It's ironic. One does not realize the ambient noise level of a modern city until one has spent time in an environment of absolute silence. Having again had that experience returning to Oakville has been somewhat of a shock. It is a fact of science that a sound that has been present in one's living space since birth is experienced as silence—we tune it out. Since I grew up in an agricultural area of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia where farms were worked by horses and oxen it was possible to hear the waterfall three-quarters of a mile away and the steam train whistle 30 miles distant. If I were to get homesick for that place I would think of sitting under a lone white pine in the middle of our home pasture and listening to the breeze sigh through its needles. But it's impossible to go home—both the tree and that silence are gone. When I first moved to a university residence in Waterloo Ontario the humming of fluorescent light ballasts in the corridor kept me awake at night and the water tasted worse than sucking an aspirin. Returning to Oakville this time round gave me a similar experience.
It was with some relief that I sifted through 8 month's worth of mail and found no bills for toll roads I'd accidentally entered and no parking tickets or red-light camera citations. That is not to say that other rude surprises were not awaiting me. It is truly mind boggling how slowly the bureaucratic process grinds and computers capable of trillions of computations a second have served only slow it down exponentially. It takes 4 weeks to get a driver's license, 6 weeks to get a police background check, and three months to make a specialists appointment. It was with a sigh of relief I learned that the passport I applied for before I left last fall had been waiting for me since November. So was a cheque for an amount Bell Canada had over-charged me last summer which was now too old to process. After making the rounds of financial, insurance, governmental, and police institutions for 10 days I had more than enough.
Friday June 19th at 11 in the morning I struck out east along the 401. In the GTA it is a reality of life that getting there is not so much a matter of finding a route that will take you where you want to go but finding a time when it will not more resemble a parking lot. The time to reach a destination is not so much a factor of distance as it is traffic congestion. Despite a car fire in East End Toronto I was fortunate in having crossed the top of Toronto without slowing below 30 KMH. Minimum speed and no stopping signs somehow seem ironic. I remember with some nostalgia an itinerant peddler who travelled by horse-drawn caravan and spent much of his time drowsing on the driver's box while his horse plodded along at its own pace knowing full well the destination of its next meal of oats, hay, and sweet water. In those days before traffic lights and superhighways the horse needed no direction to get where it was going.
Finding a suitable campground is always a challenge. To fully enjoy the facilities of my home-on-wheels I need a 30 AMP plug-in. With some constraints I can survive for up to a week at a time with no plug-ins but such 'dry land' camping imposes a great deal of discipline and uses a lot of propane especially in cold weather. I access Woodall's campground database via my computer and MS Streets and Trips to get an exact address and location. Woodall's listings give sometimes nebulous directions and MS Streets supplies addresses and locations on its maps. Alas Microsoft has been out by over 50 miles in locating many parks placing some in the middle of lakes or out at sea. National and State Parks which give a mailing address that can be hundreds of miles distant are not much help. Microsoft and my Tom Tom GPS often use different names for the same road. Internet access ideally means Wi-Fi accessible in the privacy of one's own home. Using a manually attached modem to read E-mail and browse in a public setting is not particularly comfortable. When one is already paying up to $40 or more a night for a campsite forking out more to access the internet and feeding coins into a machine to get a tepid shower feels like petty larceny.
My recent experience serves to illustrate the vagaries involved in pulling into a park.
- Cobourg East Campground is just outside Grafton East of the town of its name. My site was in the middle of a grove of hardwoods close by the central office and washrooms near the entrance road. Their Wi-Fi, when it worked was slow and inconsistent. The place was quiet, had an adjacent river and many well-maintained permanently placed trailer-homes.
- Camp Hither Hills near Manotick just off Hwy 416 south of Ottawa offered parking with hook-ups in a rectangular field beside the entrance road next to Bank St in Ottawa. A strip of trees provided scant shade from the sun when it appeared and the office demanded payment in cash for their services. Their Wi-Fi worked consistently and was ultra-high-speed.
- Camping Cantley just east of Gatineau Park charges $40 a night for a rough-hewn site in a pine forest offering no Internet service at all and a meter that needs feeding did you wish a shower. The staff are roughly bilingual. The place has been quiet save for the nearby baseball game Sunday Afternoon. I had to ask to be re-assigned from a site beside the entrance next to the highway.
Having listened to taped concerts from the Black Sheep Inn in nearby Wakefield for several decades I am fulfilling a lifelong dream of dropping in to take in two concerts there. Fortunately I did online research to learn that the venue does not sell advance tickets to its own concerts and stopped in downtown Ottawa on Sunday to buy tickets at a one-stop Folk Music Centre. My ticket is merely a reservation that ensures I get in the door, seating is by general admission. Tomorrow, before the evening concert I hope to find camping in nearby Gatineau Park. Besides allowing me to get out of town and attend these concerts this trip affords me the opportunity to discover what more I need to pack or get rid of before I strike out for 6 to 8 more months.
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