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.

If You Go Out to the Woods Today

This is the beginning line of the song about the Teddy Bear's Picnic. It is a catchy tune. The lyrics are appealing. I've heard it sung by Sharon Lois and Bram, I have heard it sung by my husband and I have heard it sung by the King's Choir of Cambridge. It has lasting appeal. It is one of those songs that an adult can hear over and over again without going immediately crazy and looking around for the off switch.

The song suggests that once upon a time people DID go out to the woods for such things as picnics. It is a nursery song and like all such songs can't have been too far off the mark in terms of plausibility. I mean of COURSE the teddy bears have picnics in the woods. Where else would they picnic?

We have been invited to a birthday party tomorrow. What with it being too rainy to hike, even for us, we've spent the morning indoors making presents. Yes, making them because the theme for this party is gifts made, re-used or recycled. I LOVE this theme. It appeals to me. It makes just as much sense as a Teddy Bear's picnic. I shall almost certainly adopt it as one of our own come the next big birthday bash in this neck of the woods.

We only have the one birthday bash. Our kids are all Easter babies, born within 2 weeks (and a number of years) of one another so a big bash just makes sense. I was a summer baby. I had back yard parties featuring various relatives and a fantastic cake made by my mother. My brother, born 3 days before me, and almost 3 years later, shared this party and I have always liked the concept.

We've been to our share of parties. A friend of mine lives in Toronto. She's my eco-friendly build a tire house friend so it was with some sense of fatalism that she caved into the birthday bash mania of the Toronto set. We've been to the bowling alley, seen the clown, visited the museum, done the indoor playground and even seen a movie. There was one house party in all of that and it was the best one. One could tell by how happy all the kids were. Problem with the exported birthdays, I find, is a lot of wasted pizza and cake and no regard at all for whoever has to clean up. They're somewhat artificial in my opinion and since they all follow the same script, well, one can get jaded even at the age of eight it seems.

Recently we went to an I'm a Year Old! party. The theme was "Curious George". When it was over, upon seeing a crumpled piece of paper and a few cake crumbs on the floor the child's mother wondered aloud if she could persuade the cleaning lady to come in on a Sunday afternoon. This family, I stress, has a dog and I do not exaggerate when I say a few. So, call me unfeeling but were I the cleaning lady I'd not feel at all ashamed of adding a hefty surcharge to the bill.

We made our debut on the party scene when my son turned 5. In honour of the occasion I draped a drop sheet under the table and let a bunch of boys go wild with some baking soda and vinegar. Also they had goo with which to make volcanoes. Surprisingly, some held back. They were worried about getting their hands dirty. Still, it was a good party.

The year after that my husband led a treasure hunt while I recovered from a C-section. That went well so we treasure hunted again the following year. Then, in search of something different, we made popguns out of dowel and PVC tubing. Last year it was a spy theme with black light and a laser ray maze. This year my sons asked for a party in the woods.

We've had some pretty cool parties but we had never exported one before. There is an advantage to catering out of the house in that one can set up things like laser mazes in advance. Also, if it rains then one has the option of running inside.

In this case the preferred venue was a ravine through which flowed a stream - the jump-able kind. Any other kind in spring is not a great birthday party venue, or canoeing venue, trust me on this one. The weather was holding out for about 12 degrees with the chance of rain. We decided to give it a go.

All our parties are open-ended things. We have friends who are local and friends who are not. So we tend to begin around 1 in the afternoon and then continue on through dinner. Dinner has always been make-it-yourself pizza. It's easy and the dough is refrigerator tolerant.

I find that in planning a birthday party a nice balance between organized activity and free play is desirable. Our boys wanted a survivor-man theme. We nodded thoughtfully and then went out to buy some rope.

Thus it was that on Saturday morning my children were all busy applying fabric to bits of broken concrete in order to make "fish" The fish had wire looped around them so that they could be speared. Yes, speared. Son #2 was not into hooking fish. He was into spearing 'em.

Now, what I love about kids is that if you tell one that a rock wrapped in fabric is a fish then it is a fish. No doubt about it. My youngest son accompanied us out to the woods that afternoon clutching his fish firmly while we tried out various methods of hanging the rope. After Son#2 had splashed in the stream and all kids were nice and soaked we had a rope that swung halfway over the stream and also, in my head, the concept of a rope ladder. Thus did we return home, dripping, son #3 still clutching his fish.

The woods trip also yielded 2 pieces of plastic, bright yellow, about half a meter by half a meter that someone had left behind. A swift moment with google on Friday night had revealed a couple of nifty initiative games, one of which involved a radioactive field and having to cross it using 3 shields. In the yellow plastic I had 2 of my 3 shields. We used an eco-shopping bag as the third.

That night we made more fish. My husband speared candy bugs on a stick and threw a few other items into a goody bag. There is no escaping goody bags. Ours tend to the edible side and the sparse. 20 goody bags is a lot of goody. The kids sat down with a bunch of toothpicks and painted them various colours using markers. There were going to represent bugs inside a toxic waste circle. The trick, of course, was to remove the toxic waste in order to be able to hunt the bugs. Some toothpicks were bright pink, others brown. This was an exercise from a David Suzuki book to show the effectiveness of camouflage. We loaded everything into backpacks and awaited the dawn.

Early in April my oldest son turned 10. On that day we were hiking. In honour of the occasion my husband and I together made a 10 layer Escarpment Cake, with green icing. Layer 10 was a Prince Polo wafer bar and a vanilla sprinkle doughnut from Tim Horton's. The cake was chocolate and vanilla layered with Nutella and raspberry jam. It sat in its decadence on top of a cookie sheet in the back of the van until lunch at which point it was cut up with a swiss army knife and handed out. The hill, we later discovered, is a Burlington ghost hill, complete with alien sightings and magnetic hill. Ignorance is bliss? Perhaps.

The other thing we did that walk was to hang various presents from trees. The treasure hunt theme dies hard. I am OLD, Brother William, and I still go for a good treasure hunt.

For the birthday bash we made another Escarpment Cake. Again, we put it in the van to await the end of the party. Some of the kids were leaving directly from the woods so we figured this was a good way to end the birthday party proper. Picnics really are not all that complicated. Beginners should always begin with the tailgate kind, in my opinion, because they are stress-free. Advanced tail-gate picnics involve picnic tables in parks. Advanced picnicing involves plastic dollar store goblets that look sort of like glass, juice that looks sort of like wine and a flotilla of canoes, but this is another story.

Back at the woods my husband laid a hunt for "tokens" (popsicle sticks with symbols on them) and I set the fish, strung the rope and laid out the climbing net. We had out toxic waste circle from the day before neatly marked out with bright orange yarn We were ready.

Up the stream from the bridge came Johannes with the guests and ta dah! one party was in full swing.

My kids tell me it was the best one of theirs ever. I actually agree mainly because it is the first one in which they took an active role in planning and building the props. I hope this trend continues on into next year because, frankly, right now we are out of ideas.

Well, mostly...

These things also have a template. It goes something like this:

• Keep the activities simple. Remember that string and black light can entertain for HOURS so moving from one activity to another at 15-20 minute intervals is undesirable. In fact, I have been to Beaver camps that do that and frankly, I find it annoying. There is no time to actually ENJOY an activity on that sort of a schedule.
• Getting hung up on food is inadvisable - make lots of cake. Have emergency rations in case someone actually does calm down enough to actually want to eat and relax.
• Trust your guests to have a good time. Simply getting out of the movie theatre script and into the home party script will be exciting enough to provide for a memorable experience.
• Make your activities ones that will engage the interest of an adult or two because you want a co-operative spirit here between kids and adults. You want mingling of the mildly interested but non-intrusive kind. 
• Have fun. Stress is not fun and it does not count if at the end of the day someone is in tears.

I have yet to find at which age the child will want to branch out on his own and export the party to a friend's basement. I suppose that day is coming but that too is another story. Until that time comes, we'll stick with the woods.

Family in Snowstom - The Story - January 15, 2011

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.