Roger Pires Aug 05, 2010
When he's not offering his take on daily life, Roger Pires spends his days as a computer systems analyst. It's not exactly a glamorous calling but hey, it pays the bills. He enjoys hockey, canoeing, snowshoeing, and spending as much time as he possibly can outdoors. He lives in Udora with his wife and two kids, who are his prime inspiration for Ravenshoe Ramblings.
Previous
what I did on my summer vacation
It was there in glossy black and white: "Note to campers: frequently used railway located near the park". This masterpiece of understatement appeared on the brochure for Oastler Lake Provincial Park. If the good people at Parks Ontario thought it prudent to include this warning in their literature, we should've taken heed. But in the blind funk that comes while contemplating a week alone while the kids are at camp, my wife and I threw all good sense to the four winds and booked a week at the park. That was in February. By the time our July getaway arrived, what little notice we had taken of the warning disappeared amidst a blizzard of coolers and fishing gear.
Our first night there was Saturday. Party night. Which in the context of our retreat meant dinner at six, campfire at eight, in bed by eleven. And after a deep, coma-like sleep brought on by the silence of the woods and the culmination of five months of anticipation, we would head out in the canoe bright and early for a tour of the lake.
CN had other plans.
It started as a low rumble - like distant thunder. Within minutes, our tent trailer rocked like it was on a fault line and about to be swallowed into the bowels of the earth. If I opened the window, I would expect to see a train barreling within inches of it. The final act of this spleen-jarring nightmare was the engineer leaning on his air horn with the gusto of someone forced to work yet another all-nighter. If this were the only time we would be shaken out of our skins that night, we could've had a good belly laugh about it over morning coffee. The fact that CN would hit the puree button on our little canvas Cuisinart about every half hour or so - all night long - altered the next day's itinerary.
Our night had been as restful as an Iron Maiden concert. The canoe tour was off. Fueled by plutonium-grade coffee, we decided to go exploring on foot. Our mission was to follow the rail-side trail near the park to find the reason for the middle-of-the night air raid siren. A major crossing probably. Under the cover of darkness and drowned out by a maelstrom of grinding steel wheels, it would be difficult to detect a car or truck - or another train - on the tracks. We walked for miles, passing nothing but forest and the occasional swamp (and of course, no trains). Then we found it: the source of last night's pandemonium. A dirt road, no more than a goat path, crossed the tracks beneath a sign with the over-the-top name: James Bay Junction Road. It looked to be an old logging road left over from the steamship days. The odds of encountering a vehicle anywhere near here in midday, let alone in the middle of the night, made winning the Lotto Max seem like a coin toss. You could make the generous argument that the kindly engineer was trying to alert any moose or bears that had strayed onto the tracks. But any wildlife that stayed put within earshot of that banshee whistle was already dead. Maybe, just maybe, the whole show was for the benefit of us campers.
We did eventually take that canoe ride. Like most glacier-carved northern lakes, Oastler is a treasure trove of hidden nooks and shady coves. Deep into one such gem, my sharp-eyed wife spotted a bass under the boat. This sighting tweaked the angler gene that has been prominent among males in my family for generations. I vowed to return the next day.
And I did. But something had changed. Cottagers had arrived. When I rounded the point, I could hear three generations of merrymakers frolicking on the shore. At least that's what I should've heard. Instead, John Cougar's "Jack and Diane" thumped from concert-sized speakers that encircled their dock like a boreal Stonehenge. Then came Eddie Grant's, "Electric Avenue". "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap". "Bad Moon Rising".
It was during Guns and Roses', "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" that I thought my moment of angler nirvana had arrived. I could see my bait nudging the sandy lake bottom. Out of the shadows, the mother of all bass glided into view and to within tantalizing inches of being the entrée at that night's dinner table. I forgot all about trains and sleepless nights. The fish hovered for several moments. Apparently, this freshwater barracuda preferred a Zen-like approach to mangling its prey. The Hollywood ending to this story would see me reel in the trophy smallmouth and haul it into the boat in slow motion to the theme from "Chariots of Fire". But this isn't OLN and I'm not Bob Izumi. Nowhere in the guidebooks does it say: "The perfect setting for hooking prized game fish is overhanging spruce, eight feet of water, and Axl Rose's hellhound shriek."
After an agonizing period of reflection the bass vanished back into the shadows, taking my dreams of starring in Outdoor Sportsman along with it. So much for my afternoon of Fishing with the Classics. It was back to camp for another episode of "Night Train".
