Monthly Archives: October 2018

20-years-ago today I was in Virden, Manitoba, almost 300 kilometres west of Winnipeg.  The daily routine on the Trans-Canada Highway, which starts each morning with a 360-degree look to the horizon, is very repetitious. We have moved our start time on the road back a half hour to 8:00 a.m. to take advantage of the weather as Mother Nature is sending us some nice days with clear blue skies and day time temperatures in the mid-teens. This is a real bonus. I even get to wear my shorts again!

Virden is a little Prairie town of about three-thousand people, with a history similar to a lot of other little towns in western Canada. Virden started out as a railway camp on Gopher Creek when the CPR arrived in the 1880’s.

It’s also the birth place of Dave Rockola who made his mark in the juke box world. Believe it or not, the name Rock-Ola is actually derived from the name of the company’s founder. It also happens to be a real cool name for a jukebox, implying a “rock-n-roll” play on words. Dave Rockola started out as a mechanic in a shop that repaired coin-operated scales. He started making juke boxes in 1935 and after World War II, the jukebox industry was booming. The boys were coming home from the war and it was party time. When Rock-Ola introduced its “Moon Glow” series of juke boxes, business took off through the 1950’s and 60’s.

On the edge of the Trans-Canada Highway, the routine of grinding out 33 kilometres day after day, left the door open to working on ‘Highway trivia.’

People sometimes wonder how we knew exactly where to start each day, particularly when it had been snowing. The answer is pretty simple. At the end of the day, regardless of whether we were driving east or west to where we were staying for the night, we set the trip meter on the motorhome to zero. If, for example, we drove 45 kilometres to get to our motel, then in the morning we reset the trip meter to zero and drove 45 kilometres to get us back to the same spot on the highway. We also spray painted the road and sometimes tied a bit of red ribbon to a fencepost or a stretch of guard rail. (Just for the record, on the Prairies our longest drive back to our start point was 80 kilometres.)

Here’s another little piece of highway trivia for you. Have you ever noticed when you are driving along a highway and you come to a section of guard rail, that there is a little diamond shaped sign at the beginning of the guard rail? The top half of the sign is silver, and the bottom half of the sign is green. At the end of the guard rail you’ll see the same sized sign, but the colours have been reversed with green on the top and silver on the bottom.  Do you know what that sign means? I’ll give you the answer at the end of today’s story. No jumping ahead. That would be cheating!

Here’s another bit of highway trivia for you. We are all familiar with the solid white line painted on the road surface to indicate ‘no passing.’ We also know the dashed white line that indicates you can pass another vehicle if it’s safe to do so. Most of the painted white lines on the Trans-Canada Highway on the Prairies are the dashed  white line. How long do you think those white lines are?  That answer is also at the end of today’s story. And still – no jumping ahead!

Virden, Manitoba, was one of the first towns to give the Prairies its world-wide reputation as Canada’s bread basket. Large-scale agricultural development  arrived about the same time as the railroad in the 1880’s. Virden became a transportation, processing and service centre for hundreds and hundreds of surrounding farms started by settlers from Scotland, England, Ontario and Nova Scotia.

One of our volunteers from Manitoba was a retired farmer and member of the Lions Club from Holland, Manitoba who taught me a lot about wheat, canola, rye and flax. We talked about farming amidst the honking of car horns, and transport truck air horns as we made our way along the Trans-Canada Highway, stopping whenever people pulled over to make a donation and take some pictures.

I learned that farmers in this part of Manitoba were getting about $4 a bushel for wheat [in 1998]. The farmers were part of a system where they received an initial payment of $3.25 and then the government might pay them an additional $.75 per bushel depending on the final price the government was able to negotiate for the sale of the wheat. Farmers were getting about double that price for canola which is used in making margarine. The Flax that is grown in this part of the country is used in making Linseed oil and linoleum products.  I also learned that Manitoba produces a higher yield of wheat per acre than Saskatchewan because Manitoba has a more consistent rainfall.  It was all interesting stuff, but still, it  didn’t make me want to become a farmer. I guess I’m just a city boy.

The people who pulled to the side of the road to make a donation in Manitoba were a welcome sight as Canada was now looking very flat and I knew the contour of the land wasn’t going to change for at least another month.

Some other interesting things happened along the road in Manitoba. We had two school teachers from London join us as volunteers for the week. Marilyn and Carolyn were great volunteers. And I knew they were very well organized because when I got back to my motel room one night after another 33 kilometres of highway, the freshly cleaned laundry was there as usual, except this time – it was nicely folded! It was kind of like having your mom along for a week.

And donations sometimes came from strange places. There was a truck driver approaching me one day and he was flashing his lights and laying on his air horn. I didn’t know what was going on, but when drove by he threw a muffin out the window toward me. It was nicely wrapped in cellophane and there was an elastic band wrapped around the muffin, holding a five-dollar bill neatly in place!

At lunchtime one day, it was wet and windy and when I stepped outside to get back onto the highway for the afternoon, there were two $20 bills pinned under the windshield wiper of one of our mini-vans. We were in the middle of a small town and yet no one had touched them, and they were just merrily flapping in the wind and rain. Sometimes people just quietly donated in their own unique way.

And now – the answers to our highway trivia quiz. The little diamond shape signs are for the snow plow driver. The one at the front end of the guard rail means ‘snow plow up’ and the one at the end of the guard rail means ‘snow plow down.’  In other words, don’t shear off the guardrail posts!

And the painted dashed white lines on the Trans-Canada Highway are just over 10 feet long. A lot of people think they are 3 feet long. If they were, they would go by like a series of dots! Now aren’t you glad you know this?

And so it went on Day number 207

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues……

20-years-ago today I was in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba.

I have now been on the road for seven months and we are well into province number seven. There are grey clouds on the horizon. Winter is not that far away.

If you have been following along with these weekly postings, you might recall that I was getting a bit anxious because it had already snowed a couple of times when I was still in Ontario. I had been keeping the thought to myself that if I could make it to Winnipeg, I just might have a chance of making it all the way. Now, here I am west of Winnipeg and for the next six weeks I’ll be on the prairies before starting into the Rocky Mountains.

The big thing that has changed is the wind.

Even before I reached Winnipeg the wind was becoming a factor. And when the wind is coupled with a driving rain and dropping temperatures, things get pretty miserable pretty fast. And sometimes your emotions get caught off guard. That’s what happened a couple of days earlier when I was coming up to Steinbach, Manitoba.

It was like the unrestrained power of the wind seemed to be asking me again just how much I was willing to take. I
was back to wearing the fluorescent orange rain gear as the rain mixed with ice pellets stung my face. High winds sweeping across the open fields sometimes stopped me from moving forward at all. Leaning into the wind that was rocking the motorhome, I had to fight just to get the door open. When I was safely on-board for my first break of the day, the wind slammed the door behind me. My fingers were numb, my eyes were red, and it wasn’t until I was shedding the rain suit that I realized we had visitors.

I slumped into my seat at the kitchen table, rain dripping from my chin, as Ed Coxworthy set a cup of steaming hot chocolate in front of me before fetching a pair of clean, dry socks that had been warming on the motorhome’s heat vent. It was then that I was introduced to a man and his wife who had driven out from Steinbach, Manitoba to make a donation. They knew why I was here.

The couple had three children, two girls and a boy, and their son had died of Duchenne in 1995, when he was just 21. Cold and wet, I listened in silence as another father told me the story of the final hours of his son’s life. It was April when their boy was taken to hospital in Steinbach for the last time. Near the end, he could barely speak. The father said he awoke from a broken sleep when he was at his son’s bedside and heard his son say, “Cool.” He thought his son was cold and wanted a blanket, so he tucked a cover around him. Then he heard the young man whisper, “Neat.”

The man told me he said, “Son, what are you talking about?” His son was very weak and perhaps mistook his father’s voice for that of his mother. “Mom,” he said, “you have to see this. Come with me.” He died shortly after that, in the early morning hours of April 19. 1995, a month before Jesse and I took our first steps in crossing Ontario.

Before they left, the couple made a generous donation to Jesse’s Journey. As they stepped down the stairs of the motorhome, the father smiled at me and said he was sure his son was in a better place. He said his son was the kind of kid who was always happy and never complained. I was close to tears as we shook hands again and said goodbye. As I watched them drive away in the rain, the weather didn’t seem to be such a problem anymore.

After the man and woman left, Ed Coxworthy, who had listened to the story, said to me, “Johnny, if you were to throw all the troubles of the world into a hat, you’d want to pull your own back out.”

I know I met other people along the road that day, but I can’t remember any of them. Looking west at the end of the day when we were about to turn and drive back into Winnipeg, it was getting dark and there was a long thin line of red running across the sky right at the horizon line. I took that ‘red sky at night’ as a hint that maybe we would have better weather tomorrow. I can still see that sky and will always remember that day.

I also took a moment to think about how, I had made it to Winnipeg.  And now, I’m wondering…

And so it went on Day 200.

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues……

20-years-ago today I was in Hadashville, Manitoba, having crossed the Ontario-Manitoba border a couple of days earlier. We are now in province number seven.

When we left Kenora a couple of days ago, I passed the giant billboard showcasing Husky the Musky. In the 53 kilometres of Trans-Canada Highway from Kenora to the Manitoba border I was thinking about the various roadside attractions I had passed so far.

There was the giant lobster in Shediac, New Brunswick, that weighs 20 tons. The giant lobster was a created by Winston Bronnum, the same artist who created Jumbo the Elephant in St. Thomas, Ontario. Jumbo weighs in at 38 tons.

Then there were things like the Big Nickel in Sudbury, the Big Goose in Wawa and the Big Apple in Brighton, Ontario. The apple is four storeys tall.

Lots of these roadside attractions are very well known. And some of them – not so much. Like the giant Muskoka chair I sat on in Varney Ontario back in the summer.

Generally, these structures give a place some of its identity. It doesn’t always have to be history that makes a place stand out. If there is something historic like the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, or the scene of the first powered flight in Canada when the Silver Dart took to the air at Baddeck, Nova Scotia in 1909, then that’s a bonus. The cities and towns that are smart enough to blow their own horn about that unique thing that they have, from a natural waterfall to a covered bridge or the forks of a river, seem to gain an economic advantage.

In many respects, my hometown in London, Ontario, Canada, mirrors the other London, the one in England, which is well steeped in history. I have often wondered if my London, with its Thames River and streets like Pall Mall, Piccadilly, Oxford and Wellington should have a small fleet of double decker buses making regular runs in just the core area of the city as a tourist attraction. But maybe that’s just me.

During the time we spent in Kenora there were few donations and not a lot of smiles on the faces of the people. You could feel the tension in the air because of the strike at the pulp and paper mill that was now into its fifth month. I saw a lot of unhappy looking young men driving pick-up trucks. They all looked like they hadn’t shaved in two or three days. They didn’t look like they were enjoying living in this area. They looked like they were just surviving in this area. It wasn’t pretty.

There was something that made me smile though when I passed Husky the Musky heading west.

I thought back to 1995 when Jesse and I were crossing Ontario together. We had started at the Manitoba-Ontario border, heading east, and at the end of our second day on the road we arrived in Kenora. We were just barely getting into a bit of a routine and we were feeling pretty pumped when I pushed Jesse up the hill into Kenora. On the morning of the next day, that ‘we’ve got this figured out’ feeling disappeared in a hurry when turned the corner leaving Kenora and the sign on the Trans-Canada Highway read Sault Ste. Marie 1171 kilometres! That was when reality set in. But looking back on that moment, the memory still made me smile.

My plan was to cross Canada in what I thought would be 275 days – and I had just spent 106 days in province number six. As you can see by the ‘Indiana Jones’ type of map that I have attached, Ontario is a very big place. It’s so big, I couldn’t even get all of northwestern Ontario, including Kenora, to fit onto the map!

The days are now much colder, particularly first thing in the morning. There is a heavy frost almost every morning and it won’t be long before we will have to shut down the motorhome’s on-board water system to prevent freezing. That will mean going back to hauling our drinking water to make tea or coffee and to cook food, in five-gallon containers, the same as we had to do in April in Newfoundland before we could start to use the on-board water system.

Lots of times in London during the winter, people will complain about the snow and cold and yet the people in the far north look at a trip to Thunder Bay or Sault Ste. Marie as going to the banana belt!

The physical challenge of the hills around the top of Lake Superior is now behind me. When you cross the Manitoba-Ontario border there are just two small hills and then Canada flattens our very fast. For the next six weeks there is going to be a mental challenge in crossing the prairies and being able to look 360 degrees to the distant horizon.

On my last day in Ontario we saw the bumper sticker that we voted as the best bumper sticker on the entire journey. It was on the back of little pickup truck and simply said, “If you are opposed to logging – try using plastic toilet paper.”

And so it went on day number 194.

Stay tuned. The journey continues…..

20-years-ago today I passed through the little town of Vermillion Bay, between Dryden and Kenora. I say ‘passed through’ because in the past few days there has been little to look at other than the highway, logging trucks and lot of trees and rock.

Passing through Dryden, I remembered the solid writing that the London Free Press did about Grassy Narrows back in the early 1970s. That was when journalism mattered, and the news was a lot more than just crimes and crashes. Dryden came onto the national consciousness when the first nations people of Grassy Narrows became sick with mercury poisoning. Investigation determined that mercury from a plant at the pulp and paper mill in Dryden was spilling into the Wabigoon and English Rivers and being taken up by the fish the people of Grassy Narrows consumed. The pulp and paper mill closed in 2008. The people of Grassy Narrows faded from the pages of the newspapers. They are still there. They are still sick.

Dryden was also the site of the March 10, 1989 crash of an Air Ontario flight which killed 24 of the 65 people on board, including both pilots. The plane wasn’t de-iced and with ice and snow on the wings, the plane failed to clear the trees at the end of the runway. The blame game went on for a long time, but it didn’t change the outcome. That story also slipped from the front pages.

In 1998, Thanksgiving was on October 12th. At the end of my day on the road it was dark outside when we marked the day with a turkey dinner on board the motor home. Our motorhome driver and chief cook and bottle washer, Ed Coxworthy, was right in his element. A true Newfoundlander, Ed had potatoes, carrots, cabbage and peas pudding to go with the turkey, sage dressing and gravy. We even had some of those little packages of cranberry sauce that we ‘borrowed’ from a restaurant somewhere along the highway. And our road manager, Trish Federkow, had made us an apple crisp for dessert.

This week, just for fun I am including a picture of Ed in the outfit he wore when he was back home on Bell Island, Newfoundland, singing with the Submarine Minors, and a picture of the motorhome we called “The Mother Ship.”

It was dark and raining when I walked out to the motorhome for dinner. The windows were all steamed up, but it was nice to see the warm glow from the lights inside and to hear the laughter. The smell of that turkey being cooked in cramped quarters was just wonderful. We were all a long way from home but we sure were a great family.

The motorhome may have been our toasty warm
cocoon that night, but Murphy’s Law was about to strike.

Communication is key in a project like the walk across Canada to raise money for research (which I am still doing.) People have to know who is where, who is coming and who is going. Who has a two-way radio and who has a cell phone. (Cell phone service was often sporadic in many parts of Canada in 1998 and that was true in this part of northern Ontario.)

When I got started the following morning, the road had almost no shoulder and I frequently had to step off the highway, particularly when we had transport truck traffic in both directions. A couple of times I got blown off the road and the wet sand and gravel at the edge of the road made me feel like I was walking in porridge. To make matters worse the wind had come up and I was facing rain, sleet, ice pellets and snow. And things weren’t about to get any better.

I finished my 33-kilometres for the day at about 5:15 in the afternoon when I reached the motorhome where Ed was waiting for me. It was getting dark fast and our job was to mark the road with spray paint for the next day’s start point and then catch up with the rest of the crew who had gone ahead to Kenora where we were scheduled to be at another Thanksgiving dinner.

It wasn’t long before steam started pouring from the motorhome’s engine compartment and we could hear the lifters starting to bang. We had no choice but to stop.

We waited for the engine to cool and then moved up one more kilometer before steam started pouring into the cabin from everywhere. We limped to a spot where we got mostly off the road and we had some phone cell service.

Nobody up ahead answered our calls because they left their cell phones in the vans while they were in our motel getting ready to head off to the Thanksgiving dinner. Damn that Mr. Murphy!

We reached the operator on our cell phone and we had no choice but to declare an emergency. Our major concern was that the back part of the motorhome was still sticking out onto the highway in the rain and the dark. We were starting to get very cold by the time the OPP arrived. The crew ahead finally called us when we didn’t show up for dinner.

Later that night we made our rather unceremonious arrival in Kenora on the hook of a tow-truck.

The repair crew went to work first thing in the morning and new frost plugs were installed in the motorhome engine. Ed rejoined us at noon. Walking the highway in the morning was a bit difficult with just a mini-van and the police escort. After breakfast at McDonalds, all we had was water and for food, some power bars to eat until Ed got back to us.

I don’t think I was ever happier to see that motorhome, and my friend Ed Coxworthy, who spent the night in Kenora parked between two refrigerator transport trucks. The truck engines had to run all night to keep the refrigeration units working.

I’m sure Ed hadn’t slept a wink. As he would say, “He looked like he had been ridden hard and put away wet.” And yet he was all apologies that he couldn’t get to us any sooner.

And this was the guy who back in Newfoundland said to his wife, “Well, maybe I’ll go for a week.”

That’s the kind of dedication Jesse’s Journey has always attracted. That was our road crew.

When is the last time people made that kind of an effort for you? When is the last time you made that kind of an effort for someone else?

And so it went on Day 189.

Stay tuned, the journey continues……