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

Muskoka’s summer a tradition of “getting ready”

When I was a kid, the Victoria Day holiday in Muskoka, meant the dawning of that year’s “Tourist Season.” It marked the beginning of the “make money time of year,” when every retailer put out the red carpet for the tourist clientele. All the store windows were decorated with the latest wares and of course souvenirs, to entice the travelers and cottagers, to part with their holiday money. There was no shame in trying to massage some money free from our guests, as it was our history you see, to make the most out of the attractiveness Muskoka possessed to the weary urbanites. There’s a lot less of that today, city dwellers now finding more of the urban wasteland re-located in their vacationland. Certainly they witness much more expansive, horizon to horizon tarmac and commercial development than back in the 1960’s, when the main street of Bracebridge was a really short walk from beginning to end.
Shortly after the settlers arrived in Muskoka, back in the late 1850’s, they met up with sportsmen from the more urban areas of Canada and the United States, requiring certain services and luxuries in the wilderness. The first roadhouse came with the McCabe family in the late 1850’s, in the present Town of Gravenhurst, and when it became abundantly clear that Muskoka was not going to be a great agricultural district, and that lumber resources weren’t enough to build an enduring, balanced economic future, these same sportsmen provided the impetus for new investment. Afterall, it was a beautiful lakeland, and could be sold as a “restorative,” even “healthful” place on earth. Bring us the adventurers, the hunters and anglers; bring us those tired of urban ways and demands, and bring us those in need of clean air and health-promoting environs.
So today, in the late spring of 2007, watching the carpet unroll for the tourists and cottagers to our region, isn’t much different than when I was a kid growing up in central Muskoka. It was said with some accuracy, although some historians don’t like to dredge it up, that prices for commercial goods went up the moment the first tourist of the year turned up Highway II North. I don’t know how much gouging went on but it became pretty much an accepted fact. Most year-round Muskokans didn’t have a lot of use for local souvenirs, and we didn’t attend places “in-season” that were known tourist “traps”. In the fall and winter season either these tourist related shops closed for the winter, or adopted a “local” pricing policy to appease the yocals. I can’t say if this is still the case, although I suspect it’s possible that tourists feel an unspecified inequality, pondering if the price for merchandise and services decreases after Thanksgiving.
The point of this blog is to tell readers that I’m pretty much caught up in the tourist season despite the fact most of our business, as old book sellers, occurs world-wide by e-commerce throughout the year. My wife Suzanne’s family used to own the Windermere Marina, on Lake Rosseau, and I worked as a young lad in the produce-supply business out of Bracebridge, visiting almost every camp and resort in the district……. during my three years of labor hustling spuds and onions border to border, lake to lake. So we both still activate when yet another tourist season approaches. It is the time of the rolling year for Muskokans to make money off the grand nature of our lakeland. Muskokans dependent on the tourism industry have from May 24th until Thanksgiving, to make their financial commitments for the year. Most tourists have no idea how much their patronage keeps our district going. Tourism is the number one industry here although some municipal politicians now and again like to think we’re much more secure economically. Well we’re not, and this historian is telling the truth. If we ever have a serious downturn in the tourism industry in the midst of our present progressive – build on every square inch development binge, you will see a business cull of epic proportion.
So I’ve been writing a lot less these past few weeks, spending time instead re-finishing an assortment of old trunks and chairs, in preparation for our summer antique sales, which we have both at home and on the road throughout the district. The antique business only has one significant season financially, and that’s the eight or so weeks of July and August. Our mission is to sell off the larger items we’ve picked from sales and auctions throughout the year, items too large to ship via mail but perfect for an open air sale. So even after years of diversification, so that our business is much less dependent on the fluctuations of the tourism economy, we still find ourselves hoping for a good selling season…..and a majority of our buyers, will once again be our seasonal visitors and second home owners (cottagers). That doesn’t mean the local citizenry snub us but it does mean our records show that we could not survive in the antique business without the summer support we receive from our summer population increase.
Without much fanfare at all or even re-assessment, we are just two of thousands of Muskokans eager to watch our business pick-up as a result of our region’s summer destination popularity….. which is still hale and hardy all these years since those early sportsmen lodging in pioneer shelters. I will always be grateful to our summer visitors for helping us to survive here these many years. I do believe we should show our gratitude much more than we do presently. For the next century we will depend on the kindness of our guests, just as we have benefited from the 1860’s to the present. The unfortunate reality is the growing indifference to conserve more of Muskoka for parkland and open space, and stop the ugly march of urban sprawl. If there’s any danger I see, to the balance of the tourism industry generally, it’s in this transformation of Muskoka, from hinterland to “the new burbs.” Muskoka appears to be either on the verge of great new things, or a catastrophic change. In the meantime, I’ve got two more old trunks to refinish and at least three community sales only several weeks away. Please pardon my Muskoka tradition, as the distance and budget of time has certainly broadened from this computer, since good old Victoria’s birthday this past May. I won’t be doing much writing at all until those nippy days of late October, when the morning frost covers the raspberry canes, and the Hallowe’en pumpkins are back in-season.
I don’t think I could live anywhere else. The seasons of Muskoka are something to behold.

Today The Bog is definitely Thoreau’s Walden


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

A More Passionate Embrace of the Good Life

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

Plase visit my other blog at gravenhurstmuskokoa.blogspot.com

May Day and some recollections of a rapscallion once

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

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

The Picturesque as Haunted –
A scene penned, painted, poeticized

The sweet scented air reminds me of the naturally enticing aroma of Nottingham’s Sherwood Forest. The low mist tumbling over the mounds of matted grasses, might well be the stage-curtain’s opening to reveal the stark, historic English moor. The voyeur even might expect momentarily, to watch either Robin Hood and his Merry Men cajoling by Major Oak (the tree they could hide inside), or see Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, seeking out clues about the Hound of the Baskervilles down in this bog of ours.
This urban green belt tangle is mysterious as always. Even though I’m close enough to the old homestead to yell to my sons or wife, the enclosure, only steps inside, is as if the traveler was miles beyond the bustle of civilization. It is as much like a child reading a story-book. The adventure in story-land begins in earnest, once the choice of titles is selected from the bookshelf. The moment I make my intention known, to all who care that I shall be walking the great beast, Bosko, over to the Bog, my imaginative process commences to concoct and churn, in sincere hopefulness something unusual will be encountered on this latest foray.
Maybe we will cross in front of a deer or two, a wild turkey, a fox or folly of grey squirrels wrestling noisily in the dead leaves. It takes only a few strides down this beaten path to glorify the unanticipated. As Bosko intently studies every scent and wind-inspired knock or creak, I am at the mercy of an unbridled fascination, where indeed it can be said the writer expects it just as likely as a deer or bear, to cross paths with a specter, troll, gnome, fairy, witch or hobgoblin….take your pick. It’s just the way I view life. Escaping into this storied woods, provides a wonderful hiatus from the electronic world I have been unceremoniously dumped by profession. I’m not at all sure I could even muster the energy to type a full page now on a manual typewriter. I don’t remember even once, feeling I needed to escape the keyboard of the old Smith-Corona. If it did cross my mind that the typewriter had a smothering, confining effect over a day’s work, it was certainly not as much then as now.
The spring rain has generated much activity in our neighborhood, particularly noticeable down in the bog where the brown, dry stands of field grasses are slowly being replaced by vivid green plants at their base. It is hard not to feel that same potential in heart half expecting that old bones will strengthen and ambition flow eternal just standing amidst this inspiring, strong, earthly re-generation. I suppose it would be nice if this strong seasonal force could re-shape humanity, as it is now transforming the winter landscape. It is changing daily as the sunscape through the still bare tree-tops warms away the last ground frost, which the oldtimers here claim was down a fair piece in the aromatic bog muck.
I used to reference David Grayson’s writings frequently, from his book, “Adventures in Contentment.” He writes about his stint in farming, having turned his back on city-life in order to preserve his health. He was tilling the field one day when he happened to look up to witness a most impressive sprawling topography beneath a gentle, universal sky, and it seemed to him momentarily, as a strange, unfamiliar scene; one that he knew had been there before, since creation, but in his days at the farm it had never seemed so important to study. The hillside view of the valley below was as if the world had immediately opened to him. When he looked back at his impressively straight furrows created that day, and then contrasted them with what had been provided naturally, he felt foolish about having ignored the bigger picture of life and times. He had been so concerned about making the furrows straight and appearing expertly contoured to the land that he had ignored all the magnificent world and life forces thriving around him. His preoccupation with the task had blocked out all else, the loss being a deprived existence. This bothered him moreso, because it was nature, this sprawling, inspiring landscape and its unlimited possibility, that brought him to the farm in the first place. It was as much an escape as a quest for salvation from city life.
There are times, even as a longstanding student of “Adventures in Contentment,” I find myself immersed in modern day commerce up to my eyeballs, such that I am just as ignorant and blind to the world around me as Grayson complained. It takes a great resolve to stop and admire the view in the course of modern day commerce….modern day hustle. We risk our health and sanity at this mill wheel because we find it impossible to invoke, impose, command change upon our condition. I have had to stop myself many times this past year, to break from the obsession of business at all cost. With exception of these daily walks over to the bog, and down this peaceful country lane, the computer commerce glowing in my office, beckoning me to invest just a few more hours, has been a powerful force to reckon with, and occasionally forcefully escape. It is a terrible reality, one that should never have happened to someone who claims dutifully to being of “the enlightened.” Yet it has happened to millions of folks who have given up entirely on the possibility there is something more in life other than technology….. and straight, perfectly spaced furrows.
When I used to look up from my typewriter keyboard, I might have been privileged to see the lilacs blossoming in the front yard, and the storm clouds blackening along the horizon. I might have looked out in time to see a hummingbird at the feeder, or a squirrel sitting up on the fence post having an afternoon respite. When I look up now I see this wavering white on grey screen, and beyond that is a dark opening of cabinet with an askew wall of books behind. Where the window should be in a visionary’s office! To look out the window at the world around me, I must get up and strain my neck to sneak a little peak out at the front yard, and the bog across the lane. And the humming. My old typewriter made a lot of sounds but all acceptable in the pursuit of story-line. This infernal racket of buzz and internal function, makes me crazy after only a few minutes. I can feel the radiation penetrating my soul. At the old Smith-Corona, the worse symptom was a stiff neck and some ribbon ink on my fingertips from undoing a key jam.
I have to be particularly disciplined at this computer terminal, to step away every half hour or so just to connect with what is real and breathing in this environment around me. Even if I was to stop right now, in the middle of this sentence, and head out the front door and down into the bog, it would take about fifteen minutes to adjust to the new normal. Adjust to the fact there is no sustained humming and neatly boxed, tailored viewpoint ahead. I resisted a computer for many years and only agreed to purchase one as a facilitator of more efficient office operation. It is true that work in both writing and antique professions has become easier in many ways because of computer technology; yet with improvement and efficiency has come isolation and numbness of spirituality. I have been known to sit at this fool contraption for upwards of four hours. When I proof-read what has been composed, it’s quite usual for the work to be flat, sloppily written, and rather lifeless even when read aloud. I put more work into corrections and re-structuring columns and editorials than was ever necessary from the greasy rollers of a manual typewriter.
Even though I have the advice of David Grayson imprinted on my soul, because it is truly what I believe important in life, I fall victim regularly to the modern trappings of the so-called “better-easier-most efficient way” of living and making money. The only salvation is having the determination to pull up from this post, this whiter than white monitor screen (despite enough furrows to make up a day’s work), and wander off into the woods for a brief sojourn from the world as it has been manufactured. I never leave this sanctuary without feeling restored and invigorated. If there is any misery at all in my life, it is the reality of this unhealthy, uninspiring attachment to the modernists’ convention and new century accepted practice of blatant disregard….for anything that doesn’t smack of new technology..
I need these sojourns, as Grayson needed his vista of heaven on earth. I want to kick this habit one day soon, and spend more time haunting these woods, than hovering over a space-age keyboard in half-spirit dreaming of a better way!

Everyone should experience this side of Muskoka – of Ontario – of Canada

You just want everyone to experience this scene. As if it will change opinions and philosophies about earth and its stewardship. Seeing this morning’s first light breaking through the trees is an enlightening span, a subtle, effortless time travel through the ages. From my vantage point on the hillside, overlooking The Bog, the scene unfolding was timeless. This same vista has existed for centuries, and I might just have found myself back in the 1600’s, as in the present domain of this new century. It’s what to me at least, remains so fascinating about these natural places remaining on earth, still largely untouched by progress, yet so precariously on the verge of change to meet the demands of the all-consuming modern-day citizenry.
But you need to see this kind of natural wonder regenerating here, to appreciate the true magnificence of the ever-changing, ever adapting realm of environment. We are humbled in the presence of such grandeur and complexity of life and its powerful forces. Imagine how this one vista, this one tiny bit of wild acreage amidst the urban jungle, will transform in a matter of weeks now, to an almost tropical vegetation of ferns and marsh grasses that will block from view all that is presently clear. Even the black, snaking ribbon of creek that dissects the lowland will be invisible in several weeks, and I will only be able to imagine what the tiny crystalline cataracts will look like, as they gurgle and churn in black pools along the watershed to Lake Muskoka.
It’s at first light that this place is most healing to the weary soul. You can’t stand on this point of land, jutting out above the bog, and not feel in some way invigorated by the way life pushes up from the decay of the past seasons. From these heavy burdens of old brown grasses and fern canopy will generate beautiful new vegetation that will weave like a carpet to the adjacent tree line of evergreens and birches. I could never come away from here, this vigil, and feel uninspired. I’ve arrived at this portal feeling depressed and distressed about life and times, and left again as if granted new wings of flight. I have mired down in self-loathing at this same typewriter and then strolled to The Bog as respite, and been restored to hopefulness that another story-line has been born. I come away with a feeling of calm. My only regret at times likes these, is that I couldn’t stay longer to watch the rest of the day unfold….to be able to watch the tiny rolls of fern unfetter themselves from tight buds into full, rich, deep green sprays that dance tenderly in the sheer poetry of windsong.
You can’t get an environmental conscience overnight, or simply from the lead-stories off the evening news, or from the banner stories in the daily press. You can attend rallies for the environment and commence a new “green” way of living but to be part of this world in earnest, requires a full and committed immersion. Not simply stepping outdoors and then initiating a hasty retreat but actually appreciating the true dynamic of earth and its cycles. Like getting your feet wet in this bog, and truly celebrating the privilege of being part of its life force. Standing here while the new sprouts are breaking through the newly thawed ground. This is where it’s happening. This is the zone that will make you a believer, mother earth is worth saving. If you are not humbled by this scene, or any other immersion in a pasture, a woodland, on a hilltop or down in a bog like this, then you haven’t yet found the meaning of life. It’s here. Right here. To find your place in nature, raise you arms, do a wee twirl if you like, look up, look down and all around, and thank your maker for allowing you this role, this heavenly experience right on earth.
Long before there was a bandwagon to jump upon, in the new century bid to save the environment from its intrusive, “we’ll fix it tomorrow,” human-kind, I was preaching to any one who would listen, about the critical need for outdoor education to immerse youngsters in the real nature of things. I campaigned for years and received nary a nod of approval for my efforts. When I confronted educators about the time and budget of curriculum devoted to technology, computers out-weighing almost everything else in assumed importance, finding a few extra bucks to make outdoor education available to more students each year was simply out of the question. A ridiculous endeavor, they said, to think that students would be better prepared by graduation, having studied from a canoe on an Ontario lake, or hiked the forests and lowlands in quest of the meaning of life. As I made it clear ten years ago, I shall state once again that unless the curriculum wizards get youngsters outdoors more often, and balance outdoor educational opportunity with in-class study, we will continue to launch careers of environmental destruction, instead of graduating good stewards of mother earth.
There is no way to save the environment the way we are going. The massive change necessary requires a sensibility of conduct that seems impossible. Convincing even a public schooler to come and explore this lowland “without a cell phone,” or other, would prove daunting and punitive. Getting a business obsessed adult to step into these woods without some form of technology to interfere, would be next to impossible. Yet it is imperative we get the message across, of just how fragile future existence will be, at the pace of environmental destruction. If indeed we are to save what has already been given a catastrophic blow for all these decades, enlightenment is the only grail that’s holy. If we want to save ourselves, our offspring, we need to re-introduce nature in its deserved light and integrity. Not as a backdrop for our sprawling subdivisions and urban tarmac winding from horizon to horizon. Not viewed as an inconvenience, “an unfavorable weather report” when the conditions turn adverse, offering rain, then snow, then black of night to some mortal’s chagrin….that it all can’t be changed to suit lifestyle pursuits. Designer weather possibly! We are a silly bunch of asses aren’t we, that we have for all these years taken our life force, or sustainability on this planet for granted?
The way to save Muskoka is first of all, to recognize that it is in serious danger of being over-developed by societal craving and greed. The only way to fight this is to see for yourself what is at stake in the next ten years. This lowland, this beautiful, peaceful, life restorative place, might one day soon be the host site of a new condo project, or a recreation centre….maybe a tennis court or sprawling, silly looking bungalows. Instead of these leaning birches and hunched-over evergreens that add so much life and poetry here, we might have street lamps and boulevard signs to point us from here to there.
I don’t make a visit to The Bog at any time of any day that I don’t offer some reservation about leaving, such that I might arrive again to find a bulldozer diverting a waterway for building convenience, or then infilling a pond full of life, to make a cul-de-sac for yet another subdivision…… for the ample profit of the money spinners.
If you want to help the environment, immerse yourself in the nature you are a part. Instead of driving by and looking at the hiking trail across the Muskoka hinterland, park the car and go for a walk. Please. See nature up close and personal, and I guarantee you’ll be damn mad about the bullying that’s been going on around here…..and then possibly you won’t mind lending a hand to an old friend.
Give a thought about how many creatures will be affected by those landmovers. I can tell you with grave honesty, I could not survive in this locale if this bog was destroyed. So like the wee creatures of the bog habitat, I would have to find somewhere else to live. I would surely perish in heart at least, to find this wonderous, enchanted, life giving place compromised by the greed of social circumstance.
Excuse me now. It seems I have to go and discuss the inappropriate act of “refuse dumping” in the forest, perpetuated once again by a neighbor’s hired help,…. who insists on fouling the good graces of The Bog with materials he won’t pay to dispose of otherwise. Apparently it’s his democratic right, or so he thinks, to change natural history to suit his disposal needs.
And we wonder why we have an environmental crisis.

PLease check out my other blog at www.gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com

Storied Muskoka –
Canada’s Haunted Lakeland

When I pass from this tired, frayed mortal coil, I too shall find Muskoka an accommodating domain for the still-unsettled spirit…..in this hauntingly craggy, gnarled, forested landscape that has for too long been taken for granted by her users and abusers.
I can’t take but one footfall from this homestead, here at Birch Hollow, than I feel the invigoration of unspecified old spirits and musty legend left to its own devices. Even when I sit in this creaking office chair, looking out over The Bog, I feel the presence of so much more than does the everyday traveler, who out of imposed necessity is too busy to stop and ponder the grand virtues of nature, and the subtle intrigue of the unexplained.
There are many good folks who reside down this lane, who have little use for “haunts” and the “marvels” of the hinterland. They have more important things to do in this frenetic world in which we live. There are aspects of this ballywick I feel are important and life-enhancing but a few of my contemporaries believe I am wasting my time selling virtues of enchantment and poetry; fantasy and the good graces of both legend and lore. The woodland I see now has a depth beyond what the naturalists identifies. The snaking creek through the hollow means more to me as analogy than the science of watershed alone. I suppose I am forever locked into the confusing hiatus between the natural and the supernatural. Yet I am contented to experience the joys of reality and then expectation while walking down these misty, well-worn pathways down into the hollow.
When the wind gusts bang at the light fixtures on the verandah, it’s as if the spirits are attempting to awaken the dead to their own new reality. Right this moment the gale force wind of an early spring storm whines through the cracks in this humble abode, and it’s as if there’s a cauldron of boiling souls somewhere beyond.
There are those who prefer to acknowledge weather as weather, wind as wind, and sunrise and sunset as a matter of sheer routine. There is no reason to question the quirks and peculiarities of a given day, other than possibly to offer some complaint about the inconvenience of having to go out in the rain or snow, or the blast of spring wind that puts sand into eyes, and hair into disarray.
I am rather passionate about these blustery circumstances, as I can always find something to write about when the sky is black, or the lightning flashes ignite so much brighter than white. I might sit here for an hour in a gentle submission, listening to birds chirp from the lilac boughs. In the event a fringe of dark, ominous looking cloud was to appear suddenly over the horizon pines, my typewriter would be employed in a rapid transmission from mind to key to paper. It is so wonderfully provocative when the wind howls and this house creaks in the thrusts of a storm’s initial bluster. Just as the wind etches down upon this vulnerable landscape presently, as we reside precariously on the brink of yet another spring storm. It is oh so much more interesting when nature decides it’s time to shatter mortal complacency. While the calm of early morning inspires the poet to write sentimentally about new beginnings and the rejuvenation of life, a mid afternoon storm cascades a wild fury of emotion and contempt, and it’s difficult to keep the fingers in tempo with the peaks and valleys of a powerful gale force.
I can sit here in the company of modern conveniences, a hot cup of tea and fresh biscuit, in warmth and comfortable sanctuary, yet feel as if, with this display of violent weather outside, I am alone in some remote wilderness cabin with a modest fire in the hearth, and most basic, humble shelter. I can feel the reaper’s long nails scraping at the window pane to harvest yet another wayfarer at the end of an adventure. I feel the icy grasp of death on my shoulder and shudder at the possibility this fire will extinguish, this hot tea run cold, this storied cabin left to erode into the landscape from which it was raised. There are many faces pressed against the glass, of travelers once, who may have lodged here for a time, partaking of nourishment to continue their passage to a homestead allotment further down the road.
Muskoka has been a tantalizing, alluring mistress for all these years. She has inspired me onward to discover the road less traveled, and left me questioning pertinent legend and lore at lakeside, when a spring sunset ignites the water into a great ball of liquid fire. I watch phantom canoes drift slowly across the lake, and have heard the whistle of a long lost steamship, and then saw the vapor off a lakeside bog float across the waterscape like two dancers in a tango. Nothing is quite as it seems. There is an intermingling of fact and fiction, legend and lore, ghosts and wee beasties that travel in the twilight of summer nights, up and down the rock faces of frozen-in-time ogres, and assorted other malevolent entities who curl up in the story-lines yet to be written.
There is a deep satisfaction in making a connection, with the qualities and quantities of unspecified manifestations; the ghost witnessed along the fern-laden garden path, or the fairy-kind found in dance ‘neath the midnight moon. It’s truly marvelous to find yourself in company with some goblin or other, at a time when a source of inspiration proves hollow and boring. How could any writer or artist-type, fail to be thoughtfully provoked, when provided exposure in some fashion, to the curious facets of what is often called the supernatural. I consider myself quite fortunate indeed to feel the hair on my neck standing in the chill of strange company, possibly encountered on a cemetery walk, or on a misted-over trail from one cottage structure to another.
I have no interest in protecting myself against all exposures to what a soothsayer might call “the paranormal.” I drink it all in as would any inspiration-starved creator, having this unnatural craving to compose until the final, ultimate collapse into exhaustion. It would be an unremarkable enterprise should these paranormal encounters suddenly cease. My goodness, what would I do? What would inspire me to sit for hours on end at this typewriter, if it wasn’t for a well placed, unanticipated haunting?
It’s apparent from what visitors to Birch Hollow tell me…. that we have quite enough ghosts already, to keep me company for many years to come. As an antique collector it is said that these wayward spirits may have arrived in our abode, quite unceremoniously attached to a work of art,….possibly an old pine cradle, a painting, book, or even a Victorian era teddy bear. My wife claims we have haunted dolls, and I have nary a reason to challenge her assumption.
Muskoka is most definitely a haunted, spiritual place, and there have been many testimonials from some of the country’s great poets and artists, agreeing there’s more here than just rocks, trees and water. There’s an ecstasy to experience. A spiritual freedom, a universality of potential beckoning free-thinkers to explore and create.
For those who wouldn’t recognize a spirit if they had one hop on their back for a wee joy-ride, sensing out the paranormal from the normal, the supernatural from the natural, is a matter of letting one’s imagination run unencumbered. It is necessary to allow your sensory perception to delve beyond the obvious. Pre-conceived notions block out a great deal of sensory perception. It’s a modern day condition consuming the child before its time. Possessing the good graces of a child’s imagination is the catalyst of unfettered adventure.
What do you feel sitting out along the Muskoka lakeshore in the darkness, and watching the magnificent fanning colors of the northern lights? Do you hear voices in the wind, when a spring gale washes down over the rock bluffs, and then through the pinery highlands? Do you feel that sense of awe when a storm-front rages down over the lakeland with a powerful fist, unclenching onto vulnerable lowlands, and then culling old leaning birches and evergreens as it rages through the woodlands.
Muskoka is a storied place, much like the historic valley of the Hudson River, made famous by American author Washington Irving. Muskoka has a collection of tales and legends to bestow the keen watcher….the curious traveler, the seeker of adventure, with the truths of good, faithful and historic hauntings.
If ye are the seekers of such adventure, you are welcome to join this mission of discovery…..and yes, I’ve known a few spirits in my time. If you don’t believe in ghosts and the paranormal, then consider these coming entries as wild speculation, ravings of a lunatic, and flights of unfathomable fancy. But if you dare to experience Muskoka’s spirited legacy, do read on…..more to come soon in this blog journal….the Nature of Muskoka.

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