Heading to the 1990 Portland, Oregon national insulator show in a brand new pickup across northern Ontario...only thing is, the truck is on an auto-rack on the main east-west railroad line going over 40 mph and its tailgate is heading forward. Windy!!

If the beauty of northern Canada isn’t compelling enough, there’s a more relevant distraction. The pole line that whips by is full of insulators, sometimes at eye level. The trick here is to focus on a pole, do a quick scan and as the pole comes up next to you, snap your gaze to the next one. At our present speed there is no time to linger on each piece. A quick disregard of anything clear, screen out the double petticoat stuff (CD 152s, CD 164s, CD 145s) and concentrate on the old stuff--the CD 143s.

There have been long stretches of nothing but clear CD154s and CD155s. But now its getting interesting, CD 143s, at first scattered, are now getting thick. Aquas, green aquas, ice aquas, several styles, the older 2 piece molds and newer 3 piece mold types. They charge past in a phalanx of glass. Attention is riveted on the next pole end then its gone. “What was that? That looked like a Canadian Boston!” Nice blue color too. Now my interest is keen. Another pole, zero in on blue color. A CD 136.4 for sure! Several more go past in the next few minutes. The next blue colored insulator to go by appears to be a CD 143 . ”Mmmm, maybe a Montreal Tel. Co.” Several more of these go past. Things then calm down, insulator wise, but I’m peaked. Back to straight CD 143s. Aquas, aquas, aquas. Then my eyes nearly bug out. A jade CD 143 slides past. No doubt, there’s too much aqua to compare it too. WOW!! I mark down the next mile post sign and later note the next town sign. The good stretch has played out.

Five trains, one national, fourteen weeks, one evening in jail in Wawa, Ontario (that’s another story), 6,000 miles bicycled, hitchhiked, and freighting later...Ken Stefan and I are headed north out of Detroit in his ’74 LTD wagon. It took Ken about two seconds to decide to make the trip when it was proposed. The year previous we had done a week long tour of northern Ontario and had snagged a load of CD 143s, amber Dominion-42s and five Fred Locke cables. Being an electrical engineer for the local power company made him a good guy to have along for his professional opinion of what could be safely picked and what should be left alone.

The town we were heading for was just a dot on the map, an hour off the Trans-Canada highway and literally in the middle of nowhere. Wilderness. While checking the map Ken said, “I’ve been there before.” “What?”. “Back in the seventies on vacation with my folks. It’s a ghost town”. After an hour on the “main” gravel road, we turned onto a one lane gravel road with trees creeping in on either side. Twenty minutes later we were in a clearing in the woods. In the 1880s it might have been a town and warranted the name bestowed by the railroad, but in 1990 it was a couple of shacks ready to fall down with a cross look. As it was still probably somebody’s property, we didn’t go lurking around. We had a mission. It was 11 a.m.

We parked, secured our gear and headed out. We walked down the tracks aways and came to our first mile post marker 128.. I checked my notes. “Insulators start at mile post 138”. Some quick mental calculations, “Lets see, ah ... um... that would make it ... 10 miles in to start”. “And ten miles back”. “Lets go”.

It’s fall in northern Ontario. A cool overcast day. Great for the hike ahead of us. The bug pestilence won’t return ’til next spring. But neither will the birds. Except for the occasional breeze in the tree tops its exceptionally silent. The area is starkly beautiful. The tracks meander through rolling hills, lakes and woods. Now and then a train thunders past. This is a continuous rail, high speed, main line. We hear them coming in plenty of time. They blow their air horns in greeting. People are scarce up here, its easy to be friendly.

The original pole line was on the south side of the tracks. The current line (no pun intended) is on the north. We spend time bush whacking the south side looking for grounders. Not only are we hoping to find good collectibles, we need tie-ins. Our supply of Continentals and Porters was used up on last year’s trip. We’ve scraped together less than a dozen between us. Some of mine even have price tags on them from back when I thought they could be sold. Besides the odd pole stumps, we find a few aqua B beehives and Dominion 42s! They’ll do for our purpose. Where those four crossarms of glass went, we can only speculate.

After several hours walk, a lunch break, and repeated pole scanning, we come around a bend, through a rock cut and there it is. As far as I’m concerned, this is what the whole trip has been for. The jade CD 143! It’s beautiful, even with the light coating of soot. A slug plate Canadian Pacific. Not a true jade, but so swirled, it’s almost better. We’re high now and all the miles are forgotten. A few poles later a curious CD 143 holds my gaze with the binoculars. Hard to say with the soot on it and the light conditions, but it turns out to be a nice milky swirled three piece mold Canadian Pacific. Now we each have one.

Things start to happen quickly. The blue CD 143s turn out to be unmarked Montreal Tel. Co.s. Good blue colors and some nice swirling. The sun comes out for a while and really lights them up. They’re as blue as the lake on which we border. One I replace with a Continental that I’ve had in the collection since 1976, it even has the letters painted white. “Good-bye noble Continental, you’ve served well”.

Now we’re into the Boston stretch. Canadian Bostons, up on poles, Wow! Great blue colors! Ken, though mostly a classic porcelain collector, appreciates the early telegraph stuff and is as thrilled as I am. We realize this is something we may never see again. Occasionally there are two Bostons on a pole, but on one pole there are four! Unfortunately they are all whacked. It was at a siding where we figure a work train was parked (there are other indications) and the workers in an off hour practiced stone throwing. Except for this stretch, everything has been mostly mint. We are guilty of similar crimes, but usually we try to pick off the clear stuff.

Long shadows. It’s about half an hour before sundown. Things have thinned out. Ken stops and takes his boots off. I have to keep going to see what is up around the next bend. As far as I can see with the nocs it looks bleak. But maybe up ahead... I’d love to go on. The country is stunning, the air is clean, there is a depth of sound uninterrupted by man. It’s over though, I can’t kid myself. We’ve walked over ten miles, climbed about twenty poles and have a load of glass to carry back. I walk back to Ken’s spot by the semaphore. His feet are a mass of blisters, but he’s not complaining. The food is mostly gone, the water is low. We can’t stay here.

The party is over. The trudge begins. It gets dark, and cold as well. We head back down the tracks. It’s tricky walking. Some places the ballast is flush with the ties. Other places the ties stick up and it would be easy to trip and having the packs full of glass drive us down. We’ve picked so much that we’ve made three caches of insulators to get on the way back. We brought a flashlight but the beam it throws is barely sufficient to find your hand in front of your face. We thought we’d stashed the loot in obvious places, but we are reduced to frantic crashing around in a couple of spots. We light some of our newspaper packing material as crude torches. We find our goods, but nearly tumble down the embankment in the dark.

The trains are running more often now. We hear them coming and then going for miles. It’s a silent, clear, moonless night. We scramble in the brush and watch their approach. The headlight beams light up one section of the woods, then swing to another. Then the beams light up our stretch of track in an unearthly brightness. The shadows get lower, the noise and the tension increase and then the engines thunder past. Darkness now, but wind and noise. Long trains. Then they pass and we watch the lights disappear off into the woods. The contrast from the light and noise is profound. The tracks make loud clanking noises as the night gets colder. The locals have told us not to worry about the bears. It’s in the spring when they get cranky. Still they aren’t far from our thoughts. Our concentration is on walking, steadily, ponderously. At last we are back at the car. There’s a thick layer of frost on it, but man does it feel good to take our packs off and sit down. It’s 11 p.m., we've been at it for twelve hours. We bag out for the night, done in!

We picked ten unmarked CD 143 Montreals in blue, eleven Bostons in good blues, the two milky CD 143s and about a dozen assorted Brookfields, CD 164s, CD 145s, CD152s, some with olive or snowy. It was a long drive there and back and the car nearly bled us white in it’s seemingly insatiable thirst for gas. You can’t put a price on this kind of adventure. We haven’t been able to duplicate it.