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Published: August 28th 2010
After a month or so of lounging around in Thunder Bay (punctuated by several small trips up north to places like Webequie and Kasabonika), I was glad to hear that I'd been given the opportunity for another week-long adventure. This one, however, would be very different; instead of flying into the wilderness to work on a First Nation reserve, I would be traveling to the aptly-named "road sites", some of the few communities under our jurisdiction which do not require flights in tiny charter planes to reach. Apart from accessibility (any of you could conceivably visit these sites if you were traveling through and so desired), these communities are also unique in that they are for the most part not reserves (although there are one or two road-accessible reserves we service, they were not a part of this trip) and they are much, much smaller than the other communities I've been to so far. Yes, you read that correctly: smaller.
Monday morning we hop into our rental vehicles- the work we will be doing this time requires a small team so one vehicle is not enough. Unfortunately the in-house fleet is booked the whole week so although Bob manages to
rent us one pickup, the second half of the team has to travel in a Hyundai Elantra, not exactly an ideal choice for extended driving on rough logging roads. Before we get to the logging roads, however, we need to leave the city.
The initial drive out of Thunder Bay is not only pleasant, it is unexpectedly beautiful. The farthest I had driven out of the city was to
Ouimet Canyon, but just beyond is where the landscape gets interesting. Steep rock cliffs follow the highway on one side bordered by lakes and rivers on the other... if I hadn't known better I would have thought I was driving along the coast of B.C. Between gazing out at the gorgeous scenery and spotting the odd moose, it made for a pretty good start to the week.
Our second day we arrive at the town of
Hillsport, a small community built up around an old CN railway station (incidentally there is a Wikipedia page for the old station but not one for the town itself, which is a far more apt analogy for Hillsport than I could possibly write here). The town consists of 8 permanent residences; during peak hunting
season this balloons to 24. You have more fingers than Hillsport has families (in fact the use of the word 'families' is slightly misleading, as there is not a single child that lives in Hillsport). The town itself is quite depressing, it looks like the CN statiion has not been used in some time (although I've come to discover that up north, how something looks gives absolutely no indication of how often it is used). The only discernible industry of any sort are the couple hunting lodges that are present, some of them quite nice-looking. The town has no accommodations apart from the hunting cabins, and the station is too small to justify a house, so after a full day in Hillsport we are back on the road to find a hotel.
We stay in
Longlac, a mostly-French community just outside of Geraldton. A quick drive through reveals it to be a nice-looking small town... There are a few hotels, some restaurants, a Robin's (northern Ontario alternative to Tim Horton's) and so on. The houses are all nicely kept with manicured lawns and gardens, although on closer inspection there seems to be a reason for this: roughly half of
Roadside wildlife
Bob took this picture of a cub while I was put on the lookout for Mommathem are up for sale. The reason for this becomes apparent enough when we drive to the outskirts of town.
Longlac Wood Industries was at one time the primary employer here; Longlac was, like many other northern communities, a forestry town. While the forestry industry propped up such communities in the good times, it also essentially made them "one-trick ponies". The plight of the forestry industry is quite well-known in Ontario (especially up north) but it was not the lack of jobs or the collection of empty houses that encouraged me to write this section of the post; rather, the shutdown of Longlac Wood Industries has resulted in the single most disgusting act of waste and environmental disregard that I have ever witnessed with my own eyes.
The mill itself lies just on the edge of town- the cargo train, cranes, forklifts and other equipment are all sitting there ready to be used. some parts of the mill building look brand new, as if they'd just been added or refurbished right before the mill shut down. But it isn't the wasted equipment (likely millions of dollars worth) that makes me sick, it's th wood.
Piles of logs,
Roadside wildlife 2
This little guy loved people up to 20 feet high at my best estimate and hundreds of metres long, lie sitting in the yard, rotting.
It looks like a whole forest (well, at least to someone from southern Ontario) has been cut and left to rot, just goign to waste. They have clearly been left sitting out for some time, and judging from the water stains and other discolouration I highly doubt they will be of much use as any sort of merchantable lumber. It is truly depressing to think of the hectares upon hectares of valuable interior forest habitat that was lost just so these logs could decay in some unmanned lumber yard. There are other materials too; cut lumber, skids, processed wood- all just sitting out in the sun, going to waste.
This is almost a common theme up north. In dire times, the cost of transportation can outweigh the worth of a product. In the far north on some of the reserves you will see the odd crane or broken down excavator just sitting next to a building or construction site, and the same principle applies: the cost of moving it out was too much, so it was left there
The Palisades
A long drive, but at least the scenery is nice. for the community. The Band would get the mobile equipment but some things, such as cranes, would just stay where they were. Despite the obvious logistical problems inherent with business in the north, I find it hard to believe that excessive waste on this scale actually occurs, never mind the fact that it seems to be tolerated.
After a brief stay in Longlac we hit the road again, this time for Hearst, another forestry community that is the nearest town of any size to our real destination,
Oba.
Oba, like Hillsport, is a small community that only exists to service a CN railway station, although an active logging company is also operating nearby. We were warned in Longlac that the logging trucks tend to fly down the dirt roads and sure enough, those guys drive like they're on fire (seeing a transport with a full load of logs fishtail on a dirt road to void hitting you is a mildly unsettling experience).
Oba is in fact smaller than Hillsport (7 permanent residences as opposed to 8) and also contains not a single child. It is actually part of an
unorganized region of northern Ontario, meaning that there is
The view from Hillsport
May not have many people, but it sure is pretty no form of municipal government, only Provincial. There are also no hunting lodges here to provide a source of local employment... the only visible jobs in the area are from the loggers and CN workers (who apparently all live in Hearst because of the lack of facilities in Oba), and the local Hydro agent, Jack, who we are there to visit. He states that he remembers Bob from the last time he made the trek to Oba, 12 years ago.
Jack also relays the story of how Oba came to be the way it is; how he moved here in the 60s when the population was closer to 700 instead of 7. Jack's parents actually ran two hotels, and there were also restaurants, stores, and other such signs of a viable community back in those days. When the logging industry shrank ovr time, the station became less and less important, and people started leaving. When I lived in Sault Ste. Marie everyone used to joke about its shrinking population ("you know it's bad when the
old people start leaving") but in Oba this is the reality.
We leave Oba and start the long trek back to Thunder Bay,
Hillsport
Obligatory proof-I-was-really-there pic. a full day's worth of driving. Despite the cost of renting a vehicle and paying for 4 workers to drive it all week, a charter flight is still more expensive which, when you consider the number of charter flights I've been on now (dozens), really underscores the cost of business in northern Ontario.
It feels good to get back to Thunder Bay, not necessarily because of the time spent in places like Hillsport and Oba but also because summer weekends here are an incredible experience in and of themselves, and are fast becoming a precious commodity. Perhaps an eventual blog post is in order...
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