Thought for the Day - June 10,00

Subject: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: Peter T.
Date: 10 Jul 00 - 10:04 AM

An occasional series:

BEYOND STONG POND

It is a hot day for the first hike around the site I am studying near the University, scheduled for "development". The video camera is not working, but a friend and I head out all the same. The Pond -- an small artificial pond on the edge of York University -- is scummy and filled with Canada geese who are paying no attention to the No Swimming and No Sailing signs. Beyond the concrete dam and spillway for the stormwater overflow, the meadow and remnant forest proliferate. The north end, where the bulldozers will be arriving sometime, is flat, but covered now in black-eyed susans, tartaned thistles, and every species of weed and mullein. In the distance, the high rises loom.

We pick our way through the creek bed, lined in broken concrete, and down into the cool scrub woods, taking pictures, mapping. We move back up onto higher ground, where there are signs of the farmland and farmhouse that used to be: part of an orchard, with wild apples; purpleblue phlox, the mainstay of many a homestead garden in the old days; and clumps of raspberries. In the interests of science, I eat as many raspberries as I can find.

On the ridge, rows of poplars flicker in the hot wind. There was obviously a fence here, and a road, long grown over into sumac and tangles of whatever. We keep hiking until we reach Black Creek, the borderline, and another sadly abused remnant of the area. On the other side, a paved path indicates the influence of the Park Authority.

The creeks fill to overflowing when the stormwaters hit, and so there is nothing in them, but they have carved out high banks in the hills, and there are cool low lands I will have to check out another day -- some high old trees reaching up to the level of the main level canopy. There are mosquitos down here, buggy, boggy ground. We loop around, and head south, to where the Hoover Homestead lies: the old house still there in some fashion, but we skirt around it today. It is at the far end of the site, on a hill on the south side of the creek, so it will be saved (I assume). We come out along the edge of the property, and find the student housing, a ball diamond, picnicers. A mower demarcates the line between lawn and the woods. And that is it.

Two hours: about 45 acres. A good start. Lots to look at in this ordinary piece of remnant farmland. Back for more probes as the summer continues.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: wysiwyg
Date: 10 Jul 00 - 07:05 PM

Lovely.

And so much nicer than some of the other crud posted today.

Refresh!!!!!!!

~S~

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: wysiwyg
Date: 10 Jul 00 - 07:24 PM

Peter, I can't remember if I have posted this before, but perhaps when you write your installments for your project, I'll trade with one of mine.

GOIN' UP CHERRY FLATS SPRING TO FETCH WATER

(From a letter to a friend)

Pennsyltucky tried to be cold and gray today but I took my warm heart off into it, to do what my "lost" message tried to tell you about. I'll try to capture it, I was thinking so much about you while planning and doing it. It was wrote so gude, too! No-- I'm going to save it for a poem. In it there will be sweet-bitter farmer men who milk a living out of hardscrabble hills, and who haunt the spring in Cherry Flats when the water in the well runs low. There they meet their neighbors, known and unknown, and judge your worth by the practicality of the waterjugs you bring. You are counted a neighbor if you help them with their water filling, or let them help you, appropriately, according to yer ability. You may be a just-discovered cousin, if you say "Yep" for "You're Welcome" when they thank you kindly for helping them, and if you just smile a man-loving smile when they help you. And you're family, if you carry water down to your neighbor when he's too busy or sock to go himself, and you don't ask first, you leave your help on the step and go away without knocking. (Eggs and produce appear this way also. No one likes to cause a thank you note to be owed for basic life support.)

They love deeply and long, wordlessly, in actions humbly done. They anger slowly but violently. They forgive with difficulty, but with true commitment when they do.

Ah, never mind the poem, what I wrote before is coming back. I am drinking the water now... The water is still ice cold, hours later. If I'd had the good jugs in the car, the big insulated ones, it'd be cold for days.

It was the lovely setting of the spring, a pipe jutting out of a rise in the ground alongside the hill road just up a bit from Zimmer's century farm. (Century Farms earn a special landmark sign under the front-yard tree, for farms farmed by the same family for a century. Some of the signs are, themselves, very old.) The present Zimmer is at least 6th generation, and the 5th generation Zimmer was well-loved so extravagantly that the neighbors erected the improved outflow pipe and stone housing in his name. He must have been a giant in his time, for no one here takes being honored by name in public on plaques unless they're dead, if they can help it, and they made his plaque awful big.

Now the present Zimmer ekes out a hard living. He's an honorable, do-anything-for-ya plumber by day and night, and a Christmas tree farmer by season. Last season was tough; WalMart went for the shipped-in "tree bundles" devoid of all moisture. He had nowhere public to set up his beautiful fresh trees and visit with everyone till they paid and loaded up. Now if you need a plumber, when you call Zimmer, you get Zimmer, any hour. I don't recall a Missis ever answering the phone-- I hope he has one. Once again I see a flatlander still looking back from the mirror-- never occurred to me to ask after a Missis.

You have lived in Tioga County long enough when you can pull away from the free-running water without kidding your car-mate, "Didja turn it off?" (And your car-mate has lived here long enough when, if you ask that, they don't at least start to turn around to look!) The outflow pipe is about hip height on me, and it has a gorgeously green and always-sparkling beard of moss growing in and out of the pipe. I don't understand how it clings to the shiny metal, but although weather prunes it, it's always there, so pretty you want to stroke and squash the fullness and rough softness of it, but I guess no one ever does, it'd wear away.

Until May, the ground is still half froze. When you step on the hard-packed gravel, on the shoulder and where the perpetually repaired, crumbling old tarmac is partly washed away by the year's runoff, it gives gently before holding firm where it's still friz.

Summertimes you wait for the hottest, humidest, buggiest day to go fetch your 5 or 50 or 500 gallons of water, so you can enjoy getting your feet wet in ice cold water and take your numb cool toes back to your hot fly-ridden house.

In the winter, you learn quick to fetch your fill on a clear windless day, to get as much sun and as little wind on your wettened fingers as possible, and you hope there isn't so much ice you slide down and into the pooled runoff. It takes at least two brave souls in winter, one to fill and the other to stow. You run the heater full blast while taking turns filling, so it will toast you when you dive in shivering.

Much of the water table is contaminated here. For some, like our family, the romance of the spring is not lost in the necessity of going. For, though go we must, we can after all take our best tunes to blast from the hilltop while we work, in our turns. There is much lusty singalong-ing up at the spring; no one is EVER too embarrassed there. During the years my stepson prayed for our death on a nightly basis, and my son languished in his room withdrawn from us all, a trip to the spring involved everyone and a good time could always be had on that special occasion. The best was when we blasted Mary Chapin Carpenter "He Thinks He'll Keep Her" with its fantastic ndow-dow-dow-dowww guitar, and we all joined in on that riff like the fools we were. No one too cool that day.

Fall fetching is the best. It's in the fall you buy more containers, or clean out the milk jugs (one more time) that have been too dusty to bother with in summer. In the fall, you want as much water as possible. It's pretty to go, and winter is coming-- you want to get ahead and pack as much as you can down cellar against the days the pipes may freeze or the pump go down in an ice storm. And you THINK if you stock up, you'll have fewer trips. But the containers are on sale as camping season ends, so everyone sports new plastic in bright colors.

Fall at the spring . . . . No need to describe it; unless you're an idiot, everyone can picture fall, can't they? Except you probably don't have the tiny orange-gold blossoms whose silver leaves can reputedly heal scrapes and hurts. I loved them for years not knowing their name or their healing property, until a parishioner I adore (she helped Search us here) went to pick one for a bumped grandson's forehead at a parish picnic. At last someone could tell me its name. Now I think it was Silverleaf, but don't quote me. I traded caring about the name for the memory of the kids, the picnic, and the rhythm instruments I'd brought.

We are not of this place, but we are such as can love this place and its hardscrabble, gallant, abusive, inbred, sometimes courtly people-- quite thoroughly. I love them as outrageously, in my own way, as I do you, and they giggle and blush most becomingly.

At night, when the stars are out (but too dim by our house because of the big bright farmyard light), sometimes, I go up to the spring. No one else in my family quite appreciates it, at night, so I have learned to go alone. I would take you. We would take empty water bottles and a loaded .357, because you never waste a trip to the spring, and you never go somewhere lonely here in the dark without making preparations for your share of the possible drunken confrontations that are common here. (I'm a safe and sure shot.) We would also take a soft mat to lay on the stone pipe housing. We would sit beside each other, with the water gurgling out between us and running away down the hill. (Making us have to pee in the woods, I completely embarrassed and laughing way too loud for such a quiet place!)

We would talk some and most probably snuggle a bit in a friendly and chaste fashion, and you would find out how soft my lips are when I kiss your cheek, and you would hear how loud I really can laugh in the echoing woods. We would talk about the things we like to talk about, and have long quiet moments to really hear each other's voices before firing back answers long saved up to be shared. The stars would remind us how small and how grand we are, and the words we would use would respect that juxtaposition. The closest to open disagreement would be the occasional affectionate word of exasperation, expressed only to restore concord.

Then of course word would get out, due to our loud laughter penetrating even the closed pickup truck cabs dopplering C&W all over the peace and quiet. I'd be scandalised, you'd be appointed town guru, and the fun would be over. But I'd never forget it.

I'll always think about you when I go to the spring again.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Jul 00 - 07:46 PM

You've still got a touch of the Time Warp there, Peter! June 10th indeed.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: katlaughing
Date: 10 Jul 00 - 11:58 PM

Peter, it is almost too painful to read about all of that knowing it will be destroyed. I greatly admire your ability to observe and chronicle.

Now, on the other hand, you said, "In the interests of science, I eat as many raspberries as I can find." So, does that mean, like Waylon Heron, you are going to go do what bears do in the woods and transplant a few raspberry bushes thereby pepetuating the adbundant growth which is about to go on the chopping block?**BG** Just couldn't resist that one!

Praise, good strong voice and really paints a picture, darlin'. Reminded me of a spring like that we used to go to in North Stonington, MA, right on what was the "King's Highway."

Thanks, both of you,

kat

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: Willie-O
Date: 11 Jul 00 - 01:41 AM

Peter, that's kind of Every Pond on Every Farm that was outside of the city, then on the edge of the city, then swallowed by the city.

If you ever drive through Ottawa from west to east on the Queensway, and don't turn onto "the split" where 417 heads across the flat hundred mile run to Montreal, but keep going east a half mile towards Orleans on what is now called Highway 174, you will pass the Blair Road turnoff. You have just entered Gloucester, an edge-city suburban / rural township when I grew up there, an incorporated city for the last twenty-five years, and soon to be a part of the new megacity of Ottawa. The cloverleaf intersection can of course be bisected into compass quadrants, with Hwy 174 as the west-east line and Blair Road running north-south over it.

The southwest quadrant contains a couple of tall buildings with huge stylized corporate logos on the roofs: "Investors Group" and some telecom company. The northwest quadrant contains the Gloucester Centre, a huge (seemingly) mall with a futuristic looking bright red transit station on one side. The mall contains a Loblaws store which is bigger itself than any mall I was ever in as a youngster. My friend Bob who grew up next door and has worked for Loblaws since he was 15 managed that store for a few years. I happen to know that where it sits was once the Ogilvie farm, Ogilvie Road being the northern boundary of the mall property. To the north of Ogilvie Road is a large federal government property, with a prominent new feature, the CSIS HQ building (our very own Canadian spy service!) which is supposed to look like a ship. It just looks like a weird building to me but what the hell do I know.

Getting back to our quadrants, the southeast quadrant is a golf course. Beyond it in that direction is Green Creek, where my brother and I and Bob and his brothers used to ride our bikes to and stay all day fishing and hiking.

The quadrant that bothers me the most is the northeast one. It contains three identical, medium sized, glass-sided, utterly non-descript office buildings festooned with various corporate logos. It is always apparent to me that this site, the imaginatively named "Glenview Park of Commerce", was designed with absolutely no thought for how it would look from the highway, on which side there is no landscaping, trees added or anything aesthetic. Tens of thousands of people see it from there every day; its a bleak thing like something from the vision of A Clockwork Orange. Once I took a walk through the Glenview Park of Commerce, on the short curving paved road with a security gatehouse and seemingly cameras anywhere. I just wanted to firebomb the place skyhigh. At that time the city of Gloucester was renting its council chambers and office space there, at a cost of about $1.2 million per year I recall reading. This is a lot more money than that lot generated when it was at the end of a scrubby dirt road which ran alongside Shoppers City, the first shopping centre to be built along Ogilvie Road. I remember when it opened in 1961; I was five years old and it was a big deal. We lived in Cardinal Heights, where my parents still are, just to the north of Ogilvie, now an elderly suburb of 1950's brick bungalows, mostly occupied by older folks. I learned to drive in the Shoppers City back parking lot. Its a second-rate tarted-up cinderblock relic since Gloucester Centre opened. But I digress.

Before the Glenview Park of Commerce appeared like an alien menace where it is now, there was a pond there. We would ride our bikes over there, build rafts, annoy tadpoles and frogs, and generally enjoy ourselves with no adults in sight. That's why my reaction to this development is particularly strong, and it doesn't improve matters that it's butt-ugly and devoid of human or natural character. Murray McLauchlan recorded a song on his very first album that has always been about this place, for me. "Then the tractors came, and the trucks and the heavy graders.
And in a month, they tore that swamp apart.
And left an ugly scar while we stood watching
Some progress-minded planners work of art.

Now paradise is sixteen lanes of highway
And the peace is gone and the cars roll by each day.
And the house in which I grew now affords a lonely view
It overlooks a sixteen-lane highway."

I could walk you through more of the neighbourhood, but it's more of this stuff in every direction, so it seems. Woods, a haunted old farmhouse, and other landmarks that now exist only in memories. Peter, I understand completely what you're up to here. Its important. If you can't save the pond and the land around it, at least remember it well.

Best,
Bill

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: katlaughing
Date: 11 Jul 00 - 04:27 AM

Wow, what a grand thread this is, wonderful, Willie, thanks.

I feel really fortunate that the original homestead farm of my great-grandparents' in Boulder, Colorado is perserved and recognised as a "century" farm, as Praise mentioned earlier. When they homesteaded on it, it was way out in the boonies, far from town and civilisation. It now sits on a busy four lane road, just another part of the city *proper*, but it is still the original farmhouse, etc. A lot of the land around it has been sold, but family still live there and it will remain protected through certain laws and provisions. My grandmother wrote wonderful stories of her time growing up there.

kat

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: Peter T.
Date: 11 Jul 00 - 09:35 AM

Thanks to all. I guess I don't want it to be July, do I.
yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: GUEST,ruby
Date: 11 Jul 00 - 02:07 PM

thankyou

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: RichM
Date: 12 Jul 00 - 01:13 AM

Willie, a fine essay and description.

I passed through the area yesterday, on our way to play some music at a retirement home in Orleans. Thanks for making me aware of the history of that part of the city.

Your story reminded me of my grandfather's farm to the west, near Mooney's Bay...on the site of the present Brookfield High School.

Memories from 1955 of a small market farm, fruit orchards, vegetable gardens, barns and a tiny square timber farm house, barely high enough to permit a gawky 13 year old to stand upright... All gone, with no trace left. My son went to the high school now built over it, and and yet there is no way for me to even recognize in the changed landscape where the farm was... I know that cities grow and change, yet it seems we often blithely discard whole areas - and history - in the pursuit of modernization.

I have a small hope that the unique Experimental Farm -several hundred acres of operating farm in the middle of Ottawa - will somehow be preserved as a green space for future generations--- even as the technical functions of the Federal Department of Agriculture there continue to wind down or move elsewhere. This might,in some small way, make up for the continuing and not always welcome changes to our city....

Rich McCarthy

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - June 10,00
From: Willie-O
Date: 12 Jul 00 - 08:54 AM

Right, Hogs Back. Know it well, my brother lives there. (For those not Ottawa-conversant, Hogs Back is a chute on the Rideau River a few miles south of downtown which was one of the reasons they had to build the Rideau Canal around it.)

Orleans, when I was young, was a sleepy crossroads with a hotel and a well-known butcher shop. Highway 17 was then the main route to Montreal... looking to the north you would see flat rectangular golden fields stretching to the Ottawa River, as they had for 150 years or so. Today there must be 20,000 identical houses on those fields.

And I ain't that old! (43) But the surroundings of the Blair Road interchange are to me the worst thing on the whole Queensway. Guess its cause I take it personally.

The Experimental Farm so far has avoided the developers clutches (picture this folks, 250 or is it 700 prime acres of active farmland and a wonderful park/aboretum, two miles from uptown of a major city) but considering how ready the NCC is to deal out chunks of Greenbelt, it's probably just a matter of time...

W-O