A triptych of essays set in — or on the road to — Ontario’s “sweetwater sea”
Part One: Day-Tripping Flowerpot Island, the Bruce Trail, The Grotto, and Overhanging Point on southern Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula
The Bruce Peninsula in southern Ontario separates the cooler waters of Georgian Bay from the rest of Lake Huron’s “sweetwater sea,” and makes of the Bay an unofficial, sixth Great Lake. It’s the kind of iconic Canadian landscape that drove artists such as Arthur Lismer and the other Group of Seven painters wild.
The rugged, 100-kilometre finger of pine-studded shale and limestone, set amidst the granite and precambrian rock of Shield country, points northward from the rolling hills of southwest Ontario’s farm country, all head-high corn and sulphur-bright canola, through Boreal Shield country and towns with names like Kapuskaping. North north north, to Moosonee and the wetland plains of Hudson Bay and, somewhere way up there, the beluga-backed Arctic Ocean…
Candid travel photographs in the cold and the rain from my – ongoing – summer trip to Toronto, Ontario, a.k.a. (among others) CondoToronto – and rightfully so! Toronto often gets knocked for being an ersatz city, lacking any real sense of place. That “There is no there there,” as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland. In this photo essay I go looking for T.O.’s genius loci – and find it there, among the historic brick buildings and glass-and-steel skyscrapers. https://medium.com/@aaronpaulson/toronto-kills-me-a8e9b799da5
Day-Tripping Flowerpot Island, the Bruce Trail, The Grotto, and Overhanging Point on southern Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula
The Bruce Peninsula in southern Ontario separates the cooler waters of Georgian Bay from the rest of Lake Huron’s “sweetwater sea,” and makes of the Bay an unofficial, sixth Great Lake. It’s the kind of iconic Canadian landscape that drove artists such as Arthur Lismer and the other Group of Seven painters wild.
The rugged, 100-kilometre finger of pine-studded shale and limestone, set amidst the granite and precambrian rock of Shield country, points northward from the rolling hills of southwest Ontario’s farm country, all head-high corn and sulphur-bright canola, through Boreal Shield country and towns with names like Kapuskaping. North north north, to Moosonee and the wetland plains of Hudson Bay and, somewhere way up there, the beluga-backed Arctic Ocean…
Leastways, that’s how it seemed to me some 25 years ago, when my buddy D. and I spent a week on the Bruce Trail, from Tobermory to Lion’s Head. During the day, we hiked the little-used trail, looking down from the rocky limestone escarpment through cold clear water which faded from yellow and emerald to the deep, dark blue of open water. At night we slept wild, pitching our tent in ruts and gullys off-trail, never an open fire and always breaking camp by dawn. Not that there were many people to stumble upon us. We had the rocky beaches and scenic overlooks such as Overhanging Point and the Grotto almost to ourselves. We starved on the thin gruel of freeze-dried “mountain stew.” D. froze at night, wrapped only in a blanket, and stepped on a massasauga rattlesnake.
It was, is, one of the best trips I’ve ever taken.
I’ve returned to Georgian Bay over the years, mostly in canoe and kayak.
Each time, I love the blue depth of sky and water, the seal-smooth rocky islets, those solitary pines, and the squalls that blow along the horizon.
But things have changed. Overhanging Point and the Grotto are still there, of course, but the trickle of visitors from nearby Cyprus Lake Provincial Park has turned into a flood of families and weekend partiers, city kids blasting their boomboxes on the trail from the camp to the water. Two new national parks, Fathom Five and Bruce Peninsula, have brought improved access and facilities, which in turn has lured a new breed of visitor to the area. Visitors from China and India and the rest of Canada arrive in honeymoon couples, in triads, in nuclear and extended families.
And the natives are restless, though for different reasons. When R. and I visited this summer, “For Sale” signs flagged a gas station, a bakery, and a waterfront home. “This might be a paradise for you,” one local, a student from nearby Owen Sound, told me, but winters are really long. “Things… happen,” she said. Fair enough. As Jim and Doug, owner/operators of Bear Cove B&B explained, a severe winter storm can leave the people around the town of Tobermory, and the peninsula’s tip, snowbound, completely cut off, for a week at a time.
Fair enough. “Been there, wouldn’t want to live there,” as they say.
Still, the Bruce Peninsula a scenic, rugged piece of landscape, as you can tell from the pictures below. But Canada wild and woolly it ain’t, not really. Debriefing back in Tokyo, R. tells me she enjoyed driving the “endless” countryside of southern Ontario on the way to the Peninsula, but wouldn’t put the landscape along the west shore of Georgian Bay in the same category as the Rocky Mountains, say. As for me, I’d love to do some more kayaking, or perhaps sailing, among the pine-studded islets of this sweetwater sea, but as for the Peninsula section of the Bruce Trail, that trip best works as a memory of a younger, fitter, more ambitious iteration of me, still at the start of my adventures.
It’s still a scenic, rugged piece of landscape, as you can tell from the pictures below. But Canada wild and woolly it ain’t, not really. Debriefing back in Tokyo, R. tells me she enjoyed driving the “endless” rolling countryside of southern Ontario on the way to the Peninsula, but wouldn’t put the landscape along the west shore of Georgian Bay in the same category as the Rocky Mountains, say. As for me, I’d love to do some more kayaking, or perhaps sailing, among the pine-studded islets of this sweetwater sea, but as for the Peninsula section of the Bruce Trail, that trip best works as a memory of a younger, fitter, more ambitious iteration of me, still at the start of my adventures.
Lake Huron
Lake Huron Shoreline
Flowerpot Island
Bruce Trail: The Grotto and Overhanging Point
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What more to say? A gallery of tree portraits taken mostly in Japan (a few from Kingston, Ontario). All of these pictures were taken with an Olympus: either e-p1, e-p3, or e-p5 (what can I say? I like the Olympus Pen cameras!), with a Lumix 20mm, or m.Zuiko 25 or 45, all prime natch…
A classic bit of slapstick from Abbott and Costello…
Until recently at least, three places stand out in Canada for Japanese visitors: Banff, Niagara Falls, and PEI (Anne of Green Gables still carries weight here). Last summer I took R. to Banff; this summer we made it to Niagara Falls. Continue reading “Niagara Falls”→
Around me a pod of kayakers lies beached in their sleeping bags as the drama of moon and stars and clouds plays out overhead, and I wonder what this ever-changing weather has in store for us. Part-way into a week-long trip hopping among Georgian Bay’s 30000 islands, lying on an exposed piece of pink granite, water to the horizon in front and behind, I can’t for the life of me think what day it is.
Kayaks carry us into a world measured in geologic time as we pass rocks older than dinosaurs. We wake with the sun and linger over breakfast. When the wind whistles in the trees or lightning flashes along the waterlogged horizon, we dash for shore and squat on our life jackets. When the sun shines, we play in the water like kevlar-skin seals.
We invented time to describe experience. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In class, my students read Robert Frost’s poem “Nature’s First Green Is Gold” as an allegory of the seasons as stages in life: spring is childhood, the shortest and best. Summer and autumn follow, and all too soon so do the short, dark days of winter.
We measure everything this way: holidays, careers, relationships, lifespans. This sense of inevitability makes it hard to get older, with summer over just as we start to enjoy it. All we have to look forward to, we imagine, is the long, hard winter lying in wait for us. But the flux of weather under the stars and on the water reminds me that the world constantly changes, and so do we. There is no real beginning or end. Rain gives way to sun; wind and clouds are replaced with a preternatural calm — followed by a line squall blowing in from somewhere else, over the horizon.
Toronto has changed a lot in the 46 years since we moved here, especially (the lack of) affordable housing.
Back in 1968 when we emigrated to Canada from the US, Toronto was a very different place from the big, bustling, cosmopolitan, and multicultural city it is today. As my Ma — a Chicago girl born and bred — likes to tell it, the first Sunday she went “downtown” (to the current site of the Eaton Centre and Dundas Square) “it was so empty you could roll a bowling ball down the sidewalk without hitting anyone. When I finally found someone to ask where “downtown” was, she just looked at me and said “This IS downtown!” (thanks for the anecdote, Ma!).
Even if T.O. Hadn’t introduced Sunday shopping back in the early 90’s, downtown now would still be nothing like downtown then. Condos continue to be thrown up faster than beavers build dams in flood season, so there’s a lot more people on the streets now than then. Immigration has also changed dramatically since then, as Edward Relph’s website, an online companion to his new book Toronto Transforms, maps out. Finally, and this is probably old news to most of us by now, Toronto’s housing costs continue to boom and boom and boom: according to this Toronto Real Estate Board website, in 1967 almost 12,500 houses were sold in the city for an average price of $24,000; in 2012 it was almost 86,000 houses at an average price of nearly $500,000 (still well behind Vancouver, Canada’s most expensive city).
This summer, my first stop in exploring T.O.’s neighbourhoods will be Davenport Village. Actually, I’ve been here before. Way, way before: like, 46 years ago. Turns out, this part of Toronto is also where we lived when my parents and I emigrated from the US back in 1968.
Initial impressions:
Keep in mind that these are my thoughts after a full day’s travel, doorstep to doorstep, from my home in west Tokyo to the place I arranged to stay through airbnb. Things may look very different in the light of morning…
The block of townhouses where I’m staying are quite new, having been built as far as I can tell in 2004. They’re bounded to the north by Earlscourt Park, which runs all the way up to the Corso Italia neighbourhood along St Clair West, to the west by train tracks and neighbouring Carleton Village, to the south by more railroad tracks and eventually Dupont Street, and to the east by some old – historic? – Factories, and by Lansdowne Avenue.
Tonight I walked briefly through the townhouse development where I’m staying, then headed south on Lansdowne to Dupont. Lots of young couples. Mostly residential, with a large playground in the middle of the development and green space near the tracks. Not much in the immediate area by way of stores, restaurants, Tim Hortons, and the like. More development is apparently promised for the Lansdowne and Dupont area, currently being redeveloped as mixed-use condos and commercial space, though at the moment what stands out is the demolition zone to the northwest, and the Coffee Time to the northwest with the kids hanging out front trying their hardest to look like drug dealers.
It’s Friday night/Saturday morning, and hipsters in knit caps skid home from the bars artisinal craft beer pubs along Dundas Street West.
“Whatcha taking pictures of bro?”
This magical, fantastical nightmare before Christmas.
England’s The New Idealist magazine have published in their first anniversary, “Doomsday Edition”, a dispatch from me about the extreme winter weather in Tokyo and Toronto this year. Check it out on page 9. Check out the other articles, too, of course. But check page 9…
Exit Booted 