Books of My Childhood—Part 2/4 Early Science

And so now we move on to the science portion of our show. These were the books that impressed me during the first decade or so of my life and helped shape my understanding of the world.

Science Book of Volcanoes

This book absolutely fascinated me back in grade three and started a long obsession with volcanoes. It focused, in part, on the story of the eruption of Vesuvius, and the dooming of the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum... one of those morbid things that seem to really sink hooks into certain kids. In fact, it led more or less directly to me creating one of the first stories I ever finished: a comic, drawn in grade four on lined paper in a notebook, called K.K.V., "King Killer Volcano". In it, an evil scientist brings a volcano to life; it grows a face and arms and legs of lava, and proceeds to terrorize the world while challenging other volcanoes to duels, and finally losing to the might of Vesuvius. I still have that comic. It's just awful. But it's mine. :)

In the Days of the Dinosaurs

What kid doesn't go through a phase where they're fascinated with dinosaurs? Just about the time you realize monsters aren't real, you discover that, yeah, for a while, they actually were! This book was practically the Bible for the boys in my third grade class. There's a lot of information in this book that's now outdated, but we ingrained every fact, name, and dimension into our memories through constant and repeated readings. On days when it was too cold or rainy to go outside for recess, there we'd be, huddled in the corner on the floor, making dinosaurs out of plasticine.

There are facts from this book I still remember. The earliest discovery of dinosaurs being equated to roughly the time of the death of George Washington. The sad, then-mysterious ending of the age the dinosaurs ruled. That dinosaurs came from huge eggs, often laid in great clusters, which always made me think of giant chickens... ironic, given that by the time I was in my twenties, I was hearing the astonishing idea that birds are, in fact, the last extant line of the dinosaurs, and those things wheeling in the sky and looking so delicious on the plate are actually dinosaurs. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that tyrannosaurus (among others) probably wandered the world wreathed in feathers. I think the thing that really stayed with me, though, was the idea that that ancient world, in which they were the overlords for so, so long, had to move aside in order for us to be here, and what we are, now. The idea that our existence might not have been inevitable was a truly profound revelation at the age of 8.

Stars and Planets

For a couple of years, I lugged this book everywhere. It came with four pages of perforated stickers you had to lick and stick in the appropriate boxes. Each page had a separate topic, along with a line drawing suitable for colouring... which I did. I loved the hell out of this book when I was 7 and 8. I was mostly interested in the topics about the planets in our solar system; less interested in the other aspects of astronomy such as stars and galaxies. That seems natural enough to me now; it was a moment in time when the US and the Soviet Union were actively sending probes to the planets, so that was in the news a lot. I remember Pioneers 10 and 11, and not long afterwards Voyagers 1 and 2, beginning the exploration of the outer planets; at about the same time, Vikings 1 and 2 had landed on Mars. These were all real places; when I was a child, for the first time in human history, you could actually see photographs of them, just as real as ones of Paris or Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro. That was new, and it was happening right then. This book was my portable little piece of all that.

I found a copy of it a year or two ago and bought it. I scanned all the pages, including the stickers, and then "pasted" the stickers onto the scanned pages in Photoshop. I coalesced the whole thing together into a PDF that I shared with a buddy who also had a fascination with such things as a boy. I guess you don't grow out of everything as you get older. :)

Stars

This was a rather more sophisticated version of Stars and Planets; a field guide to amateur astronomy. It was the kind of thing a kid with a little telescope (not that I had one) out in a field on a summer night would have found useful. Again, I was mostly interested in what it had to say about the planets of our solar system, although there was enough of interest about other topics to finally get me at least passingly interested. I think the thing that really caught my attention was the suggestion that the pole star changes over time as the 'point' of the Earth's axis of rotation itself turns, over many, many thousands of years... That while it is, today, Polaris, that is has been in the past Vega, and eventually will be again. Something about that made me feel tied to a universe greater than me. It wasn't all just here to support me; quite the opposite: I was just a momentary bubble on a great wave passing through that had existed long before me and would carry on long after I was gone.

Extinct Animals

I still remember the ride home from the mall, poring over this book in the back seat. It was the first time the fragility of life was really impressed upon me; the first time I ever realized that extinction wasn't just something that happened to the dinosaurs millions of years ago, but had happened in the very recent past, and was potentially still going on around me even then.

Two stories really stood out for me. One was the tale of the passenger pigeon. The idea that the most abundant species of bird in North America had, all in space of a single human lifetime, gone from the billions to none at all, was sobering... if I can say that of a 10-year-old boy. That they could even identify the last living individual, a bird named Martha in the Cincinnati Zoo, and the very day and hour the species became literally extinct, gripped me in a way little else has.

The other story was the utter extermination of the native people of Tasmania, including the horrifying illustration of a white settler shooting a nude, black-skinned man in the back. It seems kind of inappropriate to me now to number a race of human beings among extinct "animals", even if it is taxonomologically valid. However, I can't say I'm sorry I was exposed to the realization... it was an important one, and was one more thing that helped to shape the person I became and the values that matter to me.

Primitive Man

This is one of the few childhood keepsakes I have. It's not one of the books I've managed to find and buy retrospectively as an adult, but actually one I've managed to keep hold of through myriad moves and upheavals since 1977. I'm pretty sure it's the earliest book I still possess of which I am the original owner.

I was, if I remember correctly, 9 when I got this book, probably in a supermarket as we shopped for groceries. I absorbed myself in the book in the back of the car on the way home, and I was blown away by the revelations in it. The world and how it worked were coming into real focus as I went through the pages. But it was also kind of unsettling. The world that I knew simply just was. It had always been like this and always would be; the only real changes were the new things we invented. Now I was starting to understand that no long ago, nothing I knew from my world would have existed... even the people in it. Nature wasn't just all the stuff around the human world; the human world, and human beings themselves, were a part of nature and necessarily embedded in it; that we are, for all our special abilities, actually just another species of animal. But as I read along, I came to a passage that was kind of a lifeline. It was a simple line; just a few words, but somehow, it made everything else okay. It somehow remoored everything to a foundation, and safely so emboldened, I felt free to explore more. I'll quote the passage from the book, and highlight in blue where the author encapsulated my fears, and then in red the words that still resonate with me more than forty years later...

Do all people believe the theory of evolution

When Darwin's books on evolution were printed a hundred years ago, many people said Darwin did not believe in God's plan, but in a horrible universe run by lucky accidents and greedy fighting. They said he was making man out to be nothing more than a smart ape. But these people need not have worried. The theory of evolution says certain things happened. It does not say, and it could not say, why those things happened. If God made the world and runs the world, then evolution is God's plan. And it is a majestic and beautiful plan. With evolution, even accidents are part of the plan of life, and even the lowest creature is part of the family life. The theory of evolution does not say man is only a smart kind of ape. It says that for two billion years living forms were tried and improved and tried in improved in preparation for the arrival of man as we know him upon the scene of life upon the earth.

Well, this more or less rounds out the books that really affected me in some key, important way up to the time I was 12 and we moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario. Moving on, I'll be looking at the books that helped shape my opinions and understanding in my teenage years. Coming up next! :)

Books of My Childhood—Part 1/4 Early Fiction

Think back to the favourite books of your youth. Which ones shaped who you are? Influenced you? Or just impressed you with some particular detail? I thought it would be interesting to go over some of the ones that stand out for me.

My parents were always really indulgent with me where books were concerned. I often came back from trips for groceries with some science-based 79-cent paperback, and whenever those little Scholastic Books order forms arrived in class, I always got to order two or three. A good deal of my allowance went on reading material of one sort or another. I had quite a little library of my own by the time I was eight or nine.

I spent the first twelve years of my life in suburban Halifax, Nova Scotia. After that, we moved to the northwest shores of Lake Ontario, where I lived in various cities. I decided it might be best to divide the books both by theme (fiction vs. science/reality) and period (Nova Scotia vs. Ontario). So these are the books slotted into each cross-section.

Most of these books I actually own. The great majority of them are ones I tracked down over the years on eBay or Amazon and picked up mainly for reasons of nostalgia. The upshot of that is I was able to scan the covers and give this little presentation a splash of colour. Now, to quote The Friendly Giant, "Are you ready? Here's my castle!..."

Crosspatch

Crosspatch was a very early book in my collection; really, the first one I remember. I was two or three when I got this book; it tells the story of a lion cub in a zoo who's so thoroughly unpleasant that visitors begin avoiding his cage, leading him to become very lonely. He learns his lesson and becomes frolicsome and fun to watch and quickly attracts a large following of friends. It's an easy enough lesson for even a child of that age to take onboard. But the thing I remember most was a broad two-page spread that depicted a large panorama of the zoo, showing many animals in their habitats, featuring a tall flamingo and clusters of colourful balloons that fascinated me and became seared in my imagination... sufficiently so that I went looking for the book again many years later and gave it a home on my shelf.

The Witch's Catalog

The Witch's Catalog was one of those Scholastic Books I mentioned. I think I was in grade three when I ordered it (this is not that original copy, though). It was written by Norman Bridwell, and was part of his series of books about a friendly witch who served as a sort of fairy godmother to a couple of kids and their friends. If I remember correctly, he was also the author of the Clifford the Big Red Dog series.

It's worth noting here that while this was a surprisingly popular book among my crowd at the time, it's truly become a collector's item in the intervening decades. When I went looking for it, I had to look long and hard to find a copy affordable enough to be justified as a boon purchase. Copies of this book are often offered north of a hundred bucks; sometimes more.

I may have blogged about this particular book previously. It occupies a very special, very particular place in my life and my psyche. The book catalogs a variety of magical items that any red-blooded kid would give his or her eyeteeth to get hold of. A portable faucet with an endless supply of pop. A balloon that keeps monsters and bullies at bay. Invisibility-granting fabrics. Things like that.

But what makes it special to me is that it represents the moment in my life where I was right on the bubble of having to decide, for myself, if these things formed an actual part of reality or not. There was an order form in the back, and I was back and forth in my mind about whether or not filling it out and following its instructions would result in me acquiring the things I wanted to order. No money was required; you were to fill out the form, rub it with bat fat and flea's tears, and then hide it in the hollow of a tree at midnight under a full moon or something like that. I remember that what unravelled the whole thing for me, right on down to finally making me realize that magic must not be real, was that I couldn't imagine where you would get bat fat and flea tears. It strikes me now as funny that I could accept all the wildest claims of the book only for what tripped it all up for me to be the tiniest, least significant details at the last hurdle. But I guess I was who I was the following year in grade four because of that, and ever since.

It also occurs to me now, looking around at anti-vaxxers, MAGA hat wearers, and Brexit voters, that some grown-up people are still looking for the bat fat and flea tears to rub on the order form.

Tom Eaton's Book of Marvels

Another Scholastic Book, but not one I ordered myself. I bought this at a rummage sale in my school one Saturday when I was in grade five or six. The humour in this little tome is actually rather sophisticated for a kids' book. For instance, it includes a rather cynical send-up of The Waltons, a show I was very familiar with. It also featured a very broad interpretation of Archie comics, set in a page-by-page contrast with an average teenager's boring real existence.

I loved the art style and I still find the humour engaging. I gather Tom Eaton, who passed away just a few years ago, had an extensive career writing and illustrating Boys' Life magazine. Personally, I think he could have done just fine with Mad or Cracked. He was that good. I suppose the crucial takeaway I have from this book, though, that I still carry with me today as practical advice, was from a set of updated Aesop's fables, where the moral of one story was "You can't please some people, and after a certain point, you shouldn't try."

Arrow Book of Ghost Stories

A got this book in a trade with a friend, if I remember correctly. It was an anthology of creepy ghost stories. There were two that really stand out in my mind. One was about a "teeny-tiny" woman who finds a "teeny-tiny" bone that she takes to her teeny-tiny home to make her teeny-tiny soup, etc., etc. During the night she is haunted by an ever-closer voice demanding "Give me back my bone!" It ends with her just yelling "Take it!"; nothing really happens to her. But it was so creepily written, ramping up the suspense in an air of isolation, that it genuinely scared me, and it was a kind of guilty pleasure to dare myself to read it from time to time and risk the bad dreams. The other was about a genial 19-century ghost who befriends two boys. A murder victim, he asks the boys to dig up his bones and rebury them in a church yard so that he can rest properly. The boys do so, and it's implied at the end of the story that he becomes quite a good friend to have moving forward. It was an unusual but oddly happy ghost story and I think it made an impression on me for that reason. I certainly enjoyed re-reading it when I got hold of another copy many years later.

Ghosts Who Went to School

Another rummage-sale pick-up, or perhaps a trade; I'm not sure anymore. In any case... this is a fun story, but I think what really sold me on it was its illustrations. I simply loved the art style, and I still do. It tells the story of a family of ghosts, quietly haunting their abandoned house after having died quite some time before... turn of the last century, I think; the story is set circa 1960. The two boys get bored and decided to start going out in the world, culminating in them materializing and beginning to attend classes at the local elementary school as a pair of ordinary kids. The part I remember that kind of shook me up was one of the boys, Mortimer, privately demonstrating to one of his new friends that he actually is a ghost by appearing to the boy "in his bones", which was illustrated with a grinning skeleton appearing before a kid with his hair raised stock straight up. There's a sequel to this book, illustrated by the same artist, that I'd dearly love to get but it's considerably rarer and hideously expensive. Any copy you're likely to find is priced into three figures. Alas.

The Riddle of Raven Hollow

Funny to say, I never actually owned this book as a kid; at least, not at the time. This book was in our school library, and I pretty much had it out on permanent loan for years; renewing it again and again. This book was the one that made me want to become a writer.

It's the story of a boy named Bart who lives in Nebraska with his widowed mother and older sister. Bart was 12 or 13, a few years older than I was at the time, and he had a paper route in order to help his family make ends meet. In the course of his rounds, he begins seeing odd goings-on in the early morning, culminating in him meeting a mysterious, belligerent boy who, in the fullness of time, turns out to be a girl who is hiding out because her grandfather has been kidnapped (if I remember correctly). There's actual existential danger for these kids in the story, and I recall being totally impressed that kids could actually get caught up in situations that might see them murdered just like any adult. Makes you feel like part of the club once you understand that kind of thing. I was infatuated with Bart and I made up a couple of boy detectives of my own and started writing stories about them. I don't think I ever finished any of them, but I thoroughly enjoyed coming up with ideas and taking them as far as imagination at the time would permit me. I was lucky enough to have a couple of teachers who were willing to read them and gave me considerable encouragement, and my heart and warm thoughts still go out to them. I really ought to read this book again.

So, that's it for the fiction portion of our show. Tune in next time when we move on to blinding you with science!

As universes go by...

There's a short documentary by the National Film Board of Canada, from 1960, that's sort of haunted me for a while now. Called Universe, in about half an hour, it frames our understanding of the cosmos at the dawn of the Space Age, and bookends the work of an astronomer at the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill, Ontario, one of the most important in North America at the time. It still exists. In 1960, it was half an hour or more out in the countryside. Today, it's surrounded by suburbs.

There are two moments in the documentary that speak to me personally. The first occurs a little over eight minutes in. Speaking of the planet Mars, the narrator tells us that "It is reasonably certain that the markings on it surface, bluish-green in the Martian summer, turning rusty brown in the autumn, indicate vegetation..."

And it does haunt me. This is a moment in history when we could still imagine there was complex, multicellular life on Mars. Only five years later, those millennia-old illusions would be dashed forever by the fly-by of Mariner 4. But in 1960, when my parents and some of my friends were already alive, less than a decade before I was born, you could still dream. And what dreams they were.

The other is a more earthbound moment. At the very end of the documentary, as the astronomer is rubbing his tired eyes at the end of a long night in the light of dawn, there is a shot of Hwy 401 at the Leslie Street interchange. I know this interchange well; I've lived walking distance from it for 21 years now. In fact, I know it well enough to tell you that the NFB was cheating; that the view faces west, so is in fact an evening shot, not a morning shot. It was taken from the vicinity of the on-ramp from southbound Woodbine Avenue, which no longer exists... it's now Hwy 404 north of the 401 and the Don Valley Parkway south of it. My guess is that the NFB crew stopped (that's probably their car on parked on the right there) and took video of it on their way out of the downtown north to the observatory. Two lanes on either side, the 401 back then was out in the countryside, bypassing the city, and had it been a human child, would have been facing the prospect of starting kindergarten at the time.

For comparison, I took a video of nearly the same location in 2008 at night, shot from the bridge of Don Mills Road (not to be confused with the Don Valley Parkway), which would have been visible in the shot above except that it Don Mills Road didn't cross the 401 until about 1965.

Universe had some interesting ramifications. Ostensibly, Stanley Kubrik was inspired by aspects of it when he went on to film 2001: A Space Odyssey. As well, it was narrated by Douglas Rain, whom Kubrik chose to voice HAL, the computer from 2001 and its 1980s sequel, 2010. If you're at all interested in seeing it, it's a pleasant 28 minutes of what-was and what-if, and can be viewed here. It amazes me that people still alive today took this as the state of things, and have had the universe itself change around them.

Adventures in dentistry: Invisalign

For the past year and a half, I've been undergoing a six-month course in tooth-realignment. That's right. Eighteen months of a six month therapy. So let me explain...

Let me take you way back to tell you the whole story. In March of 2019, my weight had reached something in the neighbourhood of 330 lbs. I'd been trying everything for years to get that down again, but will power and the tide of biology conspired against me. Finally one morning at work, sitting there alone, I remembered the wife of a friend had had bariatric surgery and it had been literally transformational for her. And for the first time, I decided maybe I needed to give that a try. For what it's worth, I had the surgery not quite a year and a half ago, and I'm glad I did. So much has changed... including what I'm about to write about.

One thing led to another. Getting onto that program, which is a long process nearly a year from start to finish, meant that I had to see a cardiologist. He sent me to a sleep clinic. They told me I stopped breathing during sleep somewhere in the neighbourhood of 80 times an hour. Think about that. So, they recommended I get a CPAP machine to keep my airway open during sleep. I got it in November of 2019 and I've used it every night ever since. But one morning I woke up with a terrible ache in my jaw. I wondered if I'd fractured it. For days, I could barely chew. Back when I was in my 20s and I had my wisdom teeth extracted, my dentist advised me I should get braces because my teeth were badly misaligned and by the time I reached my 50s and 60s, I might start getting hairline cracks in my jaw. Well, this experience sobered me up to that, and so I started looking around for an affordable program.

I found Invisalign, which promised to do the job for somewhere around two grand; a lot less than other programs and with the added bonus that it was being done with transparent plastic rather than wires. So I went to see them, they showed me what they could do over 6 months, and I signed on.

The 18 pairs of aligners arrived in January, 2020. Here's how it works. You put a set it and, other than eating, leave them in all the time. You wear each set for a week, but every third set you wear for two weeks. So, 18 pairs comes out to 24 weeks, just about six months. Starting in mid-January, my therapy would have been completed around early July last year.

When I started out, my teeth were fairly crowded. I had buck teeth in the uppers (the left one out further than the right), with the outer incisors slightly tucked in behind the inner ones. My bottom teeth were worse. The two incisors on the right were pretty much okay, but the front left one was turned almost sideways, facing toward the left, and the outer left incisor was tucked in behind that one. Generally, you couldn't even see it. I looked like I had three bottom incisors because one was almost completely hidden behind another.

This is a picture of what my teeth looked like when I put my first aligners in. Please excuse the coffee stains. :)

Left is right and right is left here, of course. So, as you can see, only three incisors are visible along the bottom. There's an eyetooth there on the right (my left) that seems to be in its place. Space needed to be added there to move it forward. As well, on the top, you can see how the teeth overlap somewhat, almost like a poker hand. This is the mouth I've lived in since I was a tween.

Each Sunday night I would switch to the next set of aligners. They're tight, and they take a minute or two to seat properly using little tubes of plastic they call "chewies" that help you gently bite down and sit the aligners down over your teeth. Early on, they ached quite a bit for a day or so, but as the process went on, that really lessened. Maybe the therapy simply accustomed the teeth to moving as time went by. All I can tell you is, at some point, I stopped waking up Monday mornings still feeling it.

This was a fairly simple process at first. The first two or three sets were no problem. Then one Sunday night I found I was having a really rough time getting the aligners on; especially the bottom one. I was getting this pronounced wow in the inner arch, folding the plastic such that it formed a salient that poked at my tongue. I mean, I'm talking about something like a quarter of an inch here. It was very noticeable. I thought maybe my teeth weren't keeping up with the therapy, and I hoped they would catch up. In coping with that, I ended up getting an inexpensive Dremel tool to buff the wow and the edges of the aligners down (they can be fairly sharp). The aligners ship with a nail file for doing this, but I needed that Dremel to really get anywhere. It became a weekly thing for a while. Put in the aligners, let them deform, then Dremel the point down to a sort of inverted U gap behind my incisors.

About half way through the process, this was where we were at. You can see the bottom front left incisor has been turned to at least face more or less the same way as the others, and some room has been opened up in the hopes of bringing that outer one out from behind it. So, you know, decent progress...

The set and week is actually printed onto most of the sets I had, and at one point, around the start of June, I happened to look at them and I noticed the numbers for the upper aligners and the lower ones didn't match. The lower set I was wearing was several weeks in advance of where I was in the therapy. Well, that would explain why they hadn't fit and deformed so badly for some time. But the upper one was actually a couple of weeks behind where I'd gotten to... they were actually moving my teeth back where they'd been before!

Do I need to say I was livid? I got in touch with them and demanded they reassess my therapy. I told them I'd start putting the payments in escrow if I didn't get some action. I told them that, in my opinion, having a therapy that reversed the course of the treatment verged on malpractice. They sent me an impressions kit to make new molds of my teeth and advised me to keep wearing the current set at night so my teeth wouldn't start reverting to their old positions. I wore that set for about six weeks waiting for the new ones. They were pretty shagged out by the time the new ones arrived.

It was an entirely new set of 18 aligners. I was starting over again. This time I opened every set and checked the numbers, making sure they were in sequence and matching. They all were. I sealed each set in a sandwich bag and labeled it, and started over. This set arrived in August, which meant the new therapy would send in February. Now they were a lot easier to seat on Sunday nights and I pretty much stopped with the Dremel, not even bothering to buff off the edges unless they were particularly sharp.

You have to order retainers at some point, and just as I was about to do so, I broke one of the points of my lower left 12-year molar. I guess there'd been a crack there for a long time, because it broke while I was chewing bread. I went to the dentist who suggested I wait till the end of the Invisalign therapy to repair the gap, which was essentially just cosmetic, and to let Invisalign know they'd need more impressions to get the retainers right. So, that's what I did.

This is where my lower teeth were at just prior to the break in the back molar (it's the one with the white filling; the forward interior point is the one that would shortly break off). You can see that hidden incisor was really coming forward by then.

Fast forward to February. Filling is in and the point is reshaped. I get my impressions kit. Send it in. I'm doing this to get my retainers made. They send me back an email saying they'd received my request for a "touch-up" and were evaluating it. I nearly sent back an email saying, "Oh, no, I'm just ordering my retainers," but I stopped. Touch-up, you say...? Well, let's just keep our powder dry and out mouth shut till we hear back from them. If they want another thousand dollars, I'll just say "retainers, please". But if it's part of the therapy I'm already paying for, well...

As it turned out, it was, and they sent me another nine sets. So, another three months of tooth-straightening above and beyond the... oh, I can't even do the math anymore. This time, though, the numbers on the aligners were strictly Week 1, Week 2, Week 3/4, over and over. Each set of three was numbered exactly the same. I had to essentially trust them that they'd ordered them correctly. But in checking the first set against the last, I could see very clearly the progress between them, and so I sealed them all up again, labeled them, and got back to it.

So, that was late March. It's now mid-June, and last night, I put in what will almost certainly be the last of all those sets of aligners. I have to wear these another two weeks (at least), or however long it takes for the retainers to show up.

The last time they asked me to check in on my progress, a couple of weeks ago, this is where we were at...

Forgive the little red arrow; I drew that on there to show a friend which tooth had seemingly come out of nowhere in the past year or so. Yeah, that one is finally visible without you needing an angled dental mirror to see it.

It's been a long time, this "six month" therapy that's gone on for seventeen. But for all that, the results really are remarkable. I can't show you the original animations from last year anymore; they're long gone from the site—which is too bad, because those were profound. But I can show you what just these last three months represent...

It's been a long haul; a lot longer than I imagined. There were some real ups and downs at first, but aside from the original screw-up, I'd have to say that Invisalign has treated me with respect and addressed my concerns and, if I'm being honest, gone the extra mile for me. Would I recommend the process to friends I care about? Yes, I would. I don't imagine my experience with the misnumbered aligners was typical. Stuff happens. But when I told them about it, they made it right. I'm hoping that, aside from making me less ashamed when I smile, that maybe this will head off those "hairline cracks" warnings my dentist gave me 30 years ago.

How to destroy a closed road

So from what I’ve come to understand, this all started with a landslide in the early 1990s.

Kirby Road is a sideroad that runs across a certain portion of York Region (which is immediately north of the City of Toronto) in its west end. It crosses the region, with the odd dog’s leg here and there, from Dufferin Street at the east end to the regional border at Albion-Vaughan Road at the west. There is today, however, a gap in the road, from Huntington Road on the west side to about half way to Hwy 27 on the east. Along this run, Kirby Road’s course was substantially shaped by the course of the Humber River, and at some point in the early 1990s, about 30 metres (100 feet or so) of Kirby Road fell into the river below, causing the closure of that stretch to vehicle traffic.

There is a newer, single-lane track that Google purports to be “Kirby Road”, but I honestly don’t know if it were ever actually a stretch intended for casual traffic. I have a feeling it was mainly there as a convenience to Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) vehicles looking after the area.

It’s kind of a shame, because almost immediately east of Huntington Road, Kirby is carried over the Humber by a bow arch bridge, designed by the locally renowned Frank Barber, that’s verging on a century old. I’ve heard it referred to as McEwen Bridge, and supposedly, it was built in 1923. It’s in rough shape, frankly, and the region probably didn’t need much excuse to close it to vehicular traffic in the first place. The landslide was certainly justification, since the bridge served no other purpose at the time than perhaps field access to a local farmer, and even that’s no longer an issue anymore.

The bridge is kind of key to this, because it’s the main reason I dropped in on the road from time to time over the years. It was one of three such Frank Barber bow arch bridges over the Humber that I’m aware of, all of which were still drivable well into the late 20^th century. The one on Langstaff Road was, I believe, the first to close; made redundant by a road realignment at some point in the 70s or 80s.

The next to close was, I believe, the one on Major Mackenzie Drive, sometime around 1990; again, due to road realignment. I’ve blogged about that bridge more recently. It was completely demolished last autumn, without replacement.

The last to close, I think, is the bridge in question; the one on Kirby Road, which closed sometime in the early 1990s due to the landslide. While the one on Langstaff seems to have a future as a quasi-official pedestrian crossing, McEwen Bridge’s days might be numbered. That’s not really my main point here, but it’s related to it directly, and I’ll come to that.

I was first out there in September of 2006, and I blogged about it here. Quite a while ago now; more time’s passed since then, probably, than between when I was there and the original closure. I was there one rainy late summer Saturday morning, by myself. I took the track sight-unseen, heading down from the far east end to trek down to the bridge, if I could, at the far west end. A round trip of about 2.5 km as the crow flies, though there’s a non-inconsequential descent/climb about the halfway mark.

I’m reasonably sure this section was never paved (though apparently I formed just the opposite opinion back in 2006). It was probably always a dirt road that could be considered two-laned only in the most generous sense: if you were careful, you could probably avoid hitting someone coming the other way. It would never have been a very travelled stretch at the best of times.

Before I go on, let me give you a small sample of what I'm talking about... what's being lost. Here's a short video I shot in July of 2007 when I was out there with Larry. This is us heading down the wooded trail of the hillside down into the floodplain where the bridge is to be found. A bit of a challenge, but hardly Mount Everest. Look how beautiful it is. Shaded by trees. A clear, smooth, soft path. Interesting bits of nature within arm's reach all the way down.

Did you enjoy it? Don't get too fond of it. What you just saw has been destroyed.

This is what it looks like now...

A bit off to the side, you can actually glimpse the remnants of the trail, like some snake that's been run over by a truck full of boulders. Look, you can even see one of the old white rectangular trail markers painted onto that tree left of centre.

The first time I was there, I never saw another soul in the two or three hours it took me to walk it and linger at the bridge. I felt almost like I’d discovered something. I came back about a week later, partly to pull a joke involving a ruined truck left on the old roadside, and partly to explore a field on the north side of the river that’s subsequently been planted for reforestation. That time I did see other people there, from a distance. Every other time I’ve been there, as far as I can recall, I’ve been in the company of someone else, and encountered at least one other hiker. But it was always a narrow, natural trail through forest and fields; one benign enough that you could—and I, for one, typically did—take the entire route barefoot without much issue. Clay, mud, hard packed soil, soft pine needles, grass… the river itself, if you so chose. It was a genuine cornucopia of pleasant tactile variety on a trail that I’d characterize as moderately challenging, but rewarding. Others must have thought so as well, because the trail became increasingly popular as time went by. It became rare not to see half a dozen cars parked haphazardly at the Huntington Road end on any given weekend.

But apparently, that wasn’t good enough for York Region and the TRCA; oh, no. A moderately challenging nature walk on nature’s own terms? Oh, Lord, we can’t have that! So right now, this very moment, the entire route is in the process of being formalized. Sanitized. Wrapped in plastic and for-your-protection paper cordoned like a hotel bathroom. This pearl of nature, the gem in the raw, is being carved and shined up to be cast before swine… widened, paved, guard railed, diverted. Y’know… “improved”. The pretty, single-lane wander up and down the hillside, tricky as it was in wet weather… it’s been eviscerated; the hillside scrapped out, replaced by some twisty contrived granite intestine with hand rails that sits like a fat, spikey snake on the face of the land. A shaded stroll once roofed by towering trees is now a baking meander under unrelenting open sky. Awash with either asphalt or, worse, pea gravel, it’s certainly no place for grounding anymore. No, if you want to encounter nature here anymore, you’d better do it hermetically sealed in boots. Pea gravel’s no fun even in sandals.

They’ve turned a quiet, slightly obscure two-hour hike, a real communion with nature, into a half-hour forced march where nature intrudes on a tongue of the city thrust into it. It’s no longer a place your kids wander slowly, stopping to encounter flowers or interesting bugs right at their elbow; it’s a place where they screech and run and get hustled through and nature is a quaint remnant safely out of reach on either side of a ribbon of street. It’s now a dog toilet for the kind of suburbanites who show up in 4-wheel drive SUVs they wouldn’t dream of taking onto so much as a gravel road for fear they’d chip the paint. Meanwhile, chain link fencing has been put up at either end of McEwen Bridge. Fortunately, hikers have insisted their way through it, though it remains as a grievous eyesore. The implication, to me, is that the bridge’s days are numbered, and when the third phase of this vast “improvement” takes place, its ancient rugged charm will probably be replaced by some pre-rusted steel yawn dropped in situ; yes, you’re welcome; thank you very much Your Majesty.

I hate what they’re doing to this trail. What they’ve done to it. What they’re going to do. And it’s happening all over the fringe of Toronto. Something not unlike it just happened not far to the west in the vicinity of Bolton along Duffy’s Lane. Sporadic “improvements” have happened along the closed section of Concession 11 on the Humber’s north side. Meanwhile, they do everything they can to make it difficult to simply walk the closed course of Huntington Road just north of the Kirby Road intersection. They’re either “improving” the trails, or trying to make them impassible.

Can you people just not leave the trails alone? Let us enjoy them for what they are? Limit yourselves to coming in every four or five years to trim the overgrowth back and keep them passable? Must every trail either have the charm officially formalized right out of it, or else be shuttered up VERBOTTEN because it’s too expensive or impractical for you to ruin it? Can you not JUST LET IT BE…?

Okay, that was my screed. Let me put my photos where my mouth is. Judge for yourself. Which of these experiences looks more like the one you'd like to have? If you were going to drive 30 to 90 minutes to get out here on a weekend, which views would you want ready to greet you when you stepped out of the car...?

Here's what the beginning of the hike at the east end of the road closure used to look like.

Here's how it looks now...

The rest of the trail to the hillside descent looks pretty much just the same. But here's what you used to see as you went along...

The now-eviscerated hillside, a sea of organized gravel and granite to push back the unseemly chaos of nature, used to look like this...

...Instead of this...

The walk along the bottom land to the river and McEwen Bridge used to look like this...

...Instead of this...

Finally, let me show you a real gem. This is the climb up the old road course to where the landslide that closed the road happened. It's gorgeous. Wide, well-packed, tree-covered, and historic. People once drove here on their daily business. Here are a few shots of it from 2006, a dozen years or more after it was closed to vehicle traffic...

It's still there. But it's become far more occluded. I'd go so far as to say I believe they'd been deliberately letting trees fall across it to frustrate climbers...

Why couldn't we take just one tenth, one twentieth, of the money we're wasting making the place look fugly, and simply clear some of that detritus out? Keep this trail open? Sure, it's dangerous at the top, but look at this...

They went and added this, a bench and a big stone slab, overlooking an even longer drop at the top of the hill! Now, why couldn't they have put something like that near the edge of the landslide at the top of a much more beautiful and natural trail? A sure way of preventing people from failing to take notice and falling, and much more spectacular and direct view, overlooking the river itself? If it occurs to me, why didn't it occur to them?

Anyway, I hope I've made my case. These "improvements" are no improvements at all. They're simply the gelding of nature. Taming it. Taking away what little power even a relatively benign little walk like this has to surprise and challenge us. Pave paradise; put up a parking lot.