Sometime in the spring of 2015, I watched an ad on TV. A series of summer moments. An RV driving through the country, kids jumping in the lake, running through the woods, campfires, marshmallows, and falling asleep under a starry sky. The pay off line at the end. Bring back our wildhood.
The next day, I rented an RV and booked a campsite at one of Ontario’s provincial parks. Proof advertising works.
A few weeks later, we’re out on our maiden voyage. By some luck of the rental gods, instead of towing a little trailer, we ended up with a full motor home. My husband is behind the wheel. The kids buckled in next to each other at the little dinette table. Dishes clanking in the cupboards as we bumped down Highway 401.
As we pulled up to the campground, I could feel my rookie nerves kick in. Check in. Get the campground map. Pull up to the water fill station. How do you even do that? Thank goodness we have a pull-through site. I don’t think I would have survived backing into one.
What the hell are we doing? What if I hate it?
That night, we cooked dinner over the fire. The kids had their first s’mores. Around us, the campground settled into its evening rhythm. Car doors closing. Bikes whirring by. Smoke drifting through the trees. Kids at the water fill station. Buckets almost too heavy for them to carry.
A few days later, I stopped feeling like a visitor. Dirt on my feet. Washing dishes under the canopy of the trees. Late-night walks under the stars. No particular agenda.
I was in love.
Then we came back again. And again. Before long, Bon Echo became an anchor in our summers.
The first day always looked the same. Twenty-four hours of reaching for devices that had nowhere to connect. Then, almost without noticing, the kids would disappear on their bikes, invent games with sticks and stones, swim until dinner, learn to chop wood, and play endless rounds of charades around the campfire.
Over the years, everything that ad had promised turned out to be true. Camping became part of who we are as a family.
We grew up here.
More than a decade after that first visit, and a few years since our last, my husband and I made the trip again. This time, the kids are home working their summer jobs. Hazel and Annie have taken Georgie’s place as our camping dogs.
It’s a different trip now. Bon Echo holds so much of our family’s story. I wasn’t sure what it would feel like to walk back into it. What if going back hurts?
A lump in my throat as I walk the dogs up the long lane to our campsite. Memories wash over me. Grief for the time we won’t get back. Gratitude that it happened at all.
We find a new routine. Just the two of us. Hazel and Annie. My husband’s sister and her husband are a few campsites away. We’ve never camped with them before. Different conversations. New memories. The next chapter of our camping life.
On the third day, I find myself walking the dogs for no particular reason. I sit on the shore of Mazinaw Lake, looking up at the incredible rock wall. There is nothing to do. Nowhere to go. No schedule. Just this beautiful place.
It may sound like an overstatement, but I can feel my nervous system settle here.
I’ve been to dozens of campgrounds. Most of them beautiful. Full of trees and water. The sounds of campers. Dish buckets on picnic tables. Clothes hanging from lines strung between the trees.
None of those places feel like this one.
When you pull into the gates at Bon Echo, there’s a sign that says, this is a sacred indigenous site.
I don’t know what that means. Except that I feel the difference being here. I slow down. I sleep better and wake up later. I have an ease about the pace of the day. The change is significant enough it made me want to understand it better.
And so, into the rabbit hole I go. What is it about sacred places and Bon Echo?
Across cultures, people have identified certain places as sacred. They don’t all agree why, but similar ideas appear again and again. Some believe these are places where the spiritual world feels especially close. Some believe the land remembers. Others understand mountains, rivers, forests and rock faces as living beings with their own presence and purpose.
Bon Echo is one of those places.
For the Anishinaabe, whose traditional territory includes Bon Echo, the land is a living relation. Mazinaw Rock and the lake are living relations, each part of a community of beings with their own place, purpose and relationship to one another. The pictographs on the rock tell a story of relationship, ceremony and spirit that stretches back thousands of years. Long before campers arrived with marshmallows and mountain bikes, people came here for entirely different reasons.
Bon Echo has a special place in my heart, and in my history. But that’s different from what I’m noticing about myself being here and what I’m learning about the people who were here thousands of years before me.
When I hike up Mazinaw Rock today, I’ll see it as one of the oldest members of this community. When I kayak across the lake, I’ll pay attention to the personality of the water. When I sit beneath the trees I’ll think of them as my friends around the campfire.
In Canada, it’s common to find yourself at an event where someone acknowledges the Indigenous peoples who inhabited that land before the shopping mall or conference centre that sits there today.
I’ve always listened politely.
Next time, I’ll hear it differently.
For now, I’ll leave you with this one.
I acknowledge that Bon Echo Provincial Park is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, and that Mazinaw Rock has been a place of cultural, spiritual and historical significance for thousands of years. I offer my respect to the Indigenous peoples who have cared for this land since time immemorial, and to those who continue that relationship today.
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