Walking, With Rails

I woke up at 5 AM one morning, laid in bed for a while, and decided to get up. It was a gorgeous morning outside but I didn’t feel like going to shoot trains. I rarely do, these days.

Instead, I chose to reframe it as walking in the wilderness, near train tracks. That appealed to me a lot more, so I hit the road and headed west. That day the CN Redditt subdivision appealed more to me, with its arrow-straight track through the western edge of the wild Canadian Shield.

Nothing much was happening near Dugald, so I paused to take a few drone shots of the new Parrish & Heimbecker grain elevator just east of the town.

This view is facing west and slightly south, with the CN track along the left edge and Winnipeg in the top right of the image.

Eventually I ended up near Ste. Rita, about 50 km east of Winnipeg. I stopped at the Hazel Creek bridge and stood there for quite a while, watching the birds and listening to their songs. I even saw a turtle drift by underwater.

After half an hour or so, I drove a little bit west to a forest road, one of the many numbered but otherwise anonymous roads criss-crossing the area.

Several years ago, I drove my car down this road, and resolved never to do that again! You might be able to see why in the photo below.

This time, I left my car by the highway and walked in. It was just over half a kilometre from the highway to the train tracks.

As I walked around, enjoying the peace and quiet, I walked toward this muddy hole in the road…

As I was about to step into it, a bunch of things jumped out! I was a little startled, and when I investigated, I found that the tiny dots you see in the photo above were actually tiny toads!

I had to use my “long” lens and crop way in to get decent photos of the toads. They were tiny, about the size of my smallest fingernail.

On my way back to the car, I heard a bird calling. It turned out to be a pair of birds, some kind of bird of prey. Maybe some kind of hawks? I don’t know birds.

Heading back toward Winnipeg, I ran across an eastbound train. I quickly backtracked to Hazel Creek to catch them crossing the bridge.

Honestly, I would have been perfectly happy with no trains at all.

On the home stretch, I drove by Symington Yard and found a few ex CREX locomotives doing their thing.

I like going for hikes and walks in the woods. More to come.

Just One More Thing

I just finished reading “The Complete Maus” by Art Spiegelman. What a great book.

This graphic novel tells the story of Speigelman’s parents, who were Polish Jews during WW2. It uses a really unique style to tell their story. It shows the author interviewing his estranged father in the present day, intermixed with the WW2 scenes, all depicted with the characters as cartoon animals. The Jews are shown as mice and the Nazis as cats, and later many characters are depicted as humans wearing animal masks.

The author was very sensitive to the notion of trivializing the Holocaust by depicting it in comic form, and I think he pulled it off well. The book is a little “meta” in some ways; for example, it depicts the author fretting about how he was depicting events earlier in the book. The main criticisms of this book are in how the different groups of people were depicted, and how those depictions may reinforce racial stereotypes.

“Maus” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first awarded to a graphic novel.

It’s well worth reading, in my opinion.