By Lucy

Nothing much of note happened Friday. I finally brought my carb count up to the point that I could eat pasta, so I made myself some. I was feeling a little worse off Keto, but I wasn’t putting any weight on so I’m happy for that!

I finally unwrapped my finger to look at the damage I did to it Wednesday. Yes, I kept the bandage on for 2 whole days. It had closed up completely, although I did wrap it up again just to make sure it heals prettily.

Friday races appear to be slow. There was only 4 boats on the water.

Our crew was joined by another boat owner, who is also named Lucy for extra confusion, and her husband John. We picked up a fellow who is apparently an extremely irregular crew member named Bruce.

At the last minute, a woman wandered down the docks and said her son had been waiting at the crew bench, were the races happening today? We all exchanged looks and Chris said he could join us. He’s a young Sea cadet visiting from Nova Scotia, which caused Chris to try and ask how long I lived in Nova Scotia for! Chris is one of those people who thinks I’m more mysterious than I actually am – he keeps trying to uncover some story about me and Kevin that doesn’t exist.

The race was uneventful except that we won! (I mean, first out of 4 boats) The breeze played nice and everyone worked together fairly well.

Kevin was absent because he was attending some sort of alternative… indie… music festival? It’s called Tumblestone. As we were talking later that night, he invited me to attend on Saturday and offered to pay for my admission.

Music festivals and concerts aren’t really my thing. I mean, I have all the music on my PC or phone, I can listen wherever I want, and I don’t have to listen to people singing along out-of-key or spilling beer on me. I also have a slight concern in that the Vagabond’s son is involved in the local music scene, and I’m pretty sure he knows what I look like, but I have no idea what he thinks of me, or our relationship.

But then Kevin said “I’d like to give someone a surreal Thunder Bay experience” and I was hooked. Sure, let’s go do something weird. That sounds like a plan!

Saturday morning I had another walk with Kevin2. We went around Boulevard, then went down to the Marina for Ribfest. There was only 2 trucks there and when we tasted the offered samples, the BBQ sauce honestly tasted the same! Kevin2 joked they must be owned by the same person and running some sort of scam. We sat around and talked for a bit, until the stage was taken over by someone who – while a very talented singer – had decided to do Disney song after Disney song.

Ate lunch and started on the trek out to Lappe.

Actually, it wasn’t that far outside of town, but it was far enough that I lost all service, hilariously enough. Tbaytel uses Rogers as TPIA, so my Bell service often doesn’t work around town. I drove along the road until I found a bunch of cars half-parked in the ditch again. I’m here! Parked and wandered up the road.

Kevin was waiting by the gate with my bracelet.

It is someone’s private property but obviously they use it for a large music festival, privacy is slightly waved. As I followed Kevin deeper into the property, my mouth fell open.

“It looks like a Fallout raider base!” I exclaimed, clapping my hands.

Kevin laughed. “I’ve heard people describe it as an art scrapyard, but yeah it does kind of look like Fallout.”

Art scrapyard is lacking something, honestly. Scrapyard implies casually dumping things here and there, but there was clearly an eye to detail here. Someone tilting their head to the side and saying “why don’t we fill in the negative space there?”. A lot of the art was clearly hand-painted as well.

And the owl!

He gave me the tour around. Dirt roads crisscrossed seating areas and gardens, decorated with mannequin parts and hand-painted signs with mushrooms and ever-present pigs. There were tents and hammocks erected anywhere that might be considered private, behind groves of trees or decorations.

There was a small stage next to the house, and a larger stage erected out of scaffolding out back. The speakers were taller than me!

As we wandered back towards the first stage, he stopped and darted into the trees. “Look at this!”

“It’s a lobster mushroom. It’s edible.”

He directed me to pick it up and turn it over. He explained that the orange colour is because it’s actually a parasitic fungus.

“I suppose the real question is, does anything poisonous look like this?” I asked.

“Nope!”

That’s promising, then. Lobster mushrooms are always safe!

Back at the main area, we dropped the mushroom off at the kitchen to be cooked later. He had to start getting ready – the first of two bands he’d be playing with was getting ready. He cracked a few jokes about being rusty. As if! When he has the same memory as me. I was debating joking back that drums are simple and easy to learn, but I wasn’t sure he would appreciate that!

I felt very out of place. I was just wearing a t-shirt and some capris, but there were people in all sorts of garb, including a couple of women in bikini bottoms and tape over their nipples and not a stitch more. It helps that Kevin always wears the same kind of dark grey shorts, light grey shirt, and a floppy hat that is just on this side of not being a pointy wizards hat. I tucked myself into a seat in a corner where I could still see the stage and tried to relax.

The band was good, it’s called Bird Brain. The music reminded me of Florence and the Machine. They had 5 or 6 songs, about half an hour total playtime. Kevin was not rusty at all, the liar.

After he was done, we had an hour and a half to kill until his next set with a different band. We went up to the owl so I could inspect its construction. I thought it was put together well – no notes!

There’s a bar next to the owl. The guy called us over and offered Kevin a cup of slushie. “Jack Daniels and cola!” That’s an idea – have slushie machine, put alcohol in it! Must be a trick and a half to get it to freeze properly though!

As we walked away, I leaned over. “They just give you drinks for free?”

He chuckled. “I’m well-known.”

Yeah, but alcohol is expensive. That’s a different kind of currency, a potent sort of popularity. I was having a hard time putting it together in my head – he was so popular people just gave him free drinks, but he was spending time hanging out with me?

Here I am again, another nebulous connection to a big fish in this increasingly smaller pond.

We found a shady grove of trees tucked behind some of the seating. It was the perfect area to beat the heat, and not be disturbed, so we sat and talked for a while. Gossip, stories, get to know each other. He has a reputation similar to mine – mysterious – so we’ve been having fun trying to guess details about each other, instead of out-and-out asking. I’m not sure how old he is, but I’m getting closer to guessing. I already guessed his job – one point for me!

I was pretty sure the Vagabond’s son wasn’t here, but the thought of that wasn’t helping. Actually, just being here was reminding me of the Vagabond – the surreal art, like the stuff he’s made, the way it’s all over the place like his house. The fact that it’s all indie music and he usually listens to the student radio station and it plays weird indie remixes. People wandered past discussing fringe-but-mainstream concepts like microdosing magic mushrooms, and I could see him here, doing exactly that.

I could also see Rich having fun here, but for different reasons. I could see him getting into too many Jack Daniels slushies, tying a lurid tie around his head, and jumping onto the drums with an equally sloshed band and having a raucous good time – the kind of good time I should be having.

Instead I was melancholically musing, a Mustapha Mond expy, watching the normal people enjoy the kind of fun I wish I could have but can’t.

I glanced sideways at Kevin. Maybe that was the answer. A fellow alien. It was a joke on the boat, before I even got there, “Kevin knows everything”. His perfect memory, the depth of knowledge in disparate subjects, his quiet but friendly manner…

The second band was hotly anticipated. People lined up for it before time, and as we got up for him to go look for them, people asked him when they were going to be on.

They would be late, however. The main female broke a violin string and had to run back to town for new ones.

45 minutes later, the band finally showed up. A man and a women in what I would call stereotypical hippy clothes – flowery jeans, crocheted tops, a hairband around his mop top of black curly hair, and her aviators. Kevin grabbed a fresh, cold beer before getting back on the drums – this was serious business.

They started playing promptly, her attempting to light a cigarette between songs (hard to do with a violin). The crowd, which had trickled away, came running back, almost literally. I soon found myself squashed on the seat as it seemed every single person at the festival wanted to see this band.

I liked this band too! The band’s fluid style bled one song into the next, the main man – Jake? – seemingly jamming away on the keys, improvisational.

By the time this band was done, it was near 6 o’clock.

I started trying to excuse myself. Kevin attempted to distract me by introducing me to the heavily tattooed man who had made the owl, but he was clearly hung over and not much for conversation.

“You should stay. You’re going to miss the guy that lights a candle on top of his head for the entire show!”

‘Should’ is a relative term. When ‘should’ I leave? I had nowhere to be, but the longer I stayed here, the more tempted I was to drink. And once I started drinking, I wouldn’t want to drive home, and I was not sleeping in a tent in the woods.

So I went home. Possibly missing out on some interesting experiences.

Sunday was Gaelic festival at the fort. Gillian had invited me, and I knew it was free, so I decided to show up to support her. The bagpipes were on at 2, so I showed up around 1:30 and walked out back where Gillian is.

I was surprised – she was all by herself at her table! Just her and the unrelenting crowd. We talked a bit, but I didn’t want to distract her from her work and she wouldn’t let me anyway. I took a picture to send to her later and wandered off to get a good seat of the stage.

They had a grand entry first, of course! I walked out the gate just as the cannons fired, which startled my socks off!

After the grand entry, we went back to the field in the middle and watched the band march down. Sometimes there are jokes about bagpipes being dreadful, but I actually like them. When I was in cadets, I started taking bagpipes lessons! I also like the little flourishes of the drummers – Gillian said later that they were young, but skilled and determined. There were also three uniformed police officers with kilts, implying there is some sort of official Thunder Bay tartan.

The dancers were decent, but not as tightly choreographed as the band, more’s the pity.

I stayed ’til 3, then the heat and the humidity was too much for me and I left.

So, it was Sunday.

You call me up again just to break me like a promise/
So casually cruel in the name of being honest

I should have made plans to distract myself. Because logically, rationally, I should be avoiding him. I should just block his number and find something to do to take my mind off him.

And yet, I couldn’t. I was waiting for him to text, and I’d be crushed if he didn’t.

Around 9 it finally came in. “Thanks for the card and the walking stick!”

He didn’t invite me over and I didn’t offer, so after a couple of texts I let the conversation peter out and went to bed.

I was awoken Monday morning by a phone call. It was the clerk from the union hall – more paperwork to sign for the name change.

After making breakfast, I went out for coffee with Hanuman. He’s finally figured out what was going on with his knee, so he was game to go hiking again!

The union hall closes between noon and 1, so after 1 I drove up. Julie was thrilled to see me.

“I had to call you today, we have Labour Day shirts! What size are you, small?”

“Probably.” I shrugged. A lot of the carpenter’s swag is men’s sizes, so a small is bigger than a woman’s small. She came back with a bright red shirt.

“I’ve got stickers…” She piled a bunch of stickers on the counter. “There’s still some Pride shirts as well.” She paused. “Some of the guys are really… you know… about it.”

I cracked into a grin. “They can certainly try to give me a hard time!”

She smiled. “That’s what I thought. You’re a firebrand!” She disappeared into the back and came back with another shirt. Then she handed me the paperwork I had to sign. “Hey, so you ever gonna put yourself on the out-of-work list, or do you just work for the one scaffolding company?”

I blushed and told her about my plans for New Zealand. We stood around chatting for a bit – she also has plans for a vacation.

It was so blisteringly hot I didn’t dare turn on my computer when I got back to my place. It was somewhere above 40 with the humidex. There were multiple warnings for a risk of severe thunderstorms. Every five minutes, it seemed, there was another whoop of sirens – homeless people passed out from heat exhaustion and dehydration. It was quite disheartening.

I finally had to turn my PC on. Kevin agreed to print my visa, but the original download was some weird WEBP file, so I had to convert it to a PDF before I could send it. He wouldn’t be at sailing that night, unfortunately. He showed me his lightning detector, but reassured me that we were unlikely to get hit by the storm.

As I walked down to the marina, I heard thunder rumble in the distance.

Hah, you know what I should have borrowed from Kevin? The lightning detector.

The air at the marina was thick as soup, not a breath of wind. Foster and Gillian were there, as well as a man named Lee who apparently knows a lot about meteorology, because he started commenting about how the cumulonimbus clouds weren’t in anvil presentation yet.

There wasn’t a lot of boats out. It was strange, we couldn’t feel any wind but the boat was moving under power of the sail. We did a few lengths fairly normally.

It quickly became clear that we were in the eye of some sort of storm. You couldn’t see the Giant, Amethyst Harbor, or Mt Mckay because they were buried in rain, but it was clear and sunny above us.

The final length, I felt the lightning crackling in the air. I tried to warn Chris, but I lacked anything beyond the feeling that the storm was about to break.

“We’re three boat lengths from the marker, then we can turn back.” Chris said calmly.

Then the heavens opened above us.

We were soaked fairly quickly. We rounded the marker and started packing everything up in a panic, as lightning flashed overhead and thunder boomed in our ears, too close for comfort. And here we were, in the middle of a lake with a giant lightning rod.

Fortunately, we made it back without incident. I got a ride back to my place with Chris.

Tuesday was the only day I had nothing planned. I cleaned my room, posted some things on Marketplace. My last Factor box showed up early and, confusingly, one meal short. I took a picture of it and sent it to their chat, and they refunded me ten bucks.

I went back to 2Good2Go. All the Tim Hortons in Thunder Bay had recently joined, and now that I was back to eating carbs, it was a cheap source of them. You always get a good amount of food, and the Tim Hortons boxes are almost never sold out cuz there is so many of them. Usually 5 a day for each, and there’s ten or more Timmies in town.

I laughed when I saw the donut with raisins. That’s a Hanuman donut for sure!

I finally got a reply from the Soroptimists in New Zealand. My email was answered by a woman around my age named Maddy. She’s currently touring Zimbabwe visiting Soroptimist groups there, so immediately I was in good company! But then I knew New Zealand was going to be good for me – they claim to be the first country to give women the right to vote (technically inaccurate, because they were still legally a British colony at the time, but it speaks to their level of equality). She sent me the contacts both for Soroptimists in Christchurch, and some of her personal friends in the area.

Where I am specifically bound for is a town called Methven (pronounced ‘Meeeeeethvin’ in their accent). New Zealand is somewhat active, tectonically speaking, so there are geothermal pools nearby. There’s also several ski resorts on the mountain range, about half an hour away, which for bonus confusion points are called the Southern Alps.

Someone commented that it sounds a lot like Thunder Bay and it kind of does, minus the lack of geothermal pools here (and honestly, considering how many Finnlanders we have, why are there no good spas??).

As the evening drew to a close, my phone started going off. He was in some sort of philosophical mood, reading Gibran again. The discourse quickly broke down, however.

He’s almost ruining my vacation before I even go. I keep telling everyone I have to be back by April. You know why? Because Dryden is happening in April again. And guess who’s going to be there.

I was glad for Wednesday’s hike. Just me and Hanuman and the trees.

Last time, perhaps because we were hiking towards Pass Lake and Thunder Bay, we had occasional cell service. This time we headed south to the ‘toes’ and had zero bars the whole time, which suited me just fine.

They finally finished the shed and had a sign on it. I guess they were having trouble with amateurs getting stuck on the trails? We still ended up passing one couple who didn’t seem to realize how far the trail went!

We went to the Sea Lion first, cuz Hanuman had never been. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about that – almost exactly a year after the Vagabond took me there, and I had decided on this course of action. I felt a slight twist in my heart, but that was it. I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was amused a few weeks back, when Paul reminded me I had done Cedar Falls cuz I legitimately forgot. Because the trail is only a kilometer and nowadays, I turn my nose up at any hike that isn’t at least 10.

We kept wandering down the Kabeyun trail. For about 6 kilometers, it’s pretty flat and straight. A little gravelly, a little up and down. There were lots of mushrooms and I took pictures of a few that I thought might be interesting to Kevin (and in general).

When we reached the place where the trail splits to go to the Top of the Giant, Hanuman said he was still feeling good, although not good enough to do the 3 kilometer climb. We stopped for a snack, then decided to keep walking along the Kabeyun trail. He was happy for the donut, which I learned is called a Dutchie.

We found some interesting sights: nice views of the water, sections covered in fuzzy looking (but not fuzzy feeling) moss. This cool split log.

A couple of kilometers down the trail, we discovered our mistake. It is not flat. It’s about 500 meters of giant freakin’ rocks!

I was sweating nervously and expected him to want to turn back, but he was thrilled to bits and started clambering all over the rocks immediately. I trailed slightly behind him, but I noted in the back of my head that I was nowhere near as out of breath as I had been on the Head of the Giant trail. At no point did I have to ask him to stop.

After we completed the rocky bit, the next bit was a bit of a goat trail. We followed it until we found another steep climb, and then Hanuman tapped out. Which was unfortunate, because we were a kilometer from the Thunder Cape Bird Observatory! Ah well. We rested and had another snack, and started the walk back.

In total – 6 hours, 34’000 steps, or 24 kilometers, not counting the extra exertion of the rocky bit. We hopped into the car and headed back home.

I stopped at the liquor store. I was tired – tired of being kept up late at night, tired of planning the trip, tired of this stupid dance with the Vagabond. I bought a bottle of whiskey.

Hanuman wanted to stop at KFC. He also pointed out that I was off my diet and he could buy me dinner, so I let him.

Once I was safely ensconced in my room, I got wasted to the point of throwing up in my trash bin, which was a bit more than I meant to drink (just a bit).

When I finally hauled my hungover self out of bed the next day, I learned that the girl who cooks in the middle of the night was in the process of moving out. Also, Wayne had mentioned to the landlord that the tenant above me was keeping me up, so he had been spoken to, which explained the dirty looks he had been giving me. Ack!

I made myself my emergency can of chicken noodle soup, and Gatorade. Slowly I put myself back together – shower, clean up the trash bin. I had posted a few things for sale on Marketplace and they were picked up, so I had a little extra cash.

I felt kind of silly for having gotten completely plastered, but I also felt a little better for it. Let off some steam.

Onwards we go.