Pork, peanuts, plunges, and pique

I'd thought about going up to Kettleby and photographing the place on the weekend and sent an email to P-Doug on Thursday to that effect, but P-Doug fired a suggestion off to me at exactly the same moment... it was creepy-weird; his email was waiting for me when I hit the Send button. His suggestion entailed going out to the annual ribfest in Victoria Park in Kitchener, stopping at Piccard's Peanuts, and maybe visiting Otterwa if there was time on the way back. The ribfest is a once-a-year event, and presumably Kettleby will be there for a while, so it was pretty clear to me his suggestion trumped.

He picked me up around 10 and we headed west on the 401. The traffic was moving, but it was busy all the way. I guess there's hardly ever a time now when the 401 isn't busy.

We stopped in Cambridge and looked around a retail outlet that used to be some kind of factory; it was nicely refurbished sometime in the 90s, I guess, and now houses the kind of stores that yuppies are drawn to. In our particular case it was a clothing store that sells brand name items at reduced prices. While I was there, I heard a song on the radio I really wanted to find, but promptly forgot everything about (melody, lyrics, any hint of the name of the band) and was left only with an itch I can't scratch now, unless I happen to stumble across that song again. That's extremely frustrating. It's like one of those zits that's nowhere near the surface and you can't do a thing about it... I seem to get more and more of those as I get older.

Anyway, we got to Kitchener about 12:30 or so. P-Doug had brought folding chairs so we wouldn't have to sit in awkward ways under the trees this year. We also brought several cameras and decided to casually record the event for posterity. Nothing major or important, just one of those "how life was in the 2010s" kind of things. By and large, these consisted of candid shots of People Who Look Faintly Ridiculous. That's said in the full knowledge that we may end up in such a collection ourselves for all the same reasons.

From Dr. Seuss's unreleased manuscript, Pimp a Wimp.

A number of Ontario's microbreweries had set up shop there and for $20 I got a small souvenir glass for the beer samples and eight tokens, which I split with P-Doug. In the course of the afternoon we tried a few things, but about half our tokens went to Nickel Brook's Green Apple Pilsner (in my estimation, probably second only to Innis and Gunn, imported from Scotland as the best beer I've ever had). It's one of the most delightful beers I know of. Naturally, the LCBO has discontinued it, which means driving to Burlington if we ever want to pick any up from now on.

P-Doug picked up a 1/3 rack of ribs from the Boss Hog's exhibition. These guys were up from somewhere waaay down south. They were wearing shirts with "01" on the back (which those of us over 35 will recognize as a reference to the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard), and would occasionally draw attention by sounding a fanfare horn that played the first dozen notes of "Dixie". We had three ribs each and yeah, their sauce was pretty good.

But me, I came for the pulled pork sandwich. When I was my turn, I went to a crew from New York called Fire Island. Now, with a name like that, I would have expected their sauce to have a real kick to it (either that or be gay). It was actually a honey garlic sauce. I also got us their baked beans and mashed potatoes; the former were possibly the best I've ever had, and the latter had chunks of potato skin in it, a real first for me. The sandwiches were satisfying but, unfortunately, not really spicy. Ah, well.

I guess it was about quarter after four when we left. P-Doug wanted to get to Piccard's Peanuts to pick up some stuff for his missus before it closed, guessing that would be about five-ish. On the way back to the car, I paused to get a shot of a pioneer's house, fretting out loud about whether we could spare the time. The shot took, of course, slightly over two seconds to set up and take, after which we laughed all the way to the car about how disgusted James Salmon would be with how all the art and nuance had been drained from photography by modern technology; two seconds on a whim to do something that probably would have required most of a minute for him to set up and frame, and serious deliberation as to whether the shot was worth the film.

We got to Piccard's Peanuts in plenty of time and for once in my life I didn't spend a cent there. On our way in, some family was gathered on the porch and consoling some little girl while one them, in a surprisingly adult voice, was taunting (a la Eddie Murphy) "you don't have no ice cream..." I whispered to P-Doug on the way in "The Asshole Family's road trip vacation". By the time we left, the girl had been mollified... probably by ice cream.

We took the backroads across to Bolton where Otterwa is. The last two times we were there we were sharing the place with anglers. The first time was at the end of the summer in 2008; we completely ignored the place in 2009 as we explored other places. A few weeks ago we decided to go back. We made our way through the brush, down the hills, through the mucky swamp at the bottom, crossed the river to the sandy landing, only to spot a fresh cigarette on the shore.  And literally within one minute of our arrival, two guys with fishing rods came out of the field. We milled around for a bit and realized the day was theirs, so we headed back and just hung out on the hilltop over the road for a while before heading off for the consolation prize of beer and burgers.

This time we were arriving very late in the day. I had some misgivings about the hour and our ability to find our way back out as the sunlight faded (Otterwa is not an easy place to get to... unless you have a fishing rod, apparently), and I wondered if Glasgow might not be a more likely choice, given its proximity to the road, but I kept them to myself. Really, Glasgow's a poor excuse for the pocket Eden of Otterwa.

It was about seven or so when we parked the car. Since May last year, I've started occasionally challenging myself on these hikes by leaving my sandals behind in the car and leaving myself no recourse to them at all, and for the first time at Otterwa I decided to do that and go barefoot the whole way in and out. Asphalt and gravel aren't the obstacles they once were; I'm kind of proud of that. We headed down the road and into the trees, and made our way for the umpteenth time to Otterwa. At the swampy base of the hill, P-Doug sank his right leg in almost to the hip. The only way to extricate himself without ruining his clothes was with my help. Immediately afterward, I stepped over a fallen log by the river and sunk in past my knee myself.

I stepped into the river and it was like tea that had been left out to cool for half an hour. There was still a lingering warmth to it; it was very comfortable. Far warmer than Lake Ontario when we were down at Cherry Beach a few weeks ago. We crossed over to the landing and found, yet again, evidence of a recent visitor; deep boot prints in the sand that had to have been made that day. But, it was pretty clear by then that the guy wasn't around, and even if he was, I wasn't overly bothered. We stripped off and got in the water and channeled good old Walt Whitman. :)

Last year P-Doug happened across a couple of watertight camera bags and he picked them up for me. I put one to the test with the G9, and for the first time, I videoed underwater there in the river. It worked spectacularly. The bare, rusty-coloured rocks on the Humber bed reminded me of nothing so much as photos of Mars. I could see minnows darting around, avoiding our feet; the silt bloom out when I stepped or brushed it from the fallen tree trunks. I've been dying since last year to do that. I want to try it again in other places.

My first ever underwater video.

I was also worried the mosquitoes would be a problem but I didn't hear the whine of the first one till we were approaching the swampy lip of the river, and even then it wasn't so bad. And at first, while we were in the water, they left us alone. I was sitting near the bank and they began to pester me so I moved out to the centre. But as the sun sank lower, they got bolder, until at last most of our time in the water was taken up with keeping our shoulders submerged and warning each other off about impending landings. That, and a few other factors (concern with the failing light, hunger after six hours) prodded me to suggest we consider it a short, successful, Apollo 11-style landing and make our way to either Wendy's or The Toby Jug.

With the mosquitoes being what they were, the possibility of lingering on the bank to dry really wasn't one. We carried our clothes out, up the hills, across the little clearings, over the pine needles, keeping ahead of the mosquitoes till we were within sight of the road, when we dressed. We've hiked out naked from Otterwa before – the first time in a rainstorm – this time due to a different set of necessities.

There was nearly no traffic coming or going; the pavement under my feet was still pleasantly warm even after the sun had set. We got to within ten yards of the car when P-Doug cried out like the damned: his keys were in his belt pack, and his belt pack was back on the landing by the river.

I can't, I honestly can't, remember an instant where I felt so hopelessly resigned to a disheartening inevitability. P-Doug asked me if I wanted to sit it out by the car. I had to mull it over for two or three seconds. The only reason for accompanying him was, well, to accompany him. Solidarity. That was it, really. But there were myriad reasons not to go. First of all, he was instantly (and understandably) in, shall we say, not the most social of moods, and anyone travelling with him would have been wise to do so in unprovocative silence. Well, sitting by the car, I wasn't likely to say anything to irritate him. Secondly, offering my blood to the mosquitoes again wasn't going to accomplish anything except feeding the mosquitoes. Finally, my sandals were locked in the car. One of the challenges I like about barefoot hiking is choosing my footfalls, but that's enough of a challenge in daylight. I really didn't want to test my skill (luck) in increasing darkness; besides, I would have slowed him down. I estimated a 40-minute round trip. So, feeling cowardly and slightly guilty, I politely begged off.

I settled in the grass beside the car and tried to pass the time reviewing the underwater video I'd shot. Naturally, the battery gave up the ghost after about ten minutes. I settled back, trying to keep out of sight of the passing cars so as not to have to explain my situation to anyone seeking to offer aid (no one did... hmmm...), and watched the telephone pole fade to a silhouette against a darkening pink and azure backdrop. The mosquitoes found me, but I'd liberally coated myself with repellant and it seemed to work. They'd come close, hover around uncertainly, and drift off. But if I didn't provide an appetizing entrée for the mosquitoes, what I did provide was bait for the dragonflies. They were soon on the scene; a dozen or more. The big mammal locked outside the car was a godsend for them. I drew the mosquitoes in; the dragonflies took them out. I felt like an aircraft carrier in the Battle of the Coral Sea or something. Zeroes swarming around me, Mustangs zooming in to pick them off before they could inflict their damage on me. At one point, I watched a mosquito easing its way in toward me, about a foot from my left temple. I reached up slowly, ready to shoot my arm out and try to grab it, when I was suddenly outgunned and outclassed by a dragonfly who flashed through like a Spitfire and did the mosquito in. Not a word of a lie; I actually heard the "gluck" sound of the dragonfly taking the mosquito. I don't care how many thousands or millions of times bigger I was than either of them; it sent a primordial shiver up my spine.

There was no call of my name or sound of footsteps; just a key in the lock of the hatchback. I climbed up; it had been half an hour. P-Doug had shaved about ten minutes off my self-estimated ETA, and I was quietly delighted for him (and in truth, there's little doubt in my mind that my accompanying him perforce barefooted would have tacked at least that extra ten minutes on, if not more, as darkness fell).

Stopping to eat was off the itinerary; he simply wanted to get home. I honestly couldn't blame him; what he'd just gone through was no fun. As he started the car, I noticed a stack of coins by the gear shift. Fearing that the sudden start, fired by frustration, that we were likely about to experience would scatter them under the seats, I gathered them up and handed them to him. He gazed at them like a handful of shirt buttons and promptly hurled them out onto the road... along with them, any legitimate claim to pride in a Scottish heritage, which will always ringing slightly hollow now. I've been mad, I've been frustrated, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a time I've been willing to throw three bucks in change out into the street. It's just not in me to do that.  :) Man, I'm not joking: it fleetingly crossed my mind to get out and claim the salvage rights! Of course, I'd still be standing there, hitching a ride, if I'd done that. :)

His pique didn't last long; he wasn't sore at me, just the situation. By the time we were on Hwy 50 and leaving Bolton behind he was already waxing eloquent on the merits of over-the-counter histamines. Hey, were else am I going to hear these things?

But it all ended in comedy anyway. Typically on our hikes we tend to leave our wallets in the glove compartment. Nothing to buy in the woods and no need for a driver's license; why risk losing them? So as I stepped out of the car at my building, having gathered my things, I gave myself a quick once-over to make sure I'd gotten everything. Felt the hollow place on my thigh where my wallet should be and shouted out just as he began to pull away. He stopped, I pointed to the glove compartment, and he hauled out my wallet with a grin. At least we got a laugh out of it.

Sunday I pretty much just sat around, picking out the photos I wanted for the collection and preparing and tagging them. That and buying $50 in groceries and some of the last sixes of Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsner  the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is ever going to offer the people of this province for sale. Yup, their radar for figuring out what I like and then getting rid of it is stellar stealth-proof...

Humber summer numbers

I actually did a fair amount of exploring on the Humber the latter half of the summer, but I never bothered to blog about it. I suppose now that the summer's over and it can all be more or less consolidated, it might make sense to do so.

The first place was a gap I noticed in the road grid where it seemed to me a road might once have crossed by no longer does. Such places are endlessly fascinating to me; the idea that people could once travel somewhere we no longer can always makes me a little wistful. I like to go to places like that and look for hints of bridges — or much better yet, bridges that still exist but are now closed to vehicle traffic — and try to picture it as it once was. The gap in question was where one of concession lines meets the West Humber River.

I went out there on a rainy morning towards the end of July. The closed part of the concession there is not very long... it only takes about five minutes to reach the river, if that, at least on the north bank. Where the road meets the river, there was no hint of its south leg on the opposite shore. The was certainly no hint of a bridge, though with such lightly-travelled roads, it's always possible that modest wooden structure was utterly erased by the floodwaters of Hurricane Hazel in October, 1954, and simply never replaced. I decided to take a little time and wander the river itself, so I stepped into the water and headed a little east. I found this beautiful little spot, a kind of a pool created by forest debris, possibly accumulated on an old beaver dam, and I found a fallen tree to settle down on. I guess I spent about a half an hour there before I started wondering about the road at the other side, and I headed back to the car to make my way over. Funny how it goes... the far side I wanted to explore was probably not 150 feet from where I first came down, but I probably had to drive two or three miles to get back to the heights on the other side.

 

The roadway down on the south side was a lot more substantial. It made a long, sweeping curve down to the river, and took about ten minutes to follow down. Despite the fact that on either side, the road came clear down to the river bank, there was no hint anywhere that there'd ever been a way to cross in a car. The two parts didn't seem to meet up.  There must have been a gap of something like 50 to 100 feet between them... not impossible to bridge, but possibly more than people wanted to be bothered with. Still... if you weren't going to cross the river... why build roads right down to it in the first place? I can't make up my mind if there were ever a bridge there or not. Anyway, the principal discovery of the trip was that tranquil pool further east. I came back to it with P-Doug the following weekend and we explored. In the middle of the water a bit further east we found something that was like a natural pagoda, a sort of little sitting area made up of towering old trees, open at the top. The warm sunlight streaming down made it a wonderful place to sit and soak; the water was three to four feet deep but traveled through it so slowly it was nearly becalmed. It was a perfect place in nature and I'll never forget it.

 

The next spot was quite a bit closer to town; a conservation area up in the northwest end. The valley walls there are short, but steep, and that made it a real challenge for us to get to the river. Once P-Doug and I were at the river, the only way to get around, at least initially, was via the river itself. But, as before, it was several feet deep, so we stripped below the waist and followed the river along till we could trek across the forest floor, taking shortcuts from one bend in the river to the next. After a while we came to a fantastic sandy landing opposite a steep bank. We spent an hour or more in the sunny water before retiring to the shady bank. Again, it was a sweet slice of nature. The only note detracting from it was the faint but ever-present sound of the nearby highway traffic, not quite a mile off.

 

 

 

The final spot was back to a place on the river we've been a dozen times before, except we travelled beyond it to a new location through the woods. We went nude hiking into the hills there a few years ago and decided to do it again, this time making our way through the woods to the river on the far side of the bend. The hills in question are on a peninsula that's practically rendered an island as the river bends back upon itself. We carried our clothes across the river and stowed them on the peninsular side, then started the climb. I'd actually done this by myself a few weeks earlier when we'd been there but he had elected to stay and soak in the river on the near side. Retracing my route, we reached the place we got to the first time, at the heights, and travelled beyond it. On our way down on the far side, we came across this strange landing in the woods make up of trash and abandoned furniture. It looked for all the world like a long-abandoned spot for teenage make-out parties. We looked around it for a few minutes in curiosity before moving on to make our way down to the river. I showed him the bleached fallen log on the opposite bank that I'd forded to and sat upon in the sun. This time, it was his turn to cross over and to wander the river there; for myself, I reclined in the sun amid the long grass. He satisfied his curiosity for the river and joined me in the sunbathing spot after about half an hour or so, and we just whiled away the early afternoon there. Eventually we wandered back into the forest and up the hill, down the other side to find our stowed clothes (funny how different landmarks look from the forest instead of the river...), and headed into the nearby town to liberate a few beers from imprisonment in cold, dark kegs. It more or less represented the end of the summer, but a summer spent enjoying nature while in a matching  state is one well-spent in my opinion. :)

A study in contrasts

In the past week, P-Doug and I have been back twice to a nice place on the Humber we had kind of forgotten about since last summer. Even though only three days separated the two visits, the difference in conditions was astounding.

Saturday we arrived around noon. The river was shallower than it had been the previous time I'd visited (a couple of weekends earlier, by myself), and the riverbed was clear and visible. When we stepped in and wandered down the river to our bathing spot, it barely even wet the hems of my shorts. When we arrived, we undressed and sat under the overhanging shade tree. The day was hot and humid, the water was quite warm for this early in the summer, and the sun was blazing. Even in the shade, you could feel its might.

A couple of summers ago, we had gone nude hiking into the hills there. That side of the river is on a large isthmus that is very nearly an island, and will be soon, I think. P-Doug wasn't game for it this time, fearing the bugs, but I set off on my own and climbed the hill, made my way down the far side, and crossed the river. A climbed the far bank and sat for a while on a bleached white log left in the grass by some long-ago flood, and watched the river. After I bit I crossed back over to the isthmus side and settled back in the grass to lie in the sun. Eventually I made my way back up into the forest and down to where he was still enjoying the water. The bugs had never bothered me. We both got a bit of a burn that day, though; his worse than mine because I spent about an hour of it in the forest.

Wednesday was Canada Day so we decided to go back. It was overcast and only warm, rather than hot. When we got to the river, it was the colour of hot chocolate, and obviously far deeper, even to look at. It had rained quite a bit in the previous two days and we had to undress before even stepping in. The current was surprisingly fast, and it was deeper than we'd even guessed, not to mention somewhat cooler. I was still wearing my shirt and eventually even the bottom of that was soaked. By the time we got to our usual spot and I could take it off, we were at parts that were armpit deep. I've never seen the river as deep as that at that spot. It was anytime we turned to work against the current that we realized just how strong it was; it was hard even to take a step against it. I decided to be prudent with my backpack and put it on road side of the river rather than the isthmus side so I wouldn't have to carry it back across. We spotted a flat, muddy landing on the isthmus side and struggled to reach it, and ended up spending most of our time there, half in and half out of the river. There was really no place shallow enough to actually sit down in the river itself this time. We spent some time there before fighting our way back to the road side where our clothes and food were, and ate sandwiches and oranges on the grassy side of the bank. We sat briefly under the tarp I carry on hikes when it started raining, just enough to give the day another interesting detail.

Eventually we decided to drift off. I prevailed upon P-Doug not to attempt wading back to the initial landing against the current on this day, but suggested instead climbing the steep valley wall behind us back to the old road. He was eventually persuaded, and I spotted what looked like a deer trail and made my way towards it. He gathered his things and followed, and ended up doing a few minutes of nude hiking in spite of things. When we reached the top, we dressed, checked out the trail a bit, and headed back. It was the nicest way to spend Canada Day and really celebrate the great outdoors of this country that I could think of. :)

Summer utmost

I’ve spent a few summers now indulging in wilderness hiking and skinny-dipping in lush river valleys outside the city, but I think the experience yesterday was probably singular.

P-Doug picked me up at my place around 10 or so and we headed out on the 401 to the west end to ply the roads that follow the Humber, our river of choice, northwest into its still untamed upper reaches. I’m told that the Humber once, millennia ago, drained Lake Huron directly into Lake Ontario, but those days and water levels are long gone and today the Humber is a humbler river of a more manageable human scale. Where we were headed, a little pocket Eden we’ve come to refer to as “Otterwa”, for lack of a real name, the river twists and bends in a deep valley with a flood plain, alternating between runs a few inches deep over stones unfriendly to canoe bottoms and broad, silt-bottomed pools of chest-deep water.

Heading in, the forest floor, carpeted in russet pine needles, was bone dry under my bare feet. I remember thinking how little it would take, just the drop of a match or someone’s cigarette butt, to potentially send the place up. Neither one of us is a smoker, so it wouldn’t be us. The way in we take alternates several times between forest and clearing (one of which is perennially marked by the places deer have flattened sleeping) before the final forested slope down into the valley, where a brief, knee-deep marsh finally yields up the river.

P-Doug stepped into the river first and pronounced it cool, but warmer than our last visit. He also thought that it was higher. I’m dubious, myself; it seems to me that the river is higher in his estimation every time but I have yet to see pairs of animals making their way into the ark, or even water that reaches my shoulders while I’m standing in it. Still, in the absence of any empirical measure, it remains a subjective estimation, so I’m not prepared to say he was mistaken. Anyway, it seemed the same to me.

We waded to our usual landing, where I set my backpack in the ferns and stripped, wading back into the water more fully since there was now nothing to get wet but my skin. P-Doug set his things on the bank and did likewise. The water was cool, but not shocking. It really only took a few moments to get adjusted. The current runs down the landing side of the river, but on the far side (ironically, the side from which we’d actually come down), the bend and other elements have created a pool out of the current where the water moves very slowly and a number of fallen trees have created good places to sit immersed in the water. That’s how I enjoy being there. P-Doug’s strategy is more to find the courage to dunk to the neck and simply remain immersed that way.

The minnows who live in the river were uncharacteristically ravenous for the first 15 minutes or so. They always crowd in to pluck whatever it is they eat off your skin... more a kiss than a bite... but yesterday they swarmed around me in their dozens, some of them as long as my hand and as thick as two fingers, darting it to poke at my legs, my arms, my sides. Not really that much of an annoyance (unless they nibble someplace unmentionable). But it was a little unnerving and so I began sweeping them away, closing my fists quickly to suggest snapping jaws. I don't know if that was enough to dissuade them or whether they just decided there wasn't anything particularly tasty sticking to me, but they buggered off and left me alone after that.

We did what we always do while there… talk about cultural things (movies, mostly), historical moments, political trends… all while indulging in the great luxury of being bare outdoors, in the sun, among the trees, in the water. Primal and natural. At various times we each remarked how privileged we were, but when you think about it, a little over a century before it was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. It’s how things were on hot summer days. How did we come to lose that, forget that?

We were there for hours, really. Over time the water warmed noticeably until it was, in truth, verging on a temperature I really could characterize as “warm”. Around that time, I noticed a thick, broad natural plank of wood – God only knows the size of the ancient fallen tree that yielded it – poking from the bank behind me like a bunk. I cleared it off and reclined on it with my back and head pressed to the bank, a firm root system holding the earth and plants above me like a canopy. P-Doug decided it would make a good shot and retrieved his camera from the landing to record my languid pose.

The upper landing that we usually sun on to dry off has, this year, been colonized by the most annoying stinging nettles. So eventually I went exploring up river to see if there were any other landings to stretch out on. I did find a couple, clear and only dotted with ferns, but they were in the shade. Seemed like anything that had sun also had the nettles. At one spot where I came ashore, I noticed a wooden plaque nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing to the river carved and painted onto it. It was weathered and had been there a long time, but it surprised me. It was obviously meant to mark a trail of some kind, or indicate something to someone at some point. Intriguing. Sadly, I’d set off without anything, and I didn’t have my camera with me to take a picture. It was simply, as P-Doug has referred to such technology-deficient incidents, a “Zen moment”. I stepped back into the watery highway to return and report.

When I got back to the pool and the landing, he wasn’t there. There’s a tree just downstream with a large overhang that exactly hid him from view. He’d seen me returning, though, and called out. He was at the marl bank, about a minute downstream from the pool. I waded down there and climbed up. The really active part of the marl bank is roughly the size of a bathtub, and he was laid back on it, half immersed, and covered in grey marl except for his head. I sat on the firmer bank where the marl had dried, and watched as dozens of spiders came running out, black-bodied with huge abdomens so white I thought they must have been egg sacs. They seemed to be able to skate over the wet marl with no trouble at all. After a while I started to notice the clay under my heels was getting wet and soft, and when I began to peddle my feet against the clay, within minutes it had completely transformed into the same thick soup that P-Doug was lying back in. Soon I was sitting flat with my legs buried in the stuff up the knees. It was amazing.

We’d had intermittent sun all the four hours or so we were there but by this time, somewhere about three o’clock, the overcast had been established for around an hour and we began to hear the rumble of thunder. We lingered, indulging ourselves, until prolonged rolls made it clear we were due for a downpour. We pulled out of the marl and washed in the river and began to wade back to the landing just as the first raindrops began to fall. In the minute or so it took us to get back there, the downpour was on. Since we were already wet and naked, P-Doug suggested we trek back to the road that way and spare our dry clothes as long as we could. With any luck, the rain would be over by the time we reached the road. I tucked our clothes into my backpack and we left the river, climbing up out of the valley into the woods.

The rain was really coming down. By the time we got back to the field the deer sleep in, it was coming down in buckets. And it was warm. Warmer than the water of the river. I’ll never forget the image of P-Doug, naked, wandering through a field of waist-deep grass with his arms outstretched to delight in the falling rain.

The same pine needle flooring I’d thought so dry hours before was now verging on mucky and slippery under my feet. My forest fire fears were assuaged. When we were within five yards of the road or so, we decided to dress as minimally as we could, and so we just pulled on our shorts. At least our shirts would remain dry. As we did so, I said to him that it had to have been the most ambitious nude hike we’d yet undertaken; most of a mile up and down hills through forest, brush, and field.

Bare chested, we stepped onto the road. For me it was an interesting sensation because the normally blistering summer blacktop was merely comfortably warm under my feet, cooled by the rain, steaming and extremely pleasant to walk on. Three or four cars passed us on the ten-minute walk back to the car. As we drove away, pub-bound, P-Doug observed that the thing that made the place so wonderful was the childlike freedom it bestows… to swim and wander the place naked, sit on tree limbs, play in the clay with abandon. I remarked that there was nothing like that in my own youth… that I’d had to progress well into adulthood to achieve it. Strange irony.

Forests: home and away...

Last week the forecast led me to believe that the weather on Saturday would be warm and damp, very much like the first time I visited Kirby Road around Labour Day a year and a half ago. I had a really nice hike there that first time. I like overcast weather, the drizzle made the desurfaced road and forest a pleasure to walk on, and the place wasn't crawling with other hikers. For a while it was as though I was the only person in the world, free to "discover" the abandoned bridge there over the Humber.

P-Doug has been there with me before, but never from the heights on the east side, which was the way I approached when Bassmentbeats sent me there that first time. I suggested the trip and, uncharacteristically, he rather willingly agreed to make the hike in what promised to be rainy weather. As it turned out, it made for some extremely moody skies that he hoped would yield good HDR results (stay posted). Personally, I think some of our best hikes have been taken on days with dramatic weather, particularly in terms of photography; and now that he's carrying the S80 around lumographically he might be becoming more amenable to more extreme conditions, at least in the temperate months.

We got a late start, heading out around 10:30 or so, but we made really good time getting there and were climbing out of the car a bit after 11, which was a faster journey than my first trip (I must have taken the back roads that time; this time it was 401-427-Hwy 27). I brought my sandals with me in my backpack but managed not to need them at all the three or so hours we wandered around, which was my intention. I was only disappointed that the weather wasn't as advertised and the ground wasn't as giving and luxurious in textures as I had hoped. But there was still grasses, sand, mud, wildflowers, tilled soil, gravel, pine needles, boulders, cement, steel plates, concrete, water... Plenty to experience while moving along.

One of the first places we came to that really caught his attention, something I had utterly forgotten despite having been there twice before, was the first big curve in Kirby Road where it has to divert north to avoid the relentless plunge to the river. From there, we could see a huge mansion perched high over Huntingdon Road on the far side of the valley. It has had, and will continue to enjoy, an enviable view of the flood plain for the foreseeable future.

Not long after that we started encountering the hillside wrecks I'd noticed in previous trips. I don't know if people were actually in these cars when they went over the side, or if people were just using the cliff to dispose of old junkers, but they certainly make for some interesting kinetic free verse poetry; a kind of three dimensional graffiti sprawled and scrawled across the face of a cliff, where they will likely reside for generations. From the look, they've all been there at least since the 1980s. At one point, P-Doug spotted a cluster that looks like three cars that have been down there probably since the moon landings. Tall trees have since grown up in the path that they would have had to have tumbled through on their way down.

Soon we came to the place I'd been interested in showing him: the landslide that had torn about thirty yards out of the road some years back and caused it to be closed to traffic, if it wasn't already (I have no idea when this stretch of Kirby was actually "stopped up", as it's termed on municipal documents). He hadn't seen it when we'd been there before; we'd never really gotten beyond the wrecked truck at the other end. This time, we were high above the river, leaving the path along the lip and slipping down into the sloping roadway that once brought cars and trucks up and down the valley, like a ramp along a steep shelf. It's been totally torn out, leaving a spectacular view but not much of a drive to speak of anymore. While we were there, we saw a man and two boys approach from the other end of the washout. They lingered for a while and even discussed trying to cross along the ragged edge of the washout, but eventually (and wisely) thought better of it and made the same steep climb up the forested face of the hillside I did the first time I was there. We heard them travel along the crest for a few moments, and then were lost in the fields above us. We doubled back and returned to the path.

P-Doug had the inspiration to leave the path again after a few moments and seek the open space created by the landslide. Doing so had never occurred to me. I followed him and we got some really nice shots of the valley.

It didn't rain that day; not to speak of, anyway; so the path down the trail through the woods, while steep, was nothing like the adventure it was for me that first time I was there. It didn't have the character of making my way down hot fudge topping; it was still fairly dry and not slippery. On the whole, I suppose that's good because it's never fun to slip and fall, or feel constantly in danger of doing so, but at the same time, I missed the sensual experience of it that I was hoping to recapture.

For me, the low point of the journey is always the flood plain at the bottom. There's nothing much to see, and the road gets gravelly. I can handle gravel now, but it's still not my favourite thing to walk on. It's at best a transition from one pleasant surface to another. P-Doug, though, was rather taken by the field at the bottom. It had been freshly turned, and he had noticed tractor tracks along the trail down the hillside (which he had initially mistaken for ATV tracks), and marveled at the effort it must have taken to get the equipment either into or out of the valley up the trail, given that it's barely six feet wide. His assumption was that it was a farmer's field, likely to be sewn with corn or perhaps wheat. He headed out into the field but I didn't follow him for a couple of reasons. One is that I just couldn't muster the interest. More importantly, it was strewn with last year's chunks of cellulose-rich stalk remnants. I've learned to walk on a lot of things but I know that this stuff has edges like razor blades if you step on it the wrong way, and you can carry chunks of it around in your sole for a season if it gets into the skin. So, I left him to the field and undertook exploring the river side of the road.

I wanted to see how close the river was to the road on the north side. There's a little band of trees on that side and a bit of a drop, and at the bottom it was a little marshy. I skirted the outside of the pool and made my way into the field, but it was hard for me to tell just how far the river was from me, and I didn't want to get separated from P-Doug for too long, so I meandered a bit, never made it to the river, and started back. I ended up face to face with a much wider stretch of the pool at the base of a steeper climb. But, I was dressed for it, so I decided to take it on. The water was cool, its floor was firm, and while it was nearly knee-deep by the time I crossed it, it was never really treacherous. I stopped to take an AEB spread of it on the other side to generate an HDR shot of the striking reflections later.
I climbed up the slope and got back to the road, didn't see P-Doug right handy, so I started heading for the bridge. He met me coming back from it, having already been there and to the river. We went to the bridge, passing the spot where the wrecked truck used to be, and I noticed that from there, I could see the bridge this time. When I was there the first time, the overgrowth was such that the bridge was still obscured from my view. Early in spring, you see more.

The bridge seems to have deteriorated, especially in the guard rails on the west side. I might be wrong, but it seems more broken down than I remember. I still haven't looked through my old shots to see if I'm right. I went under the bridge, stepped into the Humber, which was abruptly deep and quite cold, and noticed that the graffiti this year is quite a bit less interesting than last year. We didn't stay too long at the bridge before heading back. Around the time we reached the old truck spot, I heard voices, and behind us, the man and the two boys emerged from the woods, crossed the bridge, and headed up to Huntingdon Road. They'd done the trip in reverse to us.

When we got to the base of Kirby's course up the hillside, P-Doug was interested in taking it, but I remembered it being a walk of several minutes that takes you only about 2/3 of the way up. He wanted to see the washout from the west side, and while I was okay with doing that, I had to let him know that at that point, you have two choices: climbing all the way back down to where we were standing already, or else climbing into the woods, something that literally requires going on all fours... it's that steep. I wasn't keen on either, having already done that twice, and since he'd already seen the washout from the other side, he decided to forgo the view. We headed up the trail the way we'd come down.

At the top, we veered left and followed another trail along the lip of the valley. It carried us past stands of pines planted in rows long ago... P-Doug reckoned about 35 years ago. He pointed out a massive lone pine, and I might have overlooked it on my own, but having it pointed out to me made it somehow worth shooting. I think it was probably one of my best shots of the day.

We followed the path along through a muddy spot where the road turned to the east along the top of the grove. I love walking on fallen pine needles... you'd think they'd be sharp, but lying flat, they're as soft as a carpet. We made our way in to where some of the pines had failed and left a glade. I noticed the ground was furrowed, just like in the field in the flood plain, and I remembered I'd noticed new pines planted across the river in the hellish field I'd spent a couple of joyless hours in during my second visit. I put it all together and decided that that's probably what they intended for the flood plain. Thirty-five years from now, that open field will probably be a thick, linear grove of pines, holding the line on the river. I sat down on one of the raised sections and relaxed, lying back on a bedding of soft pine needles. The air was perfect. The temperature was ideal: it wasn't cool or warm; it neither chilled me nor made me sweat. The sky was moody and the air was stirring, but it was in the tree tops. It barely seemed to brush over my skin. We were there for about half an hour and I was so plugged into it, I think I may have dozed off at one point. It was really special. That kind of communing is the reason I love to get out in the bush, and I'm so grateful there's still so much of it around here, even these days.

Time was wasting and I didn't want to leaving P-Doug sitting around too long, since we both wanted to get back to The Crow's Nest. About twenty after two we got moving again, and made our way back to the car fairly directly. At The Crow's Nest, a guy pulled up in a strange three-wheeled motorcycle. From the front, it made me think, "ah, so this is what Crow T. Robot's been up to since MST3K wrapped up..." We had a couple of pints and P-Doug paid for lunch (shaved beef on bread stick and a side salad for me; perogies for him) since I was to do his bidding on the morrow...

Tomorrow Never Mows

So that was Saturday. Sunday was about yard work at his place. As agreed, he called me about quarter after ten on his way out to Home Depot, and I arrived at his place about an hour later, at which point we started bagging the leaves from his front yard and the side of the house. It was the back yard that was going to be the big task. G, P-Doug's missus, had lunch on her mind so we all headed off around one or so to Boston Pizza. G had some sort of meat sandwich, and P-Doug and I ended up having the same thing, chicken cannelloni, and they were pretty good. Again, he paid.

Then came the hard part. All the saplings in the back yard! P-Doug came out with two saws, and also what looked like a huge pair of hand trimmers that you'd use to trim bushes. This thing turned out to be our salvation. In about four hours, we cut down fifty or sixty saplings, cut them up, and filled up between fifteen and twenty bags with the refuse. And never once did we resort to the saws. It was cutting through 2" green wood with almost no effort at all; I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it, even done it. I'd say it was about the best thirty bucks he's spent all year, and he'd probably agree. I didn't bring my camera; I didn't think there'd be much reason to; but I wish I had and could show you a before and after view. This tool quickly rendered that back yard very different.

Sunday was capped with Satay On the Road, where we had golden baskets (a first for me), curried chicken with potatoes, and a spicy beef dish, all over rice. After that, a quick zip to Dairy Queen for cones. I dropped off a movie for them on my way home, and that was the weekend. Felt like three or four days, but in a good way. Very full. I didn't sit around wasting my time. I like weekends like that.