Today The Bog is definitely Thoreau’s Walden


I’d like to withdraw today to a modest cabin by a picturesque pond, and write all the live long day. I’d like to leave the harried folks who push and shove, tailgate and argue, and keep company with the critters who come and go with nary a concern I might be in their way. I will not have one argument here. Not one difference of opinion. And if I was swallowed whole by a bear, it would be infinitely better than having a heart attack at the grocery store, battling fellow shoppers for the last packages of sale-priced pork. Yes indeed, it would be so much better to mulch into this hinterland paradise, my notepad and pen still employed at the final summation, than the futile attempt I make daily, to fit into this frenzy of humanity. I could easily become a hermit. Would you bring me supplies?
Thoreau’s sister used to bring him fresh baking to tide him over at Walden Pond.
There are many times now in this seemingly fatal period of mid-life grumpy, rising as a matter of conscience almost every work week, when I need to “Thoreau-ly” refresh myself, about what truly matters and what doesn’t to the “nose-to-the-grind” writer-kind. What is important enough to write about, and what is quite necessary, for sanity’s sake, to ignore of this modern day hubbub of commerce and exploitation, progress and transformation as rule of order. If you’ve read many of the previously published blogs, posted over this past winter season, you will most certainly recognize the parallel between Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond, and my hiatus periods staring out over The Bog here in my Gravenhurst neighborhood.
I have arrived as the downtrodden on this brink of topography, just a hair’s breadth above a tiny crystalline rapids, along the black snaking creek below, with a block of sheer, sharp-edged hate as my burden. I’ve stood here so frustrated with people, places and things that I could have belched a fire stream across the entire expanse of lowland. I could have, with an unholy roar, emptied the valley of all existence. And I have stood here and felt the anger and frustration slip away as if I was but a melting candle, wick to foot, disappearing into a vapor to leave nary a trace of any angry existence.
I have always thought of The Bog as Walden Pond, where I, like the writer Thoreau, could hole-up for a period, a moment or an hour, to truly exhale all expectations, particularly that preponderance of responsibility, the tithe to that modern day mantra of “more is good,” and it is “good to have more than any one else!”
Leaning up against this tall pine at my back, and listening to the soothing spring wind wash through the needles, and the trickle of water over these tiny cataracts, is both heaven and sanctuary for the writer under burden. This scene, this actuality, is of striking revelation. It would be a sin to ignore this heaven on earth. This outreach of salvation! This gracious and life-restoring place reminds one so clearly of mortality, and how fragile our continuance in partnership, particularly on clear days when the sound of chainsaws and earth-movers prevail above the crickets and peepers, the waterfalls and windsong through these endangered evergreens.
There is an enchanting cascade of sun this afternoon, falling in a funneled golden mist of diamond light that attaches to my weary old soul. The warmth and calm of this humble place, slowly brings the heart back to pulse, the spirit back to reckoning, the eyes to clear sight. The voyeur might get giddy with all this frivolous rekindling. The madness of the moderns evaporates away. I have reverence for every wildflower, each tadpole, and the vast array of mysteries I long to quest.
I will awaken in the wee hours in a sweat, having dreamt of The Bog being bulldozed, and feel so ecstatic upon awakening, to find its hauntingly charming silhouette starkly true against the moonlight, framed as art by my bedroom window. I can not imagine what it would be like instead, to rise to a nightmare fulfilled.
We all need to protect our respective Walden Ponds. Muskoka.

A More Passionate Embrace of the Good Life

This morning I am truly torn as to whether I should climb into the truck and just drive and drive into the heart of a truly amazing May day. Instead of hunkering down at this keyboard, the sun patching the floor of my office like a strewn quilt-top, I should be questing out and lusting beyond this humble burg, seeking I suppose the meaning of life. My wife Suzanne would suggest something like, “Do you mean after all these years and all the questing you’ve done you still don’t know the meaning of life?”
I suppose it’s true. My opinion changes pretty regularly these days. Depending on the latest news reports from the war-zone, the late-breaking media coverage filming the most recent casualties caused by terrorist attacks, the bold headlines revealing our cities in mayhem and the horror-filled actuality of imminent environmental catastrophe. There’s an ever-expanding self-serving attitude these days that one should simply, and selfishly “live for the moment,” and let the future manifest with all its fury. If you can’t stop it, then ignore it! Maybe it’ll just go away. There are other folks I know who spend most of any given day depressed about all the negatives facing the human race, both from nature’s wrath to citizen on citizen treachery. All the horrors of all the world do seem to befuddle plans for being fancy-free for long. Rapidly escalating gas prices are giving revised meaning to “foot-loose,” because that’s about all I can afford these days. I don’t really mind except for the fact I do need to travel for my antique business or it would surely quagmire into the same-old-same-old and subsequently fail financially. I’m then quickly reminded that without a life-sustaining environment who in the hell needs antiques?
When I began writing as a plan toward profession, I had just entered my first year of university in Toronto. I can remember wandering through the York University library feeling as a writer should. I was inspired by everything and every one. It was a cherished thought that one day I would write some tome so significant that the librarian would fight to get a first edition for these same bookshelves that so impressed the fledgling author.
Well, I’m still trying to write something or other that will eventually make that library-relevant grade but it’s not looking good. Not because I haven’t composed an impressive volume of text but that most of my efforts have been spent on newspaper and feature publication copy, and a minor amount of time spent on five locally produced books involving matters of local heritage. It’s not that I don’t want to write something worldly and amazingly insightful to warrant a hardcover binding, but my passion for more regular, even immediate exposure to the public has been all-consuming. My attention span suits short pieces. I might be able to write a collection of short stories but would fail at any attempt to compose a weighty novel.
When I began at the community press back in 1979, having my work appear weekly was a treat. While authors were penning text daily, for a period of from one to five years for a single book, I was being presented to the public every week. When I began writing for several other publications from the same newspaper group, I was feeling chipper about the ground-swell of enthusiasm regarding my work. I was getting pretty popular by the mid 1980’s and I would have an average of five to ten articles in each publication by the end of that decade. I was still broke, there were no book deals, and I was starting to get death threats because I was being forced to cover more hard news in the district, ranging from cases of impaired driving, business frauds, the police beat, and court coverage of everything from rape to murder. As I had begun as a feature writer with some coverage of local municipal affairs, I was moving up in the reporting world and it agreed with me. For awhile!
In one day I would write a hockey game summary of local minor league play, compose a story to cover the events of the horticultural society’s general meeting, type up some notes from the council meeting the night before, follow the fire engines on a traffic accident call, pen a local real estate feature story, and finish up another installment of an historical series,….. which of course I was most partial to if forced to select a greatest area of interest. One day, sitting at my desk, I zoned into a writer’s oblivion (a frequent happy-place hiatus from newsroom stuff) for about a half hour trying to figure out what the hell had happened to my quest for the holy grail. The meaning of life. How was it that I had come to this end. Instead of writing books that a university librarian would want to acquire, I was producing massive amounts of space filler generally, and most of it created at a keyboard like this without a shred of enthusiasm. It was in the year 2000 that I decided to quit the mission to fill the white space between the ads for our local publications. Sure, my name is still abundantly well represented here and it’s not likely I shall be forgotten any time soon for the pieces they loved and the ones they loathed. If you’re a local or family historian you will undoubtedly be using portions of my published research some time in the future. There’s a lot of archive’s articles with my byline attached. I’m proud of this but frankly it hasn’t answered my question, after all the ink expended. I’m not much closer to understanding the meaning of life than when I began asking the question as a university student with a long life to quest for an answer. At 52 years of age, I think it’s about time I knew something more about this purpose of life situation than I do!
When I wander out into this small neighborhood, bordered by this modest but thriving woodland with all its leaning old birches and gnarled evergreens, creatures and insects interacting all the live long day, I do believe it to be the conduit to that holy grail of considerations. I confess to withdrawing into the woodlands more and more these days because even the half solitude of an urban green-belt is better than tarmac and congestion I detest. Knowing that so much of our hinterland is in danger from capitalist “live for today,” land-sharks, and pollution from a gazillion sources, in concert with the eco-disaster of climate change, I feel compelled to visit these woods much more frequently, as a loved one visits a dieing companion….reluctant to visit because we fear the truth demise may come soon, heart-broken to leave because it may mark the last visit in the divide between life and death. If it isn’t the gateway to the greater appreciation of this evasive meaning of life, it is as close as I am likely to get. Standing in the bright May sunlight this morning, watching the new sprouts of ferns pushing strongly through the black earth and cover of dead leaves, inspires the poet within to pen something uplifting about the possibilities of regeneration. Maybe we can survive this latest threat to mother earth.
I find this a sacred place. I breathe in its legacy as if it is heavenly perfume. As I watch life new-born here amidst the decay of autumn and winter, what heaven-on-earth it inspires for this frustrated, quest-tortured reporter, feeling the compelling, conflicting forces encountered of any crossroad. It was at the crossroads where guitarist Robert Johnson met the devil, and initiated that deal for a soul. I’m not offering anything as barter, except the last molecule of patience to find the most truth-lined path onward. Or I might stay here forever, and savor the reality that after all these years wandering aimlessly, I still have a few choices yet to make. I might well petrify and become known as the “frozen-in-time writer at the crossroads,” showing fellow travelers, the grim potential of standing too long on the same spot, awaiting the right sign, the right mood, and the most meaningful kick in the arse. Always dutifully awaiting that divine intervention to point……”this way to the meaning of life.”
Undoubtedly I shall write even more newspaper features and a book or two in the meantime, and visit these restorative woods, just in case the future unfolds in story-line…. wrapped through Alice’s Wonderland, around the summer ferns, and wildflower bunches, through the bog and over the hillside, around the pines and squat cedars, to the half fallen fence….that ends at the crossroads, just as it might be said….it begins all over again.
A young woman I know asked me recently about the rewards of authordom. I inquired if she was indecisive at crossroads. “Why,” she asked. “Just wondering,” I responded. “Say, you don’t happen to know the meaning of life do you?”

Plase visit my other blog at gravenhurstmuskokoa.blogspot.com

May Day and some recollections of a rapscallion once

We all at one time or another grapple with the purpose and meaning of our existence on this planet, questing onward and sometimes pointlessly, for tangible reasons to explain beyond speculation, our placement amongst the general population.
Possibly it’s the result of having been a writer most of my life but there are times when I just don’t understand what it’s all about. Particularly now when, at 52, I feel the immensity of challenge, to cram what’s expected of me, by I suppose divine mandate, into the few remaining years of mental and emotional competence…. left to expend on quality of life issues. My biggest dilemma now is to prove to myself, how necessary it is to forward life experience toward some final important objective. Unfortunately after all these years of beating the facts out of life-as-we-know-it, I’m having the toughest time of all, reconciling my childhood in another city with my early life re-location, to another Ontario community. As much as I try, I can not make sense, or progressive union, between my day to day life in Burlington, Ontario, with our family’s move to the Town of Bracebridge, circa 1966.
I will be wandering on some sunny woodland trail here in Muskoka, with nary a care in the world, when all of a sudden l will recall some point of childhood that as God is my witness, could only be caused by spiritual intervention. As if, in fact, it is a message from the so-called “other side,’ (the deceased) that I need to bloody-well pay attention to the important markers of life, I suppose have been inadvertently forgotten. I’m a firm believer in the existence of this “other side,” and I talk under my breath to a lot of departed friends as a sort of validation that they’re still in my heart, and I’m thinking of them day to day in respect of our time spent together. So when I get a flashback about a time and place, a person or situation that may have been inspired by a scent, a spray of light on a woodland floor, a sound or combination of intrusive events, I always wonder if there is some significant string attached that will make sense to a particular reminiscence.
The greatest divide is my years living on Harris Crescent, in the late 1950’s City of Burlington, situated on the shore of Lake Ontario. Today it’s as if it was all just a late night movie and that it wasn’t at all a matter of the Currie kid’s life-actuality. But it was. When I try to talk to my wife and two boys about my days growing up in Burlington, it gets worse, because the more I try to familiarize them with the lad I was, the more fictional it seems to become. The problem of course, is that I haven’t taken them to my old stomping ground on Harris Crescent, a block from Lion’s Club Park and only several urban neighborhoods from Lakeshore Public School.
Yet it’s not as if any memory has faded particularly just that I can’t for the life and spirit of me, put myself believably back to that time period of youth, such that it makes sense today. And there is no other contentious divide or emotional block that I can determine, other than the 1966 motor trip re-location (which was greatly desired), three hours north to the District of Muskoka, where I’ve remained ever since. But for some memorable years, Burlington was my end-all, and the sound of a fog-horn the daily greeting for a boy trundling off to school. I loved my neighborhood then and the wee folk I called friends, like Fred Vandermullen, Robbie Cooper, Johnnie Burtwhistle, Ray and Holly Green, Bobby Crews, Ronny LaRose, Donna Clarke and a girl I adored named Angela who lived in a house that backed onto Ramble Creek. I used to cross over the river, against my mother’s instruction, and play on the swing set with Angela long into the afternoon. When I had to leave she would cry and so would I. When we moved to Mountain Gardens in Burlington, in about 1964, I lost track of all but a few old mates, and when I moved to Bracebridge, in 1966, I kept in contact with Ray and Holly Green, of Courtland Drive, until that finally fizzled into the grand scheme of adult existence and subsequent demands of maturity. It was no longer acceptable to get soakers in Ramble Creek and make googly eyes at dear Angela the sweetest lass of my golden youth.
As a writer I get fairly frustrated these days, trying to wrap around that part of my youth into a modern day relevance. I’m determined to do this but alas, the moral of the story aside, the reason for pursuing messages in the abyss of early memories, isn’t making a whole lot of sense. Yet the void I feel, like sensing a shadowy watcher in the woods, commands me to rebuild the breadth of fact, the bridging of personal history, so that the rest of my family has some fundamental idea I wasn’t born and raised in my easy chair here by the telly.
I want my boys to relay to their offspring one day, how grandfather and his good buddy Ray Green helped their chum George, slide down the school coal chute at recess….and the punishment bestowed bad wee lads in the principal’s office. I escaped the strap throughout the years but poor George me-thinks, wasn’t quite as fortunate. If we’d thought about the consequences we would have known his beige “fake fur” coat was going to catch coal dust like a mop head, and getting the black off our fingers wasn’t going to be easy by the sound of the bell.
I’d like my boys to have known Anne and Alec Nagy, the owners of our building at 2138 Harris Crescent….my second parents……I’ve told my family about the wonderous culinary wizardry that took place in that apartment kitchen, when Anne looked after me while my parents worked in Hamilton. I’ve told my boys especially about the great adventures Ray Green and I had in the Ramble Creek basin, and the many forts and rafts we built over those magical, enchanted years of unbridled youthful imagination.
I remember being scared to a fictional death by the vision of Mrs. White strolling through her lush garden adjacent to our apartment building. She resided on the corner of our street, occupying the charming Victorian house, surrounded by fruit trees, rose bushes and lilacs. To keep me out of her fenced yard I was told by my adult attendants that she was a bonified witch and the garden shed was where she prepared and tenderized the wee ones for the bake oven. I did get over her fence once and on jumping back on side, ripped the arse out of my pants which was a tad hard to explain to my mother Merle.
Merle told me a thousand times not to get into the tunnel below Lakeshore Boulevard that facilitated the watershed of Ramble Creek into Lake Ontario. The water was much deeper from this point onward to the lake, and it was said many young folks had drowned trying to sail away from their respective childhoods. I violated Merle’s law so many times that my friends knew automatically where to find me, if not at any of the other local hangouts. In this forbidden zone I stood on the ledge inside the tunnel and watched the Suckers swimming in the half illuminated golden pools below. It was the limbo separating a child’s ambition and responsible adulthood, that once I was able to brave the rest of the traverse down Ramble Creek to the lakeshore, I could set sail for places across the Seven Seas and sundry other oceans and rivers. I never got the chance. Just when we thought we had built the perfect raft that could be navigated down the creek, designed to clear the shallows and fit through the tunnel under Lakeshore Boulevard, and one that could safely sail upright out into the lake, we bloody well moved away and that was the end of an important dream of liberation from our fetters. I didn’t marry Angela, and Ray and I never sailed to the horizon, touched the moonscape or did even a quarter of what we believed important, and most of my chums became blips on the radar of once, and I always felt kind of bad about that slight of protocol.
Those emotionally charged, high octane days, never fit with the ongoing new realities of a kid in transit. While some kids have had to adapt to many more shifts in residence during their junior years, and a greater span of miles country to country, I still feel a sadness generally that I can’t fit one childhood journal into the binding of the second…. a volume, a generally happy story of a life presumably well spent. I want to make sense, document a logical progression of accepted family history that I’m actually the same kid, with the same parents, same vapor trail from birth in Toronto to middle-age crazy here in Gravenhurst, Ontario, my newest hometown. Maybe you suffer the same disjointed days and ways, and find as much difficulty making those important experiences of once, just as relevant to the modern day chapter, on how to enter old age with submission and tranquility.
I’d be a lot more tranquil for sure if I could one day put the soakers I got in Ramble Creek, on the same level as the soakers I now get wandering through The Bog, here in the Ontario hinterland. These feet have experienced many, many soakers, and while the water course has varied, the experience has always been the same. What a chill feeling of release and freedom then, and now, as water runs between the toes nestled in a muddy sock. Maybe the answer rests somewhere between the sensation of cool water in vessel shoes, and the fact we got them violating the strictest order to stay out of that creek. That creek was the means and route of our eventual emotional escape, make no mistake. Staying out of that water was plain and simply an order impossible to keep. When we set free our small experimental rafts, only one unmanned craft ever made it to the open lake, it was as if we had broken free of the earth’s gravitational pull. But it was the only success we needed, to feel the true, unrestricted flow of vibrant Viking Thule, as an unending adventure ever-more.
Figuring how I got from there to here, from a crush on dear Angela, to a dear wife named Suzanne, well, I’m just a little concerned whether those faded old memories are more fiction than fact, more fantasy than reality….. and if it was real, how will it ever merge, and then why should it, on the next greatest years of my life.
It has become an everso subtle obsession, building the next all encompassing adventure, proving once and for all that linking these point of life’s light,….. heaven’s held a divine plan afterall. I’m still building rafts and planning for new adventures. Heaven knows, I’ll never stop dreaming.

Please visit my other blog at www.gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com