T-Bay Notes JENNESIA PEDRI
Leaving Thunder Bay isn’t one of the things that gets easier with practice
ARRIVALS To get to Thunder Bay—where I was born and raised and where my maternal and paternal grandparents settled in the early twentieth century—you have to travel back in time. One way to do this is on a WestJet Bombardier Q400 Turboprop aircraft that travels daily, nonstop from Winnipeg to Thunder Bay, once in the morning and once at night. I now only make the trip from my home in Vancouver to Winnipeg to Thunder Bay once a year, preferably during summer months when the mosquitoes are bad but the temperature is warm enough to make you want to be outside. When I arrived at my parents’ house—the house I grew up in—it was after dark and I carried my luggage directly to my bedroom. I found it nearly the same as it always is— drawers filled and shelves lined with the past: a stuffed animal I called Tigger, an original Nintendo Game Boy, a MuchDance 2000 CD, every diary I kept from 1995 to 2004, a rock collection, a Smucker's raspberry jam jar containing remnants of an old stash, and a random assortment of books I read between late childhood and early adolescence. Each year it looks more like a set from a film about girls coming of age. Long after my parents had gone to sleep I lay awake in the next room, slightly jet-lagged from my travels, playing Super Mario Land on my Game Boy, wondering who I’d run into tomorrow and whether they’d recognize me from the future. SOW-NA In northwestern Ontario a camp is what the rest of Canada calls a cottage.
Like cottages, camps are usually modest, cozy dwellings in rural or semirural settings outfitted with items deemed too ratty for home but too good for the dump, resulting in an eclectic mix of dishes, light fixtures, towels, linens, furniture and other miscellaneous decor. One thing nearly all camps around Thunder Bay have in common is a sauna. And since Thunder Bay has the highest concentration of Finnish-Canadian people per capita in the country, you’ll likely hear it pronounced sow-na, not saw-na. In the late 1950s my Finnish grandparents purchased the land where our family camp is located, on One Island Lake, just twenty minutes northeast of Thunder Bay, for five hundred dollars. The story is that the bush and trees on the property were so thick that you couldn’t see the water but could hear it from the dirt road. After clearing the waterfront, the first thing they built was a proper sow-na. Along with the purchase of lumber came an illustrated eight-step guide to bathing in a Finnish sow-na that now hangs on the wall of the dressing room. The process starts with a light shower or rinse. Bathing proper begins by lying in a 112–130ºF sow-na for fifteen minutes followed by a period of cooling off in a shower, lake or sometimes, in winter, a snowbank. The bather returns to the sow-na; water is added to the hot rocks to produce a steam. An advanced bather may beat herself with leafy birch twigs soaked in water to intensify the heat, which, despite being half Finn, I’ve never done. Steps three and four may then be repeated several times before washing, after which the bather returns to the sow-na one last time, followed by a final rinse and a thorough towel dry,
taking care not to catch a cold. After sixty years we’re still stoking our sowna fire with the cedar my grandpa and grandma cleared from the land. STRANGER THINGS Thunder Bay formed on January 1, 1970, when the towns of Port Arthur and Fort William were merged by an act issued by the province of Ontario. A referendum was held on what to call the new town; the three options were Thunder Bay, Lakehead and The Lakehead. According to the official Thunder Bay website, several failed plebescites on merging the towns had been held over the years, and many names had been proposed for the merged city, including: Port Edward, Williamsport, Westport, Westgate, Port Thurwilliam, Fort Artwill and Port Fort. The demonym for a person from Thunder Bay is Thunder Bayer. On a quiet Friday night, I was leaving a restaurant in downtown Port Arthur when the pay phone rang at the southeast corner of Cumberland Street and Red River Road. It was a retro, lumpy brown plastic box and had the faded word TELEPHONE printed above it in all caps. (I’d once read that, before there were cellphones, a robust subculture of pay phone number collectors would dial pay phones at random just to talk to strangers, a practice apparently popularized in the 90s by David Letterman, who dedicated a segment of his show to calling up strangers passing by the pay phone in Times Square). I answered “Hello?” into the cold, brown plastic receiver. But after a few discouraging moments of silence, the caller just hung up. Notes & Dispatches 13