Finally, we made it out of Ontario! Don’t get me wrong, Ontario is stunningly beautiful. The rivers and lakes, the vast stretches of untouched forest, all thrill me. But my main impression of Ontario has been of desolate wastes and mosquitoes. I am convinced that we have been chased through this province by a daily growing cloud of voracious mosquitoes. Maybe because Chris is sick and we are both so tired, Ontario has seemed endless. This is pretty much what it has looked like the whole time.

However I promised myself not to post another cloud poem, so I decided to write about my favourite Ontario thing of this trip: Inuksuks!

Even the most deserted highways in northern Ontario are periodically brightened by little people-shaped piles of stones. I don’t know who makes them. People passing through, I suppose. Something about seeing those small, valiant efforts of human industry in the middle of all that wilderness was comforting to me. I didn’t want to leave Ontario without building one.

I left a copy of Inuksuk at a gas station in Cobden, Ontario. I also left a copy at Cheneaux, Quebec (right across the border) on an elaborately graffiti-ed park table.

This has been a rough trip for us, and keeping up with this poetry project has helped me through. Like those mysterious people who build the inuksuks, I want to leave signs of myself behind.