Here and Now

It's been years since I was in in the near-north as it has come to be known. It is probably just as well because things were changing up there over 20 years ago, even as I was shifting priorities and spending less time in my favourite spots.

When no cabin or cottage rental was available or affordable, campgrounds had traditionally been a civilised easygoing alternative. As gas prices and inflation took off, and camping became more popular, this choice became a mad rush to grab a site every April. Once the 'reservation system' was installed to handle the demand for campsites, it was literally taken over by housewives from the GTA who knew how to shop, by gawd!

If you wanted to take your kids away in the summer you spent hours on the phone on April 1 when the reservation office opened to obtain a campsite. Even then you had to compromise and take a site down the row or over across the point from your favourite location. Things got bad enough that people were doing the phone thing in April to reserve sites two summers away. I have to believe the government resolved that issue; I hope so.

Of course it was horrid when you arrived for your idyllic week or two in 'the bush.' From late June to late August camping meant facing the hordes who simply relocated from the suburbs in the south to Arrowhead, or Killbear, or Algonquin Park.

It meant stinking over-used privies, constant outages of hot water and a general state of pigginess in the once luxurious main bathroom which had showers. It meant trying to pick a time to sneak off to said bathroom to have a crap in peace and quiet because the privies made you gag that morning.

It meant rock concert-sized crowds out on Lighthouse Point every night to watch the sunset.

Worst of all, camping meant screaming kids and semi-vicious dogs; overweight, wine-sucking, self-despising housewives (the grape makes a nasty drunk), and their equally unhappy, loutish, drunken husbands, bitching at the wives and snapping at the kids.

I knew things had changed forever when the rangers started appearing in the night. The tree fuzz crept in, seeming to jump out from behind a tree, the way they had done with us when I was a teenager in the 70s. They were necessary now to quiet campsites full of noisy loaded parents blaring Alabama or the Eagles through the woods, .

In any event things were already different when I snapped these shots. They are scans of slides taken in the 80s.

I hope it is apparent that I am doing a little bit better with the scanner though the results are still far from perfect.

Two out of three of the first shots were taken at Oxtongue Lake, a post office and a gas station on Hyw.60 just west of Algonquin Park. There were a handful of family-run cabin settlements in the surrounding area. I rented a small cabin there for 4 or 5 years every autumn at one of several places.

It was still possible to rent a cabin at a very reasonable rate in the early 80s because there were off-season rates across the calendar. This was stopping later in the decade when the off-season was more-or-less eliminated up through this corridor. The off-season rate was completely gone everywhere up north by 1993 or 1994.

I surely loved it up there when I was younger. Until I stopped in the 90s I had been going north one way or another every year since I was a small child.