June 24, 2016
A steaming great pile of bear poop: I had my chief suspect
As it turned out I slept really well, then I woke up feeling rather silly with myself for having been so worried about wild animals. As if they would really go about trampling me in the night, or causing me any trouble! I lazily climbed out of my sleeping bag and out of the tent into the early morning air of what looked like being another fine and clear day, then wandered twenty metres down the track to retrieve my food pannier. Of course in bear country one should not sleep with food in the tent, for it may lead to unwanted visitors in the night. When I’d first arrived in Canada I had been advised that the best thing to do would be to hang my food in a tree and on my first night wild camping in the country I’d made a comical attempt at doing so. I’d found some rope at the side of the road that looked like it might do, that I tried to fling over a branch without success, in any case it was quite inappropriate for holding the weight and after repeated attempts that took up half the night I eventually resigned myself to just leaving my food bag outside on the ground, a safe distance from my tent. I’d been doing that ever since - and in more than a hundred nights of wild camping in Canada my food pannier had never been touched, not by a bear nor any other creature bigger than a slug.
So I was a little surprised to reach the location where I had left this bag of food the previous evening to find it no longer there. I looked around, confused, thinking at first that perhaps I was in the wrong place. Then I noticed my yellow jacket, which I’d wrapped over the top of the pannier to keep it dry, now hanging from a low branch in the woods besides the trail. Beginning to realise what may have occurred here I studied the ground again, and noticed that, in close proximity to where my food pannier had been left, there now resided a steaming great pile of bear poop.
Now, I’m not one to jump to conclusions, but I was pretty sure who the chief suspect was in this mystery. I now had no food, and I was 80 kilometres from the next town, so I reasoned that I’d better make some attempt to solve the crime. The jacket was my only clue as to the route by which my food had disappeared, and I boldly decided to enter the woods in that direction. Perhaps, however, that ‘boldly’ is too strong a word - I was grasping a frying pan in one hand and my heavy metal chain lock in the other, clanging them nervously against one another to make a tremendous noise as I stepped tentatively over fallen logs. The undergrowth was incredibly thick, and I could hardly believe that a bear could make its way through it. I was certainly struggling to myself, and it wasn’t very long before I decided to concede defeat and turn back. There was no sign of the bag, and I did not really know what I was hoping to find. It was not as if the bear was going to be sitting there fiddling with the buckles - my pannier was surely in tatters by now, wherever it was. And if I did find the bear, looking up at me with a guilty expression and peanut butter and jam smeared around its chops, I doubted very much that I would have the tenacity to bop it over the head with my frying pan for half a bag of cookies. No, no, better to let nature run its course, I decided, and I beat a hasty retreat.
Adapting to this turn of events, my first problem was how to carry all of my possessions on my bike now that I was short one pannier, but I was fortunate enough to quickly find a solution. The backpack that I usually carried on the top of the rear rack could be made to fit quite well onto the side in the place of the pannier simply by attaching its straps through the rack. Now my only problem was that I still had 80 kilometres to cycle and nothing to eat, save for a 100 gram bar of chocolate that I had miraculously forgotten about and left in one of my other pannier bags. I made a plan to ration this carefully, and headed back to the road.
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After just four kilometres I arrived at a lake. The hunter that I’d met the previous day had suggested this as a place that I might have been able to camp, because he knew that others sometimes camped there, and I was pleased to find a caravan parked up. Actually it was a caravan attached to a motorhome, which seemed a little excessive, but I was pleased, because it probably contained a lot of food. I planned to tell the occupants my hard luck story and hope that they would take pity on me and feed me. Alas, however, there was no sign of anybody, and it was probably still too early in the morning for me to justify disturbing them. So I went for a very refreshing swim, in the hope that they might hear me and come out - sadly they did not. I still really appreciated stopping for that swim. Diving under the water was not only refreshing, it was also the only way that I could escape the constant buzz of flies, that on this windless day were as bad as they’d ever been. I hated those flies, I hated them with a passion that is hard to put into words, and every dive down underwater was a brief moment of bliss, just to get away from them. Oh, at that moment, how I wished, more than I ever had before, that I could have only been born a dolphin.
I cycled on, still reeling from what had happened, thinking excitedly about how I’d had a bear within twenty metres of my sleeping head last night, and wondering, more practically, what I was going to do about getting just one replacement pannier. But I was secretly delighted - Canada had not really been the most exciting of countries, and at last I had a good story to tell. I had no one to tell it to, of course, because I was still cycling through the remote wilderness on an empty road. But then, quite miraculously, I did have someone to tell it to, because another cyclist appeared in my rear view mirror, and cycled up beside me.
The cyclist was a middle-aged French-Canadian from Quebec named Jean. I resisted my hungry stomach’s request to immediately demand he give me food - my brain correctly deciding that I should at least attempt to make small talk first, and what was more he was on a road bike with almost nothing in the way of bags, and so very likely had no food with him. He seemed a little eccentric, and his English was not very good, which meant communication was difficult, but I managed to establish that he was on a tour across Canada, and that he was on his way from Quebec to Vancouver.
“You’re going the wrong way.” I told him, thinking, perhaps, that he had Vivian’s navigational skills.
“No. I go this way.”
“But you are cycling to Vancouver?”
“Yes. I go Vancouver.”
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“No.”
This was getting us nowhere. I changed the topic, and asked how it was that he had no stuff on his bike. Surely he could not really be cycling to Vancouver with such few possessions?
“I have support car.” Ah, that explained it.
“And where is your support car?” I asked, hoping to soon have myself some breakfast.
“Just up here, in the trees.”
“Great. Who is driving your support car?”
“I am.”
Now the jaw-dropping explanation as to why Jean was going the wrong way was revealed. He was crossing Canada, with a support car, alone. He would park the car somewhere, cycle for 30 kilometres west, then turn around and cycle the exact same 30 kilometres back east, fetch the car, then drive it back 30 kilometres west, covering the same route for a third time, and then repeat. I literally could not believe it. I was alone in the woods in the presence of a clinically insane lunatic.
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After a few kilometres we reached a trail leading into the woods and Jean told me that his car was parked down it. Under normal circumstances following such a madman into the woods would not seem like a sensible course of action, but my stomach was pressing quite a convincing case for trying to gain some of this man’s food. We found his car parked in a little clearing. On the back rack was another bike, and a third was wedged in the back seats amongst a cluster of boxes and other paraphernalia. “I don’t know mechanics.” Jean explained, “So when one bike breaks, I just take another.”
I was pretty stunned by all this, naturally, but I was still terribly hungry, so I asked Jean if he could spare some food. I’d already told him my bear story a couple of times, but he didn’t seem to grasp what I was saying, so eventually I skipped the politeness and just asked straight out for some food. He gave me a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, the cycle tourist’s staple, which I devoured quickly with what I like to think was grateful impoliteness. As my stomach settled towards contentment and I batted away the flies, Jean revealed more of his story. Trying to explain the logic behind this tour, he told me that originally there had been a group of five of them. They had planned to cycle together across the country, with one of them acting as the support driver. Over time each of these other fellows had dropped out, until finally there was only Jean left. Undeterred, he resolved to continue with the ride anyway and, rather than lose out on the support driver, and all the luxury and convenience that would mean, he simply adapted to take on all of the roles himself.
It almost began to make sense now. But I did have to wonder if he was really going to be able to keep this routine up all the way across the mundane prairies - they were bad enough once, never mind three times. Especially as he revealed that the plan was originally just to go across Quebec. After doing that, he liked this lifestyle so much, that he’d decided to go all the way across the country. The only problem was he just hadn’t told his wife. “She doesn’t know about Vancouver,” he confirmed, “She keeps calling and asking where I am.”
Strangely when it was time to say goodbye and exchange contact details, the only contact number that Jean gave me was that of his wife. I wondered if this was secretly a call for help. Maybe I should call her, tell her I’d found her husband and that I was worried, that perhaps he might have escaped from some sort of institution somewhere.
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Although I’d had two sandwiches and a 100 gram bar of chocolate I was still starving hungry when I finally reached the small town of Chapleau, the only oasis of civilisation on this long, empty road. I hurried quickly to the supermarket. It wasn’t one of the cheap ones, but under the circumstances I really didn’t mind that much. As I locked my bike up outside a friendly man came over to say hello and I relished the chance to tell my bear story to someone who would understand. We had a little chat and of course he asked me where I was from.
“England?” he said, “Well of course they’ve been in the news today. They’ve chosen to go it alone. 51% to 49%. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it.”
I was in shock. I wandered around the supermarket in a daze. This was a disaster. Dea and I had put all of our savings into pounds and, with our plans being to spend all of it in other currencies, we’d just lost 10% of our money in a single stroke as the value of the pound tanked. I really did not believe that this would happen. How could this happen? I tried to do my shopping, though I had quite suddenly lost my appetite completely. The slightly-more expensive groceries now seemed trivial. What was a couple of dollars more, when we’d just lost thousands?
I went to the library and sat on my laptop and tried to digest the fallout from my country’s decision to leave the E.U. I was in such a state of disbelief that I did not even eat anything, and my stomach raised no objections thanks to the sickly feeling that now resided within it. As well as losing so much money, the future implications for Dea and myself, the potential problems we might now face with her being a citizen of the E.U. and me not, weighed heavily upon both of us as I did my best to reassure her, while feeling quite un-reassured myself. My country appeared to have descended into chaos overnight, and, quite aside from our own losses, we both feared what this might mean on a larger scale. I could not see how this was going to turn out to be anything other than a backward step for the U.K., Europe, and the world in general.
After four hours I pulled myself away from the computer, my stomach telling me that it felt it could probably hold a little food now if I wouldn’t mind forcing some down. I did that, and then got back on my bike and rode out of Chapleau. I felt like the world had just been turned upside down, but heading back out into the wild, on the long, empty, tree-lined road, I felt calmed. Whatever madness there was in the world, there would always be places like this, places to escape on my bike. I was still free, still living my life the way that I wanted, a travelling vagabond, unbound from all that political nonsense. I decided against my original plan to spend my evening constructing an effigy of Boris Johnson, and instead relaxed and enjoyed where I was and the lifestyle that enabled me to enjoy such chance experiences and encounters as a bear stealing my food and a meeting with a man who was cycling across Canada driving his own support car. As if to prove the point as I cycled along a huge mother moose lumbered out of the trees just ahead of me, crossing the road with two calves in tow. It was an incredible sight, this giant creature going about her motherly business, unaware of all our human troubles. I smiled. Life was alright.
Today's ride: 117 km (73 miles)
Total: 53,080 km (32,963 miles)
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