St. Joe’s Island is a place I keep going back to whenever I’m in Northern Ontario. The island sits at the end of the St. Mary’s Rivers in Lake Huron.

As kids, Rainer’s mom and dad would take us to St. Joe’s to fish and to pick blueberries. We would do the 20 mile drive following the St. Mary’s River through the Indian Reservation and end up at the dock to wait for the ferry to take us onto the Island. The ferry held maybe 10 cars. I remember rough, white-capped waves and staying in the car while the ferry navigated the narrow channel. In the late 70’s the Provincial government built the current bridge. The image on the left is the bridge going over to the Island.

And this morning I got to shoot a photograph that echoed back to one of my favorite paintings – Casson’s “White Pine”. AJ Casson was one of the Canadian Group of Seven – artists who, after WW I, fled Southern Ontario for the Georgian Bay and Algoma areas to paint. Reproductions of their famous landscapes were in my basal reader. I remember being proud to see the landscapes that I saw everyday living in the Sault captured in canvas, reproduced in color in my reader. (It was great to see recognizable wilderness instead of Toronto streetscapes and Ottawa parliaments.)