From Jericho Beach in Vancouver, home of the rum-runner chasing fleet of RCAF ‘flying boats’ to Highway 33 in Prince Edward County and Clark Gable’s last x-ray

In the summer of 1978, I owned a 1974 Chevrolet Vega subcompact with an inline four cylinder engine and a lightweight aluminum alloy cylinder block. I had worked for the summer between years at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario at General Motors in nearby Oshawa, Ontario.

Near the end of August, as summer wound down, but before classes resumed, I pointed the Vega west. I got as far as Banff National Park in Alberta before the aluminum block decided it wasn’t going to like the Rockies much — and blew up. Since, I was travelling light and the car was beyond salvation on any budget I had, I hitched a ride into town to the bus station, packed up a few things and sent them back to Ontario. Seeing no need to let the setback ruin my trip, while a few of my things went east on the bus, I decided to carry on, hitchhiking to Vancouver.

That evening, I arrived at the youth hostel on Jericho Beach in Vancouver, named in the 1860s after a logger named Jeremiah Rogers. The Royal Canadian Air Force had built its famous “flying boat hangars” on Jericho Beach in the 1920s to chase rum-runners during the American Prohibition era. The nearby barracks eventually became the youth hostel.

I still remember the two posters that greeted me that August night in 1978 as I walked through the door to register for the night. On one wall was a poster that said, “Help Bring Back the Sixties.” On the other wall was another poster with a quotation attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest.” I was 21. I’ve tried to take both admonitions to heart in my life’s work.

As for hitchhiking, it has entered the realm of the counterintuitive. A lost travel adventure art that has largely disappeared in North America (with the odd exception such as former Globe and Mail editor  John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up, right?

Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking was alive and well in very rural, very conservative Prince Edward County as recently as 2007 anyway, and if you wanted to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, all you had to do was just stick your thumb out. I did it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route during my year-long sojourn in the County. One Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considered to be the two worst winters in the County to that point in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield.

In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owned it, with some help from relatives, he said, returned most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still lived there on Highway 33.

Another time, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home had been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she’d also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she was well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps was the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960.

As I said, true fact.

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Newsgathering travels: From Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories to Churchill, Manitoba to Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia, and a few places in between

As a journalist, I always enjoyed getting out of the office or newsroom to travel whenever the opportunity presented itself and I could talk my way into a trip somewhere. Newspaper travel meant someone was spending money to send me somewhere, hence the story was usually interesting, as newspaper publishers are a rather parsimonious lot when it comes to travel costs and editorial budgets.

Here in Manitoba I’ve been able to write about polar bears and beluga whales in Churchill, after a boat trip out on Hudson Bay into the territorial waters of Nunavut, and up the Seal River, as well as spending an evening at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) with executive director Mike Goodyear, a wildlife biologist by training,  who is also a private pilot. Churchill Airport was built by the United States military in 1942 and owned and operated by Transport Canada as a remote airport since 1964. Churchill Rocket Research Range, also built by the United States Army, under the aegis of Canada’s Defence Research Board in 1956, operated 23 kilometres east of town, where the Churchill Northern Studies Centre now is, until 1985.

I also  travelled to The Pas to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Cathedral for the episcopal ordination of Archbishop Murray Chatlain, as the sixth bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, and the first non-Oblate priest to shepherd the archdiocese since its creation originally as a vicariate apostolic in March 1910. Since it was March and a 6 p.m. mass, the Thompson Citizen put me up overnight in a cabin at Bakers Narrows Lodge on Lake Athapapuskow, near Flin Flon.  Mind you the overnight low dipped down to -34°C. And it was March 19, 2013.  Baseball legend Yogi Berra wasn’t talking about Northern Manitoba winters when he uttered his now famous and oft-quoted malapropism, “This is like déjà vu all over again.” But he could well have been. Environment Canada predicts an overnight low in Thompson tonight of -37°C with an “extreme wind chill” of -48°C.  Hence the seemingly constant red banner “Extreme Cold Warning in Effect” running across the top of my Environment Canada weather webpage.

Before heading back to Thompson from Bakers Narrows Lodge after the archbishop was properly installed, I made the short detour into downtown Flin Flon for a brief visit to The Orange Toad book store and coffee shop, and dropped in for a quick visit to get his take on the state-of-the-north with my then counterpart, Jonathon Naylor, editor of The Reminder, a sister paper of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News.

Other Manitoba road trips have taken me into Cross Lake, Nelson House and Snow Lake for stories and photographs, while former Churchill riding Liberal MP Tina Keeper, and  Kevin Carlson, then with Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), were kind enough to let Jeanette, who was taking photographs for the paper, as she also had done in Churchill, and me, newsgathering for stories, and taking photographs also, fly into Tadoule Lake and Lac Brochet with them on a day trip.

On Aug. 15, 2002 –  shortly after getting off the plane from Yellowknife and arriving at the Inuvik Drum and News/North office, Lynn Lau, the bureau chief, who was leaving on vacation the following day, and who I had volunteered to come off the news desk in Yk and do a six-week back-fill for –  handed me a plane ticket for the following day for Tuktoyaktuk, where a public meeting was scheduled after  five hamlet residents filed formal complaints against Tuktoyaktuk RCMP, accusing the Mounties of using “excessive force” in the recent arrests of intoxicated persons. Anger and frustration at the RCMP spilled out publicly during the special hamlet council meeting, called after more than 200 residents signed a petition accusing the RCMP of “using unnecessary use of force” and “harassing the citizens of the community.” At the time,Tuk had a population of 930. About 40 residents attended the meeting.

In a scene that would be familiar to Mounties, Crown attorneys, defence lawyers and judges here in Northern Manitoba, when the fireworks were over at the understandably tense public meeting, which the accused RCMP acting sergeant and an accused constable attended also, we all raced –  complainants, the criminally accused, who were free on recognizances, hamlet officials and the accused Mounties – to the Tuktoyaktuk Airport to catch the last Friday flight back to Inuvik on an 18-seat  Twin Otter. Did I mention the North and Canada’s Arctic (Tuktoyaktuk is at 69.4428° N) can be a bit surreal?

While working in the Truro bureau of the Chronicle-Herald in the winter of 2000, I remember driving for almost three hours through continuous freezing rain out to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) Strait Area Campus in Port Hawkesbury to hear then Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm talk about a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project to be located on the Strait of Canso, which provides a naturally deep, sheltered, ice-free and dredging free harbour.  More than 15 years later, the Bear Head LNG project, as it is now known, has had at least three owners and is only partially completed.

Fortunately, there were also plenty of pleasant drives on assignment in Nova Scotia, such as one on a balmy Maritime spring evening into Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still. In a not unpleasant way, methinks.

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