Space To Be - Atikokan

Space to Be - Atikokan
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Spending time away has made me appreciate living in Northwestern Ontario, in Atikokan—even though my time away was spent in Vancouver, an extremely beautiful part of Canada, where mountains rise up around the city, ocean air wafts here and there, and the flowers have been known to bloom in February. These wonderful attributes draw many people to the West Coast of Canada. Lots of them. The sheer numbers of people simply freeze my brain.

Things are quite different in a big city.

A dense population makes driving a whole other experience. Forget about just getting used to streetlights, like we do when transitioning from Atikokan to Thunder Bay. In BC you have real rush hour traffic. And during rush hour you have temporary express lanes, or as someone from California called them, diamond lanes, where cars on the more congested side get the lane-light go-ahead to move to the opposite side of the cement barrier and drive against the flow of traffic on that side. It adds a whole new dimension to traffic awareness.

Sometimes large numbers of people pooling together isn’t a pretty thing. We drove down Hastings Street one evening. Maybe I’m just a from-the-land girl in the end, but I got nervous just a few blocks into the down-and-out part of Hastings. My friend, she said, ‘Ah, this is nothing. You should see LA.’ When we got deep into Hastings where there were police cars on every block and the street people slept, sat, walked, crouched, pushed grocery carts, hooked, or lay unconscious, a seething mass of the most down and out of humanity in Canada, she admitted it was just as bad as LA.

I found that a highly populated society has a whole different way of being and operating. Restaurants are packed but incredibly efficient in dealing with the crowds. Driving requires fast reflexes and steely nerve, if you don’t have these, talk someone else into chauffeuring you around. At nice hotels you are apparently expected to tip the staff for being helpful. And everywhere, everywhere there are people.

Nice people, really. Polite. Canadian. West Coast. People.

Flying back, I began to merge in with other Northwestern Ontarians. Families back from their March break vacations. Students back from the beaches. Travellers back from the far reaches of the earth. When I finally got off the plane in Thunder Bay, I felt, ‘Ah. I’m home. Back home with those I know.’

But it wasn’t until driving home to Atikokan, that I began to release my travel tensions for the first time. The long stretches where all you see are the trees, spruce, birch, poplar, and balsam, and all the lakes and rivers, those stretches relieved me. I knew I was coming back to the land that I am rooted in. There is incredible comfort in that.

I think, sometimes, that we take for granted all the great things we have here in town. We have four seasons, a vibrant community, restaurants, a movie theatre, banks, churches, stores, gas stations, salons, a hospital and a clinic, industries, very bumpy roads that cause us to take life a little slower, and, like a wonderful gift, we have the land and the lakes. Anytime we want we can head off into the bush and get away.

We must be the luckiest people in the world, we have space just to be.

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