‘Female Indiana Jones’ is mourned
KITCHENER — She liked taking pictures of nature. She travelled widely, avoiding hotels and valuing her trips as personal adventures. She liked hiking and being outdoors.
Samantha Stremmelaar, 35, said she wanted to enjoy “all that Mother Nature has to offer.”
For almost four decades she did just that.
All who knew her are devastated by her sudden death Monday in a highway collision. She was driving home to Kitchener after visiting her family in Quebec over the long weekend.
“It’s such a wasteful death. It’s just horrible,” said Vicki Stremmelaar, her mother.
Samantha sat with Sultan Qamar recently at a soccer field in Cambridge and told him she was practising handstands. It was very much something she would do.
Qamar knew her as a soccer goaltender with a competitive spirit who would bang on her goalposts in frustration if she made a mistake.
“Everybody is shocked,” he said. “She was always smiling, always happy, always talking to people. A real people person.”
Samantha was the official photographer for her league, Grand River Soccer.
“Wherever she went she had her camera with her. She loved photography,” said Qamar, league administrator.
Samantha filled the internet with photographs she took. She told stories about herself online, proving a glimpse into her spirit. She had a personal website she named Climb the Mountain Again.
Why Climb the Mountain Again?
“Why not?” she wrote. “When you think you can’t do it or seem to be in a rut then simply climb the ‘mountain’ again, every ascent sheds new light.”
In May, she drove alone almost 9,000 kilometres in 14 days across the U.S. and back, sleeping in her car and showering at truck stops to save money.
“I’m 50 per cent Dutch so I inherited the frugal gene,” she wrote. “This was my great American old west road trip.” She met strangers, visited national parks, ate the best hamburger ever, and rappelled down a mountain in Utah.
“It is amazing the amount of mental willpower that is required to hurl oneself off of a cliff,” she wrote.
Her mother Vicki recalls that Samantha got lost on a school trip when she climbed some rocks and decided to take a nap behind one.
“She always had a joie-devivre, I guess you could say,” Vicki said. “She liked to travel but she wasn’t a person who would go to a resort. She liked to travel and find all kinds of different and interesting things and historic things.”
When her parents remodelled their house, Samantha was on the roof nailing shingles. When she visited with her nephew Benjamen Knapp, 10, she would take him on adventures. They would go into the woods to look for things.
To Benjamen, she seemed a real-life Indiana Jones. “He’s got it right. She was an Indiana Jones. A female Indiana Jones,” Vicki Stremmelaar said.
Christopher Zimmermann was planning to teach Samantha how to scuba dive.
“She had the biggest heart. There wasn’t a sport she wouldn’t try to do. She never let anything stop her,” he said. “She was basically a MacGyver. She could fix anything. She loved to bake. She loved to sing in the car. She would stop and take pictures of everything.”
They had talked about travelling together. “This woman had so much life to go. It’s sad. She had so many more adventures,” he said.
Samantha grew up in a small Quebec town on the U.S. border where her father Hendrik, a retired paramedic, operates a pizza restaurant. Her mother Vicki is a nurse. Samantha has a sister, Amber.
Samantha graduated from Carleton University and worked for Sun Life Financial.
She was killed when two vehicles collided head-on at 4:26 p.m. on Highway 7 in Lanark County in eastern Ontario. Samantha, alone in her Subaru, was pronounced dead at the scene. The other driver, a man in a Dodge, went to Kingston hospital, seriously injured. Police are still investigating.
“Each of us not only grieves at the passing of a tremendous person but also for the loss her family suffers,” Grand River Soccer said in a statement on Facebook. Stunned teammates offered condolences to her family, as did Sun Life.
“We are deeply saddened,” the company said in a statement. “Samantha was a valued member of Sun Life Financial and we would like to offer our sincerest condolences to her family, friends and colleagues.”
Funeral arrangements are not yet made.