On the road north of Superior.

• Author: Atkins, Michael
• Position: President's Note

I found myself in Terrace Bay the other day for the first time in more than 20 years. The occasion was the semiannual board meeting of the Northern Policy Institute, which is in the habit of taking its board meetings to small communities across the North to allow board members to experience the issues and concerns at play in different communities.

This practice allows board members and staff to remember who they are working for and what is important.

For me, it was a homecoming. In the late 1970s I purchased newspapers in Ignace, Thunder Bay, Nipigon/Red Rock and Terrace Bay/Schreiber. I loved those communities, although it is fair to say it was not always easy.

In the early '80s I employed a husband-and-wife team as publisher and editor of the Terrace Bay/Schreiber News. They were very good at their work and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately for me, and the community, they decided to separate and in fairly short order left my employ What it meant was I went from full staff to no staff.

For a period of time, I would fly to Thunder Bay on Tuesday and drive to Terrace Bay. On Wednesday, I would call around and write the news.

On Thursday, I would hustle some ads from Costa's and Figliamoni's and Moore's Menswear, and on Friday wrap up stories and drive to Thunder Bay where I would have our design people at Lakehead Living (our weekly newspaper there) lay out the paper. I would fly back to Sudbury and start the process all over again the following week.

When the weather was bad, I would take the bus from Sudbury to Terrace Bay. This inevitably meant spending the better part of the night on the bus, maybe 12 hours. On one trip, I fell asleep across the last row of seats on the bus. We stopped in Marathon for a bio break. I remained asleep.

The next thing I knew a very large man sat on my head and did not immediately realize he was sitting on a living person in the middle of the dark in the middle of Northern Ontario. As I would later discover he had had a considerable amount to drink. It was life-and-death. Not a promising headline in the TBS News: "Publisher dead after man sits on him in...