Upgraded, still primitive
Big Hook Wilderness Camps are not quite the wilderness they used to be.
Don’t get me wrong; my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s fly-in fishing resort still isn’t Club Med Northern Ontario — not even close to it.
But over the years, they have made a number of improvements that have taken at least some of the primitive out of a fishing trip there.
When we go up, we stay at Central Lake — one of seven lakes where they have cabins available — which is where they live while running the camp during the summer.
Since they spend better than a third of the year in their cabin on the lake, they’ve made the effort to upgrade it — and we’ve benefited from it as well.
When we first started going to Big Hook, for instance, there was no radio, no television, no telephone — complete isolation from civilization.
We went one year during the week of the baseball All-Star game and I didn’t even find out the score for five days — more roughing it than I cared for. Needless to say, we haven’t gone up again in that week.
What little electricity they had was from a small gas-powered generator, so anything electrical that didn’t run on battery power was pretty limited.
But they’ve installed solar panels and even wind turbines to generate their own electricity over the years, and they’ve installed a satellite dish so now there’s not only television but also even the Internet.
It is Canadian television, for the most part, but a nice Toronto Argonauts vs. British Columbia Lions football game does make for a nice change of pace — once you remember the Canadian football rules, with an extra player running around in the extra 10 yards of field.
No matter how much they fix the place up, though, I don’t think I’ll ever watch Hockey Night in Canada at Big Hook — at that time of year, all you’d catch would be frozen fish.
Despite all the upgrades, there’s still plenty of wilderness up there.
For instance, there’s no municipal sewer system or even a septic tank — it would be a long drive for the honeydipper truck — so the facilities are of the pit latrine kind.
There are several outhouses to choose from, but I soon learned why the one painted red is used almost exclusively by my brother-in-law.
I headed out to it the first time nature called after we got to Big Hook — and believe me, there’s plenty of nature there to call you.
I quickly learned that you have to watch that first step in the red outhouse. Since they’ve had a lot of rain up there this summer, the ground was pretty soft, but nowhere more so than right in front of that outhouse door.
My last step to enter the outhouse was a long one — or should I say a deep one — when the soft ground gave way and I found myself up to my ankle in something other than verdant green Canadian grass.
Needless to say, that shoe quickly got washed and left outside the cabin to dry — and air out — overnight. Needless to say, I didn’t wear that pair of socks again that week. And, needless to say, I used every other outhouse in the camp for the rest of the week.
Even though we enjoyed the one almost-completely sunny week of the summer up there, I did seem to have a theme going with getting wet.
In the middle of the week, Terry and I went with her sister-in-law on a portaging voyage to one of the more remote fishing spots on the lake.
It required two portages, actually, over trails around rapids to boats docked further along the lake.
When we pulled up one of the boats to prepare for the next portage, I got out to pull the boat up with Evie warning me to be careful of the rocks as they were slippery.
If she hadn’t said that, I probably would have moved gracefully across them to the shore with no problem. Instead, no sooner did she say it than I was up to my ankle again, this time only in lake water.
It was the same foot, so I managed to wash away any residue that might have been lingering from the first step at the red outhouse, although that wasn’t really my intention.
