Part IV- June 25, 2002

Subject:
Ontario is way too big

Hey all.

Well, my last eMail came from Winnipeg, though many of you didn't receive it due to some technical difficulties. That's OK, you didn't miss much. I just went on about how hypnotic prairie driving is, and how the jazz festival was going on in Winnipeg.

Now I'm in Oshawa, just East of Toronto. The ride from Winnipeg takes way too long. Ontario is way too big. You're in Winnipeg, and you think, hooray, Toronto is just in the next province over. But you don't realize that to get to Toronto is almost as far as packing up and going back to Vancouver again. Winnipeg is only the halfway point.

And the stretch is long and empty most of the time, too. A few isolated towns between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, and a few more between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, but it's mostly hours and hours of driving, with forests on both sides or the waters of Lake Superior (which is also way too big) on your right. And at dusk there are deer, bears and moose on the roads.

But the rides were interesting. Few, but long stretches. My last, and longest, ride was given to me by a 74-year-old man who had just been diagnosed with cancer. He did not want to bother getting it treated, and would rather spend his last few months or years on the road than in a hospital. He seemed to have been living a gypsy life all along, having been a sailor by trade and having spent much of his life in South America, Australia, and the Caribbean. He was constantly talking about Cuba and how happy everyone is there in spite of it being one of the poorest countries in the Western World. People dance and sing there all night long, he says.

Toronto is also an interesting city, very cosmopolitan, but different races seem to co-exist in relative harmony (compared to other major cities racial segregation seems minimal). There's some jazz festival happening here this week as well, but I haven't caught in any music yet. No money...

Yes. Well. Just wanted to write again, and impart the vital information that Ontario is way too big. I also found out the secret behind the Mystery Of Wawa. See, Wawa is this small town in Ontario's interior that hitch hikers are all afraid of. Every hitch hiker I've talked to has told me to stay away from there, and they have all, independently of one another, told me stories of having been stuck in that town for several days, a week, over a week, ... one man said 30 days, although that seemed to be a stretch. And it's an isolated town, you can't walk on to the next one, because it's all wilderness for 100 km in all directions. I always wondered what a small town like that could possibly have about it that would make the hitch hiking suddenly dry up. What I was now finally told is that several years ago two nuns were assaulted by hitch hikers whom they had picked up, and that the priest of that district had forbidden anyone there to give rides to hitch hikers. I guess now people fear the wrath of God, or of the Church, if they are to follow the Golden Rule.

Well, be sending more mail further down the line.

Marco