Why We Love PELEE ISLAND
In high school, our environmental group, STEPS (Students Taking Environmental Protection Seriously), celebrated year’s end with a coveted trip to Point Pelee National Park, Ontario. We loaded our geography teacher’s hot-red Mazda with a ridiculous amount of cargo (more junk food than camping gear) and battled to shove our road-trip cassette tapes into rotation. Even though it was early May, the nights still held a bite of winter, especially in a non-efficient, lumpy Canadian Tire–issue sleeping bag unfurled on a damp tent floor.
My pal Bob and I packed all the Pelee essentials: binoculars, a Peterson bird guide, strawberry Pop-Tarts and glow-in-the-dark bubble gum. After a dusk hike through the Carolinian woods and along Lake Erie’s shore, we returned to our campsite to discover that we had been robbed. A nimble-fingered raccoon had found our stash and left a guilty trail: Pieces of mangled gum glowed in the woods like fat (and dead) fireflies.
I don’t remember the things I was probably supposed to remember from this monumental trip, like how the park is located at the southernmost point of Canada’s mainland and is our country’s second-smallest and most ecologically diverse national park. Instead, I remember the gum-loving raccoon and listening to Bette Midler’s “From a Distance” on repeat.
Point Pelee National Park’s popularity quickly led to it being deemed one of the
