KAGAWONG, Ont. — The virus is bringing out the best and the worst in us.
The effect is seen even here on Lake Huron’s quietly majestic Manitoulin Island, where my retirement log cabin nestles, and which is now a backwater front in the war on COVID-19.
Kagawong, Ontario’s Prettiest Village, so the highway sign reads, is to be sorely tested this month.
Thousands of lovesick rainbow smelts, hardly models of social distancing, will make their annual spawning run from Mudge Bay up the Kagawong River to Bridal Veil Falls.
The resulting fishing orgy usually draws throngs of people from on and off the island. Nets and buckets in hand, they cluster at the river’s mouth.
Not this year.
The smelt fest was cancelled at an emergency meeting of Billings Township council last week. Our leaders also barred access to the falls, which is the village’s big tourist draw, riverside hiking trails and the dog park.
The smelts are delighted, of course, but it’s a shock to their human pursuers. Not even the Second World War cancelled the smelts.
Manitoulin’s splendid little weekly, The Expositor, was so taken aback its story stressed, “To be clear, this is not an April Fool’s Day prank.”
Question is, will the siren call of the smelts be stronger for some fishermen than civic duty or fear of the virus?
Will they defy the village’s signs and yellow tape, and the province, which has banned public gatherings of more than five people?
There’s a $750 fine, though iron rule is hardly the Kagawongian way. A few years ago there was talk of licensing dogs.
“Hey, why bother?” said Delroy Prescott, then the township dogcatcher, financial officer, weed inspector and former marina manager. “I already know all the dogs. I just yell, ‘Go home!’”
But that was before COVID-19 blew in from Wuhan.
Wherever you live, I bet you too are seeing the virus’s bad side effects.
Maybe nothing so extreme as the Italian who allegedly murdered his doctor girlfriend because he thought she gave him the virus.
But you’ve noted wary looks in supermarkets, or the COVIDIOTS who flout social distancing, or the irritability that comes of isolation, or the sharpening of our political divides and internet vitriol.
Manitoulin Island, bucolic as it is, is not immune.
Panic is like booze. It strips folks of their usual inhibitions.
Early on, there were calls to “swing the bridge!” at Little Current to sever the island’s only link to the mainland. What, and supply an island of 12,000 people by canoe?
Then the first two cases of the dreaded bug showed up, when a couple returned from an Australian cruise. They had self-isolated. But that did not silence demands for info about them. There was a spurt of snowbird-shaming on island Facebook pages.
A couple of posters suggested lapses in precautions were “attempted murder.” Very un-island-like language.
It got so bad that What’s Doin on the Manitoulin, often the pulse of the island, voted to go “virus free” and deleted the shrillest COVID-19 posters.
Members returned to exchanging photos, helpful tips and updates such as “Anyone heard any frogs yet?” Recent news included “Pig loose in Spring Bay.” (Just what we need, swine flu, one member quipped.)
Thus the good outweighs the bad and the ugly on Manitoulin, as I hope it does wherever you are waging the war on COVID-19.
There are far more posts like that of Jamie and Jean Ward, owners of the Main Street Cafe. They shuttered their popular eatery and wrote a song for the Kagawong Facebook page. The lyrics urge parents to guard their kids from fear as much as from the virus.
For every unfriendly glance at a stranger, there are far more gestures of goodwill, such as the snazzy new sneeze-guard on the counter of Bridal Veil Variety. It was fashioned of cedar and storm glass by craftsman Doug Clark, whose shop, Dig and Doug Furniture, is across the street. The fee? A slice of pizza.
For every partisan insult, there are teams of quilters making hundreds of cotton masks. M’Chigeeng First Nation Chief Linda Debassige leads a Manitoulin-wide funding drive for ventilators. And the island hospital finally had to say, thanks, but please stop bringing baked goods for the staff.
Surely smelt fishermen will get in the spirit and the spawning run will pass without incident.
Kagawong could use the break. So could the smelts.
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