It took a while to find a ride from Portneuf, but someone eventually stopped and took me about forty minutes down the highway. The second lift came from a husband and wife pair delivering furniture to their daughter. They took me as far as Montreal and dropped me off on the hard shoulder next to an intersection that carried traffic in the direction of Ottawa. There wasn’t a way off the highway by foot, and hitchhiking there was definitely illegal, but I tried anyway and was rewarded with another lift. The driver was a man named Yvan who drove a vast Ford pickup with a picture of a skull where the license plate would usually be (in Quebec, cars are not legally required to have front number plates). After I climbed in, he informed me that a hitchhiker had died trying to get a ride on the same road recently, wiped out by a tired driver in the early hours of the morning. During the journey, Yvan bought me lunch at a biker cafe, offered me a lift to Florida, and drove far out of his way to get me to a convenient location. We misjudged the end-point however, and I found myself on a small backroad just off the highway with barely one car passing every ten minutes. It took about an hour before another pickup truck stopped and took me along the highway to a service station; an ideal place to find a lift. Before departing, the driver gave me his card and told me to call him if I ran into trouble on the road. My next ride came from an Indian family who spoke very little English and were a bit ambitious about fitting a guest into their car. There were five of us; a husband and wife, their teenage son, a baby, and me with my rucksack on my lap. We made it to the outskirts of Ottawa as evening pulled in, and I started waving my sign one last time besides a set of traffic lights. Hitchhiking out of a city (or through a city) is notoriously hard, and it became apparent that no-one was going to stop. It was still an hours drive to Kingston and the sun was starting to set, so I took a bus the city centre and checked-in to a backpackers inn for the night.
The next day, I completed the journey by train. My new host was named Joelle, and she lived on Wolfe Island in Lake Ontario with a devoted Colly named Winnie. They greeted me at the ferry port in a ruby red electric hatchback and we made our way to the house. Joelle was a psychotherapist who specialised in marriage counselling and carpentry – carpentry being more of a sideline. She had completed a full restoration on a farmhouse, transforming it into a classically styled but modern home full of personal touches. It had been ‘outsulated’ to leave the old beams and posts of the farmhouse visible on the inside, and the exterior was panelled with wooden boards stained a deep shade of blue inspired by the colour of Lake Ontario. Joelle’s next project was to convert her wood shed into an outdoor sauna which, on the day of my arrival, consisted of four upright posts, foundations, and a corrugated metal sheet for the roof. There were no walls yet, so that’s where we began working.
Framing the walls was simple; just arrange two-by-fours (two inch by four inch wooden beams) vertically at intervals just wide enough to fit sheets of insulation in-between. Joelle explained that any structure likely to take impacts was best built using nails rather than screws, the reason being that screws shear more easily. With this in mind, we hammered the first frame into place and panelled the exterior with plywood (to keep ‘critters’ out), a waterproof paper called Tyvek, and rustic wooden boards rescued from a barn fire. Progress was slow progress over the first couple of days as we were mostly correcting errors, but eventually the first wall was up. The opposite wall went up faster, and we started to brainstorm the back wall which was intended to have a window. Joelle had bought an oval-shaped, tempered glass table-top to use for this, but needed a way to frame it before it could be installed. She came up with a solution one morning, which was to cut insulating foam to the right shape, then insert the glass and sandwich it in place using plywood. After a week or so, the walls were up and insulated, a door frame was in place, and the oval window gazed out towards the lake. At this point we paused for Canadian thanksgiving celebrations (every second Monday of October).
Joelle was hosting her family and friends for thanksgiving, so I was lucky enough to get the full experience first hand. This wasn’t the same tradition as American thanksgiving but instead was a celebration of the arrival of autumn (and possibly some colonial history that everyone had forgotten about). Turkey was traditional, as was giving thanks before the meal. There were about twenty of us arranged around the dining table, and everyone took turns to say thank you for something. Several guests thanked Joelle, a few more were thankful for their family, and Doug (a friend of Joelle’s who lived on the island with his girlfriend Kaitlin) was thankful for dogs. With the thanking done, we tucked in to crispy smashed potatoes, roasted squash from the garden, and two rotisserie chickens.
Wolfe Island isn’t densely populated, so most of the inhabitants on Joelle’s side knew each other. Word spread quickly about the British guest, which proved handy when getting rides from the ferry port to the house, but also created a vibe that I might have been cast in an island murder mystery. During my stay, an elderly man had appeared on the island with a rucksack, and was going around trying people’s front doors. Naturally, everyone on the island knew about it immediately and the usual warm welcomes turned to icy disapproval until he stopped showing up. One clear evening, we drove to the Mustard Truck (a hut in the middle of a field that sold food) to rendezvous with Kaitlin and Doug for dinner. The chef and his wife said hi, as did the owner of the barn who was there with his dog; a cheerful black lab who greeted strangers by reversing into them, wagging his tail and looking coyly over his shoulder. After a delicious meal we drove back to the house in the dark, wind turbines flashing in unison on the horizon. Joelle and I arrived first, then Kaitlin and Doug pulled up slowly looking pale and tense. They’d hit a deer on the way back, evidenced by a dent and some scratches on the bumper. Doug then noticed the front door to the house was unlocked. Weirder still, the tap in the kitchen was running. We crept in, checked room to room to see if anyone was about, expecting the old man to burst out of a closet at any moment. No one was there – Kaitlin and Doug had left in a rush before dinner, so the tap and door were likely just a mistake. This didn’t help the feeling that I was the disposable Brit in ‘The Nightmare on Wolfe Island’, so I made efforts to keep the remainder of the trip stress free with regular swims in the lake.
Coincidentally, Joelle and Kaitlin had both attended meditation retreats like the one that I had signed up for in Montebello. My previous host Gary had also spent some of his life meditating, though seemingly with little success. In total, six people I had connected with in Canada were involved in meditation. It seemed like something was pointing me in that direction, so I changed my plans and decided to stay on at the retreat after the ten day course to help serve the following one – a total of thirty six days at the centre.
When the last day came around, Joelle and Winnie dropped me at a convenient location where I could set out hitchhiking back to Ottawa, and we said our goodbyes. As per usual, hitchhiking bought me up close with an wide array of personalities: the first ride came from a pair of construction workers whose primary interest was how many women I’d met since arriving in Canada, the second was a bearded guy in a truck (“not many people hitchhike around here but I figured you didn’t look like a murderer”), and the last was a woman who owned a cannabis shop in Ottawa. That evening, I Couchsurfed in Ottawa with a civil servant who tried hard to convince me to join him in his sauna – I decided against it and read a book instead.
