On Real Wilderness or Pity the Poor Pioneer - July 8

I've made it into Manitoba, and after a brief visit to the very windy Winnipeg, I headed north on a detour to Helca National Park, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, one of Canada's larger lakes. I took an indirect route to what is already a seriously out of the way place to stop by a series of red garter snake dens. The guidebooks said that it was an interesting place to see great piles of gartner snakes swarming, mating and generally having a good time over the summer. It was in a provincial nature reserve so I'd expected the usual Parks Canada-style do, with an information hut, guides etc. When I did get there, after 80kms, much of which was on unsealed roads, the place was deserted and frankly, spooky. I walked as far as the first snake den and was feeling increasingly uneasy. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with the place, aside from the isolation, but I just needed to get out of there. My heart had started to beat faster and I was getting clammy hands. I found out later from the Helca Park ranger that a little girl's body had been found there in the spring thaw this year, abused, murdered and dumped over the winter. I'm glad I didn't stay long.

So now I'm camped on the banks of Lake Winnipeg. Steel grey, windblown and with giant, glacial boulders lining it's shores, it's making me think about what this area would have felt like to the first settlers who made it home. Today I left the big highways, if you can call them that, and drove through mile after mile of lonely road, dotted at increasingly less frequent intervals with tiny settlements (and can't quite bring myself to call them towns) with even tinier churches. Much of Manitoba and in particular the more far flung regions were settled by hard-done-by eastern Europeans, Mennonites, Acadians, Jews and other groups who society had not been the fairest to. They decided to start new lives out here, in nothingness. But it was nothingness they could own and farm and fairly make a living from, no matter how hard.

As I drove alone today through what to me was enormous and at times somewhat frightening nothingness, plain upon plain of it, I thought of what it must have looked like to those early groups who came the same route. I followed a road and saw occasional cows, dilapidated barns and outbuildings, fences, crops. They would have been confronted by nothing but markers on a map, rivers to cross and marshes to slog through. And when winter closed in, I can't imagine the loneliness and, I'm sure at times, fear of what lay hungry in the snow.

I wanted to see some of Manitoba's lake-studded great north. I'm afraid though, that the southern end of Lake Winnipeg is as far as I will make it on this trip. The wilderness further north is simply too much for me, but it wasn't for those that went before me, without roads to guide them.