I offered to help with restoration, and so on Saturday we scoured the park dumps for discarded wood. We found several old wooden road signs, an old jonboat with a hole in it, aluminium strips for patching the jonboat, and sheets of old rubber that might be useful for something. We drove to Wawa, a real frontier town, to buy a light kit. Then he backed the trailer into one of the work bays to get started.

I was the Brandon of the operation: enthusiastic in my borrowed boiler suit, but not especially useful. I insisted on playing the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” at full volume; the Broadway chorus puts me in the mood for a road-trip. Tim retaliated briefly with the Beastie Boys. I can’t stand the Beastie Boys. Every song sounds like “Mo-om, I can’t find my college application essay!” But after these musical interludes the work was peaceable. Tim wired in lights, dismantled the lid, and sawed out the rotten wood. While he rebuilt the lid he stuck me in charge of surfaces, where I belong.

I’d been taken with Rick’s suggestion to stick large yellow daisies on the faded, peeling baby blue, but since Tim might need to rely on neighbours for winter storage, he didn’t want to push their kindness with an eyesore. So I sanded. And sanded. And slopped on Park Brown to cover the baby blue. Meanwhile Tim sawed and soldered and hammered and wired, and eventually fitted a new patchwork lid back onto the base. One end, patched with a road sign, now has a large yellow arrow. We sanded the lid right over the fresh paint, speckling it blue and immortalizing our footprints on the wet fenders. The whole thing took two days.

We spent Monday boarding up the Laughing Brook cottage for the winter; cursing at heavy screens, too-short screws, and sandy bolts. I chickened out of paddling in the freezing stream to recover the water pipes for the gravity feed.

The next task, the fun part, was packing in the snow. Tim has seven boats: a fourteen-footer, the salvaged jonboat, large red canoe, a smaller plastic kayak, and three inflatable kayaks. Far too many paddles. Then add a bicycle or two, a large cedar chest, several boxes of books, a hundred-gallon water heater, camping gear, fishing tackle, tools, three computers, a large monitor, a printer, a full stereo system, a Koolatron fridge, a few lamps, and kitchen sundries. Plus me and my rucksack. All of this was to fit in a Honda Accord estate and a 4 × 6 trailer. I knew it could be done, but only because I’ve seen Burmese country buses. I was hoping to pay my passage with the Tetris skills I picked up in the early 90s.

Moving keeps you busy to stop you feeling sad. Early tomorrow I have to board up the Pilot House cabin, and stuff my sleeping gear into the car while Tim greases the trailer axles. A quick walk on the beach to say goodbye to the lake, then a ten-hour drive to Ottawa’s Glebe. I’m looking forward to lowering the tone of my sister’s posh neighbourhood with this shuddering hillbilly wagon, built with such love.

Hunting season has started. The park is just an hour and a half from Michigan, and the Americans have started their winter migration. They are easily spotted because they love camouflage. The Canadians disdain them: Michigan Militia, Uncle Norm’s boys, they say, doing target practice on crown soil.

I remember when American tour groups barreled into Limerick from nearby Shannon airport. Ireland was poor in the Eighties and while we welcomed them, we suffered resentment just because we lacked their freedom to swoop into another country on a magic dollar carpet. We assumed they were all rich, but I realize now they were mostly well-meaning retired midwesterners who had probably saved for the pilgrimage. They wore their own idea of camouflage to hunt their roots: godawful kelly-green crimplene flares and tartan caps. They were loud, large, and childlike, and I still have difficulty convincing some Irish friends that other varieties of American exist.

Northern Ontario is not wealthy, and I sense the locals feel the same as we did then. They can’t head south and get a dollar thirty for their buck. The tourists have bigger, flashier cars and gear, and this sting is relieved only by traded satire. Ranger Sam reported a Sunday sighting of a Ford Explorer heading north, completely painted camouflage including the windows, with the licence plate BOWHUNTER. This prompted the story of a legendary Lake Superior ranger who bore no love for our Michigan neighbours. Every autumn he took great pleasure in his frequent trips to the beer store, where hunters in full gear would stagger out with boxes of suds. He would cross the parking lot to shoulder the guy, a solid whomp, followed with a stream of folksy Canadian apology:
  “Whoa, sore-y, sore-y, didn’t see you there, eh?” Then, brushing his victim’s sleeve, he would continue in wonder: “Hey! That camo really works!”

An asshole. Still, my kind of asshole.

Two weeks ago I switched to a policy of rodent repatriation rather than murder, since this seems like a poor time in history to train in hardness towards suffering. And this is my reward for a bleeding heart: the fecking mice chewed through my life phone line, depriving me of my blistering 19.2K AOL connections.

I’d never relied on a dial-up connection before I left New York, even though I spent two years working at a dial-up ISP. At home I wrote on a unconnected laptop and up-and-downloaded at work using a WiFi card. Broadband, baby, broadband all the way.

Joining the beep-beep-crackle-beeeep masses has changed my internet habits, especially as I’m also sharing a phone line with homesick rangers and building contractors. Connecting has become an event.

I switched to Mozilla, despite their ugly logo that was poorly-designed for icon size. I switched not because it’s faster, though those who are wise in the ways of browsers claim it is. An eager-beaver browser can’t much improve a connection that never grabs more than 19.2 bits of information per second. But Mozilla has tabbed windows, a feature Internet Explorer lacks. Now I launch a Salon article, for example, and while it’s loading I flick pages two and three open in adjoining tabs. I scan my list of favourite blogs, and pop the updated ones open in another set of tabs. While the daily 90-100 spam emails crawl into my inbox, I zip around the internet like rat on crack, trying to grab everything I might want to read that day before I log off. It’s never enough.

I write emails offline and try to batch up the chatty ones into a weekly session to curb my addiction. It doesn’t work. I’m a reformed instant messenger: now I check my buddy list just to picture old friends at their desks, then disappear before I get an excuse to hog the phone line. (The few times I’ve left it on in the background no one flashed a message anyway. IMing after a long silence has all the friction of a phone call.)

I write these entries offline too, and have always done so. It affects the texture. I eat other peoples’ words like a locust, but I’m not much of a linker. This site is a series of (sometimes cranky) love letters to the people who read it, not a thread in a conversation between bloggers. I’m not connected enough for that conversation, and I write too slowly anyway.

Dial-up breeds idiosyncrasies and complaints. I look for the printer-friendly version of any article I read, to get it on a single page with no heavy sidebar images. I’ll scroll text to the bottom of the sea, but please don’t make me click. I’ve waited twenty or thirty minutes to download photos from the many besotted parents among my friends. (You’re worth it! Your babies are by far the best-looking babies in their age-group.) It needs to become much, much easier to edit all the new digital photos out there—most people I know can’t do it, and they don’t know how to upload them to a website, either.

There are still “designers” who forget alternative text on fancy graphic navigation—come on, people! At least if I wait, though I probably won’t, those lazy links will appear eventually. A blind person’s reader software will never get them. And I send special bad ju-ju to those who make fat Flash home pages with no alternatives. On shopping sites, yet! Flash is intrusive and irritating to casual surfers on a slow connection, and I’ve yet to see an exception. Skip. Goddamn. Intro.

In the US no one listens to the complaints of digital peasants. Who cares, cabin girl, you’re not buying from us anyway, and nor are the Vietnamese kids who crowd the internet cafés in Saigon. But the dial-up experience is remarkably similar to the wireless toys I worked on when I last drew pay-cheques. Connecting for data on phones and PDAs still requires patience and crafty information thrift, both from designers and customers. The gadgets are not optimized for freeform data yet, but it’s also because because the connections are as slow as AOL in the woods, if not slower. They will get faster eventually, despite phone company bumbling, but it’s good to have this period of forced simplicity. Scarcity breeds elegance, at least some of the time.

In the meantime, I’ve cobbled together another phone line, and am back digging (information) for victory.

Lake Superior has been the first real home I’ve had in eighteen months. I’m a domestic creature (a domestic goddess, you might say) despite—or because of—all my wanderings. Here, I was happy to wake in the same terrible taco-bed every morning. I developed daily routines, ordinary but deliciously exotic after too long on the road—Red River Cereal at 8, coffee at 10. At Beaver Rock I got the kind of Huck Finn summer that everyone should have when they’re ten years old. I think I’ve grown four inches.

But the Monarchs and the geese are heading south, the obsessive and compulsive squirrels are hiding caches of nuts under the porch, and the bears are getting hungry. Those are my cues to get out before snow starts swirling through the chinks in my unheated blog cabin. It is not sensible to live in a country where “winterize” is a normal, everyday word. I am not winterized. I have no home, no job, and no residency permit, and so it’s time for this grasshopper to pack up again and give Canada a kiss goodbye. Or rather, a passionate get-a-room-for-god’s-sake snog goodbye, since I’ve come to love the place in spite of the GST.

Ottawa next, to play with the power-dressing MBA chick my lovely sister has become in her latest incarnation, and to play with the step-niblets, who call me “Durbla”. I will go armed with an extensive movie wishlist, and perhaps even make it to a few museums this time.

Then New York in early October to catch up with some old friends and maybe meet some new ones in a more fleshly world than this. A wedding near Toronto at the end of October. November onwards belongs to Ireland and London. I will try very hard to curb my feral ways and not pee on the sidewalks.

I’m nervous. I’m hoping for friendly faces as I start yet another new life. I think they’ll be there.

   “There was a very large black bear on the porch just now,” says Tim as I flail up the hill, back from a jog. “Sniffing at the crate of food. Much bigger than the last bears.”

I’d heard heavy movement while I was sitting inside earlier. I’d thought it was Tim stopping by while he carried out the daily water tests. More likely it was my new neighbour, Mr. Bear. “About 350lbs, I’d say. I was scrambling for the digital camera, but he’d gone by the time I found it. Just ambled up shitter path and into the woods.” (Up here, people say “shitter”, not “outhouse”. It took weeks for my delicate sensibilities to adjust. I swear like Colin Farrell, but such frankness is a different thing entirely.)

We carried all the dry food over to the staff pantry. The wooden dumpster outside the kitchen door was hacked and splintered—bear damage, new since the morning. It was my pungent, fermenting squid guts that drew him, and I felt slightly guilty. It wasn’t the season for problem bears, though, right?
   “Depends. Berries are gone. The campground is empty, no more garbage. Things are starting to get harder, and that sometimes makes for a problem bear. He seemed pretty shy, though, scooted pretty much as soon as he saw me.”
I quizzed Tim. Could he get into the cabin? Under what circumstances would he find me irresistible enough to want to? What should I do if he came back? What about walking back from the kitchen at night? What kind of doors can he open? How tall was he? Taller than me? Taller than you? Where do bears sleep at night? How big is his territory?
   “Just look left and right before you stroll out onto the porch,” said Tim. “And don’t keep food or dirty dishes in there.”

Now I shout “Hello Mr. Bear,” whenever I step outside. I hope I’ll see him. I hope he won’t be the last thing I see.

   “I can’ remember that,” says Mikey. One arm is draped heavily across my shoulders. A bottle of Sambuca hangs from the other. “Iss too hard. I’ll forget. Dirt. Dirt, I can remember. Can I call you Dirt?”
For the twelfth time, I say okay, Mikey, you can call me Dirt.
   “Dirrt!” he says with satisfaction and a fine French-Canadian ‘r’.
   “See, that’s ignorant, calling her Dirt,” says Jim. I am fond of Jim, the former dog-musher. He broke his nose six times in his amateur boxing career, and now it wobbles down his face. His hair and moustache are still glossy black, though he passes around proud photos of his grandchildren. In his overalls he looks exactly, and I mean exactly, like Super Mario. “Try it, Mikey. DAR-ve-la. Am I right?”
   “Pretty close,” I say.
   “Darbel…” says Mikey. “No, I can’ be doing with that. I won’ remember it. I’ll call you Dirt. You don’ mind?” He peers blearily into my face, searching for woman-hurt.
   “Not at all. I’ve been called worse.”
   “You’re a good woman, Dirt. Have some Sambuca.”
   “Breathe on the fire, Mikey. It’s going low.”

The contractors are working on the new Visitor’s Centre at Lake Superior Provincial Park, a shiny, five-million-dollar affair that will soon hum with electronics. Motion sensors will detect your entrance and immediately ten DVD players will project across the lobby, recreating the sights and sounds of a November storm on the lake. Inside, a bronze lynx stalks a bronze merganser duck, paddling obliviously on the next plinth, while a sleek bronze otter watches nearby. Equally sleek displays introduce other park inhabitants, past and present: the Ojibway, the giant sturgeon, the Voyageurs, the black bear. You could visit the Visitor’s Centre and avoid the whole untidy out-of-doors thing. The hope is, though, that you’ll be inspired to explore.

Mikey, Scotty, Andy, and Jimmy are not much inspired to explore, though they’ve been here since Spring. The work is hard, the hours are long, and they speed back to their homes in the Soo as soon as they are released on Fridays. During the week they peer into my cook-pots in the staff kitchen while they wait for their pizzas to heat.
   “What’s it tonight, then?”
   “Vietnamese stuffed squid,” I say, wedging a thumbful of noodles into something slippery that might be a Victorian catgut condom. “Do you want to see their eyes?” I say, with an evil glint in mine. Scotty looks like he may vomit.
   “Got the wine going again, eh?” says Andy.
   “I do,” I agree. I am the only one in the kitchen who does not drink case after case of Canadian beer, and so my three-month collection of empties is conspicuous. Whenever they see me, or so it seems, I have a wine bottle clamped between my sneakers and am wrestling the cork out with a Swiss Army Knife. The contractors are puzzled about my purpose, though no more than myself. What is she up to, this Irish girl of no apparent occupation other than filling the kitchen with strange smells?

We lived peacefully side-by-side all summer, exchanging pleasantries about my bizarre culinary performances and silently united by our illicit status. They are supposed to be paying fifty or sixty bucks a night for dingy motel accommodation outside the park gates. I am supposed to be in my own country. We are all, in the nicest possible way, squatting in the abandoned buildings at Beaver Rock Cove staff complex, and so we tried not to annoy the official staff in the kitchen. I baked occasional bribes of peanut-butter cookies and hid behind Ranger Tim. The builders mostly skedaddled once their pizzas were heated. Once a week they blasted The Bear Classic Rock and swept and swabbed the floors. “Dwayne’s Crew” was written on the cleaning rota in erasable marker, where everyone else was listed by name. They didn’t mind. This way four of them got to share the chores of one person.

Now the summer staff are gone, and we are braver.

The builders doss down in an old bunkhouse at Beaver Rock, and do occasional fix-ups as payment. In the evenings they hit golfballs on the beach sand, or play horseshoes with old plastic toilet seats. They hang out at a picnic bench in front of the bunkhouse, just above the beach, where they build great fires with old construction materials and down heroic quantities of Molson Canadian and Labatt’s Blue. They smoke Drum tobacco or legally-possessed dope. They gossip about the marijuana plantation that was raided last month in the park.

I had seen them there sometimes on my walks on the beach. The flames from their bonfires were high, and lit up the growing collection of dead soldiers on the picnic table. I never joined them, though, until one night Mikey pressed Sambuca shots on me and Ranger Tim in the kitchen, on his way from the cooler to the weekly pow-wow. We decided to follow him out with some beer offerings later, and they were touchingly glad to welcome us.
   “Well, it’s great to finally fucking meet you properly, eh Tim? All summer we didn’t know if you guys minded us being in the kitchen…”
   “We didn’t know if you were real straight and all, workin’ for the Ministry…”
   “Always nice to have a woman about the place. Makes it feel more like a home, eh? We used to go crazy with the smells in the kitchen, and all we’d have is pizza or burgers.”

We chatted and drank, figuring each other out. When it was my round I scrabbled desperately in the walk-in cooler for beers that weren’t poncey Hefeweizen or Czech Pilsner, and eventually redeemed myself with some good Canadian Sleeman’s Ale. Mikey, now half-way down his Sambuca bottle, was slurring when I got back.
   “We never knew your name.” I knew that. Most non-Irish people don’t get it right away if they haven’t seen it written down. People I’ve known for some time often get a desperate look when they have to introduce me to someone else. “And this is…”
   “Dervala,” I say.
   “JAR-vla?”
   “Dervala. With a D.” My brogue lives on in alveolar fricatives.
   “What kind of a name is that?” says Mikey. He sounds affronted.
   “Irish. I’m Irish.”
   “You’re not.”
   “I am.”
   “From Ireland Irish?”
   “Exactly.”
   “When did you come to Canada?”
   “July.”
   “But you don’ have an accent.”
   “I do, though. But Northern Ontario sounds very like the west of Ireland accent.”
   “You’re not Irish. If you’re Irish, where did you learn English?”
This may be a lot of information to present at once, I decide, and since Mikey is now quite drunk I don’t want to tax him. “In New York,” I say, and he seems satisfied.
   “I knew you couldn’t be straight over from Ireland. Your English is too good, eh?”

Tim helps Scotty throw a large armchair on the fire, and we watch it go up. It is entirely itself as it burns, sitting with dignity as it shimmers in the flames. I picture Shelley’s cremation on the beach in Italy.
   “So Tim,” says Scotty with a backslap, “you’re the big naturalist, eh? We were watching the geese fly south earlier, in that V like they do. Tell us, why is one side of the V longer than the other?”
Tim thinks for a bit. Scotty and Jimmy hoot.
   “Because there are more geese on that side!”

They discover that in me they have a virgin audience for ancient Northern Ontario jokes, and they spar to tell them. Mikey launches into an endless ramble about the Soo woodpecker that goes to Toronto (“And this Toronto woodpecker, he’s a big fucking cool dude and he’s walkin’ around in sunglasses…”) Jimmy tells me how Two Dogs Fucking got his name. Then he then tells me how much he adores his second wife, how they hate being separated while he’s working up here. “She’s Croatian. Speaks it and everything. And a great cook, as good as my Italian mother.”
   “Do you know why Italian men learn to cook?” I ask him, an old Brooklyn joke my landlord used to tell. He shakes his head. “So they can marry Irish women.” This pleases him greatly.
   “The one you want to have cooking for you,” he says, “is Mikey’s mother. Makes his lunch and dinner for the whole week and sends it up with him in Tupperware. Five lunches, four dinners, every fucking week.”
   “He never even knows what he’s going to have until he opens it,” Scotty hoots, “ ‘What’s for dinner, Mikey?’ ‘I don’t know yet,’ he says.” I laugh. Mikey is at least forty years old. Now he’s glowering through swigs of Sambuca, but they won’t let it drop.
   “Little fucking Tupperware boxes,” sputters Jimmy. “He doesn’t know what’s for lunch til he opens them.” It is a great joke. Mikey doesn’t think so.

   “Dar…Darbel…I jus’ can’ get your name. Do you have some kind of nickname?’ he says, leaning on my shoulder now.
   “Sometimes people call me Derv.”
   “Derv. No. I won’t remember that either. I can remember…Dirt. Dirt, I can remember. Is it terrible if I call you Dirt?”
   “Not if it makes you happy, Mikey.”
   “Dirt. My brother, see, he remembers everyone’s names. I jus’ remember faces. My brother would get your name. He’s in business, eh? Has to remember names.” His elbow is now wedged painfully into my neck. “What these guys don’ get, eh, Dirt, is why my mother makes my lunches that way. The psy-cho-logical aspects.”
Jimmy and Scotty are still throwing Tupperware barbs. The fire is roaring. Mikey tells them to shut up, he’s explaining to me.
   “See, my mother was not my mother. She was my grandmother. The woman I thought of as my mother was really my grandmother.”
   “Then your birth mother was your sister?”
   “Right. She lived with us. But my grandmother was my mother.”
   “You never knew this growing up?”
   “I knew. I didn’ care. My mother was my mother, and she was my sister. She had other kids later, too. I liked her, but she was my sister.”
   “Jack Nicholson found out the same thing about his family just a couple of years ago. You’re in good company.”
   “Huh. So anyway, I moved to the Soo, built a house. And my grandmother died. Then my birth mother, she needed to move to the Soo to be near some of her other kids. And I had space in my house, so she said could she come and live with me. And I said fine. But now it’s like she wants to start being my mother for the first time. And I’m 41. And I had a mother already. So she makes me fucking crazy with where are you going and here’s your lunches. I tell her, stop trying to be my mother all of a sudden. But she needs it. She makes me fucking crazy, but she’s lonely and she needs it.” He swigs his Sambuca and jerks a thumb at Scotty and Jimmy, who are standing back so they can’t quite hear. They’re still laughing. “These guys, they don’t get the…deep stuff behind my lunches. They just think it’s funny.”

For a moment he looks so lost that I can fully understand the urge to mother Mikey.

Photo by Ranger Tim

Parked the car outside the power plant. Arranged innocent “who, me, officer?” expressions. Slipped into the forest to bushwhack down a steep, boggy slope. Climbed past humped, rusted wrecks. Jumped at the ghostly creaking of a truck-door in the wind. Cursed at blackberry brambles and sticklebacks. Slid over wet logs onto the rocks to examine the Montreal River at the base of the huge hydro dam. Whooped, and with a shuffling, one-footed Riverdance, pumped up the inflatable kayak. It was Ranger Tim’s day off, and we were exploring.

The Montreal River was once one of the finest fast-water rivers in North America before it was dammed in the Thirties to bring light to this benighted land. There are six dams in all; three in the six or seven miles between our put-in spot and the river’s escape into Lake Superior. This famous canoeing river is now inaccessible to all but the eccentric. There’s no way to get a hard-shell boat down to the water, and most people are too sensible to trespass and bushwhack with an inflatable kayak. It’s a great shame.

The mighty Montreal is now stately and plump. I confess that this is fine by me: I like my whitewater on the distinctly blue side, with the kind of gentle rapids that save paddling but don’t trouble the heart-rate. Unlike a canoe, where you kneel like a galley-slave, the inflatable is like a blow-up La-Z-Boy, the aluminium paddle as light as a mixing-spoon. It was all very restful. This brave red kayak has seen far worse: it has been buffeted by ferries while circumnavigating Manhattan, and once it bounced off a startled hippo on the Zambezi.

The pent-up flow of the river drowned much of the surrounding forest when the dams were built seventy years ago. The effect is unearthly. Great stumps poke out of the water fifty feet from the bank, and here and there single-tree islands survive. Looking down at the underwater forest floor, you expect to see sodden hares and squirrels running between the branches. The forest seems untroubled by its loss. The bank is lined with drooping cedars, bright maples, and magnificent white pines that would have made fine masts for a British man o’war. Pink alders and aspens gave the river the festive air of a royal barge party. Saved by its inaccessibility, the area has not been logged for a long time.

The journey was bittersweet for Ranger Tim, who had once turned down the opportunity to buy the two thousand acres of this township for pocket change when the Algoma Central Railway was divesting its assets. Instead it was bought by an American—boo, hiss—subdivided into lots, and flipped for an unholy profit. As we wandered down the river, he mourned each of ‘his’ trees.

A murder of ravens, two dozen, emerged river-right. They cawed and played on the updrafts in great high spirits. A moose must have died for such a party, since they don’t usually congregate in large groups. They wheeled and swooped, dressed inky-black as a SoHo brunch. I lay back in the boat to watch them, and wanted desperately to fly.

There was a neat take-out point just before the second dam, and we climbed up the hill to investigate. A power station thrummed below the bridge, and at the bottom of the gravel road there was a single red truck in the yard. “We stay together, stay quiet, and walk fast,” said Tim, who knows how to do these things. We retrieved the kayak, dry-bags, and paddles, then solemnly scuttled down the hill, camouflaged by a large red blow-up boat like a particularly foolish beetle. Nobody stopped us as we stumbled through the trees, so we put in again and paddled off down the river.
The river was wider and slightly less sluggish on this stretch, and we stopped paddling altogther except to steer around the bends. At a few points we shrieked as we were drenched in chutes of fast water, but it didn’t matter much on yet another day of warm sunshine instead of the expected late-September frost and snow. (By the end of the day my milk-bottle legs had burned pink.)

Two miles down we came to yet another power station. The river had originally split here, and was dammed on both forks. At the wide mouth of the left dam we could see a sign on a small beach, which drew us like a casino billboard even though we knew it probably said mean things.

KEEP AWAY
Dangerous waterway ahead.
Levels rise and fall
without warning.
No swimming or boating.

Parroted in French. But the little beach was connected by a small strip of land to the power station above the dam, and we were naturally curious. A bulldozer dozed near a gigantic pile of sticks, logs, and driftwood, like some bird with a slovenly nest. There was no one around. The station was fenced off, but by scrambling up the rockface we found a passage around the fence, which acted as a useful handrail on the way down. I sashayed across the grand mesh catwalk over the dam, pretending to be Kate Moss modelling life-jackets. We admired the huge chains that raised and lowered the gates like canal locks. Windows flapped in the abandoned storage buildings. We poked our noses where they didn’t belong until we grew bored by these feats of engineering and headed back.

We paddled back across the estuary to the far bank of the river. This was the end of our trip, since from here the river headed to its final dam through a canyon. Tim deflated the boat while I packed the bags, a little deflated ourselves. Then I noticed a Great Lakes Power truck parked just in front of the forbidding sign opposite. Two security guards stood, hands on hips, clearly puzzled, watching us pack up our gear. Our industrial jaunt had tripped an alarm system and they had sped to investigate. The rubber kayak left no landing marks on the gravel beach, though our footprints would have been clear, and with no sign of a boat they couldn’t figure out how we had got over there. Nor could they catch us, and with a good girl’s terror of authority, I was relieved. Instead we slogged an hour and a half up the highway back to the dull, law-abiding world of motorized transportation.

The sugar maples are slowly turning, a few bright-orange prodigies lighting up the hillsides. The salmon are spawning in Speckled Trout Creek. The Mighty Bear, the local classic rock radio station, is choked with commercials for hunting gear. Jonathan, the park maintenance superintendent, promises me moose stew from the roadkill he butchers and freezes every year around this time.

The woodpile is untouched so far, except for the single log I use to prop up the head of the elderly sofa-bed every night. It is raining today, but September at Superior has been two weeks of glorious t-shirt weather, against all predictions that I’d be crouched in front of the fire. Instead I was swimming in the lake.

A huge swarm of flying ants hatched in the cabin. They flew in my face and hair and the ungainly queens crunched lightly underfoot like ant tempura. They did not succumb to a delicate swat like mosquitos, so I sprayed them with my carpenter-ant death spray and swept up hundreds of bodies. Then I began to fret about the birds eating poisoned ants.
   “Most birds don’t like ants,” said Tim laconically. Smart birds. After that I marked my territory with death spray every day at 3.45pm, when the hatch of the day began.

Last time I’d had flying-ant fun was in my college flat in Dublin, where they streamed out of the wall one afternoon when we were watching Blind Date instead of going to lectures. We were all hapless housekeepers, and I think it was my flatmate Pat—or possibly Phillip Bouchier-Hayes—who suggested we should pour honey all over the wooden floor to trap them. Oh, we trapped them all right. They were stuck to the floor long enough to chip off and sell as amber when we ran short of milk money.

A large family of aphids hatched by the porch picnic table when I was eating dinner on Tuesday. Most seemed to think that the purpose of their very new life was to follow the tomato salad into my mouth, and they made a mad dash whenever an opening appeared. They were delicate, gauzy creatures with white powder-puffs around their midriffs that dissolved as soon as you touched them. Presumably this powdery stuff was either for camouflage or it had a foul taste to deter birds; I can confirm it tasted foul to me. It made them look rather like the ghosts of all the striped mosquitos I’d slapped this summer; benign ghosts who didn’t sting but floated reproachfully in my September dinner.

The weather was headed towards autumn yesterday, so Tim decided to take me on a last canoe ride to Rix Township, about an hour down lake towards the Montreal River. His father bought him the red, chestnut-wood canoe the year I was born. “Nice to take the two old girls out,” he said as I climbed in, unsteady as ever. Of the two I am in marginally better shape, if only because my seat is not broken.

We passed a mink in the water, which evoked a profane Hail Mary from this recovering Catholic: “Blessed art thou, a mink swimming.” He was a sleek and beautiful furry tube, a wet weasel. They are native up here, and so are not the pests they are in Europe. We turned the canoe around to follow him, and he rewarded us with a filthy look and a powerful surface dive, reappearing behind a rock we couldn’t reach.

A bald eagle followed us out and back. Did my weedy paddling made me look a more likely prey than the mink? He perched in a tree and and watched, and I was charmed. I’d never seen a bald eagle before, and he looked just like the cranky old lads in the box of The Muppet Show.

Halfway out, there was a house-sized rock in the water, and above on the cliff we saw the long naked roots of a red pine, exposed when the rock fell. It happened last year or the year before, and I would have liked to have seen the explosion from a safe distance. I wanted to stay well out from the cliff face after that, but was drawn back in by the diabase dikes, crevices in the native granite filled with much younger black lava stone. Some were narrow, like Flintstone escalators in the cliff-face, but one was as wide as barn door.

We ate roast-beef sandwiches on a slab of pink rock, then turned back when the rain started and the wind picked up. Canoeing with the wind behind you is like working in a surging economy: you think that you are powering along solely due to your own skill, strength, and talent, and it can be a shock to turn around. Still, in the stern of a sturdy old canoe, maple paddle in my hand, I find bouncing over the waves as much fun as skimming fast across flat water.