PDP #41: Main Street Moosonee

"So how far north have you been?" Joe asked, after I acknowledged that, yes, I have in fact left the Eastern time zone. I didn't have to think for long. The north tends to be memorable in its own way.

"Moosonee," I said.

"Damn."

Moosonee is, and has been for the last three eight* years, a town near the shore of James Bay in the far northern marches of Ontario - before then, it was a Development Area, the only one in the province. It's still one of the most isolated significant communities in Ontario. For most of the year, the only real access is by a five-hour rail ride from Cochrane via the Polar Bear Express train, run by Ontario Northland.

My grandfather and I rode the rails up there in July 1989, taking first the Northlander north from Barrie - well before the city government, in an absolutely genius maneuver, tore up the tracks at Allandale station - to Cochrane, well up north itself, and then the Polar Bear Express the rest of the way. Particularly in 1989, when cell phones were just starting to come on the market and the World Wide Web would not even be invented for another two years, Moosonee's isolation made it seem, to six-year-old me, almost like some weird other world.

What really struck me as odd, and which is the subject of today's photograph - taken on July 31, 1989 - is that the streets were unpaved and a lot of the cars seemed to lack license plates.


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* Thanks to commenter Paull for setting me straight on the issue of when Moosonee became a town.