Lessons from History II - Laura Secord - Niagara

Every time I read about the "legend" of Laura Secord I remember that history is written by the victors. The legend of Laura Secord bears striking similarity to the legend of Madelaine de Vercheres. research into both women is chary of actually committing to a statement along the lines of: yes, this did happen.

This is rather odd really. History is not often shy of reporting the facts. Either a battle happened or it did not. History likes to rely on source documents. It is not given to conjecture.

It is, however, prone to bias. 

I remember learning about Laura Secord in grade 8. That would have been in the early 1980's in Dundas. I had an amazing teacher. I fell in love with history that year and the history we learned was that of Ontario. We learned of MacKenzie and corduroy roads and Lord Durham and, yes, Laura Secord.

I pricked up my ears at Laura Secord. Even then it was evident to me that much of history was about this man or that man and here, large as life, was a heroine - sort of. The heroine got kind of clouded with stories about chocolate, cows and ice cream. The linear fact-like reporting of deeds long done and immutable became softened. Laura Secord was, and was not a heroine. Maybe she had been a heroine. Maybe she had been 18 at the time, maybe she had been older. Even in grade 8 I knew that was a lot of maybe.

Elizabeth I and Victoria are not subjected to such a wave of maybe. King Jadwiga of Poland does not suffer from insecurities brought on by the specter of legend. These women are assured a place in history that is free of ambiguity and does not dare to bring ice cream into the story.

Yet, Madelaine and Laura are "legends". They are not heroes, as is our man Brock, nor rebels, as in MacKenzie, simply legends, like the Maid of the Mist. What brought that on?

When we hiked past DeCew House back in June of 2010, I got my Laura Secord facts straight. She was 38 when she brought the warning. There was no cow. She was the mother of 7 children. She was the wife of one of Bulter's Rangers. She'd rescued him after he was wounded at Queenston Heights. Laura Secord come across as being anything but flighty and nervous.

So why the mystery?

Why was she in her 80's before anyone acknowledged the deed? Why, even then, was there ambiguity? You'd think that a government letter saying thank you would do the trick in the eyes of history.

Well, yes, and no. I read my Pierre Burton on the subject and even Pierre, with his meticulous attention to people and motivations and backstory seemed a bit miffed with Laura Secord. The main issue, it seems, is that she never told a clear story concerning how she got the information. In fact, her story changed over the years. It never included a cow or a box of chocolates but the source, ahh the source, that was always protected.

Now I'm personally not sure why that is such a big deal. Where she heard the story of the impending attack is really not important. The fact is that, having heard it and having determined that there was no one else to bring warning, she went. General Fitzgibbons was clear on the fact that she had brought warning. He remained her supporter in this and helped petition that government for that letter of recognition. Yet history balked because she was a woman and because it did not have the source.

If Pierre Burton were still alive I might be tempted to sit down with him and say: Pierre, let's think about this for a moment.

In 1813 the Niagara Penninsula was a mish mash of conflicting loyalties. family ties and friendships crossed the border. Laura's own father had fought the British in the American War of Independence. In 1813 the war in Niagara was shifting from being a military matter to being one involving civilians. Feeling ran high. There were trials for treason. The penalty for treason was death. Such feeling was not likely to dissipate over the course of a generation. People tend to carry grudges.

That means that naming her source Laura Secord most likely would have gotten someone in to a whole lot of trouble. The face of that someone may have been Kith or Kin or distant relation of one or the other but in the end the result would still be the same - bad blood. No one could fault Laura for warning FitzGibbons. She was a decided loyalist. She acted accordingly; however, by naming her source, there she would have acted in error. That would have tarnished her reputation and, most likely, that of her family.
 
Six of Laura's 7 children were girls.

THINK about it.

Of COURSE she never named her source. Sheesh!

Heroism is a strange thing. Bringing the warning was brave. It was heroic.

She was 38. Six of her seven children were girls. She outlived her husband by 27 years. He, wounded in the war, never was rich, nor was she. Her life, lived to the ripe old age of 93 can't have been all tea and roses. She was 85 before she was publicly recognized as a heroine.

Yet, she would have always known the truth of it.

Thankfully, history seems to have made its peace with Laura Secord. The mists of "legend" are lifting. The same thing is happening with Madelaine de Vercheres. I count this as a good thing since I remember clearly that feeling of disappointment I encountered when my heroine got bogged down in ice cream and chocolate.

When I teach my children their heroes and their heroines will shine. Brock Tecumseh and Secord were both products of their time. They made decisions out of the strength of their characters. They turned history. There is nothing ambiguous about that.

http://www.niagaraparks.com/heritage-trail/laura-secord-homestead-history.html
http://www.warof1812.ca/laurasecord.htm
http://www.canadiangenealogy.net/heroines/madeleine_de_vercheres.htm
http://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Daughter_of_Time.html?id=SM5HKlhuOEEC&redir_esc=y

Wormholes - November 20, 2010 - Iroquoia

Wormholes are tunnels through the space/time continuum. One goes in one end and comes out the other elsewhere, or else when, or both. They're much like black holes really, only minus the crushing gravity. The thing about a wormhole though is that it will rarely do the same thing twice and it is plagued by a serious quantity of unpredictability. To ride a wormhole is to play the odds and hope that they will come out in your favour.

Hamilton mountain access is a lot like wormholes.

In theory they are a series of viaducts that connect the lower city with the upper. They have to climb the escarpment to do it of course. Easy enough to do, in theory.

In actuality, your viaduct which looked innocent enough on the top or the bottom will branch, much like a hydra, re-name and re-invent itself, twist, turn and, if you're not paying serious attention, deposit you parsects away from where it was you wanted to be. To add to the fun you must negotiate this thing at as near to the speed of light as possible. I actually think that 9 10ths of access navigation is done by intuition and the seat of one's pants. It is quite difficult to explain HOW one makes it work. It simply works - sort of - most of the time.

So much for the elsewhere. What about the else when?

Once upon a time, long before the dawn of Stelco and Dofasco, Hamilton was a city with Aspirations. Actually, all three of the cities around here had Plans. Ancaster was heavily into milling. Dundas was the actual shipping terminus and economic powerhouse in those days. It had a canal. It had a man made reservoir. It had Webster's Falls. It was going places. A little later else when the railway was invented, took a look at the escarpment around Dundas, calculated it was well over a 4% grade and pulled the plug. .Hamilton had a deeper harbour. Hamilton was destined for industrial mayhem.

However, in the days in and around the War of 1812 Hamilton was pretty. These were the days of Dundurn Castle and city planning on a grand scale. Hamilton has a lot of faded grace that it has done its best to ignore but if you look you can see it peering through the superstructure of the modern era.

One of the legacies of that bygone era, for example,  is a number of stairways that allow pedestrian access from the lower city to the upper. The stairs have an advantage over the roadway in that they are linear. The Bruce Trail crosses them all. It also crosses the actual roadways.

You will recall that the road is typically navigated at speeds exceeding mach 2. I have yet to travel any mountain access by car and see signs saying: "Beware, there is the outside chance that some pedestrian  might actually want to cross the road." Likewise, one does not read in the Bruce Trail Reference Guide anything like: "Expect a sheer drop through two intersecting lines of traffic that will make a jump off Felker's Falls seem like a walk in the park." The two seem determined to ignore each other.


Yet both the access and the stairs get good usage. Even in November there was a lot of pedestrian action up and down those stairs. At lone point we noted a hawk sitting in a tree watching people go up and down and, apparently, bored with it.  In my youth the stairs were made out of railway ties. Now they are metal and equipped with sides that act a lot like luge runs. Why walk when you can slide?

From the mountain you can look out over Hamilton and see the echoes of its faded glory. The trail itself runs along a former rail line. There was once a tram as well. The statue of Queen Victoria in Gage Park, the greenhouses at Gore Park, McMaster University and even the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Bruce Trail itself, all these are echoes of else when. Dundas, Ancaster and Hamilton are anomalies. I have seen enough of Canada to know this for a certainty. Wormholes LOVE anomalies.

Even as a child I was sucked in by the echoes of Hamilton. We'd go shopping downtown at the big department store, the one with the gates across the elevator. Slush drenched poppies could be picked out of the gutters of populous November streets. The market, large, bursting and indoors was a wonder to me as was the St. Vincent de Paul and Amity, second hand stores that pre-dated the Goodwill and Value Village chains.

When we climbed the James Street stairs and saw the imprint of the old city shining through the new it confirmed for me that Hamilton really is a pretty city. It has simply suffered a blight. From the mountain it is pretty clear where best the deploy dynamite should one wish to revive that bygone era.

The hike across Hamilton was also neat because it allowed me to piece together the geography I grew up with relative to the trail itself which has always been a bit of a mystery to me.  We drew even with downtown and there was Jackson`s Square, then the Cathedral of Christ the King, the 403, McMaster Hospital and then finally we were looking over the University campus itself and down into Dundas. Very wormhole when one considers that we walked a mere 10 kilometers and put an entire city behind us. Hamilton`s lower city is constrained by geography. The upper is a sprawling mess but the lower still has charm.

Wormholes being what they are, a funny thing happened on the way to the wedding reception. Yes, at the end of this hike we went to the reception of a friend of Johannes`.We changed from hiking clothes to reception togs in a Chapter`s washroom. Prior to that, since we were hardly in the hinterland, we went to Winners to buy dancing shoes.

Now, just prior to this my husband had won shoes at a Keen Canada promotion at Limehouse Conservation Area. I was coping with the jealousy factor pretty well. Prior to then I had never really known they existed. The fact that having met them I was now in love with them hardly mattered, did it?

Ah, but I am a child of the mountain. All things are possible with wormholes, the cosmos, and Herself's wicked sense of humour. Winners tossed me a pair of Keen hikers. I danced the dance of the comfortably shod, bid adieu to the Green Eyed Monster and marital harmony was renewed.

What's your Cause?

We actually got asked this once when we were telling someone about the end-to-end hike. It was a new concept for me; namely, that we'd have to have a cause in order to be doing such a thing. We are not raising money for anything. We are not even making much of a public profile for ourselves. I suppose our cause is to get our kids motivated and ourselves fit and to enjoy the hike. Does this make us selfish in modern eyes?

Last year Keen Canada had a promotion for the Bruce Trail. For every photograph of boots a person sent to them they donated $5 to the trail. The promotion was a fabulous success. Upwards of $50,000 was raised. Keen held a marvelous gala event at Limehouse Conservation Area, invited everyone and a good time was had by all. It was very effective marketing.

This year Keen again has a promotion. It has been running since August 1 and will end on October 31. There are 10 locations on the trail. For each picture taken at a location Keen will donate $10. To date, and this is the end of September, they have yet to reach the $3,000 mark.

I still think it is excellent marketing. I like this year's format better than last year's. After all, this year we have to work a little. We have to get out there. It worries me that even though 4 of the locations are within easy reach of the GTA so few have gone and participated.

For us, traveling as we do, 8 of the shots were within easy reach. The two on the peninsula were a little far out for a day trip so we decided to go camping on the last weekend in September at Bruce Peninsula National Park. Well and good, only the forecast was dismal.

Dismal is not a relative term. Weather-wise it involves drizzle and, on occasion, a fair bit of rain. It's colour scheme is grey and it's theme is damp. Dismal is one of those unequivocal things, especially when the forecast has not budged for 5 consecutive days.

Fall being what it is, the weather tends to get colder, not warmer and we only had so many free weekends, many of them being tied up in our actual end to end hiking. Also, dismal is, in actuality,  kind of a relative term for us. We spent 8 of 14 days camping in dismal during the month of August. We knew that daily highs of 18 with lows of 12 were not impossible to deal with and, hey, if it was REALLY wet then we could come home on Saturday. We rolled the Pro vs. Con dice and came up with good numbers. No one was going to end up miserable and damp, well, hey, we were used to damp.

I packed the van on Friday during a period of drizzle which was better than packing in the actual downpour. Johannes came home from work in good time. We flowed into the car and headed west.

In Owen Sound the rain and drizzle was sufficient to talk us out of cooking along the way. We hit up a McDonald's. Much of Owen Sound appeared to be doing the same although, to be fair, perhaps they were mainly tourists.We tourists are a veritable plague on occasion.

After Owen Sound the clouds really began scudding across the sky. Unfortunately, our "clearing tend" looked to be removing layers 18 and 19 of a very heavy cloud cover. The rain did not stop. The rain made it known that it was settling in for a while.

We've camped coast to coast in the rain. We've struck camp in the rain. We've pitched the tent in the rain. Once we draped our soaking wet tent over the van to help it dry out a bit before actually putting it up. That was in Buffalo Pound Provincial Park, Saskatchewan. We're not strangers to rain.

On the other hand, we've usually made site-fall when it was still light. In this case dusk tumbled eagerly into dark. On the site next door our friends were hunkered down in their tent. They'd been in since around 2. Clearly it had been a wet time. Nobly, they emerged to help us struggle with tarp and tent. Up both went. We had a hurried discussion while our kids played on the rocks in the dark. Saturday was supposed to be marginally better than Friday had been. No one was miserable. Things were very damp. Someone had dug a trench around the tent site. We deepened it to canal-like proportions.

In the night there was wind. It was high-in-the-treetops wind. It was encouraging wind. It made going out to re-jig the tarp so that it would not dump water directly onto the tent kind of fun. The wind held promise. When, around 4 in the morning, peepers sounded in the swamp, well, things began to seem drier. The night was pitch black.

Morning dawned. The wind had died but so too had the rain. The park is well treed so it is kind of hard to judge the mood of a day at 7a.m. This is the latest one can hope to awaken when camping with 6 excited kids.

Much of the early morning we spent suspending 2 tarps over the cooking area and near the fire-pit. After all, Saturday's forecast had promised rain in the late morning to taper off in the late afternoon. So we figured that the key to drying out post hike was to have seriously good tarping.

Now, in my family an odd phenomenon happened once upon a March. Babi, my grandmother, set out to marry Mark, my second grandfather. The date was March 15th, 2000 and it was the only beautiful and spring-like day of the entire month. Mark died in 2001. He was a beautiful person. If ever a soul was bound for heaven then it was Mark's and to this day we ascribe good weather in the face of all indications to the contrary, to Mark.

It became clear to us that Mark was working overtime.

Saturday was sunny. Saturday was warm. We slithered down to the Devil's Monument and did the boot shots. Then we returned tot he park and the three oldest kids went swimming in The Grotto. Post Grotto we went to scrabble over rocks on the White Beach until the sun began the September plunge and we deemed it advisable to return to camp.  All the dark mutterings of Friday had been worth it in spades. We were having a wonderful time.

Sunday was a repeat of Saturday weather-wise. We were able to pack up dry. Our kids filled in the Parks Canada Xplorer books. These are rather neat. For each park running the program they have activities to do. If completed then the kids receive a certificate and a small token. We had a number of these already from the out east trip. Notably, not one of the Bruce Peninsula activities was even remotely connected with the east, or cliff-like, side of the park. Slide down the rock chimney into the grotto, for example, was just not on the list. Even so, our kids filled out their books and received zipper pulls from the visitors center in Tobermory. This, I might add, is a very nice visitor's center and absolutely chock full of information and good times.


After that there was the Boundary Bluffs boot shot, a lovely picnic in the September sun and a return home. Bruce Peninsula National Park is quite beautiful. On the west side at Dorcas Bay is a lovely beach and not one single life threatening cliff. On the east side, well, there you have the Grotto and all the excitement a plunge off a cliff into freezing cold water of indeterminate depth can offer. However, just north of Wiarton is another campground run by the Ojibway First Nation and, from what we saw, this too is quite beautiful. We will return one day to camp.

Eh voila, we went camping for a Cause. More accurately, we braved dismal weather for a Cause. That the dismal turned into splendid, much as a grub becomes a butterfly, this was the Luck. However, even without this boon we'd have been OK. This we knew because, after all, we know weather. We know ourselves. All the caveats we weigh before a hike were employed and mulled over. We had it covered. Tarps are wonderful things.

Encouragingly, we saw many young people and even a few families out camping that weekend. Some had come up on the Saturday. Some had been there for Friday's rain.The Grotto was far from deserted. Many people lazed on the White Beach. Two parties came by the Devil's Monument, though Boundary Bluffs was deserted.

Not all of them were taking Keen Boot Shots. Some of them were not out there for a Cause. Some were simply having a good old fashioned selfish time. I'm all for that. After all, it's the good times that we pass on to our children.

Music of the Scarp - November 13th - Iroquoia

I am of the opinion that we need a Bruce Trail musical. Whether it be opera or operetta remains to be seen. It can't go so far as to bow to modern convention in musicals, though. It will have to either define a new niche or else stick with older, classical ties. In a pinch a series of ballads might suffice, but surely, one day, they could be strung together to tell the whole tale.

This is the sort of idea you get when walking in the fall with kids in Hallow'een costumes and one (a girl) stands in a dead tree singing opera and the other (a boy) sits at her feet pretending to throw up. If that doesn't do it then there's another point in the same hike whit the girl singing sweetly and a different boy mimes the playing of a punk rock guitar. The juxtaposition, in both instances, was striking. Nature is like that. As the Bruce swings into Hamilton the hiker finds another juxtaposition, nature rams itself firmly up the gullet of urbanization.

We need a haunting  morning hymn for mist. Fog and mist change everything. They take the ordinary and make it extra-ordinary. They cloak things. They provide a means of conveyance for things that always were extra-ordinary.

I really like fog. I like the way it muffles things. I like how it can turn the everyday world into one of secrets. It can, for example, hide the existence of a city the size of Hamilton. I know this is no mean trick because Hamilton is stubbornly pervasive.

Actually, for fog we need more than one tune and in more than one style. Fog is hard to pin down. A theme runs through it but the shape of the theme shifts. When one hikes in mist one really connects with the source of the myths and fables of Eire.

We also need some percussion to denote the various rustles that leaves make. Amid that percussion, strings or xylophone to represent the colour. Deep rich tones here, saturated colour this is, the exercise and the Earth providing an anodyne to the perils of seasonal affective disorder. Thread that into the theme as well, dark and mercurial - lurking.

Holst wrote "The Planets". Lloyd Webber wrote "Cats". Some mix of the two might serve to begin to capture the personalities of this hike as we revolve around each other, tango with the city, drop in and out of our orbits and tend to our shifting constellations. No actual storyboard is required, rather a piece reminiscent of "Fantasia," heavy on the "Night on Bald Mountain" for the fall.

Music too for the concrete. A built edifice is not without its charms. Two lines of bitterly controversial highway snake their way up the mountain, the only straightforward thing about them being that they connect Point A with Point B. Hyperspace need not apply. The trail runs under them, providing an opportunity for storytelling on a moonscape.

Celestial tunes, so long as we are at it, for the parts where the trail takes the hiker above the rooftops. On this hike the lingering fog loaned an almost model like appearance to the housing survey below. Thus might a capricious deity look down on making and scheme to move one figure so, another thusly and then knock over a model garbage can, blame it on a model dog and carry out a model heist. I tell you, Playmobil (t.m.) really alters a person's view of the world.

Needless to say, much music is needed on the subject of water and rock; specifically, water falling, crashing, seeping, dripping, dribbling, dropping and plummeting over rock. As the seasons change the rock does not. The quantity of water falling ebbs and flows but the rock is pretty much timeless.

On this particular hike we came to Felkers Falls. As it turns out, it is quite similar to Tewes Falls, only different. In addition to the Bruce Trail ballad CD the world, I am sure, is in need of a Symphony of Falls. Holst had to deal with nine planets (Pluto being "in" at the time). Hamilton Ancaster and Dundas collectively have something like 100 waterfalls running scherzo in the spring, allegro in the summer and mordant come fall. Then for the ice of winter, ahhh, something clear and crystalline, shot through with the subtle tones of the blues.

Oh, and also a cleaver little ditty concerning all the sheer drop-offs that needs must be avoided. Skipping around them with small hands grasped firmly is kind of fun. Then again, perhaps Pink Flloyd covered that already in "Learning to Fly".

I can also almost hear in my head the rousing chorus of the song "Coming up the Kennilworth Access". This would be in the spirit of a canoeing song, only without the canoe. Alternatively, she'll be tending great big bunions when this ends...

On this hike we also had a session with lose rocks that was truly the stuff upon which opera is built. The fallout, for me, of this encounter, involved spending Sunday and Monday in agony. Short of actual death, opera could not ask for more.

Oh, and just prior to that memorable encounter, we traversed my favorite part of the hike when the trail came across the slopes of an ex ski hill, full of field grass and teasels. Here people were parachuting off the brow of the escarpment. That scene requires light and airy music - the uplifting kind. Ones muscles are tired but the soul hums a happy song.

Ghostlike on the mist during this hike came the imagined sound of bagpipes. This because my father way playing in the Hamilton Santa Claus Parade. We could neither see nor hear it but the knowledge of it sufficed. With bagpipes, I find, this is often the case.
So there we have random images and thoughts for a symphony. Once past Kenilworth, though, we acquired and actual plot. This first became evident when we noted that the trail was taking us beyond our car. In fact, from our vantage point of about 1/3 the way up the escarpment we could see ourselves approach Azsa, draw level with her and then see her begin to recede. Also in recession was the daylight. The score for this part begins happily enough but gets nervous and darker.

Thus did we conclude that the Gage Park Access Trail was no more and thus did we fall directly off the mountain. Insert a bouncy theme here with overtones of 7 league boots.

Now we add a touch of the bizarre in the "Going for the Fetch the Cars" section of the opera. Here the canny Hamilton native returns triumphant and unscathed and also un-followed because the others were using a GPS. This part of the opera will digress significantly into heavy metal or something equally jangly and discordant.

'Cos the thing is, of course, that Hamilton can stymie even the most well meaning GPS. Mountain access and one way streets and, of course, the highly controversial Red Hill Expressway all conspire to hoodwink the unwary. One person was sent to James St. and had to extrapolate her way down Main.

Another, being notorious for double guessing her GPS, had a darker journey to make. Words for this section of the opera will be written in a specially designed language so as to avoid actually swearing on stage. Musical renditions of colourful metaphors will be employed.

Picture if you will the darkness falling on Gore Park, the temperature dropping like a rock and the husband speculating musingly on the probably state of mind of his wife should she A) phone to find out where she is or b) accidentally stumble upon the park. True epics are spun out of just this sort of situation.

The kids played in the park. They played right past dark. When mommy got back she had a flea in her ear, a bear in her hair, no one had parked the shark and no one got any beer - yup, definitely opera (with thanks to Dennis Lee).

Another scene may be written the afternoon before this hike in which the 3 year old threw up and though that the bug in his mouth was causing him to throw up his brain. He was understandably upset. Oh yes, we are in need of a musical dramatization, we really are.

Lessons in History I - Sir Isaac Brock and Tecumseh

I've read quite a bit of history. After all, I hold a major in History from UofT. I've read textbooks. I've read historical fiction. I've suffered through episodes of the CBC extravaganza, "Canada, A People's History". Yup, I am no stranger to history. I actually love history but I have to agree that most history is badly presented by teachers and writers and TV people - even national broadcasters.

Now, this is not always the case. If you read Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy, Potop: (The Flood), then you'll absorb a lot of history and fall in love with and era and a nation. Potop is historical fiction but it is extremely accurate in its descriptions of: motivation, politics, war tactics/battles, collective psychology, individual psychology and geography. This makes the three stories some of the best ever written. They are absolutely not boring. If you want to read Potop in English get the Kuniczak translation - same advice applies to Quo Vadis.

Likewise, the BBC makes some very good historical dramas and pays careful  attention to dress, surroundings and societal norms. It is telling that the Canadian novel Jalna by Mazo de la Roche was given life on TV by the BBC and a hit in Europe whereas here one would be hard pressed to find the series in any library.
 
When you begin to hike the Bruce Trail from the south, going north, you begin at Queenston Heights. You do not have to go and see the Brock Monument. The trail does does not pass by it. However, if you're trying to get the most out of your surroundings then it is worth a look.

The Brock Monument is big. It is actually one of the biggest monuments in Canada. It marks the site of the Battle of Queenston heights and also the site of Isaac Brock's grave. The size of it says its a pretty big deal and yet the only in depth reference to Brock I ever got out of all those years of history was in grade 8.

I had an amazing teacher in Grade 8. His name was Mr. Rayner. He had a wonderful collection of very broad ties which other kids laughed at. He also had a plot in the Dundas cemetery reserved and took us there on a field trip. I remember thinking this was kind of creepy but also a good example of thinking ahead. Mr. Rayner was great at teaching science and history. He knew his stuff. He gave it life.

The two things about Brock that stuck in my head were that he was a tricky man (in that he gained the bloodless surrender of Detroit from G. Hull) and that he was a fair man (in that he gained the loyalty and trust of Tecumseh). I had the sense that he was an interesting man but it was grade 8 and in the early '80's even Mr. Rayner had to go quickly over the War of 1812 since, after all, it was a war with our great friends to the south and, therefore, kind of embarrassing to talk about.

This is part of the problem with history. We read it from the perspective of the present. It takes a lot of imagination to go back even 50 years into a different culture and mindset. We forget our former selves. We concentrate on the now. We do not think ahead, nor do we think behind. Not many of us have grave sites reserved.

Naturally, once we had begun our epic journey, I looked Brock up. I figured that the kids were hiking through battlefields and this was cool, especially if you KNEW you were hiking through battlefields. So I had them learn along with me.

As I said, I had a favourable impression of Brock and what I read confirmed this impression. It strengthened it actually because I noticed that Brock had a keen genius for thinking ahead and also for human psychology. He had no love of Canada. He was a career soldier and a perfectionist. He got sent to the backwater that was Canada and it probably ranked because he would much rather have been bashing Bonaparte on the Continent. Still, he did his job.

The War of 1812 did not begin out of the blue. People saw it coming from a long way off. They were pretty pessimistic about the outcome too and they had reason to be. The Americans outnumbered the British and Britain was more or less committed elsewhere whereas the U.S didn't give a damn whether or not Boney ruled Europe. Everyone knew this. Everyone also knew that the defenses of Upper and Lower Canada were a mess. Brock toured them and concluded that of all the forts only Quebec, maybe, could hold against invasion. He was right too.

This is one of those places where history gets very interesting because here is a case where one man and his decisions shaped the next 200 years of a nation, right up to my day and age. Brock could have shrugged and joined in the general apathy but no, he was a perfectionist. He was a visionary and, I am guessing, he hated losing.

Brock spent two years or so haranguing his superiors and the men under him and putting some heart into them. He wrote that the people around him were demoralized but that, "I, however, speak loud and look big." It worked and it's a fine motto.

Forts strengthened, Brock threw convention aside and went out to negotiate a firm treaty with the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh. He struck hard and fast when the war began. The natives wanted to see victories and the British troops in the Canadas needed to see victories. I think that Brock and Tecumseh were very well matched. In a different time they might well have become good friends.They could never have done so in 1812, even if they had both survived the war but it looks as though they shared mutual respect. Brock was almost certainly ahead of his time. Had he survived the Battle of Queenston heights I like to think Tecumseh's outcome would have been different.

To teach the War of 1812 in grade 8 and not to really take a hard look at Brock is to do a disservice to the students. A nation needs heroes. Okay, so Brock was not Canadian and had no desire to be Canadian, had, in fact, been approved for transfer back to Britain when the American invasion began, but so what? He was here then and his actions made our now. Without Brock we'd not have had Sir John A. We'd not have had the British North America Act. We'd not have "won" the war.The man was snufffed in October 1812 and the work he did prior to that helped the win in 1914. Pretty darn amazing really

Brock was loyal to his government. He was a good pre-Canadian. Plus, in his temperament were certain key traits that one would like to see in one's citizenry. If you're teaching history then you have to teach about heroes. Bad luck for you if your heroes pe-date your constitution.

Sienkiewicz had no such problem. He had it easy. On the other hand, when he wrote Potop his nation no longer existed. If he could write about heroes of a nation that had ceased to exist then surely we can write about hereos of a nation that was going to exist. It's two sides of the same coin, really. Get past the warp and the woof, look at the entire fabric. .

While we're at it, take a look at Tecumseh.

Someone felt strongly enough about Brock that the monument was erected and trended and re-built and buffed and polished and turned in to a National Historical Site. So, yeah, pretty good but what about Tecumseh?

If you poke around the massive granite  base of the Brock Monument you will come across a bunch of sticks tied together with twine. Hanging from the sticks is a bundle of feathers, the odd bit of ribbon and bead and a laminated piece of paper stating that this is a monument to Tecumseh that was erected by the First Nations.

There is a whopping metaphor there and also a very graphic example of how the telling of history is shaped by the victors and by their times. Even now, in 2011, we have not given Tecumseh equal billing. Even the number of streets names after Tecumseh is fewer than those named after Brock. Sure, Brock sought the alliance but Tecumseh honoured it, even after Brock was dead. Tecumseh died almost a year after Brock in October 1813 at the Battle of Moraviantown, left to fight it afetr the British line broke and ran. The British "won" the war, the Shawnee categorically lost it.

The General gets granite, the Chief gets a bundle of sticks and we think the mindset of 1812 is too alien for us to imagine.

That's a pity because our history informs our present. If a nation can be said to have a soul then much of that soul is made up of history. The older the nation the richer the soul. Give a nation enough soul and then finally it might begin to engage our imaginations, take Egypt and Greece, for instance.

I don't think one can engender a feeling of national pride without a good love of national history anymore than one can engender a love of the Earth without going out onto the Earth. When the CBC released "Canada, a People's History" I was quite excited. I made popcorn. I got comfortable. Sadly, I fell asleep long before the first episode was over. Equally sadly, it is difficult to obtain in libraries and prohibitively expensive to buy.

Fortunately, the facts are out there. Sometimes you can come across and old school textbook that actually looks at the history of Canada as a whole. This is nice because while Mr. Rayner was an excellent history teacher he did stick to curriculum and in Ontario you learn Ontario's history. In Quebec you learn Quebec;s history and so on for each of our 5 regions in this country. This is about as effective as learning the biology of the human body by only studying the liver.

So, we're stringing together some history as we hike. We string more together as we travel coast to coast though Canada. We collect history like beads of wampum. We get the broad picture. We get that history unfolds according to cultural norms and also according to geography. At the end of the process I hope that we'll have  grasp of Canadian history that is vibrant and entire.

Just because we were taught history badly does not mean that we have to continue to teach it badly. Maybe, if we stick at it, we'll glimpse the national soul. Maybe we'll walk tall and think big.

http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=36410
http://www.warof1812.ca/tecumseh.htm

Plan B - June 4th - Iroquoia

Allow me to point out right off the bat that Plan B is the title of a very good book by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. The very good book is part of a very excellent series.

In general, people consider fear to be a negative stimulus. Still, for some reason, they tend to seek out the thrill-factor. Amusement parks know this. They make a good income on this fact.

This presents a lovely dichotomy. Your average person does not like to be afraid and yet pays good money to ride the "Drop Zone". What gives?

Me, I think it has to do with predictability. I think that people have no problem with being afraid so long as they also believe they are safe. It's like watching a movie. You know the good guys will win and that nobody really ever dies.

Now, the problem with predictability is that in daring a predictable outcome one can never really come way feeling brave. It's a bit like signing on for the crucifixion and knowing for sure that the resurrection is in the bag. There is not a whole lot of glory in that kind of deal.

I've never really liked amusement parks. I find them artificial and noisy. That said, I experienced one of the most self-defining moments of my life at the C.N.E when I was 12. My grandmother put us on the gondola ride thinking it was a round trip deal. It was a long ride. It was also 1 way. So I had to be brave and I had to be smart and I followed the gondola line back, on foot, with my 9 year old brother in tow and I was successful. I got us through. I developed a Plan B.

In my late teens I decided if I was actually experiencing fear in any given situation then it must be dire indeed. By then I had figured out that fear is self-limiting. The trick was to get competent at things so that the little stuff would not hold me back. It made good sense to limit the controlling aspect of fear and keep it lurking over in the corner along with the bug-eyed-monster.

This policy has served me well over the years. It gets me places. It encourages me to keep on learning and to be flexible. You may remember the T.V. show "McGyver". I admired the character for more than his looks.

On Saturday we went out to Mt. Nemo to pick up our hike. I was out with Donna and my brother and the kids, but no dog. The bother was wrangling two dogs. We figured 3 adults, 4 kids and 2 dogs was about right. The weather forecast had promised a p.o.p of 60% with thunderstorms. I am not an advocate of hiking in a storm, but thunderstorms being what they are and about 2k between each car parking spot, well, we figured we could wait them out easily enough. We all knew that p.o.p 60% is no big deal.

We set out in a light rain. The high was supposed to be 23'. Rain is good in that instance. It keeps the bugs down.

The rain persisted through about 2.5k of well-fenced and tall soggy grass. The paige wire fencing on the quarry side of the trail and on the road side of the trail was impressive.The aggregate is clearly taking Safety to the nth degree, although a paramedic would need wire cutters to get though to an injured hiker, the likelihood of impulsively running out into traffic or into the quarry is nil.

As the trail left the fence run to turn right and head down Blind Line, so also did the weather turn. The wind picked up. Bits of new made  leaf snapped off the trees. The temperature dropped slightly.

A thunderhead cruised into view. It was not the friendly sort. It was the jagged-edged toothy sort. The sky was not precisely green but it was thinking green thoughts. There was nothing casual about those thoughts either.

My brain began doing calculations that involved the merits of lying in a ditch and the most efficient way of getting back over the 2.5k to Azsa (the van). This was when the lightning hit and the thunder sounded at the same time (never good) and my youngest child froze, screeched and jumped into my arms. Then the rain came sheeting down.

Holding the kid, mindful of the other 3 kids, and 2 dogs, we watched two cars splash by. The smell of ozone wafted by. We were spared the necessity of stepping out in front of the next car by the fact that it stopped voluntarily and the young man behind the wheel offered succor. At the same time a sharp whistle beckoned us over to a nearby garage.

My brother was dispatched to get the van and the rest of us ran for cover. Two very nice men were in the garage discussing wood and woodworking projects. "Bad day for a hike," the opined. "No kidding!" we agreed.

Andrew arrived with Azsa, allowing us to beat a hasty retreat back to Mt. Nemo through the driving rain with many thank you's for the rescue.We waited out the rain. We noted that a storm of that intensity at 11 a.m. meant some baaaaad karma. Interestingly, the man in the car had stopped because it was good karma. Ah, balance.

The rain tapered off. We decided to hike another 3k to Kilbride.

They were a nice 3k. We crossed Bronte Creek in full flood. I recognized it. Bronte Creek is the site of another defining moment of my youth, one involving a Rover troop, a Ranger unit, a kayak, and some canoes. Some day I will visit Bronte Creek in the dry of the fall but for now we seem fated to meet in the spring.

In Kilbride, we found the world's safest, and most temporary, road hockey venue. A huge pine tree had snapped in the middle and come crashing down across the road. About a hundred meters past that was an uprooted tree, also blocking the road. We began to suspect that perhaps the weather forecast had not been entirely accurate.

Hospitality was again offered, this time by a woman allowing us to use her washroom as we dithered as to whether or not to continue. She confirmed the conculsions we'd reached following the ozone-sniffing. That strike had been darn close, perhaps even over the pond on the corner of Blind Line. We'd been hiking during an actual severe t-storm watch. Oops.

As I said, I categorically do NOT advocate knowingly doing such a thing. However, as with any situation involving adversity there are positive points to be scored if you do inadvertently end up  in one. I think this is a big advantage to adverse situations. Boring ones seldom yield fresh points of view.

Having done it, and talked about it, I find people's reactions interesting.

In Poland if someone rescues you from your erroneous assumption that there would surely be room at a B&B in Leba (after laughing a lot), by lending you a tent and setting you up with the relative of a relative who runs a venue called "Stork Camping" then the mood will be mellow. There'll be a sense of shared adventure. People will be curious. They'll want the whole story. They might even ply you with tea. There'll be a shared understanding that hey, plans go awry but enacting them is preferable to staying home under the bed. Then again, if someone in Poland tries to keep a fellow from jumping off a bridge and fails then that someone will shrug it off and figure, his funeral.

On the other hand, I have just read a story about a woman who was sailing and got stranded for a week on an island and all the comments are negative. They all center around forcing people to be safe.

I have nothing against safe. I do have a problem with forcing. This is because it is my opinion that since 9-11 society has been moving increasingly towards fascism in North America and fascism is baaaad karma. It is fostered by people who are afraid to do anything EXCEPT abide by the rules and who, consequently, seldom do anything brave. They seek to achieve control by forcing people to abide by limits. They get right pissed off about failing to stop people from jumping off bridges. They seldom allow for individual wants or needs or capabilities.

Not good.

We, for example, knew what we were doing. We wisely decided not to continue hiking past Kilbride because the kids were wet and getting cold. Also, the sun was not coming out. More rain was moving in. We knew our parameters. We knew how far we could push them. We did not intentionally seek to be out dodging lightning. We're pretty practical people, really.

I am raising children. I have to chose what kind of characters I wish to help forge. I am not interested in keeping them under the bed. We do not own a Nintendo. I have to chose challenges for my children to face, ones I can share. The sequel to Plan B is called I Dare.

On Sunday morning my 8 year old son went out and got the pine tree pelt he had dragged home from Kilbride. It is almost as tall as he is. He could and did wear it like a coat of armor.  "What do you want to do with that?" I asked.

"I was thinking maybe we could nail it to the wall and it would fill our house with the scent of pine," he said.

He was quite serious. I have that sort of house.

My youngest son woke up early Sunday morning. He looked at me and made sure I was awake. "Mommy," he said solemnly, and with great pride, "I am brave."

Power of Siblings - April 2, 2011 - Iroquoia

Sibling rivalry is an odd mechanism. One would think it would ease up with the passage of time, what with no longer competing for the attention of the same parent, getting on in the world and so on, but it surfaces in odd places. Sometimes this can be a good thing, sometimes not. I wonder how much of it is simply a hind brain sort of thing and how much is mitigated by sober second thought. I mean there is no point in comparing your life to that of a sibling on an entirely different plane, unless maybe you hate your life. If one of the people jumping off the proverbial cliff is a sibling then are you more inclined to jump too?

Suppose, just suppose, that one sibling likes catching snakes. No one knows why exactly. She has had a thing for snakes all her life. She finds them kind of groovy. Her mother, who HATES snakes has had to suffer many times as the daughter dragged home a snake and said, look! She doesn't think twice about picking them up.

Once she picked up a snake in Kazimierz Dolny, Poland. Imagine, if you will,  a bright green hill atop which is perched a ruin of a castle in bone white. Girl picks up snake and shows snake to boy. Boy turns as pale as the stone behind him. Poland actually has a venomous snake. Who knew? As it turned out, Poland also having ten trillion boring ole garter snakes, no tragedy ensued.


Now, true, the Bruce Peninsula also has a poisonous snake. Yon snake-loving-sibling knows all about it. Yes, the mighty Massasagua Rattler is not to be trifled with - if you can find one that is. In fact, Dennis Lee wrote a poem about it: Mississauga Rattlesnakes eat brown bread/ Mississauga Rattlesnakes fall down dead/If you catch a caterpillar feed him apple juice/If you catch a rattler, turn him lose! Great skipping rhyme as it turns out.


Yer snake-loving-sibling KNOWS these things. She even feels an affinity for the poor ole Massasagua and wishes it well, wherever it is. Being a marginal life form on the brink of extinction slightly better documented then the Sasquatch has GOT to suck.


Anyway, lets suppose you have such a sibling. I mean she's been under the Mill Street bridge in Dundas in the fall and seen snakes puppy piling on the concrete to keep warm. She thinks its cute.


Yeah, OK, point being that you are the brother and you're three years younger and you're a GUY, right? Right!


So, there we were hiking and everyone was suddenly all knotted up looking intently over at something. Had to be neat, yeah? As I drew near, down went my brother in pursuit of the something. As I drew nearer my heart thrilled. Snake! Oh yes! Snake in the early springtime = piece of cake!


Being cognizant of the pitfalls of sibling rivalry, I let my brother have at it. After all, he saw it first. Trouble was, he was not at all sure he wanted to catch a snake. Trouble was we had 6 kids who wanted to be up close and personal with the snake, to say nothing of me - Ye Snake-Loving-Sibling (see above).


Ergo, when a second snake made an appearance, thereby distracting the bro, and my hubby pointed out Snake #1 slouching off into the leaf mold, I went after it and I nabbed the thing. We Snake-Loving-Siblings do that sort of thing, gently but firmly, just behind the head. Your garter snake it not poisonous but it will fang you, most especially when mowing tall grass, just saying.

'Course sibling rivalry being what it is, the bro nabbed his 3 seconds later. Yes, sibling rivalry can be a bane but it also has its uses. I mean sometimes we all need a little motivation to get us going. I ponder that fact from time to time because this brother of mine has not seen much of me these past 10 years.We both have children. His oldest is 6 months older than my twins. One can't help but think about that.


His kids have not been out as much as mine have. His go to daycare, mine are homeschooled. He bought more into the bubble-wrap school of thought than I ever did but, of late, the bubbles have begun to pop. Thus, here he is, out with me and mine and also two other families, neither of which saw anything wrong with braving an Alberta Clipper across the top of Toronto for 4.4k of winter hiking.It sort of makes a person think hard about the benefits of re-defining "normal".


To have hung back and not caught that snake, that would have been bad. To have hung back and not hiked with us, that would have been bad also. The point is, we are siblings. We grew up together. We have much in common. Maybe I have a thing for snakes that he doesn't share but we both know that hiking is cool. We both really like to be out here. 

This was an interesting hike for us. It took us through our hometown. We passed the school and the church. We walked up Sydnham Hill. I'm not convinced that any of we children have a deep and abiding love of the town to Dundas but I do think we all love the escarpment. The entire charm of Dundas rests in the way it is nestled into the valley. Lucky for us that we grew up here and that much of the "mountain" was conservation land. Lucky for us that our parents took us out there. Good on us that we're taking our own children out there. 


I like to think that my brother is easing up a little on the bubble wrap. He got himself wrapped up in an urban cocoon. It nearly morphed him into something ikky. As he breaks out of the chrysalis, it is better that he learn to fly than to creep. We all have different definitions of flying, I grant you, but I am hopeful of having his children along on a hike in the not too distant future. 


Rivalry of any kind can be a very negative thing. In the age old dynamic of loser and winner, there are often hurt feelings; however, rivalry can also be positive. It can affirm our sense of self and it can make us brave.