Riding Mountain to Blue Lake

Riding Mountain to Blue Lake

August 27, 2006

We drove through down town Winnipeg to have lunch at the Forks. Flower beds, barrels, hanging baskets, flower boxes and pots filled with petunias and other annuals splashed ordinary city streets with splotches of rainbow.

The Forks is where the Assiniboine River flows into the Red River. Winnipeg has improved the area with a river walk, an outdoor theater, where a dog show was in progress (Elmo was not impressed), lots of restaurants, shops and a market. We had lunch in a sidewalk café with Elmo just across the rail. He didn’t even know he was being discriminated against. We watched people, the dog show, boats pulling up to the dock at the bottom of the steps, and walked along the River until we started sweating. I think it was 88 degrees in Winnipeg. We just can’t get used to the heat.

From Winnipeg to the Ontario border, the country looked like the country around Amarillo. I kept waiting to drop off the caprock. Near the Ontario border the land changed to rolling granite hills; rubbed, ground, polished and gouged by ancient ice. A few inches of sandy dirt on top of the polished granite supported the forest of spruce, fir and pine. Clear blue lakes as numerous as billboards along I35 filled every hollow carved by the ice.

We camped at Blue Lake, an Ontario Provincial park, just north Vermillion Bay. Scattered pines grew in the sand almost to the shore of the lake, and the trunks were inky poles against blues and yellows and oranges as the sun settled below the far bank.

Night is now black and comes quickly rushing twilight, and stars fill the patches of sky between the pointy tree tops. Common loons sang.

Sound swells into the void

Of the cold black night.

On the lake the lonely loon cries.