Fire on Skippy Dippy

We turned west again through upstate New York, heading towards Elmira for my oldest, best friend’s wedding. It was raining hard again, waves of water smashing into the windshield, and we passed through the downpour into the gentle hills just north of Pennsylvania. There were no hotel rooms for 100 miles – it was Hall of Fame weekend in Cooperstown, coupled with a Little League national tournament, so we passed up a Motel 6 room for $250 to find one slightly less expensive farther west, a spare bedroom in the administrative offices of a Holiday Inn.

The wedding went off well – my oldest friend Ben got hitched (finally, as my grandmother said), and we sent him and Rhianna off with more partying and some dancing, then we headed for Niagara Falls. Bean’s grandparents went there for their honeymoon, and we’d considered staying there, except we had gotten a late start.

The falls are probably the East Coast’s largest tourist trap. Impressive, even awe-inspiring, as millions of gallons of water a second thunder over a precipice, the falls are dwarfed by the operations on either side of the river dedicated to sucking money from the wallets of willing tourists.

We paid $8 to park for 15 minutes, stroll over to the edge of the Horseshoe Falls (slightly higher than the American Falls), gape for a bit, and return to the car. I get sick of crowds.

The border crossing was easy, and we drove north up Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula towards the ferry. We arrived past midnight, and after a search for a motel room, parked in the ferry terminal lot and slept. Elmo’s seats leaned well back, and turned out to be soft and comfortable. The next morning we boarded the ferry, heading north to Manitoulin Island and my grandmother’s cabin on Lake Huron, for 10 days of relaxation.

The fourth day at her cabin, my Uncle Phil came running up from the water, saying something about a fire. Skippy Dippy, an island about a mile away, was alight, with thick gray smoke pouring into the sky. We threw the fire hoses (the cottager association had provided 400 feet of fire hose to each cabin a few years before) in the Boston Whaler, scooped our gas-powered water pump off the rocks and sped over to Skippy Dippy. There were already five pumps in action, along with about 40 people, and the smoke had calmed down some. We set up the pump, and unwound our fire hose, only to find that the hose wouldn’t fit on the pump. Lesson learned.

We joined in with others, helping pull hose towards the 1/4 acre fire burning in some pine trees, but a Canadian Forestry water-bomber swooped in and a local guy named Zach came running across the rocks, waving his hands.

“Everybody get the fuck off the island!” he shouted. “That thing is gonna drop two tons of water right here!”

Everyone pulled their boats off, leaving the pumps and hoses, and the bomber made three runs, each time skimming the lake to pick up a load of water. The water spilled from the bottom of the bomber like a fine mist, but hit with a force that cracked the branches of the trees and sent them swaying. The smoke disappeared, but within five minutes of the last run, it had returned.

We piled back in and I used an axe, another guy used a chainsaw, and four hoses were back in action, mopping up. Some trunks were still burning on the inside, and much of the moss and pine-needle covering on the island was still smoking.

With everything under control, the neighbors promised to check up on the island (the needles can smoulder for days in fissures in the rock), and we returned to our cabin. After ten days we drove south again.