It’s entirely likely that, as Facebook claims, their blocking of this link is an automated part of their system (and no – it has nothing to do with it being a link to Pirate Bay. You can link to anything else on that site). Even taking that at face value, the fact that responsibility for censorship is delegated to automation doesn’t make it ok. Particularly when exactly the same thing happened when Wikileaks released their “Collateral Murder” video.

Were my experience with Facebook otherwise positive I’d likely not have jettisoned it on this account. But it’s not been positive. In fact it’s generally been a rather cynical experience.

A few other things I hate about Facebook:

1) The system is set up to encourage a silly sort of morality. When you become “friends” with someone, they see everything you post. When they see things they don’t like, they can choose to not have your posts appear in their feed. You continue to see their posts until they say something offensive enough to you to make the block mutual. So congeniality and mildness directly translates to a broader diffusion of information. It’s built into the system.

2) The friends-web structure of Facebook translates to insularity. While some of the people I associated with were very independent-minded and published lots of strange and interesting ideas and links, the vast majority constantly bounce variations on pre-ordained political and social values. I don’t enjoy echo chambers.

3) As a musician and promoter of music I find the event invitation system awful. The overload of rubbish information everyone receives necessitates shifting the way you engage people with your work: from content-based information to cute aphorisms and social manipulation. That might work well for some, but not for me.

one last manipulative push from Facebook

Having dropped Facebook, I’ve started using my long-neglected Twitter account. Of course Twitter has some of the same nonsense about it, as any social media will. But with only 140 characters per post it’s impossible to grasp the personality of the people you’re interacting with; and yes, I do consider that a very good thing. Coming to terms with the repulsiveness of humanity isn’t something to trivialize. People are strange and disgusting creatures, which is a large part of what makes us worthwhile.

Also I’ll be updating this blog a lot more frequently. So come back and visit sometime soon. I’m lonely… I just lost 400 friends.

Woke up in my bushcamp outside Tobermorey feeling surprising well rested. I was back in Tobermorey by 7:30, intending to catch the Chi-cheemaun Ferry to Manitoulin Island but discovered that the early ferry had left at 7:00 and the next trip across wouldn’t be leaving until after 10:00. So I had breakfast and decided to spend a bit of time cleaning my bike (pushing it through the bush to and from my guerilla camp hadn’t been good for it) and patching the tubes that were punctured yesterday, in case I needed them later on.

doing some bike maintenance while waiting for the Chi-Cheemaun

While I was working I looked up and noticed a native guy with sun-bronzed skin wearing a cycling outfit had stopped and was watching me. He saw me looking at him and broke into a big friendly grin. “You biking?” he asked the obvious in a slow monotone.

“Yup, I’m biking,” I said. “Are you biking?”

“Yup. Where are you going?”

“Toronto to Saskatoon,” I said.

He thought for a moment. “Take you four days so far?”

“Just my third day today.”

“You’re pretty quick. Good stuff!”

“How long have you been on the road?”

“Hmm… I left Vancouver on the 13th of May.”

“No shit! You’ve been on the road for three months?!”

“Yup. I’m slow.”

my comrade-in-wheels: Ray

I hung out with Ray for more than an hour. A really great, if enigmatic, person. When I asked him why he wanted to do this trip he answered “Just thought I’d take care of some of my bucket list”. Not many people can say something like that in a way that’s neither ironic nor insipid, but he could. He talked always in a slow monotone without any inflection to differentiate between seriousness and jokes. I found it very striking: most people do everything possible to make sure know when you’re supposed to laugh and when to nod gravely. Ray was full of humour but he didn’t give a fuck whether or not I noticed. I liked him a lot.

He’d come to Tobermorey to meet his brother who lived a ways south of town, but it wasn’t at all clear whether he was staying here or not. When I asked him about that he said something along the lines of “well, I’m not selling the bike.” Before he left he gave me a set of brochures and business cards from the campground he’d found and liked; told me which towns had decent bike shops (also told me that, if I got a chance I should stop at Petrie’s Cycle in Thunder Bay and thank Mr. Petrie for doing the good turn of fixing Ray’s rear wheel for cheap – he says it’d “cracked up somewhere in Manitoba”. I did manage to pass on his thanks).

His advice about the road ahead: “when you get north of Lake Superior there are some mountains. It’s not that bad. There are a couple big slopes coming up just south of Espanola too. You’ll get there tomorrow, and if you can do that Superior will be ok.”

the Chi-Cheemaun Ferry disgorging some motorcycles

The Chi-Cheemaun Ferry is huge. Apparently it can carry 150 cars in one trip. The lower part of the hull is a huge hollow tube, like an airplane hanger, and most of the cars go on both the bottom level while some sit above them on a level of magically-suspended scaffolding. Unfortunately my camera soon ran out of batteries so I couldn’t take any photos of the trip across to Manitoulin. I explored the ship, finding my way around all the decks until it started to rain. Then I found there was a bar and hung out there drinking and playing euchre with a bunch of motorcycle-riding folks I’d met while waiting for the ferry after Ray’d left.

my bike leaning against the wall of the Tourist Office at the north end of Manitoulin Island (notice the pouring rain)

The sun had come back out by the time we reached Manitoulin and stayed with me for the first twenty kilometers of the seventy kilometers to the other side of the island. But then it got ugly. I got well soaked and ended up taking shelter in a Tourism Office near the north end of Manitoulin for a couple hours (…some of you got my pathetic Facebook update from there…). But the rain didn’t look like quitting and I wanted to get as near to Espanola as possible, so around 5:00PM I decided to put my rain jacket on and push on.

Between the north end of Manitoulin and the mainland there’s a series of smaller islands connected by bridges. The bridge to Great Cloche Island is a very strange bridge, designed by either an idiot with no budget or a sadist with unlimited resources, that rotates 180 degrees to allow ships to pass through. It has only one narrow lane so traffic from either direction has to line up and take turns. Not a fun experience on a bike in the pouring rain. But that bridge is the border to the real North. On the other side one immediately notices the change in the air – the sharp dark smell of coniferous forest.

About a kilometer further, riding along a long strip of road running through swampy bush, I saw a little group of people huddling in the rain on the edge of the road. As I reached them I saw it was three native kids, maybe eighteen or twenty-year olds, two guys and a girl. As I was going by, one of the boys called out “Hey! Do you have any cigarettes?”

I realized that I did have exactly four cigarettes left and they were getting soaked in the rain, so the four of us who’ve been suffering in the rain might as well have them now. I skidded to a stop and gave them each a smoke. We hung out for a while by the road, chatting about my trip and the pow wow they’d been to on Manitoulin the day before and drank from a water bottle full of melon-flavoured vodka. They were trying to hitch a ride north to Birch Island and they must’ve got one soon after I left them because a minivan went screaming by with the guy who originally asked me for cigarettes hanging half out of the window and yelling “Have a great trip!!”

The rain finally stopped when I made it past the little chain of islands (including Birch Island) onto the mainland north of Lake Huron. The road here got pretty rough, with lots of steep ascents and drops. But it was beautiful and, as Ray had said, taking these hills made me feel better about the prospect of going through the mountains north of Superior.

It was here that I met a bear:

this isn't the bear I met, it's just a random picture of a bear.

And I met this bear at a very bad moment: I was coming down one the steep hills when, just about 30 meters ahead of me, it suddenly came out of the thick bush on the side of the road – right in front of me and I was going too fast to stop. In a very short moment I did a mental analysis of the situation and decided that the best course of action was to yell my head off while accelerating as fast as I can and trying to swerve past the bear. I figured yelling at it was better than startling it as I went by and that accelerating towards it would make it think I was attacking it and not something it wanted to chase. Also I had some sort of (in hindsight) absurd idea that, should the bear lunge at me, I’d do better to crash into it at full speed.

When I yelled the bear got up on its back legs and turned toward me. It had a strange glazed-over look in its eyes that gave me hope: it was exactly the same look my dog Gus gets when he’s startled by a plastic bag blowing across the sidewalk and doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to fight or run.

So I went by the bear. It was almost in the middle of the road and I stayed as far away as I could, but if I stretched out my arm and it stretched out its paw, we could’ve shaken hands. But it didn’t try to get me. It just pivoted its head to follow me with its stupid, glazed-over eyes. Then I was passed it and I just flew for fifteen minutes, going over two more big hills like Alberto Contador before I dared to look back.

Night 3: Camping near Espanola