Why I Stay

Sioux Lookout recommends itself to anyone who wants to shimmy free of derivative living. It is not a place of easy, anonymous consumption, or complacent spectatorship, but somewhere that invites headlong participation in the joys and challenges of community, in all its streaming, messy diversity. In this month alone, we have gathered for the town's first annual Pride picnic (which was said to have attracted more folks than twenty-times-larger Abbotsford's parade), the fifteenth Take Back the Night walk, and (next week) the vigil for missing and murdered Aboriginal women. We've also gone from working to lake swimming in under ten minutes, hiked up the town's namesake "mountain", and successfully completed several Sioux Lookout triathlons (cycle, paddle, potluck). The latest of these forays took place during a six-hour power outage - an annual event in early fall where transmission line maintenance sends the whole town back a century or so. This year's iteration gracefully fell on a warm and sunny Sunday, and it seemed like everyone spent the day joyfully outdoors, bedding gardens, cording firewood, or fishing from the train trestle in unhindered defiance of trespass laws. Despite all that you may read here, this is a good place to be human, and to call home.