Monday, July 4, 2011

Canada Day and the End Of The Road



Canada had a bloodless fight for independence. Sometime in 1868 England decided to unite the whole of their fur trapping, logging brothers into something called "Canada" The British still had some control but having their own name was enough to satisfy the peaceful Canadians. It wasn't until 1982 that British Parliament finally cut the cord completely and now Canada's free health care, cultural exchanges like Rush and Joni Mitchell, legalized pot and such are their own responsibility.

Today finds me as far north east as you can drive...North West River, across the river from a reservation called Sheshatshiu. All the signs here are in two languages, English and something that is totally foreign to me...a native language. I'll try to interview someone who speaks it. Why am I here?
I'm here to find some Labradorite and the elusive wolf. I think I found some wolf tracks as they are around here. Then a red squirrel with no tail jumped onto my van and climbed down the side of the window looking for a way in. I could tell he was a male...he was that close. He was upside down hanging by a claw against my side window. Where there are squirrels there are wolves. Moose about here also but I haven't interviewed one yet.

North West River...where the rain falls and stops falls and stops all summer long until it turns to snow and then people come out of their metal Qwanset huts and start to fish and trap.

America's independence day is not celebrated here but my thoughts are with you all. I stopped at a closed park, empty. set up camp and heated some water on the wood stove for a sponge bath. Then people started coming all at once. The whole town of Happy Valley to this one little park which turned out to be the place they blow off the fireworks. I shook my head. So typically me to park in the one place I'd be on display. The next day I went down a one way road to the river.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.