14 May

A continental breakfast with Judas, on the balcony, keeping an eye out for the local masked bandits … raccoons. How times change.

Alas the naughty mammals have retreated, the lure of sweet tea and bread and jam and other first-meal treats not enough to coax them out of the trees.

After a while, Judas gets bored and schleps off – leaving a trail of breadcrumbs which lead all the way to the toaster, downstairs.

By which there follows a long farewell with my hosts – an equal mix of tabbies and human beings – before I take my leave, thankful in some ways that the last few days didn’t take too many dark turns.

This morning I have a ticket to ride, I have a date with a bird – a Blue Heron. Lustrous in the bright glow of the glaring sunshine, blithely waiting for me down at the harbour.

Or, more accurately – me and a crowd of random people unknown to each other are waiting for the skipper and his shipmates to finish off their Tim Horton’s and crank up the engines of the craft in front of us.

On the nod, us passengers all race up the steps to the top deck, with all the fervour and dignity of folk scrambling into a fire sale.

We’re waved out of Tobermory by a man and a woman who no-one knows. For some bizarre reason, we all wave back.

Then it’s full speed ahead, around the bend to Big Tub, where a couple of shallow shipwrecks have been laid on for us today.

The Sweepstakes, and the City of Something / Grand Rapids. Ghosts long-since departed, on a day trip to a local museum.

More fool them – they left behind a decent treasure haul, a loot of good sorts if you go by the titanic size of the bayfront houses and their towering lookout perches and their private cargo docks and their government-issue brightly-coloured oversized Canadian deckchairs.

Turns out those phantom vessels were dragged here, on fire, by some enterprising local who foresaw regular income from the tourist masses. Not once, but twice!

A solid enough business model, if you’re on friendly terms with the local firefighters.

Out into the lake, or the sea as it seems, past the private island with nothing there except the know-it-all rocks, the courteous trees, abandoned thoughts.

With turbos on, we’re off to Flowerpot. Fffffssssssccccchhhhh.

Hunkered down in the stiff breeze, we might be well-anchored but we’ve gone partially deaf.

And here are the old flowerpots – vase-like monuments from a glacial age I don’t remember, rendered in parts in concrete and brick, if my eyes aren’t deceiving me.

We gawp at them like a stable of curious horses. Nevermind how did they get here … how did we get here? I used to have a stable job!

We dock with ropes thrown around like lassoes, which enables the assembled travellers to disembark with some degree of dignity. Most of which is lost on the jostle to the only information board on the island that we can see right now.

I hang a left, away from everyone else.

To stumble and fall along the steep mountain trail, birds giggling up in the trees as I go. Nothing changes.

And now I’m climbing over rocks and roots, through impossible trails of trees all intertwined, making this into some kind of giant siamese forest, everything as one.

It’s a long-haul hike to the red lighthouse, which isn’t a lighthouse nor is it red. It’s a shop on a pebbly beach selling ice cream and souvenirs to no-one, because no-one lives here except for the person serving in the shop.

Up around the headland is a real lighthouse, which is a massive disappointment because it’s not red and it’s not open and there’s no ice cream and there aren’t any weird souvenirs.

Despite that, we all queue up to take photos of it.

This is where I bend over backwards, being overly courteous to a journalist from Germany – who immediately provides me with a life warning … don’t be so kind.

Around the edges of the island to the flowerpots and a too-friendly squirrel. I have no nuts for you, my bushy-tailed friend, because I’m spiteful now!

I end my island hike on a boardwalk promenade, with a beach excursion into clear-water paranoia, nothingness, below clear blue skies.

My cheese sandwich is taken on a bench by the noisy flagpole near the dock, next to the enormous gull.

Everyone who got off the boat earlier is now waiting for it to reappear; and getting restless, as we were the ones told not to be late.

The ride back is a riot – one of those quiet ones where nothing really happens, and there’s only one flag to wave between us.

Peak civilisation is reached in the queue to disembark the boat. No-one falls in the drink, no-one needs rescuing.

It’s a good job we all learnt how to walk.

Back on dry land, I’m feeling nautical.

So I drive my car fifty yards to pay a man in a booth to get myself onto another boat – the Chi-Cheemaun.

Beyond the barrier, queues of cars and human beings and dogs and random thoughts and hope.

We await the ferry and then we get on the ferry.

It’s plain sailing from here, with occasional glimpses of forgotten lands and high-stakes card games.

I take my afternoon beer in the lounge with these people, and then we all run down the wrong flight of stairs to get into the wrong cars.

Jostling for position to get off a ferry is a trivial pursuit. Some play it better than others.

I’ve arrived on Manitoulin Island.

In a fit of rebellion, I drive straight past my motel reservation to an appointment that was never made for me at High Falls, a sinkhole by the main road left behind by spirit people.

Backwards from the rush, a fall by the wayside, going around the bend in Manitowaning.

I absorb all available knowledge from my EU host with a mug of tea, only to be accosted by the only cyclist on the island.

This is an elderly stranger in skintight spandex, telling me to go post-haste to the USA; but if I really must stay local, to get myself around the full Cup and Saucer.

I stare at my tea, then the sky, in the hope that this indicates that yes I’d like to be somewhere else.

My cyclist friend leaves, and I’m left spinning around, on a locally-made piece of furniture.

Through downtown to the waterfront, where a mob of indifferent teenagers are lazing around on the grass in front of the white mill, by the derelict love boat, beyond the Ram pick-up truck.

We’ve all come from different places, and in time we’ll return to them.

In the meantime, an early-evening ramble up Fossil Hill, but the only relic I catch sight of is the skeletonised remains of a 1980s Chevrolet delivery truck, very slowly being consumed by the surrounding nature.

I go to the roadside restaurant by the RV park to eat a pickerel dinner beneath a widescreen TV.

Watching ice hockey on a dry reservation as I chow down on the freshest of fish suppers, intently following the loose puck, silently goading the monster players info a full-on fight.

And so what if I’m a sucker for a butter tart … arrest me.