18 May

Following the Ojibwe northern branch to Chippewa Falls, right by the Trans Canada Highway, at the halfway, within touching distance of the roadway.

Here is a relentless power in water, rushing without hesitation or thought over boulders and rocks straight down to Lake Superior – taking full-grown trees with it in places.

Tourists arrive here in their hire cars, and barely even need to get out to see the falls; the rapids are so close to the highway I’m surprised Tim Horton isn’t lurking nearby.

This would be all too easy for the Group of Seven – they arrived here in the Roaring Twenties on a makeshift railway line, as a kind of disparate bunch of ‘Canada’s Got Talent’ contenders, formed into a supergroup of famous landscapists by two crafty svengalis.

While everyone else was going all art deco and surrealist and conceptual, waving jazz hands as they went, the G7 were keeping it real by working on stuffy old canvas in celebrated brushstrokes.

And a little economical with the truth perhaps – these lands were long-since occupied, not quite undiscovered.

One thing’s for sure … I haven’t brought along my easel today.

A search in vain for a trail – any trail – to hike along; all I get is dead-end paths to places I can only think are where folk throw themselves in for a whitewater thrash down the rapids.

The Henderson Falls, or the Henderson Cliffs – now there’s a challenge I can take on, and subsequently waste most of the day to eventually arrive at the conclusion that this Henderson is / was a fraud.

Parading up and down the Highway, looking for the trails, but all I get are ‘no exit’ roads marked at the end by a private driveway or a mob of trees or a hunk of rocks and boulders which all dismiss me.

I even go down the long winding track to Sandy Bay, an inlet which remains elusive and constantly hidden from view behind the lakefront houses and the ‘No Trespassing No Hunting’ signs.

I go to Batchawana Bay in the drizzly rain just to see a person in the Visitor Centre peer out startled and amazed that anyone has driven in to the car park there today.

Here I am, arrived from the UK.

A disjointed day, alright.

After all the false starts, Searchmont appears through the mountain mist as a shut-down ski resort.

Shit, I think I’ve landed on a filmset again.

That boarded-up solitary house on the other side of the tracks … it’s straight out of Hiker Meat … Jamestown … frozen in time, suspended in the 1970s …

… I made it here from my cabin, but will I make it back?

Stood on the deserted road, in a moment of loose clarity, snowmobile tracks call out to me.

I pass remote family homes, happening upon a random mountain weekend social.

The lost boys have turned up through the fog in their oversize trucks, to drink Canadians and bourbon chasers and cook off any feral visitors and have them in a brioche bun with a side of slaw and maybe some home-cut fries.

They wear check shirts and unkempt facial hair and beat-up baseball caps and are probably listening to Bon Jovi or Lustfaust and later on maybe a bit of Britney.

But one thing about living in Searchmont I doubt I could ever stomach: all the damn campfires.

Along the Whitman Dam Road, which may as well be a horse-and-cart track from the 1800s.

I park up in a clearing, to hike up a steep incline which leads nowhere.

I drive on further, persevering with this unlikely sequence of events which now see me up an unknown mountain, with little to no idea (whichever arrives sooner).

Here is another clearing, and still with some remnants of positivity and possibility draped over me, I venture down another snowmobile track.

Past the Pepsi can hanging forlornly from a tree, like a signpost in this horror film I’ve yet to star in. Or perhaps more as marker than a piece of litter is what I figure.

When the snowmobile track ends, the hiking path commences, apparently – and there’s a slim chance I could finally be onto something here.

The swaying damp trees seem to be encouraging me now.

Eventually, a water-like sound, faded at first but progressively louder the deeper into the bush I get.

I’m pushing my way through branches and trees now, eager to see my quarry and to extinguish the muted snicker of failure which has stalked me throughout the day. I don’t really fancy finishing it as an also-ran / once-ran.

I’m determined now, totally bloody-minded.

I’m going to barge my way through this thick forest and scrub to see this rushing body of water I can hear going wroooosssshhhh-hrsssshhhh-wroooosssshhhh-hrsssshhhh … louder and louder to the point where I can’t even hear the birds and all other life is inconsequential and the water is all-powerful and takes over everything even the trees, which I find submit to it and throw themselves in to be dragged down-river and meet their destiny propped up against a rocky escarpment … an arbitrary arborescent cemetery … and all the while the water still louder and louder until I see it with my own eyes, a white rush of angry water pouring violently over the rocks who gladly let it do so in return for some wisdom but what does the water know that the boulders don’t?

It’s all a damp mystery which I’ll become a part of in time.