After leaving
Montreal, we puttered through traffic a bit and continued on our way to
Sudbury, home of Steve Caruso, an old friend from Becket.
The highway through
Northern Ontario was characterized by the contrast between the overcast skies and the green and golden (a.k.a. dead) trees.
One could see how these landscapes would have inspired the quivering falsetto and famous one-note guitar solos of
Ontario’s most famous native son, Neil Young.
After a long day of driving, we met up with Steve at the local Tim Horton’s (a sort of Canadian Dunkin’ Donuts, with decent sandwiches and terrible, terrible donuts). I hopped into Steve’s pick-up truck and Brad, Bryan, and Gordon followed us down the long dirt road to get to the Caruso Family Compound. Steve enlightened me on a number of Canadian matters, most notably the devastation caused by the pine beetle in British Columbia. The pine beetle has always existed, but thanks to Global Warming, the cold no longer kills it off, and it continues to spread south and east, destroying vast stretches of pine forest. It is expected to cross the border into Washington and Oregon in the next few years. One of the side-effects of this phenomenon has been the fall of the timber industry in northern B.C., resulting in an economic depression and all the myriad problems that come with it. We also talked about the significant number of banditos from Ontario who made their livings smuggling alcohol into the U.S. during prohibition.
The Carusos have an impressive spread situated on the banks of one of Ontario’s many lakes. We spent most of our time in the old cabin, but there was also a summer bunkhouse, a sauna, and a massive new building under construction which included a few soon-to-be-bedrooms, two porches, and a common area. Steve had prepared a raging hot sauna for us, so after a few beverages, we headed down to warm up our aching muscles. Steve successfully scared us by hyping up his sauna as one that would make the Becket sauna seem like a refrigerator by comparison. The fire had been going strong for a good four hours by the time we got there. Though a bit reluctant to tempt the heat at first, before long we were sweating out the dirt and nastiness we’d accumulated on our journey thus far, and our muscles appreciated the respite from long hours of amateur contortion in the car.
In a further effort to frighten us, Steve explained that the lake had been created by a half-mile wide meteor made of nickel, and though we could only see its murky surface in the dark, he assured us that it was both thousands of feet deep and lined entirely with jagged rocks. So we stood on the dock for a while trying to imagine what it might be like to see a half-mile wide piece of Martian rock careening toward us and then we finally got in and swam around a bit. It was refreshing to say the least, and it was excellent practice for our proposed polar bear swim in Alaska.
Throughout our time there, there was a guy on the Sudbury college radio station, pouring out his heart to a woman. This went on for hours and included the sappiest of love songs and poetry that he’d written himself when he was fourteen adapted for his current love interest. He was putting himself out there in an exhausting and potentially embarrassing marathon of emotions. At the end of the night, he signed off thinking that his words were falling on deaf ears, we wished we could have called him and let him know that even if he didn’t get the girl of his fancy, he had inadvertently touched five naked guys in a cabin in the woods of Northern Ontario.
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