Last winter, when I was home for my grandfather’s seventy-fifth birthday, my dad and I drove out to Kenora for a day. We planned to visit a few places to research my novel, Up in Ontario. We left Winnipeg early in the morning, before sunup. By the time we reached the treeline just east of the mennonite town of Steinbach, the sun had risen to the horizon. All across the fields, drifts of frozen snow shone in the low light. The day seemed to hold great promise.
We passed into the transitional country, the mingling space between ecological zones which makes up twenty precent of the area and holds eighty percent of the wildlife. Deer tracks crossed the highway where creeks ran off into the bush. The temperature dial on the dash of Dad's truck never went beyond halfway, so you kept your jacket on when you travelled with him in the winter, whether you were going hunting or to hockey practice. He joked with me that it might break something to turn the dial all the way into the red. He had never tried it before; you never knew what might happen. I smiled at him and called him an old farmer and my coffee steamed in front of my face when I took a sip.
We arrived in Kenora about mid-morning. Everything was very quiet. The population of the town doubled or tripled in the summer, and that was when I visited. So I expected a lot more activity. But it was a Thursday and the roads were empty. Many shops had a "Closed for the Season" sign in the window. Snowmobile tracks ran along the shoulder of the highway and then veered off along well-worn trails down to the water or up over the hill into the backcountry.
To prepare for the trip to Kenora, I had made a list of things I wanted to see. We followed the curving backstreets down to where we used to pass through the the locks from Lake of the Woods into the Winnipeg River. Neither Dad or I had been there in over fifteen years, not since we had passed through the locks on a daytrip to Minaki Lodge where we ate brunch before spending the day in the boat, exploring the network of islands and channels of the Winnipeg River. That had been my first time riding in a boat on flowing water and I remember watching the shore blur by at a tremendous speed as we shot downstream, and then crawl by on our return trip upstream and home again. When we stopped and swam I felt the pull of the current and it made me nervous. We snorkelled around the reefs but I never strayed far from the boat for fear of being pulled down the river.
Dad and I followed a road along the creek to the locks. We passed over some rail tracks and the road dead ended on a rise looking out over the Winnipeg River. The locks had been closed and filled in. A hand railing slanted down into the snow and the earth below where the locks used to be.
To be continued...