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.