Newspaper days were good, blogging is better
I have been writing an editor's retrospective feature column for the past few months, for a swell publication in Ontario, known as "Curious: The Tourist Guide." By the way, of the 20 or so publications I've written for since 1979, I have enjoyed my lengthy tenure with these fine folks.....who are truly generous with editorial space and always open to new feature ideas. The column has been about my days working in the editorial department of a weekly newspaper formerly known as The Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge, Ontario. I began as a cub reporter at a sister publication known as the Georgian-Bay/Muskoka Lakes Beacon, then published from the community of MacTier, south of Parry Sound. In the early 1980's I moved over to the news editor's position of The Herald-Gazette, and then on to full editorship, which included management positions with The Muskoka Advance, and The Muskoka Sun, a popular summer time publication.
From 1979 to 1989 belonging to Muskoka Publications, here in the hinterland, was an aspiring writer's dream come true. After graduating from York University my girlfriend, at the time, wanted me to accept a job in the downtown Toronto area. I lasted in an office job exactly one half of one day. I couldn't do it! I came home to Muskoka, opened up my first antique shop in Bracebridge, known as Old Mill, and as most collectable dealers need (other than a rich partner), I looked for a supporting job to cover my extravagances. So I landed a job as a cub reporter for a small publication serving the Georgian Bay - Muskoka Lakes region. My parents took turns running the shop while I was at work. It was a business that would be closed after a short run simply because I got more gigs writing than I had expected and simply couldn't devote the time to hunting, gathering and refinishing the antiques I needed to stock the shop. It would be in the late 1980's that I opened another shop known as Birch Hollow Antiques, still chugging away today, with my wife Suzanne at the helm.
I worked at these sister publications until management decided my irreverance and failure to worship them with full heart and soul, meant I was no longer committed to their editorial plan. Well as you may detect sarcasm, it was true that I was irreverent to a fault and I offer no apology. I just didn't agree with their management decisions and I simply couldn't deal with the way I was being minimized as a writer. I was a journeyman writer who could compose a story quickly, efficiently, accurately and responsibly.....and that guaranteed the publisher wasn't going to face a lawsuit because of my reporting shortfalls. As for editiorial excellence, well, very few of us can be excellent about our tasks all the time but whenever I was putting material together for public consumption, I didn't cut corners or offer-up crappy copy juist to meet deadline. A few of the publishers I worked for had changes they wanted to implement and they knew, rightly so, that I wasn't going to be shaped by anyone or any wild and whacky editorial scheme they thought would be the next money maker. They knew in advance I'd probably try to dump their initiative on a rookie staffer who was still by industry standards a "keener," and didn't know when to duck the pitch! I wasn't adverse to negotation but I didn't dance on command....and if I sensed at any time an editorial project was being headed up by the advertising department....well by golly, I did everything to miss the opportunity entirely. I could be invisible fast when I saw the briefcase-toting ad sales manager coming up the stairs toward my office. I hated ad-supporting feature stories but I loved the news beat.
My tenure at the helm of The Herald-Gazette was a cherished time.....I loved to go to work each morning, and the fact I had some fine colleagues who mentored me constantly with sage advice, it was better than having spent tens of thousands of dollars in a university journalism course......this was immersion at its most precarious. Every word we put out there to the public could have meant a lawsuit, a firing, a reprimand.....and statements from the publisher like, "you'll never work in this business again." Being responsible and honest about the job was mandatory if you wanted to stick around. One miscue was all it took to be dumped. I had an amazing ten years in the day to day operation of a community newspaper and for the most part it was a hoot. Even the difficult moments with management non-confidence, and incredibly draining press nights into the wee hours, political run-arounds and smoke and mirror games with news sources, we never hoisted those frosty mugs of draft at the local watering-hole, (after the paper was put to bed), that we didn't feel it was all worth the battlefield of landmine-navigation.
When I was unceremoniously forced from the paper with a drastic reduction of hours, which I assume they knew would force me to seek employment elsewhere, I lobbed myself unceremoniously over to the competing publication, which ended badly a half year later. I needed a break from being an employee. Did I mention I got kicked out of Cubs as a kid for insubordination. How many can say that? For a number of years I reverted to my old standby, as an antique dealer, and we ran a successful small shop on upper Manitoba Street, in Bracebridge, with my business partner-bride Suzanne. This new antique business was called Birch Hollow which we still operate online today. This is when I began writing a freelance piece (I didn't ask for any remuneration) in the Muskoka Advance, a weekly Sunday paper, called "Sketches of Historic Muskoka." Following this was a huge and prolific period of demand when I was researching and writing dozens of features for The Muskoka Sun each winter, from first snowfall to first lilac bloom. I wasn't doing it for the money. I just enjoyed writing and selling antiques. Not very complicated. I needed my antique business for profit but writing was for the good of an ever-questing artistic soul. Eventually however, management decided to impose a few controls on this seasoned, gnarled, curmudgeon of a writer, and once again I said, well, (amongst other things about what they should bite)..... stuff it! I had no shortage of publications that wanted my contributions but I determined in this universe-reaching new century that it was time to make my antique obsession turn over an occasional profit. It's a problem of all dealers.....we like to spend and that doesn't always balance with what we earn....but we're surrounded by a lot of neat old stuff with potential.
I remember telling a boss once, in a heated debate, that I didn't take the editor's job because of any prestige, or for that matter because it offered a great wage. It sucked. I was in it because of writing, and even as editor, to fill the big hulking white spaces between the ads, I often composed seven to ten articles and more each week. It was a co-operative newsroom task that by necessity demanded lots of editorial submissions. The ads were husky and plentiful back then and demanded a substantial amount of copy each edition. I've had a lot of publishers and managerial overseers snear at this comment, when I'd tell them quite bluntly....."you think I put up with you guys just for the meagre beer money stipend? I write because I love to.....that's it.....and I'll take the few thin dimes you pay me and buy a new typewriter ribbon....why...because I love writing so much." I wasn't fooling. They just didn't get it. I was the most productive writer they had but they couldn't deal with any one saying they loved their job. And over the years they did everything they could to make me hate it. It just didn't work. Sure I've been wounded a tad but not enough to detract from an enterprise that gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
I was thrilled to be able to spend a day writing. Just writing. No distractions, no banging-door meetings, no intrusions.....just writing. It has taken many decades to find comfort amidst solitude. There was a time when I needed a constant din to feel as if I was in the ball-game. Back then there were always intrusions, always distractions, and there weren't many days when management calmed to satisfaction with anything. We were required to attend lively meetings to trim up the troops. I loved it when they tried to motivate us! We were self-motivating..... period! I almost clobbered a new managing editor at one meeting when he told the writing staff he was going to "nurture us like flowers in a pot." From that point I hated the guy and he knew it. I told him in no uncertain terms that if he ever said that to me again, I would embarass him beyond recovery. Funny thing was, this was the goof who had to break it to me....with a smile only a belt sander could have removed, that I was being cut down in hours to status of a part-timer, after a decade's service to the publication. As a former baseball player in regional fastball, I knew some pretty incredible hand signals, and I gave him all of them in a magical sequence mixed with some of my own invention.....and a few other rude ones. I refused the part-time offering needless to say. Best thing I ever did! I actually started to make money in my freelance approach, and I was able to concentrate our antique business beyond the storefront and into e-commerce, which we still pursue now with steady results. The only jerk I answer to these days is the one writing this blog. My wife is the accountant. As long as I turn a profit she has no reason to order a staff meeting.
When we closed our antique shop in Bracebridge in the mid 1990's, moving it to our Gravenhurst home, and I began a different approach to writing, having a much higher standard of who I'd work with and for, my home office with computer became a nurturing, resource laden, inspiration oozing paradise. I could write for hours on end and never have one urgent request for my attendance at a disciplinary meeting. I was able to run my antique business on-line and world wide, and my writing enterprise, geez, I was free at last. I could write at any time of the day or night and not have calls and frequent, annoying raps on my door intrude upon the story-line. Sure there was the household din sometimes, because I was a Mister Mum to my two lads Andrew and Robert (looked after them while my wife went back to her teaching job), yet surprisingly, I seemed to write more and better with the voices of the lads playing in the other rooms. They play guitars now and have a music store here in Gravenhurst......their replacement noise being the play of three cats and a dog, snoring, growling, shreiking with the timely, regular interuptions..... maybe an occasional nuzzle, when they've determined its feeding time at the zoo. I miss the boys but these critters are good company. It's sort of a passive news room.....they don't bark commands and get in my face, or bloody hell, ask me to stop my work mid paragraph to take a used car photo for the advertising department. I hated that with a passion.
I don't think I could ever go back to that time in my life, where I had to listen to my alleged superiors, tell me how and what to write. Since I began writing in the mid 1970's as a struggling poet/author at York University, I have never had a period when I couldn't find a willing publication or media outlet interested in a freelance piece. And to this point in my life, it's pretty much the same although everyone around here notes I'm spending a lot more time in the antique field than with writing at present. Every few years it switches around, and I get more writing gigs than antiquing opportunities. With this amazing outlet to "blog-at-will" it has opened up a lot of doors, not just for me but for many other proficient and talented writers wishing to express themselves without the whining and nattering of publishers....worried about losing ads and readers because of a controversial stand.....the side taken on a political debate.....the impact it might have in social situations. I got pretty sick of the "good time was had by all" approach to journalism, and it pretty much created the conditions for my diminished position at the paper. I haven't been fired yet from this blog site. I'm pretty buzzed about that!
You know it goes back to childhood, this problem with bullies as bosses. Shortly after we arrived in town, moving north from Burlington, Ontario, I was just delighted to receive a warm and welcoming invitation to join the rank and file of the Bracebridge Cubs, and I was working on my first badges of accomplishment. I didn't have my uniform yet but for this one evening get-together, my mother insisted on buying me a brand new dress shirt and church pants as we used to call them....just to look mildly dapper and respective of club standards. We weren't rich folks and I didn't get a lot of new clothes so I was pretty proud of my attire. Mid way through the evening it was recreation time, and we were told the group would be playing British Bulldog....which was pretty dumb considering the number of kids and the small size of the Scout Hall. We'd run back and forth and attempt to avoid being tagged. Some of the touches were a tad heavy I noticed, to the point a few kids were falling into the wall. I was pretty good at the game and lasted until there were only several players left. I made my last foray across and a kid grabbed me by the collar and ripped the whole back out of the shirt. There was even a lengthy red, multi finger claw mark down about six or seven inches on my shoulder. Some of the other lads had similar wounds that needed tending, and outfits showing the rigors of rough play.
I went to the leader and said, "Hey, look what that guy did to my shirt?" "So?," was the limit of his sympathy. "Well, he's going to buy me another shirt," I retorted with a half Irish-Dutch demeanour, dragon-like by any other description. "Buzz off kid," said the leader. What happened next would have impressed that white attired, gun slinging cowboy, "Shane"....although I never hit anyone or pulled a gun.....well sir, I told him about his "skunky" attitude (it was the 1960's), and suggested that he was a pretty poor excuse for a leader......and that yes, he would be dipping into his retirement funds to buy me a new shirt. This isn't intended to discount the good work of the Cub Scout movement, just to suggest that at this time, the leader was a jerk.
My father later let the chap know he should have had more sense that to promote rugby rules in a game of indoor British Bulldog....but I don't think I ever got money for a new shirt. My mother just fixed it the best she could and life went on pretty much as it had before the incident. The Cub leader tried to be my good buddy for the next thirty odd years, especially when he'd try to sell me on writing a promo for his failing business...... but I never forgot that shabby treatment he bestowed on a trusting kid who wanted to be part of a good program.
Guess it sums up my attitude today. There are still certain names from the former publishing business that are not to be spoken in our homestead..... and that's my right. But I don't let it become an entanglement.....in fact, if I do inadvertently think about some of these folks at all, it's because I always write better when I'm madly gnashing my teeth.....I'm a beggar for punishment but it works, it works! You wouldn't believe the huge volume of manuscripts penned in anger. Surprisingly, they don't read as angry and vengeful as I felt at time of penning! I'm suring seeing my byline pop up after all these years drives them nuts. That's all the incentive I need.
We all have our markers from the past that make us cringe, send fear and trembling through our hearts, and yet make us appreciate how far we've come, to become so pleasantly, successfully independent.
When my son Robert, who helps me polish and then publish this blog, asked me bluntly how I feel about blogging versus writing for a publication.....I said "Well, that's easy......liberated." It does take a while to get used to, so for comfort's sake I often write while imagining a former boss hovering over my shoulder, trying to read my copy......to make helpful, "I know better than you," additions and deletions...."to make the story more suitable to our readers." It's kind of like hitting your hand with a hammer because it feels damn good when you stop. And yes, despite what you've just read, I do enjoy my craft and can produce volumes without ever once thinking about the clod who wanted to nurture me like a wee flower.
Thanks for joining me on this most recent blog submission.

The lilacs are blooming -
What a wonderful world
Early in the morning, on the 24th of May, I stopped on the way out of our house to smell the heavy blooms of lilacs hanging over the gravel lane. I looked forward all winter to the day when the melt water would soak down and nurture the roots of these many bushes that we rescued from a family cottage at Windermere, on Lake Rosseau. When we moved to our Gravenhurst home, after a lengthy stay in Windermere, I insisted we bring along as many lilacs as possible, to plant in what was a rather barren front yard. Each spring it is a real treat to see these beautiful trees bring forth such magnificent blooms. I never pass that I don't inhale as much as my lungs and senses can consume.
It was on this day that we received word, from a retirement home in Bracebridge, that my mother was unlikely to survive the morning, and we should come as quickly as possible. I knew they were wrong. When I stopped to admire the lilacs down by the car, I had the clear sense that she had already passed, and that she too had stopped in the abandon of this mortal coil, to take one last smell of heaven on earth. I had a very real feeling she was, for just a moment, standing by my side peacefully enjoying what had been a wonderful life. Merle Currie was in her 86th year. She enjoyed living here in Muskoka, although at first country living seemed to frighten her, particularly the early start and late melt of the winter season. She adored walking and spent hours strolling along the shore of the Muskoka River, and up and down Manitoba Street, so strikingly beautiful at this time of year when the maple leaves unfurl into the early summer sunshine.
I stood there admiring the massive blooms and the sweet aroma, and I know Merle would have agreed at this point, that it was a far better thing to dawdle and celebrate life. Hers was now the recognition and fulfillment of a well spent life, and just as these charming blooms will retire, the tiny individual petals falling to the ground from which it grew, we will always recognize fondly the short but vibrant season of lilacs. When we arrived at the retirement home, Merle had indeed taken her last breath, and when I asked my father when it had happened, it corresponded almost precisely the moment I stood in the shadow of the thriving lilac, feeling the presence of my mother's last earthly moment. Merle always was perceptive and amazingly intuitive. We subtly agreed that it had all been a good mother-son relationship for these 53 odd years, and that it was okay after all the mileage, to just calm everso gently by these flowering shrubs that remind us all of other days and homestead ways.
I knew that my mother was contented following her passing, and that her request was that we cease to grieve and go about our earthly days in good cheer. Death had released her from considerable mortal pain. She was free now. And it was a settling feeling that she had found immediate peace, enjoying these spring lilacs as she always had in life. When I attended to pay my final respects, and saw her tucked into her hospital bed, I thanked God she had been freed universal, to enjoy enternity with the wild abandon of a free spirit.
My mother had been a great source of inspiration to me as a fledgling writer. She had great faith in her son and sometimes I honestly feared she had too much confidence, expecting me to do handstands when I couldn't do a simple push-up. "Of course you can do it Teddy," as she used to call me, much to my chagin....because she often said it front of my burly hockey or football mates. Merle knew I couldn't abide any one who bestowed a half effort on an important project, and she knew how to motivate me when I seemed least inclined. My love of the outdoors probably originated from her pet project to keep me out of the house. Once I had breakfast as a kid, the rest of the day was spent outdoors except in case of monsoon. I may have thought she was cruel a few times, especially when it was raining or on the brink of a winter blizzard but I always found an appropriate shelter, friends that welcomed me into their homes, and offered a few morsels of lunch or dinner to a kid bent on adventure. She just didn't want me sitting around all day watching the television. It worked. My love for the outdoors is directly proportional to the fact I used to hole-up every day, for several hours, in a quaint neighborhood green-belt called, "Bamford's Woods." It was only a few acres of evergreens and a few hardwoods, lots of ferns and critters, and it was just so perfectly suited to the poet in residence. There were so many places to hide-out watching the world unfold. I didn't need friends. I just sat there on an outstretched bough, comtemplating the novel I was going to write one day with this place as a backdrop.
I stopped again this afternoon, to once again admire the huge and magnificent lilac blooms, hanging heavy on the trees that border our lane here at Birch Hollow. And I thought about my dear old mother, who loved the budding spring more than any other time of the year. I feel she's been here already, for that last glimpse of life and family. Hopefully she liked what she saw, what she smelled and experienced here, on the homestead path at Birch Hollow. Truly it is a beautiful life. And she was part of it!

These Haunted Old Woodlands Beckon Me
This afternoon I've been antiquing here and there in this interesting old ballywick, in particular at an old Muskoka farmsite, with some of the few still active farmers in our burg. I love my enterprise. It's also true that it consumes me seven days a week with a hell of a lot of hours of hunting, refinishing, contemplating and negotiating....sometimes with my wife Suzanne, who has reservations about any more of anything getting into our modest home here at Birch Hollow. All winter we've been downsizing a large portion of our collection, simply because we have no place to store the old paintings, old chairs, old bottles, crocks and yes.....many, many books.
So once again I've arrived home here with a van load of creature comforts for us nostalgic folk. Son Andrew got a 1940's bicycle that he plans to use as an advertising sign for his vintage music business. He found some swell 78 RPM records and he chipped in and we bought mom some blue and yellow daisies right from the farmstead soil.....of course I'll have to dig her an appropriate garden with full sun. Suzanne claims we have too much shade to grow anything but jungle ferns.
I picked up some old tools, a rickety old ladder, some books, old ceramics, pitchers and vintage jewellry that should soften my partner, just enough to get some of these other more cumbersome antique items into the house.
When I started out in the antique and collectible business, it was pure recreation. I loved every moment I was out on the road looking for yard sales, estate clear-outs, hole-in-the-wall antique shops and most of all.....the country auction. I liked auctions so much I published an ongoing column called the "Auction Roll," for several years here in the local press. While admittedly I could get a little crazy at auction sales, blood pressure pulsing into a headache, I had the resolve to rebound from a lost bid to a winning bid. Today I have a patience problem and when an item I'm interested in finally comes up, well, I start sweating profusely and if no one sees my bids (cause I'm pretty good at the nod and wink), then my red face and uncontrolled chin fondling gives me up. And I've usually spent way more than I intended but that's what auctions are famous for....getting the tight wad to get mad at all those who wish to bid him up. That's me! You'd think a guy who used to write a column about auctions, and its protocol, would know when to quit advancing a bid. I don't. So I'm usually under close supervision, and within a sharp elbow's distance from a family member, willing to put me onto the ground if I pass the agreed limit determined prior to the start of bidding. Yup, it's that bad.
The antique and collectable industry has become a great deal more competitive for dealers today because there are more informed sale hosts, second hand shops, thrift shops, church bazaars and lawn sales. Even the auctions today are much more aggressively aimed at dealers and collectors, and it's next to impossible to purchase a job-lot these days, as items are sold one at a time, no matter how long it delays an auction. I loved those job-lots. I was at an auction that was on the verge of being rained out, and the auctioneer was putting ten and even twenty boxes of glasses, vases, kitchenware and vintage Christmas ornaments together for a couple dollar bid. We just bought a new van and it was the first major work-out, as we picked up about thirty boxes of nostalgia. Now getting a bargain is much tougher and the prices have quadrupled. You have to travel twice as far to get half as much, and with gas prices these days, it's getting pretty tough to run the business the same as we have for over twenty years.
So after getting home with whatever we've been able to stir up, at a half dozen sales and a few shop visits, I can't do one blessed thing beyond leashing our old hound Bosko, for a jaunt into the woodlands next door. I know there's a message here. Seek tranquility. Seek refuge from one's fetters. Escapism. But I adore antiquing. Yet I adore wandering these forest paths more.
As I have mentioned earlier in these collected blogs, my foray into the antique enterprise came at about the same time as I began my early explorations of the Muskoka hinterland; first as a treasure hunter, digging bottles from old homestead dumps. While I was out excavating a wide variety of sites, I would often stop for a brief hiatus, to make some notes in a small leather bound journal I kept in my backpack. From the first outings when most of the time was spent digging, to the final expeditions five years later, I was spending more time sitting on grassy knolls and rocky hillsides making notes, than sifting through the castoffs of yesteryear. I wrote thousands of pages detailing the particular woods I was visiting, and noting characteristics such as the windsong through the pinery, the sound of a myriad crystalline waterfalls along the course of the little creeks that criss-crossed the pastures.....the sounds of the birds in the branches overhead, the flights of squirrels leaping from bough to bough....the play of sunlight through the thick maple leaves on the hillsides, and the melancholy that permeated the abandoned homestead, as if the deceased were all watching me paint with words; speaking to me in so many ways about the life and times, the family, the victories and hardships, the births and deaths, the spirit of this place, or another, locked into a space between reality and memory.....imagination and truthful reconstruction of the cycles of life....in the giant ponder of "I wonder what it was like to live here back then."
While I wandered back to these haunted old homesteads thinking about the possibility of finding crockery soda bottles, old sealer jars, medicine bottles and china remnants, I never once participated in a dig that I wasn't acutely aware, and respectful of the site and the people that once dwelled here. I was always profoundly aware of the nature around me, and the eerie solitude at some sites,.... and the mysterious voices from thin air. There was outright good spirit at other locations bathed in full sunlight and refreshing breeze. I think about those times now as I stand here overlooking The Bog, feeling somewhat restored from a long day on the hustings, bumper to bumper traffic, sirens and horns, money spent, money earned.....and here I stand in this forgiving, natural place, where I have found solace once again.
I will probably never separate my passion for history from this mortal need to escape from all bustle, actual or perceived, and I'm not sure it will ever become an either-or. I'm sure my family finds it odd that I should require this escape to Thoreau's literary cabin, to escape all the excitement of a profession I confess.....I adore. I just adore this sanctuary a wee bit more.
Take a walk in the woods. What a rush. Now to return to the Walden Pond memoir, a book which I confess looks as if it has been run through a fanning mill.....but it's still quite readable.....I'd love a first edition but alas I shall never be that well off, as to afford such a luxury......suffice that this book meets the need and this forest meets all other requirements of any good day spent anywhere on this grand old earth.
-30-

Blog - April 2008
Confessional of an antique dealer and the lure of the great outdoors
I don't imagine that there are too many people right now, in this neighborhood or in yours, wishing as a first and only.... one to-be-granted request, to be immersed in the misty heart of a spring awakening woodlands, and that the only intrusion be the occasional winged creature, large or small, beating its path across your line of vision....or the soothing wash of the hundreds of little waterfalls that sound in unison, dropping the little creek at my feet many levels on the black snaking path toward the lake. Oh, there are probably a few folks who would like to push away from the office grind, pull away from the business community, the chores of the day, to stand here with the writer in his field, and admire what the good earth is all about. But it's a pretty small number of souls of all those in peril, and we wouldn't have any problem fitting in the eager "takers" on a pretty small knoll situated above the bog. Most would prefer a day at the spa if it came down to an "either-or", versus getting soakers treking through this lowland looking for tadpoles and newly emerging wildflower blooms.
It is so beautifully sun-bathed here now, the wetland and wooded hillside being washed in a most soothing, restorative sunlight, the buds on trees and sundry other shrubs by the trillions, are all in the throes of passionate rebirth....meeting sun and sky and heavens above with great expectation of the rains to come later, nourishing the blooms of mid May and full boughs of early summer when this sunscape will be shadowy and cool in the afternoon heat.
When I began working in the antique trade I was very much inspired by farm culture, pioneer ways and means, and open spaces where the collector/researcher could roam old homesteads and forgotten graveyards of which there are many dotted across the countryside.....one day to be disturbed unceremoniously by the urban developer's bulldozing brigade, stretching the cityscape where once farms and cultivated fields wavered in the misty morning light of its own fading history.
As a young antique collector/dealer, I never missed a farm auction and any sale outside the urban area of Bracebridge, Ontario. The exception was the occasional estate sale in town where there were plenty of antiques and provenance to the old days, old families, who founded the mid-Muskoka community. My greatest joy was to hunker down against an old gnarled maple, affording a soft landing place below and the shade against the summer sun, to watch a good old fashioned auction sale unfold. I lost a lot of girlfriends in the early going because this wasn't their idea of fun on a Saturday. True it was shopping but not the kind they held near and dear. To me it was heaven on earth because I was immersed in the natural day.....no hall with electric lighting for me - and I could watch and bid on important pieces of our heritage in natural comfort. I never once got bored watching a country auction. I used to write a column for the local press about auctioneering with advice on how to get the most for the least, the best and authentic antiques, and how to avoid breaking the bank and still get desired pieces. I wrote a lot of copy in my head sitting there on that clump of soft grass with a contoured shade tree at my back. While some of the great writers in history sat in cafes in Paris, and in tiny cottages on bluffs above the raging sea, I wrote with a tree at my back and the scent of spring lilacs permeating the air.
I said to my wife just the other day....(Suzanne has come to a thousand auctions and even admits to enjoying several) that I would love to throw-back to that golden era of antique questing.....and put ourselves back in the country scheme of things the way it always was..... As some of the great old auctioneers passed on or retired, the new brand of caller is enamoured by indoor sales and the total reduction of job-lots, which was always my favorite auction purchase......ten or so boxes of goodies being sold as one lot in the essence of time.....and the stuff yet to auction off. I got some of my best finds this way. But it was the country air, the feeling of open spaces, of history, of the pioneering spirit, that attracted us to these farm and estate auctions. We adored being able to wander throught the wildflowers in the left-fallow pastures, and bask in the sun on a meadow incline in between items we intended to bid on....watching our wee lads make little straw boats to float in battle upon the overgrown farm pond.
I suppose it is at the pioneer's expense, the more recent farm owner's demise or default that we are enjoying ourselves, and believe me I don't like the thought of that possibility......because of course we'd rather see these beautiful country estates and sprawling farms survive another century......but it would be fiction to believe this. Many old homesteads I attended for those concluding auctions decades ago, are now a memory in the criss-crossing of subdivision lanes and tennis court fencing.....somewhere under the swimming pool is a remnant of the root of the old maple tree I once used as a backrest.....ah, that's the change that hurts the soul.
My heritage as an antique dealer has always been with the outdoors.....and by insistence I expect it always will be.....and in my collection at any one time you will see this reflected by the many landscape paintings, the folk art, the treen ware that reminds me daily of the importance of nature in all our lives all of the time......despite the fact admittedly, only a few folks, at this precise moment in time, would care to jaunt through these haunted woods, at the expense of a dollar lost being non-productive in the new century order.
Whenever I feel weak of soul and lagging in spirit, and my body feels particularly urban-drained, and my inspiration low, a retreat to the woodlands here at Birch Hollow, restores good faith nature hasn't abandoned us......though it can be said with some accuracy, we have most definitely neglected a history-imprinted partnership. I could never turn my back on a friend. I might even take root here, standing for the better part of this morning, admiring the honest, pure pleasure of our natural places.

Muskoka Blog-site
I have been consumed, this long-long-long winter season, by the work of American writer/ philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, and I've spent many hours by this cedar-fueled, crackling hearth, reading about his stay at the humble cabin he built at Walden Pond. I agree with most of his reasoning for retreating from the often mindless hustle and complicated economy of his modern world, which was pioneer by all standard...but I've always pondered why he left after only a modest stay in paradise. My downfall would surely be the outright refusal to abandon what offered me enlightenment and such natural joy. No, I couldn't leave voluntarily. Unless I was real hungry.
My son and I trundled through The Bog, across from our home at Birch Hollow earlier today, taking some more photographs to include with this "Muskoka Blog," and there are times when I can visualize Thoreau himself wandering this spring rejuvenated landscape, getting some soulful inspiration watching frost melt free of the myriad new buds glistening on a trillion little branches reaching hardily toward the sunlight.....and the frothing little creeks that criss cross in black veins across the hollow. I can find numerous places where one might find a Thoreauesque cabin, such as upon the level shelf overlooking the main basin of this Bogland, where he most assuredly would have been afforded a decent view, for all seasons, of the comings and goings, the evolution, and adaptations of this wild place so close to the hubbub of daily activity in our small community. Thoreau wasn't particularly isolated in his cabin at Walden, and it is said his family made sure he was kept in fresh baking and supplies, such that he wouldn't die of starvation.....and only be mildly affected by loneliness.
What draws me to Thoreau is the same characterisitic that attracts me to the work of Canadian artists like Tom Thomson and the legendary Group of Seven. I know I'm missing the profound and important messages of natural life that I might pick up by osmosis, living in a cabin like Thoreau's, and I'm pretty sure I would find a myriad sparks of inspiration, canoeing an Algonquin waterway, as did Tom Thomson on his painting expeditions into the deep and storied lakeland once long ago.
As a career writer, it is my one lingering dissatisifaction with my own work. Staying connected with the wilderness, and learning from it, and being nurtured by what occurs naturally..... not artificially which is the polluted and intoxicating reality of a majority of functions in my so called civilized world.
I want to re-connect with the hinterland. It's the commencement of my life's last significant mission. As a long time writer and researcher, historian and author, I simply can't leave this mortal coil without a much clearer knowledge, about the lifeline modern civilization has abandoned....and wishes to find again.....and if we are to save the planet, and ourselves, we'd better find it soon. I think Thoreau gave us the reason to quest for a better, more natural existence.....a simpler plan, a lesser expectation of mortality to be a greater player in the natural order than intended.......just a respectable, considerate, conscience componet in the cycle of life. Nothing more, nothing less. Our zeal for progress has in so many ways enhanced our lives, and in so many others, been a history of civilizations self-strangulation.
Join me for adventures in the hinterland, with influences of mentors, Thoreau and Tom Thomson, two sources of inspiration who have never let me down.

Newspaper days were good, blogging is better
I have been writing an editor's retrospective feature column for the past few months, for a swell publication in Ontario, known as "Curious: The Tourist Guide." It's about my days working in the editorial department of a weekly newspaper formerly known as The Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge, Ontario. I began as a cub reporter at a sister publication known as the Georgian-Bay/Muskoka Lakes Beacon, then published from the community of MacTier, south of Parry Sound. In the early 1980's I moved over to the news editor's position of the Herald-Gazette, and then on to full editorship, which included management positions with The Muskoka Advance, and The Muskoka Sun, a popular summer time publication.
From 1979 to 1989 belonging to Muskoka Publications here in the hinterland was a dream come true. After graduating from York University my girlfriend at the time wanted me to accept a job in the Toronto area. I couldn't do it! I came home to Muskoka, opened up my first antique shop in Bracebridge, known as Old Mill, and as most collectable dealers need, I looked for a supporting job to cover my extravagances.
I worked at these publications until management decided my irreverance and failure to worship them with full heart and soul, meant I was no longer committed to editorial excellence. Well as you may detect sarcasm, it was true that I was irreverent to a fault and I offer no apology. I just didn't agree with their management decisions and I simply couldn't deal with the way I was being minimized as a writer. I was a journeyman writer who could compose a story quickly, efficiently, accurately and responsibly.....and that guaranteed the publisher wasn't going to face a lawsuit because of my reporting shortfalls. As for editiorial excellence, well, very few of us can be excellent about our tasks all the time but whenever I was putting material together for public consumption, I didn't cut corners or offer-up crappy copy. They had changes they wanted to implement and they knew, rightly so, that I wasn't going to be shaped by anyone or any wild and whacky editorial scheme they thought would be the next money maker. I wasn't adverse to negotation but I didn't dance on command.
My years at the helm of The Herald-Gazette was a cherished time.....I loved to go to work and the fact I had some fine colleagues who mentored me constantly with sage advice, it was better than having spent tens of thousands of dollars in a university journalism course......this was immersion at its most precarious. Every word we put out there to the public could have meant a lawsuit, a firing, a reprimand.....and statements from the publisher like, "you'll never work in this business again." Being responsible and honest about the job was manatory if you wanted to stick around. One miscue was all it took to be dumped. I had an amazing ten years in the day to day operation of a community newspaper and for the most part it was a hoot. Even the difficult moments with management non-confidence, and incredibly draining press nights into the wee hours, political run-arounds and smoke and mirror games with news sources, we never hoisted those frosty mugs of draft at the local watering-hole, (after the paper was put to bed), that we didn't feel it was all worth the battlefield of hassle.
When I was unceremoniously forced from the paper with a drastic reduction of hours, which I assume they knew would force me to seek employment elsewhere, I lobbed myself unceremoniously over to the competing publication, which ended badly a half year later. All my mates knew it would and so did I frankly but it was still worth a try for experience's sake. For a number of years I reverted to my old standby, as an antique dealer, and we ran a successful small shop on upper Manitoba Street, in Bracebridge, with my business partner-bride Suzanne. This new antique business was called Birch Hollow which we still operate online today. This is when I began writing a freelance piece (I didn't ask for any remuneration) in the Muskoka Advance, a weekly Sunday paper, called "Sketches of Historic Muskoka." Following this was a huge and prolific period of demand when I was researching and writing features for The Muskoka Sun each winter from first snowfall to first lilac bloom. I wasn't doing it for the money. I just enjoyed writing and selling antiques. Not very complicated. I needed my antique business for profit but writing was for the good of a thriving soul. Eventually however, management decided to impose a few controls on this seasoned, gnarled, curmudgeon of a writer, and I said, well, stuff it! I had no shortage of publications that wanted my contributions but I determined in this universe-reaching new century that it was time to make my antique obsession turn over an occasional profit. It's a problem of all dealers.....we like to spend and that doesn't always balance with what we earn....but we're surrounded by a lot of neat old stuff with potential.
I remember telling a boss once, in a heated debate, that I didn't take the editor's job because of any prestige, or for that matter because it offered a great wage. It sucked. I was in it because of writing, and even as editor, to fill the big hulking white spaces between the ads I composed seven to ten articles and more each week. It was a co-operative newsroom task that by by necessity demanded lots of editorial submissions. The ads were coming and the writing requirements were growing proportionally.... and then there was the fact I simply loved my job, and writing was like a paying hobby. I've had a lot of publishers and managerial overseers snear at this comment, when I'd tell them quite bluntly....."you think I put up with you guys just for the meagre beer money stipend?"
I was thrilled to be able to spend a day writing. Just writing. No distractions, no banging-door meetings, no intrusions.....just writing. It has taken many decades to finally attain a solitude for writing. Back then there were always intrusions, always distractions, and there weren't many days when management could find calm satisfaction without a couple of lively meetings to trim up the troops. I loved it when they tried to motivate us! We were self-motivating period.
When we closed our antique shop in Bracebridge in the mid 1990's, moving it to our Gravenhurst home, and I began a different approach to writing, having a much higher standard of who I'd work with and for, my home office with computer became a nurturing, resource laden, inspiration oozing paradise. I could write for hours on end and never have one urgent request for my attendance at a disciplinary meeting. I was able to run my antique business on-line and world wide, and my writing enterprise, geez, I was free at last. I could write at any time of the day or night and not have calls and frequent, annoying raps on my door intrude upon the story-line. Sure there was the household din sometimes, because I was a Mister Mum to my two lads Andrew and Robert (looked after them while my wife went back to her teaching job), yet surprisingly, I seemed to write more and better with the voices of the lads playing in the other rooms. They play guitars now and have a music store here in Gravenhurst......their replacement noise being the play of three cats and a dog, snoring, growling, shreiking with the timely interuption. maybe an occasional nuzzle, when they've determined its feeding time at the zoo. I miss the boys but these critters are good company. It's sort of a passive news room.....they don't bark commands and get in my face, or bloody hell, ask me to take a used car photo for the advertising department.
I don't think I could ever go back to that time in my life, where I had to listen to my fetters, tell me how to write. Since I began writing in the mid 1970's as a struggling poet at York University, I have never had a period when I couldn't find a willing publication or media outlet interested in a freelance piece, and to this point in my life, it's pretty much the same although everyone around here notes I'm spending a lot more time in the antique field than with writing. With the opportunity to "blog-at-will" it has opened up a lot of doors, not just for me but for many other proficient and talented writers wishing to express themselves without the whining and nattering of publishers....worried about losing ads and readers because of a controversial stand.....the side taken on a political debate.....the impact it might have in social situations. I got pretty sick of the "good time was had by all" approach to journalism, and it pretty much created the conditions for my diminished position at the paper. I haven't been fired yet from this blog site. I'm pretty buzzed about that!
You know it goes back to childhood, this problem with bullies as bosses. Shortly after we arrived in town, moving north from Burlington, Ontario, I was just delighted to receive a warm and welcoming invitation to join the rank and file of the Bracebridge Cubs, and I was working on my first badges of accomplishment. I didn't have my uniform yet but for this one evening get-together, my mother insisted on buying me a brand new dress shirt and church pants as we used to call them....just to look mildly dapper and respective of club standards. We weren't rich folks and I didn't get a lot of new clothes so I was pretty proud of my attire. Mid way through the evening it was recreation time, and we were told the group would be playing British Bulldog....which was pretty dumb considering the number of kids and the small size of the Scout Hall. We'd run back and forth and attempt to avoid being tagged. Some of the touches were a tad heavy I noticed, to the point a few kids were falling into the wall. I was pretty good at the game and lasted until there were only several players left. I made my foray across and a kid grabbed me by the collar and ripped the whole back out of the shirt. There was even a lengthy red, multi finger claw mark, down about six or seven inches on my shoulder. Some of the other lads had similar wounds that needed tending, and outfits showing the rigors of rough play.
I went to the leader and said, "Hey, look what that guy did to my shirt?" "So?," was the limit of his sympathy. "Well, he's going to buy me another shirt," I retorted with a half Irish-Dutch demeanour, dragon-like by any other description. "Buzz off kid," said the leader. What happened next would have impressed that white attired, gun slinging cowboy, "Shane"....although I never hit anyone or pulled a gun.....well sir, I told him about his "skunky" attitude (it was the 1960's), and suggested that he was a pretty poor excuse for a leader......and that yes, he would be dipping into his retirement funds to buy me a new shirt. This isn't intended to discount the good work of the Cub Scout movement, just to suggest that at this time, the leader was a jerk.
My father later let the chap know he should have had more sense that to promote rugby rules in a game of indoor British Bulldog....but I don't think I ever got money for a new shirt. My mother just fixed it the best she could and life went on pretty much as it had before the incident. The Cub leader tried to be my good buddy for the next thirty odd years, especially when he'd try to sell me on writing a promo for his failing business...... but I never forgot that shabby treatment he bestowed on a trusting kid.
Guess it sums up my attitude today. There are still certain names from the former publishing business that are not to be spoken in our homestead..... and that's my right. But I don't let it become an entanglement.....in fact, if I do inadvertently think about some of these folks at all, it's because I always write better when I'm madly gnashing my teeth.....I'm a beggar for punishment but it works, it works! You wouldn't believe the huge volume of manuscripts penned in anger. Surprisingly, they don't read as angry and vengeful as I felt at time of penning!
We all have our markers from the past that make us cringe, send fear and trembling through our hearts, and yet make us appreciate how far we've come, to become so pleasantly, successfully independent.
When my son Robert, who helps me polish and then publish this blog, asked me bluntly how I feel about blogging versus writing for a publication.....I said "Well, that's easy......liberated." It does take a while to get used to, so for comfort's sake I often write while imagining a former boss hovering over my shoulder, trying to read my copy......to make helpful, "I know better than you," additions and deletions...."to make the story more suitable to our readers." It's kind of like hitting your hand with a hammer because it feels damn good when you stop.
Thanks for joining me on this most recent blog submission.

Muskoka
The Hours Before Yet Another Winter StormThe March Lamb Eaten By The Lion
It seems every week there are storms whipping up from the Gulf to bring hardship to beleagured Canadians, pondering
whether this is the beginning of the new globally alterede weather-normal. Actually, I get quite a laugh at all the armchair critics
these days because the winter this year isn't any where near the quality and quantity of many back to back winters when I was
growing up here in the Ontario hinterland. And I'm not an old fart either! It was always the case that winter wasn't officially over until the 24th of May weekend, and it was to be anticiapted that there
would be wintery forays even into June......that it wouldn't jar us into the realm of the twilight zone to have a few snowflakes land
on our heads even in June. I can remember many wicked storms in March and a few in April, with snow layering over the
daffodils in our front garden down on Ontario Street below the former Bracebridge high school. So now when some
hypothicating armchair general tells me that it's all the work of a declining universe and global warming, then I will remind one
and all that global warming has been around thusly for a long time.....if present weather is the barometer of change. The winters I
am writing about are from the 1960's and 70's, not ancient history. From the on-air descriptions of the newest stormfront to bring hardship upon the population, it would appear the end is upon
us. This afternoon! It must be a rating binge that makes weather prognosticators make these embellished storm claims because
frankly not one this year has measured up to the adjectives they used on the gaping-mouthed viewership, anticipating that they
should bid a speedy farewell to friends and family before the end arrives. While I always watch the daily weather updates
because I do wish to prepare for dangerous natural events, the storms they predict usually fizzle well short of the pounding we
have prepared ourselves to receive. Today we have heard so many bulletins that even taking a buzz to the corner store seems
too risky, in case the freezing rains arrive before I can get back home. Scaring the crap out of people is crappy for the local
economy.....the god fearing weather watchers with their noses pressed to the window glass to watch the grim reaper rise over
the horizon tree line. It's all about fear these days. It has become quite marketable like the time during the Cuban Missile crisis
and Cold War when folks were building bomb shelters. While this is not a denial that bad weather doesn't occur, or that global
warming isn't a fact, but a few historians have presented some pretty compelling evidence of wicked periods of weather activity
in the past.....there was an ice-age afterall. Does that ring a bell? Do we really believe we can change what nature has ultimately
in store? I'm a pretty active environmental watch-dog around here but the fear mongering is putting many folks in hiding; not
helping the planet recover. Having a respect for nature and her patterns of the past seems a worthy point of investigation......and
is this the beginning of a harsh new cycle of an ever evolving globe? How much is global warming and how much is the inevitable
march of time and evolution? We've been getting alarmist reporting of weather.......these days, more for ratings than for accuracy. The storms we have
received so far this year are run of the mill period. Inconvenient. Only in Toronto. Here in the outback of southern Central
Ontario, well, bring it on! We're not stupid enough to sign off on winter weather in February like some, and we've made it part
of our daily existence to cope with God's will. So I won't really be holing-up to avoid the predicted storm.....just watching to see
if, this time, those who predict the weather can......like horseshoes, come within a wee distance of actually predicting a real arse
kicking storm, versus the fluff-er-nutter of inclement weather that at the most chills our old bones, and makes a few of us slip
slide away. Just a cranky watcher in the woods' opinion on an otherwise spectacular March day.

A Long Hard Winter – But Isn’t it Beautiful Here in Muskoka

This has been a critical turning point winter season here at Birch Hollow. It’s been one of those dedication periods of a life, when stock simply has to be taken. My stock. My stuff. All of it jammed into an archives room that was too small ten years ago but I decided to make new acquisitions fit none the less. If architecture could cry this room would be screaming. So it has been two months now of sorting, selling-off, and distributing materials to various organizations, such as local archives and heritage groups. I really burdened myself and our home with all this historical material….but then I am an historian afterall…..apparently an obsessive one at that! Funny, I used to call other collectors obsessive. I never thought of myself as “having to” do anything but obviously I had to have all this assorted literature. There are stacks twenty books high.
This is probably the first winter since I began writing in earnest back in 1977, from my portal onto the world, in the McGibbon home on upper Manitoba Street, in Bracebridge, that I have under-composed in the prime authoring season. I have always been much more prolific in the autumn and winter season…..and would much prefer penning pieces during a howling snow storm than on a calm summer night with nothing but distant lightning flashes and insects hitting the window screen.
I haven’t even been traveling much through the woodlands in our neighborhood this winter because of the treacherous conditions along my old pathway into The Bog. This is of great disappointment because dog Bosko and I spend hours every day wandering amongst the birches and cedars and following the tracks of a thousands critters that make this woodland home. So it is with a heavy heart that I inform readers of this blog that I have not provided much in the way of new editorial material this winter so far but have high hopes for the spring and summer.
One of the biggest decisions I have made in my life so far this industrious winter season, other than to become a senior “roadie” for my two boys’ band and music enterprise, here in Gravenhurst, is to pull away from political involvement and community heritage groups……that often leave me at a loss for words. Sometimes miffed, a little confused and frequently angry about their shortfalls in sensibility and application, I have little will to reform the unreformable. My days of trying to wrench social justice and fair, sensible play from local political representatives, here in Muskoka are over. While I will never give up the mission to save our neighborhood and the environment generally, I feel too old now to effect much change among the dunderheads who believe nary a shrub should survive economic development.
There are too many philosophical divisions between my appreciation and pursuit of heritage matters than the commercial-economic ambitions of historical wannabes….how they paint the historical mural they want to portray to the public….the visitors to the community, the glossy “good time was had by all” image….that is marketable, saleable, to the gullible! My appreciation of history is a realistic mix of life and times, success and tragedy, failure and misfortune, contentment and fulfillment. Honest assessment of what happened here since the late 1950’s is critically important to me as an historian and I won’t be a part of painting a pretty picture of local heritage to please market expectation.
My history is the history of the people who built the community from the first homesteaders to the present. I don’t glamorize the folks with the most money and the businesses that raised the biggest profit. What I do appreciate is the history of the citizens who worked together to build a community….the bakers and clerks, loggers and preachers, the waiters and waitresses, sign painters and candlestick makers. I would rather sit and talk to a descendant of a pioneer furniture maker, farmer, tanner or brick layer than research the construction of a building or edifice…..or quagmire down in the details of local politics and the eras of the big wigs and posturing celebrities, buffoons and assorted glad handers looking to inspire the historian’s pen. Naw, I can’t find myself selling out to the new vested interest, old Fezziwig noted when asked to sell out his life and sense of well being to modernization, technology, and diminishing individuality of place and person, in Dickens “A Christmas Carol.” No, I shall remain loyal to the old ways and die out with them if I must.
I’m much more fulfilled as an historian walking through Muskoka’s pioneer cemeteries than paying to see artifacts in glass showcases in a museum. I am a museum supporter and did found one and help save another in my “wanting to belong years,” but I got tired of being pounded by financial concerns, poor numbers, poorer grant allocations, and volunteerism out the whazoo. My museum days were spent begging rather than researching and developing because it always came down to the almighty buck. Every meeting, all meetings, were weighted with financial burdens. I don’t feel to many burdens walking in the peaceful, historic graveyards, respectfully remembering the good folks who represent the real and important heritage of our region. They were the history makers. The force behind all that happened here. The characters. Boy oh boy, there are a lot of characters represented by these lichen covered markers. Some historians have simply forgotten about the lives and contributions made by these heroes…..and honor artifacts and edifices as if the sum total of history is physical presence only. It is a depersonalization of heritage such that we honor things and buildings more than the folks responsible for their creation and construction. I will always invest in the heritage of people versus “history as a good show.”
All this work in the family archives has made me a rather keen fellow for what I wish and do not wish to do in the future. I do wish to take this book, just recently recovered from mounds of old titles, of Thoreau’s “Walden,” more seriously, especially after my wife has traced her family heritage back to the well known American author. I still don’t believe it but there it is……Thoreau had some Shea molecules in him…..and a really nice cabin from which to write. I’m trying to convince my wife that I should have a cabin to fulfill my writing ambitions……now that kin have verified its value to the creative spirit.
More coming soon. Maybe from a cabin in the woods. You never know!

Muskoka at Peace
The Paradise that is The Bog
There is an encompassing, soothing, pleasant, altogether peaceful lull here now at this late January hiatus between the thaw and the burdens of an unpredictable ice-clad February. I would so much rather be immersed in this actuality of change than holed-up at Birch Hollow now at this boring old keyboard. I find many excuses in any day to conduct my field studies across the lane, in the grand bog that unfurls in this shadowed snowscape, a secret respite is a blessed thing when weary becomes the master author.
There have been times so far this new year, when I have wished so intently to retreat much deeper into the fiction of these woodlands, to a Thoreauesque cabin with a modest window, a few sticks of furniture, a humble stove, a candle and stand, and a writing table would be nice. I’d like very much to get away from phones and computers that vex me throughout the day of business, which lately seems to run so much longer than ever before. Maybe it is too much to ask that I be allowed to escape my fetters for the rest of this winter, to hide away in such a shelter as Thoreau found so comforting at Walden Pond. As the years go by the urge to get away from the bustling world increases. As a travel-crazed teenager, I even thought about engaging the essences and pleasures of a hobo’s life.
It’s a rather crazy period, don’t you agree, in the rolling year, when there is the clearness of sky reminiscent of the first days of spring, yet the hulk of February is the merchant of ill will, to hold us back from rebirth for yet another dark and stormy month.
This has been a gloomy January so far, and despite the most recent thaw and unusual floods that resulted, it wasn’t as tempting to the spring of heart, as it is now, at this very moment….so much colder but wonderfully bright and universal. Each January I commence the new writing season with a plan to reduce the worldly and economic burdens, like the nudist shedding inhibiting attire. Each year there seems to be some new and unanticipated situation that develops to hold me to this keyboard, when in heart, I would so love to be trundling down the forest path, and exploring the shelters made by snow-laden cedars and burdened venerable spruce arched to the ground. The deer have found safe haven here by the busy trail east and west, along the upper bank bordering the bog.
It’s the silence that I find so wonderfully embracing and healing……as there is nothing quiet about our abode which is loaded full of clocks and technology clicking and clacking and resounding noisily throughout day and night. Here it is the occasional wash of wind over the boughs, and the soft tinkling of ice and the melt in the sunglow, and that could never be considered intrusive or an encumbrance against such a peaceful hiatus. Even the patting down of hooves in the snow from some nearby deer is as much a sweet enchantment of harp and violin. Diamond prisms of ice-light twinkle in this mid-afternoon fairy tale lending so very much to the author staring abroad in contemplative awe. What to write, what to write….that it would describe the invigoration of tired soul and weak heart. It is no effort at all to sit here and make these mental notes about the saving graces of solitude. This is the Muskoka I adore. The Bog we spared from the developer’s plans.
Note: A project for 2008 is to convince the good neighbors here at The Bog to stop dumping unwanted items into the woodlands. This winter we have already had the Christmas tree dumpers busy, and it will be a task once again this year to retrieve them and cut off the branches and dispose properly to enhance habitat. As far as the other folks who dump so much more than just lawn and garden debris, we hope to erect some type of signage that will clearly identify penalties for illegal dumping. Many folks around here cherish the woods like we do but don’t seem to worry about the crap they toss over there on a weekly basis. We have a handyman in this wee burg who routinely casts off debris such as glass, plastic and metal into the woods after raking a local lawn. We’re watching for him this year and hopefully the town bylaw office will help us enforce “no dumping” policies. Each year we fill three full bags of garbage in an area of no more than one full block which is outrageous. Please help look after the eco-system of this wonderful lowland in the midst of the urban jungle. Till we meet again.


MUSKOKA

The New Year and a clear perspective

I have often sat here for hours on end, staring out this window onto the snow laden lilacs, squandering my time poeticizing life as it becomes framed by this physical portal. There are times when I have sat here for two hours and not written one complete sentence let alone the half dozen pages needed for the next most pressing deadline. I might initially feel bad about this non effective use of time but then only if my wife was to be gauging my disappearance from the normal fare of homestead life. I can justify the poor work ethic simply as a legitimate writer’s preparatory hiatus. The time invested in this pondering and observational exercise will spawn a much greater supply of written material one day soon.
When I was a kid growing up in Burlington I must have done a lot of this…..observing stuff. It’s funny how I can be looking out this window onto our beautiful Muskoka woodland, yet be thinking about those days of childhood wandering the creek hollow that opened onto the expanse of Lake Ontario. I know for a fact many others have accused me of daydreaming away important business day hours. I used to take twice as long to walk home from Lakeshore Public School in Burlington because there was so very much to look out for and wonder about. Some who know me well would say that this preoccupation could be a fatal flaw. Of course they’ve been saying that behind my back for years and yet I’m still puttering along. I might be consumed by an inferno while deep in thought or run over by a speeding vehicle taking too much time to cross an intersection…..being too absorbed by the blossoms on a flowering crab apple tree to notice my life hanging in the balance.
When I was younger there was seldom if ever a time I couldn’t compose a story or feature article for a local publication within minutes of sitting down at a typewriter. All the time spent pondering in the early years of my life added up quite a store of enthusiasm and observation from which to draw ideas. Over three decades of writing since I officially turned pro, it’s pretty obvious the wondering and daydreaming worked to inspire a pretty fair quantity of editorial material. The difference now, moreso than the necessity to spend twice as much time in thoughtful contemplation, is the ability to kick-off the nagging stuff like local politics and aggravating current event issues in our community; sparking the old newsman’s fire in the stacked (for a warm fire in retirement) kindling, representative of a wonderful self-imposed complacency. I’ve even found myself gnashing teeth this morning, while walking through the ever-so peaceful bog, because of some intrusion of local affairs that has pulled me once again out of pacifism to the plains of editorial confrontation. The past year was one of the most intrusive years in recent memory for getting involved in local political issues, and defending for example this beautiful woodland that was slated to be hacked down to accommodate more residential housing…..and other business community nonsense that inevitably sucked me in like a twister gouging over the landscape. I was agitated for over a year. It’s why sitting here now overlooking the January snowscape, I can become deeply withdrawn, cradled so wonderfully by the softness of this gentle place on earth……a writer’s hiatus, and I will not feel guilty whatsoever.
I think possibly I’m staring into space more now to refill my reserve of goodwill and insightfulness because the several most recent forays have tapped my patience. It’s a coping mechanism sitting here, watching the birds and squirrels flit from branch to branch, and the trace flurries that the wind drifts by, depositing large flakes onto the warm glass, the water trail attracting my interest as the poet studies the changing light at dusk….. and the heartbreak of so much time lost. Suzanne has actually had to come and physically stir me from this eyes open coma, wondering aloud if I’m dead or alive…..because there’s no other evidence other than I’m still seated where I began….. with nothing to show for it on the wavering blue computer screen. It used to be that she would look over my shoulder into the belly of the old underwood and even pull up the paper in the roller to see if my time spent had been worth anything at all. I’ve never really tried to evade the enquiries about productivity yet she knows I can write a book in a week, or twenty columns for local publications in about the same time.
I do fear my pessimism and anger raised by these irritating shortfalls in democracy around here, has drained away an unspecified amount of enthusiasm and optimism mostly. I find it somewhat harder to escape issues of conscience and it was this way when the bog seemed doomed. It was one of my most unproductive years in creative writing but my most prolific year writing scathing reports and new releases for the local press and online. I would so much prefer the pacifist life, the carefree scampering of poetic license and the freedom to ponder all the live long day without even the slightest inkling that something was wrong at town hall….. or with the local dysfunctional business cooperative.
I so much enjoy in these hiatus periods of subtle comforts, the liberated, free-flowing recollections of my childhood….the soaker footed quests along Ramble Creek, and the great unfloatable rafts I spent hours crafting…..to eventually sail across the lake and onto the seven seas. Ah, what imagination unfurled in those days….. feeling, sensing with my soul, the raw hope of possibility and the raw energy of expectation realized…..that made immortal what was flesh and bone, to travel the universe in thought, and to return without consequence at bedtime……only to look forward to the same satisfying regimen the next day and the million after that.
I’ve caught a little of that right now, thanks to this old man’s wish to be unfettered and as the song says, to live “consequence free.”
Thanks for letting me share these thoughts via my Muskoka blog-site.

A

Precarious Balance in Muskoka – Speculators changing regional character
- for more of what is unwarranted expansion
The rest of us holding on for dear life –

I take accountability as religion. I’ve never had a problem accepting a personal or professional shortfall. If I’ve made an error or caused even a minute part of a problem or unfortunate situation, I fess up as soon as I’ve been made aware of my part in the debacle. I’m not Muskoka’s best citizen, but then I’m not its biggest folly either…..although this is open to debate. I just have a conscience that commands confession. I can’t live with myself if I’ve done a disservice, in house or community. And yes it’s also true, I’ve offered a lot of apologies over the decades, for stuff I probably didn’t even do. That makes up for things I did do….but probably shouldn’t have….and simply didn’t get found-out. As a widely published editorialist since the late 1970’s, it’s one area that has always been non-negotiable…..if I deserve blame and or it’s proven to me I should make restitution, correction or otherwise, there won’t be any question about my making amends. In print. In person. Just cause it’s the right thing to do and it’s a grand feeling to be entirely human……hopefully a decent human being, admitting openly and honestly we may have goofed up.
What I long to hear in our Muskoka region, is an elected official admit their leadership may have “sucked” in the past; their wisdom and insightfulness being somewhat less than what the community really needed in the area of good and responsible governance.
There are many urban development documents and good planning reference texts available to municipal politicians, investigating the negative aspects of urban sprawl and the contentious issue of establishing commercial pods all over God’s half acre, in small communities all over North America. They’ve all had access to this information and certainly they seem at times intelligent enough to understand the material. Yet they lend their resources to developers who know full well what happens when you take a small community and test its economic elasticity. In Bracebridge, in particular, the pod influences and impact on the main street will brutally manifest itself in the coming years for a number of reasons that were all known…..all discussed before approvals were granted to expand all over the place, without a clear town centre in this new century. What the town officials have guaranteed is that there will be an economic adjustment that will border on catastrophe……but they’ll by tradition, take no responsibility for their failures……..only the good stuff is worth recognizing.
The main street of Bracebridge is my old stomping ground and I love it dearly even now after living many years in Gravenhurst. The old buildings are expensive to maintain and often cost inefficient to rent out and still make a profit. I imagine that many insurance companies are researching carefully the fires in Wasaga Beach and Barrie where old commercial businesses were razed this year by large urban fires. As editor of The Herald-Gazette in the early 1980’s, I watched a huge chunk of urban landscape destroyed by fire, when the Thomas Block went up in flames one bitterly cold January day. While this was rebuilt with all the benefit of current safety inclusions to prevent the spread of building to building fire in the future, the main street is still composed of higher risk architecture; connected buildings, many without the firewall installations……..requirements proven effective today in curtailing the spread of fire building to building To make the mainstreets of our Muskoka communities vibrant isn’t as difficult as dealing with the overall problems of seriously aging structures, the need for widespread restorations, and cost efficiency all round. Check the ice build up on roof-lines on main street buildings in our historic mainstreet business sites. Then check out the same on new commercial buildings and box stores and you’ll see that the builders have factored in energy efficiency into their business designs. So what can really help the mainstreets?
The only way to save the downtown areas, the traditional main streets, is for massive urban renewal to be fostered by respective communities. This has happened in Gravenhurst most recently where old homes in serious decline were removed and replaced by a new building and a new commercial tenant. While some have complained bitterly about the historic character and charm of the main street being altered by this contemporary architecture, the fact is that it has guaranteed a critical new dynamic to the main business corridor at a time when the development of commercial nodes threatens to beat local commercial tradition into oblivion.
Municipal councilors need to take a serious look at this outward expansion and node development and how it will affect the future character of the communities. They must show goodwill toward the main street because it is where the town began…..and where it will die, if by ignorance, they leave it to falter in the wake of giant corporations and developers streaming past, who couldn’t care less about community heritage and that old-time sense of neighborhood well-being. If mainstreet commerce died in each of our communities, do you think the commercial nodes would feel a sense of loss……versus a chipper feeling that there’s less competition for the local dollar.
I’ve been a Muskoka historian for a long time and I’ve apprenticed with some of the best known historical types in our region from the 1970’s to the present, and I don’t have even the slightest doubt, that if this node expansion we have been witnessing as of late, is followed up by recessionary times in this province…..we will see a truly unfortunate tumble of local businesses from the traditional downtown centres,….forced into last ditch re-location to nodes….. or thrust unceremoniously into bankruptcies and closures up and down the street.
If you add onto this the statistics about tourism shortfalls and there shouldn’t be a councilor anywhere in this district…….not pondering what a further decline in our number one industry will mean for our economic future. Every councilor should want to know who are buying speculaltion condos and houses here……are they investors or are these to be family owned? Are we a retirement mecca…..do we know the average age of new home buyers in our communities? Are councilors giving any consideration to the fact we have serious limitations in retirement and nursing home beds, hospital beds and medical professionals? Is it wise to be developing Muskoka’s residential capacity with little consideration to the possibility we are stressing our resources too thinly for a safe and accommodating future?
I would like councilors to discuss these issues in public so that we can judge their grasp of the situation. Down the line a few years I have a feeling that these same councilors will be glad-handing all over the place for re-election and will take full credit for every perceived advancement and improvement, but will right-off failings as “the cost of progress.”
I feel the main streets have been badly short changed by those politicians who have fully supported the pod sprawl into the Muskoka countryside. An economic downturn in both real estate, public confidence and spending, will have a deep and profound effect on our respective town characteristics……and in this case, where decisions have been made with full appreciation of good advice to the contrary, well, me thinks there will be a few consciences disturbed amongst the progressives……who may feel some responsibility for shamelessly facilitating the over-retailing and over development of our modestly populated region of rural Ontario.
Heck I feel bad because for all my published critiques, I still couldn’t change the opinion of even one elected official…….to take the side of sensible proportion and loyalty to town heritage. I want to say that “they will live to regret their liberalities,” yet I’m more confident than ever, they will refuse to accept responsibility for the mess they create…….and as we have come to expect, continue to recognize what they see as positive, while washing their hands of the negatives. I do feel sorry for them in many ways, because enlightenment is such a liberating way to live life.
I do not feel we are being governed by “the enlightened,”……rather, I fear we are being led by the naïve, toward a very uncertain, precarious future in the region we call home.

Bracebridge re-visited; and the times I shall never forget

A writer friend asked me one day if there was some sort of historian’s mutual admiration club in Muskoka, where old farts like me could go and talk with vapid vigor about the days of yore….you know the kind of club where we have smoking jackets with crests and glasses of port to mix with a quarter-pounder Cuban cigar….with companion piped-in music from some aged, venerable folk musician regaling us with nostalgia..
“No……local historians around here don’t socialize…..most of them wouldn’t drink Port on a dare and they’re too bloody health conscious to chomp down on a rich, juicy length of wrapped tobacco,” I replied. “It’s not that we don’t agree with the rights and responsibilities of historians of the empire, we just don’t feel like any company just now.”
At one student-parent day at the local school, the teacher asked me to give a talk about being an historian…..after ten minutes of shooting the concept well over the fourth graders’ heads, I said in conclusion…....”let’s just say that being an historian doesn’t get me invited to many parties…..did I say many….ha…ha.” Well, they were still lost but after class, the teacher asked me for some research tips….as it was the case she was embarking on work to uncover some family history. While my kid was fed-up having an historian for a dad, I helped a teacher find her roots.
In Bracebridge I grew up historically. While other of my chums just chewed gum, basked in the sun listening to the transistor radio….playing Dylan or some period rock’n’ roll, I was paying attention to the way the town was advancing day by day. Now while this might seem a tad nuts, and who would be interested in such minute transitions, it was something I needed to know. I somehow knew that the town was on the verge of profound change, and that it would be important one day to know how this wee burg of 2,500 souls would become a sprawling half-empire by 2008.
When I began writing a column in the early 1990’s called “Sketches of Historic Bracebridge,” all the observations and explorations of my times spent here began to make sense. As a matter of some irony I had to move away before I could really make sense of it…..so here I was then…..writing about Historic Bracebridge while living in uptown Gravenhurst, in South Muskoka. Living ten miles away, in the tropics of true South Muskoka, meant I could look more objectively at my hometown experience. There was a sense of nostalgia and there have been times since 1989 when the thought of moving back to Bracebridge crossed our family’s collective mind. With my parents still residing in Bracebridge and business taking me there three to four times every week, I can’t get too homesick afterall….but I can view change with an added measure of objectivity…..I don’t have to give up my nearby meadow for a shopping centre as I might have in Bracebridge, a town with city aspirations here in the Ontario hinterland.
My columns from this period were full of people sketches, reminiscences about old friends and strange encounters. I realized that I was probably one of the only historians who believed it was more important to recognize the history of the people, the everyday front-line folk who built the town’s economic future in the same effort as they struggled to make daily ends meet. I had a greatly diminished interest to highlight local politicians and the major players in local wealth building. I always gravitated to the stories of the bakers and janitors, clerks and post office workers……I held patiently to the words of retired farmers and police officers, teachers and electricians, waitresses at the local greasy spoon, and lumbermen who always smelled like pine.
I despised the histories that over-estimated the contributions of the elite, the rich, the political mucky-mucks, and the social club executives; their stories as a rule always being half as interesting as the worker-bees of the community, the stay at home moms, the clerks, plumbers, and candlestick makers. We were a family of paycheck to paycheck working stiffs and sometimes we had to scrimp real hard and real long to make rent and eat at the same time. But we found kindnesses amongst our mates, our friends up at 129 Alice Street, the apartment where those of modest income could have a few residential comforts. And it was a community within a community, and to this day I will never forget how everyone kept their doors open in the evening, and residents trailed from one apartment to the other, getting in on conversations, good television or a radio program, or even a game of euchre needing a new player.
I have often wondered whether it is true of myself, as an historian, that I have been tainted by this general mistrust for the upper echelon and their still faithful historical scribes, who believe the only history worth telling is what great new thing the community leaders have bestowed on the future this time. While I have always paused to mindfully glance at the society news, just to keep up on what some believe to be the way toward salvation, it’s my opinion the pulse of the community is better understood being close to those in the midst of this ground level machinery….versus listening to the mutual admiration of cronies in between fat cigars.
I grew up as a street kid, tumbling through the alleyways across the town, investigating every nook and cranny, and watching events unfold both humorous and tragic and then, well “tragically humorous”…..such as when the local bouncer at the former Albion Hotel would eject a trouble-maker without first opening the door. Us wee lads used to sit on the railing by the tracks watching the front door for these flights of despair. For the bouncer there was no sense going to the extra effort of opening the door with one arm when a patron’s head would do just fine. When I used to write about events like this….. some of my historical colleagues would become quite belligerent about my cavalier approach to report the history of their town. While I have a great respect for protocol I have no respect for revisionists or those who believe local history begins and ends at town hall.
When I became editor of The Herald-Gazette in the early 1980’s, it was “one for the gipper,” I can tell you. And there were a lot of powerful folks who couldn’t figure out why the publisher would hire someone without social standing, a rootedness in the local service club program, or at least someone who could be moved by the will of protectionist reason. Here I was in the editor’s chair with about fifteen cents to pay that month’s rent, no earthly reason to bow to any of the political grandstanders who used to get all the press, and a person uncommitted to follow any protocol other than honest, responsible, unbiased reporting. I could think what I wanted about the folks in my community and their bad habits but it wasn’t going to influence my editorial capacity….and it never did. Now of course, after I had given up the editor’s desk and settled into a long tenure as a columnist, I let it all hang-out. Needless to say I made more than a few enemies. The combined forces of opposition began tightening the noose I knew was around my neck, and after I’d made my peace with local history….. and presented a new look at what has always been steadfastly maintained as fact ingrained, I knew it was time to move on and celebrate a period of relative non-confrontation in print or otherwise.
Today I’m a tad gentler, somewhat less resolved to save the world from tyrants and local politicians but I really haven’t changed my mind about the good folks who keep our communities alive and thriving……and admittedly I don’t mention the names of politicians, although I’ve met a few recently who have made me wonder if a trend is developing….or a new complacency arrived at.
I loved my job as editor because it allowed me to drink it all in, just as when, as a kid, I sat on the stoop at Black’s Variety and watched the adult world folly and fiddle, hustle and dawdle through each god-blessed day. I was proud to represent my hometown and yet I wasn’t about to hide news or bury what the public needed to know. And I had lots of angry readers who demanded that I bury what they believed wasn’t in the best interest of home and family. I fought them every inch and printed what I believed, in heart and soul, needed to be in the public domain. I was right more than I was wrong. I took a lot of abuse in a decade editing the Muskoka press but it was an experience I needed to expand my appreciation for life and times, good and evil, joy and tragedy. I had readers embrace me with heartfelt appreciation after a feature story…… and then I had angry readers intent on hurting me when we ran stories about their relatives being busted for impaired driving. I took a lot of heat for running negative news reports of any kind. For the first two years of my editorship, every Wednesday in local publishing was like driving with highbeams into a blizzard…..amongst those mesmerizing, dizzying snowflakes, there were a few good wishes….and you know, it was all I needed. Just a few folks to say, “Nice work Scoop….I wondered when someone was going to blow the whistle.”
I was born a writer and I shall die a writer. I will always show my goodwill toward those unsung community builders who work progressively and patiently, most often with modest return, who build the future one brick at a time…..one cheeseburger and fries, one bagged carton of milk in the bag.
Please check out Curious; The Tourist Guide for my newest column series in 2008 regarding the good old days as a beat reporter=controversial editor, working in the South Muskoka region of this grand old Ontario.

A Time for Writing – This Autumn of Mine


I have never been a summer season writer. Even Canadian artist Tom Thomson wasn’t particularly interested in painting the green Algonquin landscape in June and July…..preferring instead the stark, beautiful contrasts of autumn, winter and early spring. As readers are likely aware, I have spent quite a bit of time recently researching the death of Thomson back in July 1917; it is a cumulative life-long project I think now because it dates back to the mid 1990’s and I’m even more enthused about the investigation now than I was five and ten years ago. It’s usually the opposite for me, and that after a project has been successfully published, I’d rather leave it for the rest of time. This is because I never do any full scale research with an eventual published outcome, than I don’t immerse totally in the subject. I haven’t had one day in the past fifteen odd years when Thomson hasn’t been on my mind, even if only as a passing reference, when for example I see a particularly striking autumn scene…..a windblown pine reaching like an arm, over the rolling whitecaps of a storm-swept bay…..maybe a brightly colored hardwood canopy bathed in brilliant sunlight. I’ll wonder to myself how Thomson might have interpreted the scene onto his paintboard.
I have always, at least in spirit, wandered away after the summer season complacency, into the mindful illustration of Thoreau at Walden Pond, discovering as a matter of some ecstasy that there is an unending source of inspiration standing here on this brink above the neighborhood bog, looking down at this life-filled lowland…..and being impressed routinely to write about life at its root; truth at its source, passion generating exploration, discovery spawning revelation. I could stand here all day watching out over this remarkable spot where old crows cackle and squirrels chatter, wise owls hoot and mice scurry, as pen scratches upon paper reflecting with some poignancy the writer’s latest proclamation. “This is life….this is freedom….I am home!”
After a rather profound period this past summer season, to save this Bog from the developer’s chainsaw, it has been a very emotional recovery……to have won our fight yet realize just how close we came to losing this amazing urban wetland…..this part of natural Muskoka that was nearly sold off to accommodate yet more residential development in a town being strangled by speculators putting profit above all else. I do not take one moment for granted here now…..and cherish the opportunity for at least one more year, and hopefully more after that, of watching from these woods as life abounds and changes in the glory of the seasons. I told my wife honestly that I might well die of injuries sustained, blocking that chainsaw blade from taking one stick off this small wetland paradise…..and she knew I was serious. From this vantage point, in the midst of this Bogland now, saved by our concerned citizens at large……and the protest raised throughout Muskoka on its behalf, I would like to dedicate the coming entries this fall-winter season, on this Blog-site, to this most impressive, beautiful place on earth…..its modesty is its beauty. I want you to know how important it is to recognize and conserve these wild places, and how to fight to conserve these places in your communities. You can get an idea what it meant for us trying to preserve The Bog, here in Gravenhurst, by clicking onto our blog-site, for a beginning to end adventure. It was the most difficult projects I’ve ever worked on but one of the most satisfying. I think the fact I had Tom Thomson on my mind constantly through the process was certainly helpful and inspirational when conservancy seemed most threatened.
After a recovery hiatus and a catch-up period with other “old book business” chores and writing projects that had been delayed because of our protest to protect The Bog, I can now finally devote time to this blog-site. Thanks for joining me. There’s much more to come.

Please visit my other blog at savethebog.blogpspot.com