Reid has Google Earth. It’s so cool, I have no words.
No, wait.
Here is an image with my tags on it, showing Kirkfield, the village where I was born, and other things. As it all is now from space, of course, (virtual height of about 32,000 ft) not as it was then, in my imagination.
It may need to be enlarged, by viewing outside your browser, to read my annotations properly. Firefox and Explorer display the page quite differently both on a Mac (as does Safari) and a PC.
It’s a little bit of my history, made with a little bit of our future.
You’re looking at three small lakes all joined by the Trent Canal. The lake in the middle was low land flooded to allow the canal to go through. When I was a child, we called it ‘The Drowneded Lands”. The lake to the right is Balsam Lake, all natural, and the tongue of water to the left is Canal Lake, also artificial, with the oddly named Antiquary Beach on an island, a beach new in the Fifties (probably; the sand probably being carted in for the tourists, although the area is very sandy and gravely too, the Ice Age, you know…)
The straight blue line in the upper left quadrant curving to the left is the Trent Canal, and it is on this section that one finds the third largest set of liftlocks of their type in the world. There are, at last count, only three of that type. The ovoid near the curve partially obscured by the push pin icon is a gravel quarry abandoned to flooding over forty years ago - you can see how close it is to the canal - the annotation tells you I nearly drowned there when I was thirteen. Many of my family worked there, until the powers could no longer pump enough water out of the pit to make gravel mining practical and profitable. My father and my older sister were, according to family legend, both born, twenty-five years apart, on the same kitchen table in my grandmother’s house on the quarry property.
When I was little this map was pretty much the extent of my world, this is what I thought of when I thought of the Whole Wide World. My grandparents lived near the Talbot River pushpin (although they didn’t think of it that way), and all my paternal relatives lived pretty much in the area of the image, and a few of my mother’s relatives lived not far outside the area; Burnt River and Peterborough.
The brown patches of countryside are, I think, drumlins, and perhaps moraines, certainly they’re mounds and hills of sand and gravel left by the glaciers. Some of my earliest memories are of going out with my father in his pickup into the country around Kirkfield to find one of these hills, already ‘mined’ by someone else, and fill up the back of the pickup truck with sand for our sand box. When we moved to Milton later, another town dependent - partly - on quarries, clay and gravel, I remember wondering why people ‘bought’ sand.
One memory I cherish is that of long, narrow, deep streams with high banks; clear water, big fish, rocks, algae, moss, running through cedar groves, which tend to be thick and dark, water running cold. We were warned off them - ‘if you fall in, you’ll drown’ - but I loved them anyway. I don’t have any memories of wandering off along such a stream and getting lost, but I wish I did.
It’s lovely country up there, but I understand it’s all tourists and retirees now.
And now a story that might as well be entitled ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’.
When I was a child the public school was right next door to our house, and only two rooms. My sister started Grade One when she should have started Kindergarten - and that’s another story.
The general store in Kirkfield was run by Jim and Rita Ewans (might be Ewens?) - I’m pretty sure that’s right, because I’m pretty sure I remember how really nice they were to us kids. The store had the classic dark wood and thick glass cabinets of such places in those days, and I’m pretty sure they had the big roll of brown paper on the countertop (and the roll of string up by the ceiling) to wrap our purchases. They had a big elderly dog named Queenie, or maybe Duchess, who just laid around and loved everybody who came into the store, especially kids (as I remember it). You could place your order on Wednesday and pick it up Thursday.
Then we moved and twenty five years later (late 80s?) , I went back. A friend had family living near Lake Simcoe and I talked him into a side trip. He parked on the curb and I went into the store. It was what I should have expected - fluorescent lights, Beefaroni on the shelf, Gatorade in the back cooler, an east Asian proprietor, and all the soft core porn on the top shelf with a board across it. I bought some gum and went out to the car, laughing.
I wish I could say something pseudo-deep like ‘the land remains’, but of course it doesn’t.
Besides that fact that most retirees and tourists don’t have a cat’s regard for the Ice Age, drumlins, moraines, the streams through cedar groves, the Kirkfield Limestones, or the Drowneded Lands (although I seem to recollect that we spelt it ‘the Drownded Lands’), this was once, and recently, all swamps and muskeg, left behind as the Ice Sheet, once four klicks thick there, and the ecosystems of the south crept north as the deep cold retreated.
Humans have never had such an effect on the world as Chicxulub, as the Ice Age, as the draining of Lake Agassiz until now.
I guess, Time being what it is, I don’t want to see what we make of my memories and imagination.
I’ll probably just laugh at it anyway as I get into the car.