A short time ago the picture on the left was entered into a photo contest for the Bruce Trail. It was short-listed as one of the top ten picks but it did not make the final cut. It will end up in the winter issue of the magazine, but not on the front cover. I am not a photographer by trade but I am quite excited. It proved an extra bonus to a good hike.
The selection of the picture was, an a way, a catalyst for writing this blog. I had been wanting to begin one for almost a year but kept putting it off. However, when the picture was selected I decided that the story behind it was worth sharing. Thus the blog and this is the story.
We're Canadian. Canada experiences winter in different ways. Southern Ontario has been known to experience largely snow-free winters but not a maritime climate. Arctic Canada knows several different words for snow and likely a number for cold that include some highly creative hyperbole. However, no one really ever gets to escape snow altogether unless they migrate to Florida.
By the time we are 10 we have a pretty good idea of what manner of hats or mitts or layers we will need to weather any given winter day. Our personal knowledge of slush will vary according to our latitude but we all tend to agree that it is lousy. Winter is a defining feature of being Canadian. One could even call it a unifying factor.
That said, it is a first for me to have been traveling in a van in which the children were complaining about each other blocking their view of the snowplow.
There are certain truths that go along with winter in southern Ontario. One of them is that there is a snow belt near Buffalo, one near Kingston and another in the Georgian Triangle, this being the land between Lake Ontario, Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. The highway just south of Barrie through Innisfil is especially notorious.
Barrie itself has short on and off ramps which ever since I was little and visited my Great Aunt Grace off oro-line 10 has proved challenging to traffic, especially traffic that does not know about the short on and off ramps. It takes a bit of living in the Barrie area to actually figure this out. I mention it here as an aside for people new to the area or traveling through en route to cottage or wherever. There is a reason behind the Barrie Triangle and through traffic does best in the middle or far lanes.
These are Known Things. Therefore, when Donna called from Toronto on Friday and told me that an Alberta Clipper was supposed to hit the GTA I looked up the environment Canada website and noted that there were no warnings out and that the snowfall for Barrie was to be minimal. Donna informed me that she knew of which she spoke. The same thing had happened the weekend before and made the 401 somewhat tricky. Not unaware that Toronto had, in fact, been hit harder in general than we had all winter long I conceded to the argument that we might want to move the hike start time back from 9 to 10am. For a forecast of -3 and light snow in Hamilton, it seemed a bit wimpy to cancel altogether. After all, we're Canadian and we have the parkas to prove it.
You will note that the family in the picture is from Innisfil. We are from a small survey near Horseshoe Valley Ski Hill, Donna and her crowd hail from Ajax and Markham and the third family hiking is from Elmvale. None of us are local to Hamilton. We all had e-mail confirmation of a "go" on Saturday morning except the family from Elmvale, they being on a dial-up connection.
More of a concern than driving through the snow was how to make the trip worthwhile in the event that we did not hike far. We had an afternoon plan to go tobogganing. The Elmvale family had a date with their grandmother in Hamilton and my brother, from Dundas, was joining us for this hike.
This in itself is interesting. His children are 2 and 4 but his method of raising them is more by the book than mine and involves considerably more bubble-wrap. He grew up with me in a family that drove to Montreal in snowstorms to visit our grandparents and, lately has been exploring life outside the bubble-wrap but this hike, which he did without the kids, was going to prove an education.
Our plow, as it turned out, gave us ample time to admire it since we picked it up on the 400 near Forbes Rd. and did not lose it until Dunlop Street in Barrie. The 10am start time was looking like pure genius and, indeed, we got to the Tim Hortons at Mohawk and Scenic Dr, just as the clock struck 10.
Tim Hortons was about getting coffee and also about getting our kids into their snowsuits. This is a key concept. If you are traveling in the winter remember that the car has a heater. So you don't want your kids perspiring and then being wet by the time they have to go outside. In the Tim Horton's we found the family from Innisfil suiting up THEIR kiddies, having already encountered my brother at the start point.
Fortified and equipped, we headed out to the foot of Scenic Dr. There we found Donna and the GTA crowd. There was no sign of the Elmvale family and the windchill was nasty. Accordingly, we headed into the woods and left the hopscotchers to their task of dropping a car down at Tiffany Falls (the 4.4k point). By the time my fingers warmed up, the cars had been dropped and the Elmvale family had joined us.
This sort of thing really warms my heart since I am not related to the other two families on this hike and yet we are, all three of us, clearly not bubble-wrap types. As an exercise in Educating the Brother one could not ask for anything better. We ended up packing the twins, with one stuffed into the front of my snowsuit and we ended up doing only the 4.4k but we did it with panache and we had fun.
To underscore the added thrill of the drive down, the trail passed over the 403 where we had a great view of the highway we had driven up and all the motorists who were clearly not enjoying the snow at all. We waved cheerfully at the motorists and on the other side of the overpass came to stairs of the same ilk as those on Hamilton Mountain. Layers of snowsuits make good padding for using the sides of these stairs as luge runs.
As a group we do not, as a rule, ascribe to the notion that one ought to blend in with nature. For one thing, if you dress your kid to blend in too much then you might lose it over an overhang on an overpass. For another, this is a well photographed project we're engaged in so we like to look good against the background. On this hike we had a lot of white and grey and the lacy green of balsam fir.
We had Astra, of Innisfil in her lovely wooly coat in bright hues of pink and orange and blue. It was striped. It was bold. We had Pam of Markham in a navy blue duffel coat and Donna did have white on her jacket but the purple detracted from it quite handily. We had Grant, one of the GTA, in a bright red anorak
So when Grant stepped back a pace and slipped on the edge of the trail he was simply gorgeous as he turned caber-wise to land on a shoulder and his pack where he then slid 30cm's or so before he began to lose his posture. It was a truly lovely fall.
Other falls were not as artistic. I fell while carrying a twin,gauging the pitch on an incline and reaching for my camera and contemplating picture angles. My brother discovered that his niece is heavy on a particularly nasty incline above Tiffany Falls. I slid down a series of terraced stairs with Kolya on my lap. My son is firmly convinced that I will carry him out of the Apocalypse, should it arrive in his lifetime.
Hiking, as I have said, is not really high tech. Negotiating the path, this takes skill. Being ready and aware of local conditions, this also takes some intelligence. We called it quits at 4.4 k and went back to my father's house for lunch, bagpipes and afternoon tobogganing.
The toboggan hill off Old Ancaster Road is one I know from my youth. I learned how to steer a toboggan there and also everything I know about toboggan hill etiquette (yes, there is such a thing). Never walk up the slide. Always clear the slide as fast as possible, lighter kid up front and so on and so forth. This was my first visit back to it as an adult.
It came home to me, as it often does on these hikes, that the land does not really change. It also marks the soul. The pitch of the hill has not changed. The ravine to the left as you slide down has not changed. The hill is a small slice of permanence on a swiftly tilting planet (Madeline L'Engle). There were fewer people on the hill than I remember from the 1980's. I would like to think this was due to the weather but I have my doubts. There was a father there with a 5 year old kid and "build and snowman" on his agenda. He had to scrap this item due to a persistent lack of packing snow.
Land marks the soul. It was deeply satisfying to me to be out there with my children. It was satisfying to my brother and to me to see how the Chedoke Ski hill connects to Tiffany Falls. Walking the trail through Hamilton Ancaster, Dundas and Burlington is a bit like watching each and every step of a magic trick. Even after one knows how it is done the magic remains. The trail is stitched over an aggressively urban landscape and, as such, is a bit of a chimera.
That is the story behind the picture. The saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words and most probably are. However, if the words do not get resolved then the actual story gets lost. In some cases this may be a good thing but this particular picture is not generic. It is an integral part of a bigger story, the one which will keep on unraveling as we go.
My brother, for example, has peeled back a layer of bubble wrap. The mommy in the picture has taken up roller derby. You can read her blog at rollerderbyvirgin.com. The walk which began at Queenston Heights continues. It has a number if good stories in it already, a few thousand pictures, and good times to come.
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