http://www.canada.com/montrealgazet...b7-40307c9bae6d
DEBORAH STOKES, CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, March 18, 2006
To get to Lawrence Martin's town from where we are sitting in downtown Toronto, walk over to Yonge St., then head due north, for 10 hours.
Don't turn left or right. Just stay on Yonge St. until you run out of road and end up in Cochrane. You have to drive, because there are no commercial flights. Or you can take the train, the Ontario Northlander, to Cochrane, where it turns into the Polar Bear Express.
Martin is Cochrane's mayor. He's travelled up and down Yonge St. a lot lately with an idea to sell: he wants to turn his remote northern town of 5,700 people, English and French, into a tourist town.
Martin is a Canadian Indian and a good storyteller. He is from the area, though not from Cochrane. He was raised on a trapline and shipped to North Bay, like other Indian children, to go to school.
His roundabout journey to Cochrane included working in the nickel mines in Sudbury and writing songs while underground. He became a musician, picking up a Juno for one of his three albums. He also has been a journalist, a policeman and the grand chief of the Mushkegouk Council in the north. He moved to Cochrane with his third wife, an artist.
"With my background, I know how to promote Cochrane," he says.
That Cochrane is smack in the middle of nowhere is a good thing, he believes. In the winter, there are endless empty snowmobile trails. In summer, ATVs are the transport of choice for exploring the forests, rivers and lakes. There is fishing, wildlife spotting and birdwatching.
There's more. Cochrane's $5.5-million Polar Bear Habitat, which opened in 2004, has been named one of the country's top tourist attractions by the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. There's also the Tim Horton Event Centre - the Hall of Fame hockey player was from Cochrane. The Blueberry Festival and powwow is a big draw in summer, while the highlight of the nine-day Winter Carnival is the annual Polar Bear Dip in the lake that borders the town. "This year we set up a beer tent on the ice. The floor was beautiful. Beneath you was this blue, blue ice," Martin says.
And there's something else he wants to capitalize on - giving tourists an authentic Indian experience. "We're surrounded by First Nations up there," he says. Visitors can participate in a sweat-lodge ceremony. "It's a spiritual ceremony. Like being in a church, there are certain rituals," he says. The dome-shaped lodge is like a sauna, heated with steaming rocks. "If you get really good at it, you can go directly to the spirits, communicate with the creators," he says.
In his travels up and down Yonge St., Martin is talking to other northern community mayors to see how their attractions can be bundled up and packaged together for visitors. There is the $19-million Constance Lake Eagle Earth Cree and Ojibway Historical Centre, outside Hearst.
A few hours south of Cochrane, in Timmins, is the Shania Twain Centre. And Sudbury has Science North. "It's a matter of taking what we have and putting it on some kind of stage and talking it up like crazy," Martin says. "All the little towns have something."
That something is a unique northern experience that is at once exotic and so Canadian. And if you listen to Martin long enough, it is surprisingly compelling.
©*The Gazette (Montreal) 2006
Linear Mode
