Canada

by RICHARD JOSEPH

PLANNING a vacation in Canada can involve you, if you go about it earnestly, in an extensive reading program. You can get from the Canadian Government Tourist Bureau at Ottawa, for example, a fifty-page booklet, “ Canadlan vacations Unlimited”; a forty-page booklet on fishing; and brochures on any subject in which you express an interest. Should you indicate a curiosity about Ontario, say, you’ll receive literature from the Ontario Department of Travel and Publicity within a few days. These shipments will be followed by packets from local chambers of commerce in Ontario, hotels, guides, outfitters, oil companies, and from Canada’s two principal railroads and air lines.

This is typical of the businesslike, efficient, yet pleasantly low-pressure manner in which the Canadian tourist industry operates. Most resort hotels are run on the Swiss plan — the theory that you’ll be back some day if you feel well-treated, so there is no need to shake every last possible dollar from you while you are still in their clutches.

The travel business is the Dominion’s third largest industry, preceded in importance only by the production of wood pulp and the growing of wheat. Last year 27,913,000 Americans spent $260,000,000 in Canada. Far more Americans visited Canada than any other foreign country.

Canada’s “foreignness” is not a strong tourist attraction except for a comparative handful of Americans who go to Montreal, see a sign reading “Buvez Coca-Cola,” and like to fool themselves into the happy belief that they are practically on the Champs Élysées. Of much greater importance are the feeling of space and distance from smoky cities which you get from a pine-fringed lake on the edge of the wilderness; the cooperative spirit of the fish therein; the high ratio of caribou, moose, bear, deer, elk, Rocky Mountain sheep and goals, and game birds in proportion to hunters; the basic geographic fact for lovers of winter sports that snowfall generally increases as you go north: the magnificence of the mountain scenery in the west and the seascapes of the Maritime Provinces in the east; and the breezy friendliness of so many Canadians.

Probably the worst mistake an American visitor can make in his dealings with a Canadian is to assume that he is practically the same as an American because his speech is similar. A Canadian is not almost an American, or almost an Englishman; and if he speaks French he is far from being a Frenchman, He has the northerner’s energy, yet he can make good talk or dawdle eompanionably over a drink w ith all the unhurried and unharried leisure of a Cuban sugar planter, a Mexican hacndado, or a Brazilian coffee millionaire, He has a fierce sense of personal liberty, yet he permits himself to be saddled with some of the most ridiculous sets of restrictive liquor covenants to hobble the spirits of man since our own prohibition was obliterated.

Every section of Canada has its own particular appeal to U.S. visitors. The Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are to some extent a continuation of New England. Most remote of all in spirit is Prince Edward Island, smallest Cunadian province, where the post from other parts of Canada is referred to as “foreign mail” and where “going out west” means a trip to the western end of the island, a maximum distance of 145 miles from tip to tip.

Though the island is only 9 miles by ferry from the mainland, it is a century away from most of North America in its detachment from the hurly-burly of American big-city life. This expresses itself not only in the tempo of the lobster fishermen’s speech, but also in t he rates you’ll pay for your room and meals in hotels, lodges, and cabins.

In these inflationary days of budgeting by slide rule, prices posted for the 1951 summer season by the Prince Edward Island Travel Bureau have an air of delightful unreality about them. Rates at the best resort hotels, for example, begin at about $6 per day per person, with meals, and you can stay at a farm home close to the shore and with fine trout and deepsea fishing waters near by for as little ns $15 per person per week, all meals included.

Canadians generally have been able to hold the line on prices better than we have in the United States, with the result that the inflation story always seems to be a chapter or so behind in Canada. Early this year, for instance, I paid $2 for a huge steak in the dining car of one of the Canadian Pacific’s transcontinental trains.

Of every four Americans who visited Canada last year, three went to Ontario. This disproportion is caused partly by the fact that sections of the province are just across the bridge from such American cities as Detroit and Buffalo, but it is also due to the deep affection felt by thousands of American fishermen for Ontario’s lakes and streams — something like the love of pre-austerity English gentlemen for their private fishing preserves in Scotland.

Perhaps the most varied vacation menu is offered by Quebec, Canada’s largest province. The old city of Quebec has the authentic medieval French atmosphere sometimes falsely attributed to the entire province. Here too is Montreal, metropolis of Canada. The Laurentians are popular with Americans, and so is the neighboring Laurent ides National Park, where you can rent your own private fishing camp, complete with a canoe, for about $10 per day per person, including meals at a central lodge near by. The 550-mile circle trip around the Gaspé Peninsula presents to the motorist what is perhaps the most typically Old French countryside. Or you can enjoy an inexpensive vacation aboard one of the cruises of the Canada Steamship Lines from Montreal along the St. Lawrence and Saguenay rivers. Allexpense five-day cruises cost $97 and up.

With this variety awaiting them all the way across 4000 miles of unfortified frontier, many American visitors choose for their own some particular Canadian resort or village because of its recreational facilities, its picturesque surroundings, or some especially attractive quality of the inhabitants, and then return to it for their summer vacations year after year.

My own special discovery is a littleknown fishing and hunting lodge near the hamlet of St. Michel des Saints, Quebec. Si. Michel is literally at the end of the trail —the last town between Montreal and Hudson Bay — and the motor ride up there. I’d better warn you, will take you over some pretty discouraging roads. North of St. Michel is the great wilderness, populated only by moose, caribou, bear, deer, and other game, a few lumberjacks, and an occasional hunter and trapper.

The owner of Kan-A-Mouche Lodge on Lac Carmel, which was named after her, is Carmel Daury. She is a French-Canadian girl who looks like a Parisian chanteuse and whose American counterpart has been extinct since the end of Annie Oakley. One of the world’s few licensed women wilderness guides, she gives about as much consideration to a threeweek sortie inlo the untracked back country — the one girl in a party of bushmen— as the average woman does to a hat-buying expedition on Main Street with the members of her Friday afternoon bridge club. In a frontier country where wives have been known to tuck their husbands under their arms and carry them home from the saloon, she lives among men as an equal, hunting and trapping with t hem in one of the wildest parts of Quebec.

She is pretty, slim, red-haired, green-eyed, well-formed, and a widow. Although she weighs only 118 pounds, she can — and frequently does — portage a 100-pound load consisting of canoe, duffel, axe, and rifle over 5 miles of wilderness trail. The story is told that she once discouraged an angry mother bear, which had caught Carmel in the woods without a rifle, by picking up one of the bear cubs and throwing it at her.

Carmel Daury decided to become a wilderness guide when she was a schoolgirl in a Montreal convent. She ran away regularly every year until she was sixteen, when her family gave up ihe struggle and let her take off for the woods.

A few years later Carmel married a Montreal man and returned restively to city life. When her husband died, she look her widow’s mite, went back to St. Michel, and built Kan-A-Mouche Lodge.

About six years ago she stocked Lae Carmel wit h trout by plane. No one was allowed to fish the lake for aboul four years; it was closed until the fish grew big, fat, rugged, and Careless. Today you can haul out of Lac Carmel 4-pound speckled trout as red as spawning salmon and with the fight of smallmouth bass — if you’re a guest in t he $10-a-day cabins of Kan-A-Mouche. The rate includes but fishing privileges on the lake cost you $10 a day extra, with a boat thrown in. The beds and cabins are comfortable, the food and drink are good, and the company and the conversation are even better. I’ll probably go back there this year, as I have every summer since I discovered it.