Poutine And Bears: Part 5

We rolled on, and on, and on. Then we took a turn. Then we drove more. The weather looked threatening but never cut loose.

A few times I spied a Provincial campground. I briefly “explored” each one. These are my planned future alternative to hotels. After a few I declared that Canadian Provincial Parks were more primitive than American State Parks (not to mention National Parks which are so uptight I avoid them). I don’t mind “primitive”. (I camp in a tent not an RV so “full hookups” don’t impress me.) It’s just a thing to know. Do they sell firewood? Do they lock the outhouse out of season? Is there a water supply? Etc…

As soon as I’d formulated my theory, we stopped at another Provincial campground that was every bit as fancy as anything south of the border. Who knew?

Every “Checkpoint Charlie” entrance to campgrounds (primitive or not) was manned! In my limited experience (often off season) many American campgrounds have elaborate elaborate toll booths like it’s the border to Lichtenstein but (at least since Covid and possibly earlier) they’re unmanned. I assume it’s the modern weird American economy where staffing any enterprise is nearly impossible and too expensive even if you could find a person to do the job. It’s a lot like Walmart having 30 cash registers and three cashiers.

Not that I care, to me the dude in the booth does little more than an on-line reservation web page. But it’s nice to know details in case I come in too late or whatever. Painting with a broad brush, in Canada there was a guy to open the gate and in America the gate is unmanned but chained open. Either is fine. An exception is the US Park Service which seems to exist as a jobs program for people who piss me off.

We got to a town that was partway to one of my favorite canoe access points. We weren’t “at the end of pavement” but we were getting there. This was not quite the last “town” that is a “town” on the route but it was close. I remembered the town as clean and prosperous but that was years ago. This visit it looked rundown and shabby. The main hotel was large but undergoing construction. Half of it was shut down. The other half had 283,372,278 trucks from the CN train crews. Not a lot of tourists in this hotel. By “not a lot” I mean ” none”.

I cooled my jets in the car while Mrs. Curmudgeon checked in. It took forever. When she came back she explained that the power was down. She’d checked in using a laptop running on battery power. Making the magnetic key would have to wait until the power comes back up for that alternate computer. Also the person doing the check in had said “this is a First Nations town, why the heck would you visit here?”

We set out to find food. The other half of town had power. Sweet! Everything was closed. Yikes! I looked at a few likely restaurants. One had taped up a sign on the door; “Power went down and staff bailed instantly, good luck sucker.” OK, that’s not exactly what it said but you get it.

We found a place with an open door and power! The joint was hopping. Mrs. Curmudgeon ordered a salad and I ordered a small one-person pizza. Then, I looked at the prices on the menu and the numbers hurt me. I wonder how much we’d paid for a night’s lodging? Unlike the train service guys, my expenses are not reimbursed.

It’s time to discuss what I call “frontier pricing”. Shit on a frontier costs a fortune. This is a fact of life. If you explore fringes you need to accept it. Everyone has a story of how they went to Alaska and bought some thing and were surprised by the price. I did it too. I once bought a glass of milk for my kid near Denali National Park and it was mind blowing. But it was in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere and my kid wanted milk. It doesn’t take a genius to see that it was a place that has many moose but no cows. A guy needs to make allowances.

It’s easy to think 4 hours out of Anchorage is “remote” and I was “just in Canada” but that’s not fair. I was a billion miles from anywhere. If a pizza cost twice what I’m used to, who am I to complain?

I was looking forward to my double priced pizza. Then the power went down. Damn! Everyone in the building groaned.

I glanced at the owner, who was working his ass off. I hoped the pizza oven was gas powered. He shook his head. Damn! Several orders got canceled and some locals wandered home to cook in their house… assuming they had gas stoves. The owner offered to double our salad order and throw in some cold chicken. I was delighted. Who needs pizza anyway?

The other problem was that the power down meant no debit/credit cards. I had some Canadian bills but it was only $13, which would probably buy little more than a couple bottles of coke. I explained this to the owner, who was crestfallen to see a customer walk out.

Oh well, this is why I brought the chuckbox. I’d whip up something in no time! Mrs. Curmudgeon vetoed that idea. She was in no mood for “camping food”. She handed me a wad of US greenbacks. The owner lit up! He was more than happy to have foreign currency.

His staff of three were nice but utterly clueless. Without electricity they’d gone to zombie mode. I’ve never seen anything more closely approximating a human screen saver.

I went to the counter looking at the menu. People treat math like they treat a proctology exam but I had it handled. I was just going to do the math and tell the kid how much I owed:

“Let’s see, Mrs. Curmudgeon’s Caesar salad was $17. Multiply that by two because I’ll take a salad as well. Now you’ve got $34. What’s your tax here? Oh heck, I’ll just call it 10%. So now we’re up to $37.40. Throw in a bottle of water and a bottle of Coke and tax on that. Plus what do you charge for chicken?”

The kid at the counter was in physical pain. If he was put on earth with some particular purpose, it never did and never will include math.

I was trying to calm him down. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out and throw in a tip.”

The owner saw his teller-kid about to have organ failure. He shouted a random number. “Call it $50 even.”

That seemed fair enough. “I’ve got $10 Canadian and $40 American. I think the exchange rate is plenty for that to include a tip.”

The teller-kid started going pale. Two kinds of currency with two values? It was the end times!

The owner beamed: “Yes, that’ll be fine. American is worth a bit more.”

“It won’t be for long, we’re trying to ruin the greenback.”

“I’ve seen the news, you’re shooting your economy in the foot. We wonder about America sometimes.”

I handed the teller-kid $50 in mixed currency. “Spend it fast, it’ll be worthless sooner or later.”

The teller-kid held the money like it was going to bite him. He’d experienced arithmetic, ratios, the idea of fiat currency, and a hint at the dark voodoo that is arbitrage. I’d physically injured his mind. He’d need a week of eating CBD gummies to make the pain go away.

The owner pushed the kid aside, manually opened the till, and stuffed the money in it. He was a nice guy. I wasn’t necessarily getting screwed, I was paying frontier prices in the only building with food during the middle of a power outage. I could live with that.

Mrs. Curmudgeon wasn’t about to eat anything emerging from my chuckbox and desperately wanted vegetables so she agreed. At the same time she was mystified to see me handing over money without complaining. I always complain! However, I get frontier pricing and don’t mind it. As a contrast, paying for parking in Kenora pissed me off for a week. Mrs. Curmudgeon asked for the leftover cash (which was only a handful of ones). Sadly, I’d already put it in my wallet. Such a shame.

The salad was OK. Not great but not bad either.

Back at the hotel the power had come on again. It was not a pretty hotel but it it was clean and roomy.

Our giant, fluffy, photogenic dog was swarmed by happy fellas with accents from Bangalore. The workmen at the hotel were more likely to speak Hindi and eat vindaloo than talk about hockey and eat poutine. There were a couple Sikhs too.

Modern workforce or not, among the welders and truck drivers, I didn’t see a single female. The dudes were probably making bank and racking up overtime but also working with heavy equipment in the middle of a mud bog at the ass end of nowhere. Funny how you’ll hear endless bitching about 70% pay rates but complaints are uttered exclusively in air conditioned University settings. I’m pretty sure any skilled welder or heavy equipment operator would make bank in the hinterland. I know that virtually not a person alive would give a shit about genitalia.

The guys politely asked to take a picture with our dog and the dog basked in the attention. Our dog is probably on Pinterest or TikToc right now.

Last post coming up…