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ALL WELCOME (p. 2 of 3)

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Morning dawns doubly bright in midwinter Northern Ontario – sunlight multiplied everywhere by snow so white your eyes ache. We blink as we cross the parking lot. Instant headaches from the famous Dryden paper mill stink. The smell of money, they call it.

The two guys at the Top of the Line Mechanics behind the Patricia Motel agree to look at our heater but are vague about how long it’ll take and how much it’ll cost, non-committal as to how much they know about Volkswagen vans. Ten minutes later Jeremy and I are squabbling sotto voce in the Patricia Motel’s coffee shop, volleying phrases like, more assertive, take us for a ride, and desperate for work up here.

Then the smaller of the two men comes in under the bell on the coffee shop door. Dark beard, blue canvas snowmobile suit, same clear crow-footed eyes as the bigger guy. He saunters over to our table and says, Your heater motor’s toast. Hafta order it in and then it’d take half a day to install. Sounds like you’re in a hurry. He hands us our keys and a card with the number of a garage in Thunder Bay where we might be able to get a used motor. Then winks and leaves. We finish our coffees in silence and go back to their plywood garage door, offer them twenty bucks for their trouble. They won’t take it. They ask us where we’re from, where we’re headed. I tell them the reason for the road trip.

When it shits it pours, eh? says the smaller guy. You take care, says the bigger one. We drive away without heat and with a sense of having received the service we needed.

Eventually we make it to Thunder Bay, temperature dropping. No answer at the garage. The Thunder Bay Canadian Tire is also sold out of heaters that plug into your cigarette lighter. We gas up and buy cigarettes instead.

At nightfall we stop in Nipigon. Dinner at Guenther’s Bar and Grill, which specializes, according to the sign outside, in Bavarian and European cuisine. Wood panelling, low ceiling, patterned wall-to-wall carpeting and dim lighting inside, much like the rec-room Dad built in the basement when we were growing up. Guenther is both bartender and cook. We’re the only customers. I order Guenther’s Goulash. Guenther disappears to cook our food, and we play foozeball while we wait.

An older lady comes in with a dog. Unperturbed by Guenther’s absence, she sits down at the bar, lets a minute pass before turning her barstool toward us and launching into conversation. Her name’s Sophie. She’s seventy years old, a socialist. Once punched Pierre Trudeau in the jaw. Left hook, she says, winking. She lives a block away, on the other side of the railroad tracks. Took her dog for a walk and a long slow train came along. Couldn’t get across back home so she decided to come in here for a beer. Eventually Guenther shows up with our food and gets her a bottle of Sleeman’s. She joins us at our table.

I’m getting the feeling that Sophie regularly finds herself cut off from her home by a train with no choice but to stop in at Guenther’s for a beer.

Some guys are fixing the furnace. Overhearing that they need duct tape, we happily supply it from the van. We talk politics with Sophie for a while, her dog licking my hand under the table. Guenther leans back behind the bar and lights a cigarette. He clears our table, shrugs when I praise his goulash.

I’m getting the feeling that behind Guenther’s indifferent persona is a talent for hospitality. My father, the most effortless host I have ever known, is gone. I cross over for a moment into the knowledge – perhaps for the first time – and hold myself very still in Guenther’s Bar and Grill while grief barrels through me like a night train.

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