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.

September Morn

My friend R-Lang visited from New England and enthusiastically agreed to pose for me in nature. Though he'd like to maintain a modicum of anonymity, he's also got just a bit of an exhibitionistic streak he was eager to indulge. These were some of the shots I took that we both agreed were among the best from the session.

Hold for the Humber, please...

The place P-Doug and I have been relaxing on the Humber's been getting kind of crowded lately, so we decided to explore another spot on the river. This one's not so accessible, and requires a fifteen minute (as the crow flies) hike through the forest from a country road. We made our way there last Friday...

I separated from P-Doug for about half an hour on the way in. He took a much more direct route; I followed a small creek to the river. On my way, I found this long-abandoned Ford F150. It may have been here since the 80s. The truck bed was rusted right through to the axle. There was no vandalism that I could see... unusual. Suggests that not many teenagers make use of the place, if nothing else.

When we found the place, it was better than anything I've imagined. The curve in the river is preceded by a fallen tree that long ago built up the river rock; the water cascading over it seems to have hollowed out a natural pool in the river. It drops off quickly and is about five feet deep. At this time of year, the water was only a few degrees below body temperature (or so it felt to me); there were virtually no temperature shocks in wading into it. We indulged ourselves for about five hours.

The above three shots show panoramas from the same position; the top two at noon (in infrared and colour) and the third at about 4 in the afternoon. We headed home (by way of beer and a nosh) about 4:30.

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Update: Nov. 24, 2007. Video in infrared from that day.




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Today, holiday Monday (Simcoe Day hereabouts), I was kind of at loose ends so I decided to go to a place I'd been before, May last year. This is the end of Flindon Road at the Humber River, at what used to be the border between North York and Etobicoke. Many years ago, there was a small traffic bridge on Flindon Road that crossed the Humber. All that remains now is the embankment.


Unlike May in 2006, this time I decided to make my way down to the river and wade around. I'm far more familiar with the Humber now than I was back then. Most of the following shots were taken from the river itself as I headed south downstream. The water wasn't just comfortable, it was decidedly warm. I only wish it had been possible to dive into it instead of just wade.

The bridge seen in the distance was the main reason I returned. It's not the Flindon bridge, since, as I said, that's long gone. The bridge in these shots was once actually the Albion Road bridge over the Humber. Today, it's closed to traffic and carries only pedestrians and bikes across. Maps that I have from about 1970, though, suggest that, at least for a while, both the old bridge and the new bridge carried vehicle traffic side by side.


I climbed up the embankment to the root of the old bridge on the North York side. This view looks down what was once Albion Road. If you look to the centre left, you'll see a van on what is currently the course of Albion Road, a few dozen yards to the west.

This view looks northwesterly up what used to be Albion Road, with Etobicoke on the far side.

Looking northwesterly into Etobicoke from the bridge.

The new bridge as seen from the old.

The following views look northerly along the Humber upstream...


Before heading back, I paused to look back across the bridge into North York.

I returned to the North York side and crossed back under the foot bridge.


Finally, a few views of the abutment for Flindon Road bridge, seen from the river and then from the climb back up.