A Note to the Reader The last time out, Ed, Brenna, and the Nearys stopped for a break after days of fighting a stubborn headwind. Now their layover is at an end, but it’s becoming clear that the two couples aren’t seeing eye-to-eye. Will their differences leave them “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”?

 
Our story continues…

 
Chapter Twenty-One

 
Pete Neary couldn’t shake the notion that something was wrong. He couldn’t put a name to the problem, but his anxiety grew hourly. It was like watching a thunderhead building over a lake. There was nothing he could do about it, but it was always there, a darkening presence in an otherwise blue sky.

His wife Karin, on the other hand, knew exactly why she felt miserable. She was dirtier than she’d ever been before in her life. Grime packed the space under each of her nails. Her shoulder-length hair was a smelly, undisciplined tangle. Going to the bathroom was a horror beyond description, and it was made still worse by clouds of biting flies. She itched everywhere, yet she was afraid to scratch. She was constipated. Her lower back ached constantly. And her cold had left her with a dry, hacking cough.

To add to her misery, they’d had to abandon their picture-perfect camp on the sand beach on Lower Wabakimi Lake.

Black flies, little black flies, Oh way up in Ontario…. Ed has started humming that wretched ditty just as soon as he’d ventured out of his tent on their first morning there. It hadn’t taken Karin long to realize why. Eighteen hours had been all they could take. Right after breakfast, they’d packed up and paddled on to Wabakimi Lake, choosing a campsite perched on a windswept spur of granite, not far from the mouth of River Bay. It wasn’t a very picturesque camp. It wasn’t even very comfortable, in fact, but the wind blew the flies away, and that was what really mattered.

Things looked up a bit later in the day, after Ed found a faded red rock-painting of a spirit-man on a nearby cliff. Then and there, he christened the campsite “Spirit Point,” and the name stuck. Whoever the spirit-man was, his magic seemed to invest the place, and Karin was very glad for that.

During the five days that followed, she downed gallons of honey-sweetened tea, while Pete grew steadily more anxious—and more bored. At least once every day he paddled away from camp to listen in secret to his world-band radio, hoping that Ed and Brenna wouldn’t guess what he was doing. And every day he felt a little bit angrier with himself for caring what they thought. To make matters worse, the news that he heard during his clandestine listening sessions was never good. … Read more…

 

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Hooked? A new chapter in our serial adventure novel, Trip of a Lifetime, will appear every Sunday. If you’ve missed a chapter, or if you’re coming aboard for the first time and want to catch up, just use the hot-linked title to go to the archives.

 
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A REMINDER This is a work of fiction. All the characters are figments of the imaginations. It’s NOT a paddling guide. If you’re planning a trip on the Albany River—or any other body of water, come to that—consult the most recent edition of a good guidebook and be sure you’re thoroughly familiar with all applicable regulations. While maps of Ontario show some of the waterways mentioned here, the places depicted in our story exist only in our minds—and in yours.