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

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

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

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

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

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

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


MUSKOKA

The New Year and a clear perspective

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

A

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

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

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

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

A Time for Writing – This Autumn of Mine


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

Please visit my other blog at savethebog.blogpspot.com

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