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?
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