Walking Through a Place You Thought You Knew

“The only true voyage … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.”

Marcel Proust, The Captive (La Prisonnière), from In Search of Lost Time

 

Ontario Yours to Discover

 

One of the questions we were asked today during an interview with CBC Sudbury was what we had learned while walking through Northern Ontario. It seems like a simple question, and after more than a year on the Trans Canada Trail we have become reasonably practiced at answering variations of it.

 

There are, of course, a range of “usual questions” - What have we learned about Canada? What has surprised us? What has been the hardest part? What has been the most beautiful? Usually we can offer something from the trail, the birds, the people we have met or the landscapes we have crossed. Yet this particular question stayed with me for the rest of the day because Northern Ontario is not somewhere we came expecting to discover in quite the same way as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or PEI because … Ontario is, or rather was, home. We were both born here, have lived in different parts of the province, studied here, camped here, worked here and spent much of our lives travelling its roads and exploring its provincial parks. Somehow that familiarity had convinced us that we knew it.

 

Yet walking across the province has been steadily showing us how questionable that assumption was.

This is not the first time during our Ontario trek that home has felt unfamiliar. Earlier this summer we walked back into Peterborough, where we once lived and went to school, expecting to recognize a place that had been important in our lives. Much of it was still there - the Otonabee River, the Lift Lock, familiar streets and buildings (including our old home) - but enough had also changed that we often felt more like visitors than former residents. Chic restaurants had replaced old student haunts, new condominiums stood where familiar buildings once had, and places preserved clearly in memory no longer matched what was in front of us. It was strange to discover that knowing somewhere in the past does not necessarily mean knowing it in the present. Perhaps Northern Ontario is now teaching us a related lesson on a much larger scale. Living in a province does not necessarily mean understanding all of it.

 

Growing up and living in Southwestern Ontario, our mental map of the province was inevitably shaped by the places around us. Toronto was the enormous centre toward which roads, media and attention seemed to flow. Southwestern Ontario was farmland, Carolinian forest, Great Lakes shorelines and cities connected by Highway 401. Cottage country began somewhere north of the GTA, while Algonquin and the Canadian Shield occupied a familiar place in our imaginations as the beginning of something wilder. Beyond that, Northern Ontario stretched across a tremendous amount of the map, but much of it remained represented by names - Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay, Kenora - and by occasional journeys along highways and VIA train trips that carried us through rather than giving way for us to stop.

 

Walking makes that kind of simplification difficult to maintain.

 

Even leaving North Bay began changing the picture. Our route immediately took us onto the Trans Canada Highway, which was hardly the peaceful trail we might have preferred, but moving along it on foot put us inside a landscape we had previously experienced almost entirely from vehicles. We passed the Anishinabek Education Institute and an Anishinabek-run store, walked through Nipissing First Nation, saw Indigenous artwork on buildings and signs, and encountered bilingual street names and stop signs. At a lookout over Lake Nipissing, many of the people around us were speaking French. None of these things was hidden. We simply had never been travelling slowly enough, or perhaps attentively enough, to consider how strongly different histories, languages and cultures overlapped here.

 

The French presence has been one of the simplest examples of how much our assumptions have needed adjusting. Somewhere in the very basic geography carried around in my head, Québec was French, and Ontario was English. I would never have claimed that this was literally true – political boundaries are never that fixed - yet there was clearly some version of that division sitting there unquestioned.  A set of assumptions that Northern Ontario has refused to cooperate with it. Community names are often French. Conversations around us are also often in French. Road signs and businesses reflect a bilingual world, and the history of French exploration and settlement is present throughout the landscape. The border between Québec and Ontario may be obvious on a map, but language, families, history and culture do not seem nearly as interested in remaining neatly on one side of it.

 

The same has been true of the idea that Ontario can be understood primarily through its southern cities. The distances alone begin to challenge that perspective. By the time we reached North Bay, we were seeing road signs telling us that Ottawa was only about 350 kilometres away, which was mildly demoralizing after we had already walked more than 1,500 kilometres through Ontario since leaving the capital. We had crossed Eastern Ontario, wound south through the Greater Toronto Region, travelled north through Muskoka and still had more than 800 kilometres of the route ahead through what we were calling Northern Ontario before dealing with a break in the TCT that itself is more than 1200 km in length along the shores of Lake Superior. Somewhere along the way, the province we thought we understood had become physically much larger than the one in our imagination.

 

Perhaps travelling by road had always hidden that scale from us. In a vehicle, distance is translated into hours. North Bay is a certain number of hours from Toronto. Sudbury is another couple. Sault Ste. Marie is farther still. Gas stations, coffee stops and highway signs divide the journey into manageable pieces, and the kilometres disappear quickly enough that enormous regions can become the space between departure and destination. Weekend vacations and summer Road Trips are divided between En Route stations and the distance to our destinations.   On foot, there is no such compression. Thirty kilometres remains most of a day regardless of how little space it occupies on a provincial map. A community visible on a highway sign in the morning may not be reached until late afternoon. Lakes remain beside us for hours, while geological changes, settlements and language shift gradually rather than appearing as isolated destinations.  There is something humbling about following road advertisements for the largest part of the day that count down – hour by hour – Tim Hortons 10 minutes' drive away.  Tim Hortons 7 minutes' drive away.  Tim Hortons 5 minutes' drive away.  Tim Hortons 2 minutes' drive away.  To fully realize that what took someone in a vehicle 10 minutes to do fills the shape of almost a full day of hiking.

 

The slower pace also makes it harder to separate the attractive parts of a place from everything supporting them. Today we spend long hours beside highways rather than moving from scenic lookout to scenic lookout. We pass homes, quarries, businesses, reserve lands, wetlands, road cuts, forests and industrial landscapes. We see thousands of discarded beer cans and plastic bottles in the ditches as well as the lakes beyond them. We watch transports roar past carrying resources through communities and then step away from the road to find marshes alive with birds. The experience is not always beautiful, but increasingly I wonder whether travelling through a place should require beauty from every kilometre. Perhaps understanding somewhere means being willing to see more than the portions we would have chosen for a postcard and see in a tourism ad on TV.

 

Walking through our own province has also made us aware of how often we have treated familiar names as though knowing the name meant knowing the place. We knew Sudbury was associated with mining. We knew Northern Ontario had large Indigenous populations. We knew French was widely spoken outside Québec. We knew that this part of the province was vast, that forestry and resource industries shaped communities, and that many towns had histories extending far beyond the industries most outsiders associate with them. None of these things is secret information. Yet knowing something as a fact and encountering it repeatedly in people's lives, street signs, landscapes and conversations are very different forms of knowledge.  In the process, a lot of assumptions fall away through lived experience.

 

Perhaps that distinction is becoming one of the many lessons of walking. Familiarity can make us curious, but it can also make us lazy. When we arrive somewhere entirely new, we expect not to know things. We read historical plaques, look at maps, ask questions and try to understand what we are seeing because the ignorance in ourselves is obvious. At home, ignorance is easier to conceal from ourselves. We already recognize the place name. We know roughly where we are. We have driven the highway before or heard the town mentioned on the news. That small amount of recognition can masquerade as understanding. Walking removes a lot of that comfort.

 

There is enough time between one community and the next to wonder why it exists where it does, who lives there, what happened in the region well before we arrived. There is time to notice that the place does not fit whatever simple category we had assigned to it. Occasionally there is even enough time to realize that the question itself was based on an assumption we had never bothered to examine.

 

This seems particularly relevant to a journey intended to help us learn more about Canada. It is easy to imagine that the greatest discoveries will happen far from home, somewhere culturally or geographically unfamiliar. Somewhere we think of as exotic and unknown.  Our first season certainly offered plenty of those experiences. Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Eastern Québec constantly presented us with landscapes, communities and histories we had never personally encountered before. Because of this, on some level they were all new to us and so exciting to us.  Needless to say, Ontario was supposed to be different simply because it was ours.

 

Instead, walking through it is making us question what that word means. Perhaps home is not the place you already understand. Perhaps it is simply the place where your assumptions are most deeply rooted. That does not make those assumptions bad, intentionally malicious or even particularly unusual. Most of us build our understanding of large places from the small portion we personally inhabit. Someone growing up in Thunder Bay will likely carry a very different Ontario than someone from Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa or Cornwall. Each is real. None is complete. The difficulty begins when our particular version slowly becomes the whole province in our minds. 

 

There is something valuable, and slightly uncomfortable, about discovering this while still inside the place we thought we knew. Don’t get me wrong - we definitely have not suddenly become experts on Northern Ontario because we are walking through it. In many ways, the journey is revealing how little we know rather than how much we have learned. Every community seems to open another set of histories and questions. Indigenous territories and treaty relationships stretch far beyond what we were taught in school. French culture is more deeply woven through the province than our southern perspective appreciated. Resource industries that can appear as statistics and easy targets for environmental critique from a distance and a classroom become communities where people work, raise families and build their lives. Even the enormous geography of Ontario feels different when measured by footsteps rather than highway kilometres and train stops.

 

Perhaps this is what slow travel can offer even at home. It can make the familiar unfamiliar long enough for curiosity to return.  Tomorrow we will continue toward Sudbury, still following highways and roads through a province whose name has been written on our birth certificates, driver's licences and addresses for most of our lives. We know where we are.  Increasingly, however, I am less certain that means we know the place. And perhaps realizing that is a better beginning than believing we already do.

 

See you on the trail.