[Paddlewise] A frustrating experience

This past weekend was the Great Lakes Sea Kayaking Association's annual get 
together and cleanup weekend.  We meet on a Saturday every mid-September
and paddle out to Franklin Island (a large island of Crown (public) land in 
Georgian Bay near Parry Sound) and pick up the litter and generally clean up the 
many campsites around the island.  This year we also installed several boomboxes 
at popular campsites.  Boomboxes, aka thunderboxes are wooden, lidded boxes 
used as toilets in the woods.  Their name comes from the habit some people 
have of dropping the lid closed noisily in the middle of the night.  We wanted to 
ease the strain on the area caused by random piles of peoplepoopy in often 
inconvenient places.

Last week was a very trying and emotional week for most of us.  I haven't watched
so much TV since the '69 Apollo moon landing.  It took a long time to sink in and
is taking a longer time to recover.  I really needed some kayak hydrotherapy (as
someone put it recently) and was looking forward to the weekend.  

Amie and I drove up to Killbear Provincial Park on Friday night in the biggest traffic 
mess I've seen in years.  Bad drivers for too many hours meant we arrived later than 
planned.  We set up the tent and snuggled up in the very cool tent ( approx 5C - we
could see our breath.  My favorite camping conditions :-)!! )

Saturday morning's sunlight allowed us to see that we had picked a spot in the 
middle of a gang of other GLSKA paddlers.  After greeting our old paddling
friends and meeting a few new ones, we headed off to Snug Harbour to launch.
It is a short paddle to Franklin from there.  Our group was quickly scattered as
one person, in a newly constructed stitch and glue kayak, promptly dumped.  He 
used plans from an old book that offered a design better suited to a racing
masochist than a recreational paddler.  One of our better paddlers took that
kayak and let the beginner use his stable old beast and the group eventually
regathered on the island.  

The good news was that there was relatively little garbage to be picked up,
compared to previous years.  The bad news follows.  

The boomboxes had been delivered unassembled to the sites in the spring by 
Tim Dyer (of White Squall, a very good paddling outfitter and dealer) and Bill 
Lanning of GLSKA in a small motorboat.  They were bundled, marked and 
hidden in the woods near the campsites.  The intention was to assemble 
them in the summer, but everyone's schedules clashed and it never got done.  
Now that we were assembled and ready, we found that, while several were ok, 
others had been unwrapped and, presumably, burned as firewood. :-(  One 
partially assembled box was broken up.  This was all new cedar and cost 
$125 per box. 

Make no mistake - this was vandalism.  There was no way someone could have 
mistaken this for scrap wood.  With my faith in mankind shaken by the events of
last week, this was a very major disappointment.  There's no doubt in my mind 
that this was the work of the same louts who leave the garbage that we have to 
clean up.  It is also worth noting that there has been a fire ban almost all summer
as the tinder-dry conditions caused by a drought has made the fire risk quite 
high.  The heaps of ashes in the fire pits say a lot about the respect people have
for the outdoors during fire bans.

This is so frustrating.  Doesn't anyone take any responsibility anymore?  We have
nations that have made so much about rights; it's too bad we didn't make as much
of an issue about responsibility.  I couldn't help thinking about the closures (or 
threatened closures) of camping on islands in the northwest because of staffing 
problems, as noted by some on Paddlewise.   If everyone acted like this, there 
wouldn't be enough staff or volunteers to keep any paddling destination operational.

Please take responsibility for yourself, and spread the word.  We need to keep our
paddling areas clean and neat.  We've only got everything to lose!

Mike


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