the freshwater sea and the home of god
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
We're on Manitoulin island, the world's largest freshwater island and in myth the home of Manitou, the creator of the universe.
It was another day with lots of driving, unfortunately, but on rare occasions it's the destination that matters not the journey. And Manitoulin, I've always thought, pays in spades.
First there's the highway in from the north. Turning south from 17 you pass through Espanola with its manly rugged waterfall and power-generation site right next to the highway. Then the highway wends through the La Cloche "mountains", which on a sunny day like today is surely one of the finest pieces of highway ever built. The land here is the remnant of true mountains that once stood as tall as the Himalayas, ten kilometers of seemingly invincible ancient rock that have since worn away to a beautiful gem of a stump. Here the rough round hills dive into the world's largest lake (Huron-Michigan) again and again as the road traces south. It's a challenge just to stop pulling over to take photos every 250 meters.
And then suddenly it ends. La Cloche island, right against the north shore, is as flat as the hills to the north are impassably rough. You get the impression of poor and thin soil, with the windswept stunted trees and bushes few and far between.
Another short (and one-lane, swiveling) bridge and the highway takes you to Manitoulin itself. By now the Niagara escarpment is plainly visible over a flat plain on the island's northern shoulder, and stretching away to the west are the escarpment's wandering cliffs and smoother slopes.
We stopped at the visitor information centre hoping for some help with accommodation for the night. But it wasn't to be: the dim and disinterested teens at the counter (is there any other kind?) just told us "go for it, you'll have no trouble" and couldn't help with either of the two maps I was hoping for (one showing me where exactly the Cup-and-Saucer hiking trail was; the other a map of the route itself). Grumbling, I took it up myself, using my mobile phone to rack up a fortune in calls to the island as I hunted around. Amazingly, I found something nice (more on that later).
With accommodation sorted, we could take our time to explore the island and do the things we were there to do. The first stop of course was the Cup-and-Saucer, pictured below in a previous visit.
Everything went very well with this hike despite some frayed nerves when it came to finding the place without a map at the end of a long drive from Sault St. Marie. Kenny loved the hike, it turns out--he exclaimed with delight when Mari showed him how far he'd climbed, and he said "I did it!" and volunteered that he wants to do more! Oddly, one of the bear bells we'd bought for the hike turned out to have no clapper, but Mari simply went without to encourage Kenny to wear one of them. We made quite a racket, but it was nice to know where Kenny was at any time.
Then we got to the vista that looks out over the eastern end of the island, and Mari exclaimed at the site. We wandered around taking it in and taking photos, and sat to just look for a while. I had my camera on the tripod that we'd been hauling all over the province and Kenny wanted to take a photo. So I showed him how. Then I turned to get the water bottle behind me and when I turned back I saw Kenny playing with the release on the tripod. Shouting at him to stop I tried to reach for the tripod but he ignored me--he gets shouted at to stop everything all day, so there's no blaming him. The release switch opened, the camera toppled over and landed lens down on the limestone edge of the cliff. I grabbed for it as it spun toward the abyss and managed to catch it. But there's now ding on the front element of the glass and the entire rim of the lens is a mess of grooves and scratches. The centrepiece of my camera system is now a "dropped lens"!
Kenny heard quite a stream of certain words at high volume at that point, but I wrestled my dismay under control and told him that it wasn't his fault.
We made our way back to the car and decided to head for the beach at Providence Bay on the island's south side. We checked in with our "lodge" to ensure that we could turn up later in the evening than sooner, and south. The island's not very large despite being the "largest freshwater island in the world" and we enjoyed the last of the day's sunlight on the broad and clean beach.
We made it to the hotel (on the island's north shore, naturally) slowing to watch deer and catching some hill tops that were still in sunlight. When we got to the lodge, we were happily surprised to find that it was as secluded, well-appointed, and well-situated as the description would have had us believe. It was a real treasure.
Aside from possibly losing my finest (and most expensive, naturally) lens, it was a great day.