There is an art to walking with no sidewalks. Alone, it means hugging a gutter, or hopping across the ditch to a worn-down strip of grass designated by other pedestrians as the path of least resistance. With another person in tow, it involves making joint-unspoken decisions as to how we are arranged, who walks on which side, when to turn, all queued by subtle gestures and body language. The closer you are with someone, the less you’ll have to stop and ask things like “turn here?”
I saw a distressed looking sign painted for a hardware store in the 50’s that had slowly faded with time. It faced the train tracks on an old side of Westfort.
A painter would have had to spend a week rappelling up and down the brick wall, schlepping paint buckets and stencils with the sun to their back the whole day. Just down the street Linnea and I saw an iron bridge spanning up and over the train tracks. We got poutine to go and ate it while watching the trains roll under. It might just be me, but the surrounding mountains seem higher-resolution when winter fades. A few days earlier, I had gotten my hands on a new camera, and we were shooting a tourism commercial for class. The breeze took us on a 10 kilometre walk home straight-shot through the middle of Thunder Bay. We stopped at the Coney Island diner on Frederica Street for a coffee. Everything from the counter stools to the drywall looked straight out of the 70’s— framed in time.
As we zig-zagged the south-end streets, we saw a wide, stout building spanning almost a whole city block. Getting closer with my zoom lens, it was a parking garage, 3 or 4 stories high right around the corner from City Hall. A few weeks later I was standing on that very corner with Landon, James, and James’ friend Sacha who was driving to Winnipeg. “Should we go up there?” One of us gawked, pointing at the megalithic automobile shelter blocking out the sun across the street. It turns out, you can’t actually go up to the very top, but from the second-to-top level I could see the entire city to the south. “That’s the eagle’s nest I saw yesterday,” James exclaimed, pointing at a black spot at the top of a tree about 2 kilometres away.
“Nah,” I say. “Looks more like a crow’s nest, “ as he held up an indisputable piece of evidence: a picture of an eagle’s nest taken from that location, paired with a Googled photo labelled “eagle’s nest” with exact proportions of the one off in the distance. I stand corrected.
The next day we were walking along Maureen Street by the shipping terminals when I spotted a very photogenic old-style car parked in a storage yard. With my 300mm lens in hand, James and I trudged through calf-deep snow to frame a perfect shot. I sent the picture to my dad and he said it was a 1963-65 Ford Falcon. I don’t know much about old cars, but it’s interesting how the automobile industry has completely done away with that style of sedan. Whatever happened to station wagons and rancheros? The great thing about this city is that these kinds of cars are still alive in a living time capsule between the American Midwest, Canada’s far North, and the wide-open prairies. Very few places offer such a convergence of culture, geography, and energy like Thunder Bay— Canada’s beating heart.
We stopped for brunch at Java Hut, an old diner on Memorial Avenue. I ordered green tea and a full breakfast (hash browns, toast, eggs, sausage). I had my camera out taking pictures of various things. One thing I’ve realized about having a fancy camera is that it freaks people out. Nobody likes to have an 8-inch cylinder of glass and small electronic components pointed at or around them. That’s reasonable. I don’t think it’s a technology humans should take for granted. A camera doesn’t just “take pictures.” It bends light to its will, captures time itself in a precise arrangement of photons, and then—like a wizard—beams it invisibly across the air to my phone. We point this thing at stuff, and somehow it remembers everything, down to the finest detail. That’s not just engineering—it’s alchemy. I feel this way about a number of things. Computers are magic. So are portable speakers, 3D printers, and hospitals. If you know how those things work I will be referring to you as an alchemist henceforth.
On my way home one day I was walking through the university campus when I stopped to pick some grasses for a bouquet. A soft-spoken man in a fitted suit walked by. He said he was a researcher in statistical sociology and asked if I had seen the oddly shaped trees around. I looked at him, puzzled.
“If you follow this path, there are two big trees off in the forest that way that have grown diagonally into a perfect x,” he said gesturing down the trail.
As I rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill, I squinted into the forest, looking past knarled and burly trees, following reflections of light and shadow dancing around as the trees swayed and creaked. Precluded by pine boughs, I saw two perfectly straight trunks, forming the prophesied “X.” Something moved from behind them, but I couldn’t get my camera out before everything was silent again. I looked up the sidewalk, but my researcher friend was gone. Just me and the trees again. Maybe I’ll go get a shovel. Does X mark the spot? What kind of pirate-map kind of quest have I been assigned?
