I just finished my second round trip between North Bay and Toronto. Yet another stretch of highway is becoming very familiar. It’s a very different trip than the Toronto-Stratford run. Not only is it twice the length, but it has a very different feel.
As I’ve mentioned before, a very large portion of Canada’s population lives in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor. For most of the drive out to Stratford, you’re never very far from the orbit of one city or another: Toronto, Mississauga, Milton, Guelph, Waterloo, then Stratford itself. And even when you’re driving through farmland, it’s still all very… civilised. The rows of crops are precise and perfect, the animals are neatly fenced in, the farmhouses are neat and picturesque. Mostly, though, it’s the trees I’ve been noticing. In South-Western Ontario, the trees are where we want them to be, where we allow them to be. Our vegetation is very much under control.
Even up into Muskoka – cottage country – where there are certainly a lot of trees, humans are still in control. At least along the highway. Once North of Muskoka, though, everything changes. At first I thought it was just the vegetation. While, technically, it’s not yet Boreal forest, there are far fewer deciduous trees, far more evergreen and birch. And the underlying granite shoulders up past the surface, rough and raw. But, I’ve been realising, it’s more than that.
Up here, the forest presses right up against the edge of the road. You can feel the mass of it, the weight. And it seems to go on forever, dense and impenetrable. Beautiful. Majestic. This is what Canada must have looked like when Europeans first got here. Forest, wild and untamed, as far as the eye could see. How isolated early settlers must have felt. How intimidated. I was reading about Callander, a town 15 minutes or so south of North Bay. It was founded by George Morrison in 1880. He travelled from Muskoka to Lake Nipissing by ox cart with his family, then put everything he owned on a raft and floated it to the site that is now Callander. I imagine because there was no other earthly way to get there. Only the loggers were there first. As for North Bay itself, wikipedia tells me the area was first explored by Samuel de Champlain in the early 17th century, and then very little happened up here until the arrival of the railroad in 1882.
Any human structure has had to be carved out of the forest, and you can see the forest pushing back. Many of the billbboards by the side of the highway are already half-obscured. It makes me think, in the not-so-distant future, after the population crashes from disease, or starvation, or war, how quickly the forest will swallow all this again. And some lonely wanderer, a future Samuel de Champlain, hacking his way through the underbrush, will stumble face first into a faded blue billboard enveloped by trees. A few metres further on, he will find the highway, cracked and uneven from the climate and neglect, weeds and saplings pushing up through it. And a long stripe of sky above it, where the canopy can’t quite yet reach from one side to the other. The first sky he’s seen in days.
These are the places my mind wanders during the two northern-most hours of my drive. The past, the future. There’s so little up there that speaks to me of the present. It’s wild and eternal and uncivilised. And liberating, somehow.
kithika