Our son Walker invited me along for his work to northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan during the cold Canadian winter. I realized it would fill a gap in my Canadian library work and it would be another great father-son Library Road Trip.
We arrived late in Winnipeg, MB after a long drive from Minneapolis. Our dinner was in our lonely motel dining room. Completely surrounding us were wall-to-wall large screen TVs all playing the Canadian National Woman’s Curling Championship tournament. My tired brain was mesmerized by what I saw, and we felt that we had finally landed in that great country to the north called Canada.
Waking up in Winnipeg the next morning, I began to question the wisdom of making a winter trip to this land of ice and snow. As we drove due north for nine hours the temperature kept dropping eventually reaching 0 degrees F, a new record low for me.
Our first library of the trip was the tiny Manitoban town of Lundar. The building was a typically unadorned civic building that I have often seen throughout Canada. Weirdly, located next door was a Cannabis shop. Inside we met three delightful middle-aged women including the librarian. She claimed to be proud of her 100% Icelandic heritage and pointed us to the local history Icelandic Room. Lundar was settled by 40 Icelandic families there were brought here by a local blacksmith in the 19th Century. The town’s population now was 50% Icelandic and 50% Métis, a mixed people of Indigenous and white ancestors.
The next two tiny towns of Eriksdale and Ashern were blanketed with snow, but their libraries were open and busy.
We drove for many miles through forests of short Canadian Arctic trees, many of which seemed burned. I remembered the terrible fires in Canada last summer and thought we might be seeing some of that damage. Climate change is real!
As Walker and I had done before, we passed the endless hours and miles listening to podcasts. We started by listening to one about the strange career of Michael Jackson. It was very depressing and bizarre, so we eventually turned to our old favorite Ezra Klein. His story on why Joe Biden shouldn’t run for a second term was even more depressing. Finally, we switched to an interview of Paul McCartney talking about his wonderful lyrics and songs. “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” kept us going.
Somehow, with all these stories, the kilometers whizzed by, and we eventually arrived in the town of The Pas, MB. We drove into “The Gateway to the North” in the fading northern light and headed straight to the library. Working quickly in the cold and dusk of northern Manitoba, I was able to make some nice images of the library housed in a beautiful old powerhouse. As I glanced towards the river, I noticed some shiny objects which turned out to be ice sculptures of animals left over from the Winter Carnival which glowed in the breathtaking last light of the Arctic twilight.
We finally arrived at our destination of Bakers Narrows Lodge outside the town with the funny name of Flin Flon, MB. Walker discovered the Lodge on the internet. It turned out to be a world-famous place for fishing, especially for winter ice fishing. All the cabins were full, and ours was delightful. As an experiment, Walker put out a glass of water and an hour later it was frozen solid. It certainly had a winter-sport white, male vibe to it which, coming from San Francisco, was a little unusual. But as the temperature outside kept plunging, I decided that I didn’t care about the demographics. For everyone here, it was just COLD!
The town of Flin Flon is a mining city located astride the border between Manitoba and Saskatchewan and is administered by both provinces. The town is named after the 1905 fictional character Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin who piloted a submarine into a bottomless lake where he sailed through a hole lined with gold to enter a strange underground world. A copy of the book was allegedly found by a prospector in the nearby forests. When the prospector discovered a high-grade exposure of copper, he thought of the book and called it Flin Flon’s mine.
The mine closed a few years ago throwing everyone out of work. A new mine opened about a two-and-a-half-hour drive away. Most of the unemployed miners went to work there but stay in camps in the remote setting and drive back to their homes in Flin Flon only on the weekends. It is an odd town with its cheery cartoon symbol overlying a hardscrabble place with a lot of poverty, anger, and violence just beneath the surface. As we were driving the gloomy, ice-covered streets of Flin Flon, we drove behind an unmarked pickup truck containing four guys in unmarked camo with full flack vests, helmets, and carrying heavy machine guns. No one could tell us who they were or what they were doing but we learned later that a major, heavily armed drug criminal that was wanted on an all-Canada warrant had been busted in the Flin Flon that day. You can’t make this stuff up.
The heroic Flin Flon Public Library was located right in the heart of the mean streets of downtown. Walker and I watched each other’s backs as we navigated past the inebriated, the stoned, the Cannabis Store and the solidly frozen streets to the library. The librarians were great and helped me understand the reality of Flin Flon. Librarians have always been helpful to me in understanding a place. Much of the material in the library reflected the mining roots of the town. I was especially impressed with the miner’s lunch pail displaying a painting of the mine.
Needing a change of pace, we headed back to the Lodge located several miles out of town on the shores of frozen Lake Athapapuskow in the boreal forest.
We decided to walk out onto the ice-covered lake and soon encountered several empty ice-fishing houses. We found one that was beautifully covered with Canadian maple leaves. Inside was a grandfather and granddaughter happily fishing through holes in the ice. They were toasty with a stove, tea pot, underwater camera to look for fish, and wall full of snapshots of the big ones they had caught in the past. Although we were frozen walking around on the ice, they said this week was a warm spell. Usually, it gets down to -20 degrees F with two feet of snow on the ice. I was grateful for their hospitality and thankful that we may have dodged the normal deep freeze for this time of the year.
As we walked back to our cabin, we passed the Lodge’s plane sitting on the ice under a frozen sky. Later, at dinner, we found out that the mysterious soldiers/police/narcs that were sitting on the pickup with machine guns in Flin Flon were our neighbors at Bakers Narrows Lodge. I didn’t know if I should feel comforted or afraid.
Library Road Trip 