Trip to Ottawa: National War Museum

All of us wanted to see the National War Museum. This one was the real no-brainer of the trip; the must-do for each of us.

Sunday, I was up well before P-Doug and MG so I decided to beat the crowds to the breaky and when I got back told them I figured I'd wander our neck of Ottawa for half an hour while they ate. After that we all formed up, did the National War Monument as mentioned above, and then... off to the Museum.

MG's dad actually died, around the time President Kennedy was assassinated, of kidney damage he sustained in WWII, and an uncle was lost over Italy, so quite a bit of the experience resonated with her on a personal level. We all kind of took it at our own pace.


The Museum is arranged differently from others I've been in. It leads you via a serpentine route though our military history, from the First Nations (what little we know about the unrecorded experience prior to the arrival of the Europeans), through the colonial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, to the American Revolution and War of 1812, our involvement in the Boer War, the two World Wars, and then peacekeeping and the Cold War (that last section we didn't see; by the time we got to VJ Day, we were beat).

I forget now which First Nation it was, but one first referred to the French as the Men of Sticks, because they were first encountered as 'bears in the trees of a moving island' that was quickly understood to be men, in the rigging of a very large boat. For their part, the British, when they were met later by the same natives, now French allies, were referred to as the Men of the Fog, because they were first encountered on the battlefield.


There were numerous audio-visual displays. They were were usually of moderate lengths, 10-15 minutes in most cases, and they alternated English with French subtitles and French with English subtitles. No matter where you came in, you would be able to follow along, either by oral or written narration. An effective, but not always obvious solution, and kudos to the museum for doing it. One of the first, and most amusing and instructive, had a couple of guys, one in a Leafs jersey and one in a Canadiens jersey representing English Canada and French Canada, sharing a couch and popcorn while watching a TV documentary about the French and Indian war and the conquest of Quebec. The two friends trade barbs, jibes, and insults, exchanging their rather different perspective on the matter. They suddenly realize their other friend, a Native in a Vancouver Canucks jersey, is with them, and they ask, “When did you get here?” only to be told, “I've always been here.” The documentary they're all watching suddenly shifts to the American Revolution, where the Native and French Canadian josh the English Canadian about having come from a “dysfunctional family”. Finally, they all get bored of it all and switch to a hockey game. Very amusing, and indicative of life in Canada where we all get by by agreeing to disagree on the things that really don't matter and are subjective anyway.


The section on the War of 1812 highlights just how close a thing the survival of Canada was. At the time, English Canada was largely populated by people from the United States, some of whom had come out of loyalty to the Crown, but some of whom had simply come for the free land. Had even one of the American invasions been successful, Ontario and everything west certainly would be, and Quebec and the Maritimes would very likely be, parts of the United States today. To my amazement and delight, the museum has, and displays, the coat Sir Isaac Brock was cut down in during the Battle of Queenston Heights. The hole left by a sniper's musket ball is plainly visible, the size of thumb tip. Brock was the British officer who readied Canada's defenses in the lead-up to the war, particularly by forging alliances with Tecumseth and those who followed him. Without Brock (and Tecumseth), there'd be no Canada today, and here before me was the very proof he once lived, and how he died. It's hard to put into words how awed I was to see it, much less realize it even still exists.


A number of other things amazed me during our visit. The actual model, from 1926, of a proposal for the National War Monument; the one that was actually built and I had visited just hours before. Hitler's car, captured by American soldiers and eventually sold by a private collector to the National War Museum. The medals of Billy Bishop, the top WWI flying ace of the British Empire. A round roofing tile from the Temple of Sairen-Ji, at Ground Zero in Hiroshima. There was so much to see; I'm sure that two or three visits would still yield surprises, wonders overlooked, history dimly remembered and suddenly come alive again.


The museum is not without some controversy. There is a large display about the internment of Japanese Canadians during WWII, the great injustices done them, and the government's attempts to make amends forty years later. There's also a panel that calls into question the effectiveness of strategic bombing (though not the valour or patriotism of Allied bombing crews). Some people, it must be said, don't care for these. But in a free country, which some of them fought to defend, it must be noted that with that freedom, we have a responsibility to the truth. Truth is rarely absolutely, but all its facets must be shown, even when they don't strike the viewer as lovely. If we ignore what we may have done wrong, then we free ourselves or our posterity to repeat those mistakes.

Reservoir Dogs

It's that kind of Saturday afternoon for me. Listen... here's how it is.

Today I was supposed to walk a few miles along the Humber and then visit a favour pub with P-Doug but he wasn't in when I called. Instead, I worked on my reminiscences of our trip to Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, long overdue (in fact, I'm uploading the images as we speak, as it were). Once that was done, I decided to do a solo ersatz mission... I walked up to a plaza Scarborough where I bought some overproof rum, Diet Pepsi, and rented some movies at Blockbuster. It took me nearly two hours of walking, which I'm moderately proud of, and I think I earned the buzz I have right now.

Anyway, one of the movies I rented was Reservoir Dogs. A little background here. In my mid to late 20s, Iused to work in the animation industry, in-betweening television commercials. The work trailed off in October of 1997 and for 18 months, I was unemployed... chronically, crushingly, living-in-my-parents'-basement unemployed. I used to take long walks by myself up Tenth Line in Mississauga to the 401 and back in the spring, summer, and autumn of 1998, trying to imagine a future with anything remotely brighter in it. At some point during that summer, I bought a VHS copy of Reservoir Dogs, which I'd heard a lot about but never seen.

I was hooked. Really hooked. I've rarely seen a movie as tight as this one, as innovative, as compelling. These are all bad guys in their way — even the cop Freddy Newendyke has some flaws — but every one of them has something that makes them compelling. This is an almost perfect movie, and like a handful of others that gild my soul, I've seen it over 50 times. I can quote whole passages from memory. I can't tip a waiter or waitress without thinking of the opening of this movie. It was one of those emotional crutches that got me through a hard point in my life and inspired me with the breadth and depth of the writing. The situation and action are a bit unlikely and over the top, but these actors breathed real life into these characters. It's a masterpiece. I imagine you've seen it, but if you haven't, rent it. Let it wash over you. Turn out the lights, unplug the phone, have a drink, and plug in. Become part of this movie. Grit your teeth and take the ride. It's amazing.

Sunshine on my shoulder...

On Saturday night I saw a movie called Sunshine. In Toronto, it's showing in just one theatre. I asked my friend at the outset why that was, and he too was flabbergasted.

By the time the movie was over, I kind of had my answer.

Sunshine is not really a bad movie, as movies go. But there wasn't much about it I thought was good, either. It's not something I'd rent to see again, and given my nature, it's rare for me to say that. I'd characterize my experience of the movie as ambivalent to bad. Since this is the internet, and since this is what people do on it, I will now regale you with my wisdom on the matter.

Flawed premise

If I go to see a movie about dragons and elves, or ghosts, or cartoon characters, or anything else largely divorced from everyday reality, I'm a lot more willing to suspend my disbelief. I have -- I think we all have -- a higher standard for movies that purport to be about "real" life, like political thrillers, slice-of-life, or hard science fiction. This one kind of let me down from the start. The premise is that, about 50 years from now, the sun is "going out". Period. No explanation. To me, this suggestion is only slightly more plausible than basing a movie on the idea that the sun won't come up tomorrow. If you're going to ask me to sit still for the next two hours on that basis, you should at least provide a mechanism I can mull over.

Here's the problem. Big as it is, the sun is, at the bottom of it all, an extremely simple object. In composition, it's essentially the same as all the rest of that gas floating around in space at large. The only difference is, there's a whole lot of it in one small little space. The sun is driven by pretty much just one thing: gravity. The sun is what hydrogen does when there's a large mass of it in one place. When there's enough of it that its combined gravity is stronger than the force of the electrons pushing back against each other, the hydrogen nuclei fuse into helium, and you get the phenomenon we all know as a "star". That's all there is to it. All that mass isn't going anywhere, as so neither is the gravity that drives the fusion. As long as the sun still has hydrogen to fuse, there's hardly any force in the universe that can stop it, in fact. And I checked... by various measurements, the sun is still 92% composed, by volume, of hydrogen. It won't stop shining for a long, long time. Ultimately, "the sun is dying" was just a plot device to get a bunch of people out into isolation. A better one could have, should have, been devised. So for me, the milk was a little off to begin with.

Anyway, this plot device sets the crew in motion on a mission to the sun with an object reputedly the size of Manhattan designed to "restart" the sun (by making Tesla coil sparks, apparently). It's a big bomb. How apropos. :)

Who cares?

The next problem I had was there was no set-up. I've heard it said that the best way to write a story is to write all the lead-up to the first big action scene, then shred all the lead-up. Sometimes, sure. Would have made for a confusing experience in On Golden Pond, I think. But I can see times where you'd want the opening scene to be one that gets the blood pounding.

Too bad that didn't happen in Sunshine. And yet, neither did any exposition that would make us care about the crew or the mission. We're dropped into a space ship a long way from Earth on a mission of vital importance, but there's no suggestion of how or why it's important. This isn't the beginning, and it isn't where the action starts. It's the coda between the two. Okay, yes, I know the sun going out would be a big deal, and I can imagine the ramifications. But this is a movie. The whole idea is for the movie maker to show you something. Something incredible, something profound, something you're paying money to see because you didn't or couldn't think of it yourself. Sunshine, though, just puts you in space with a bunch of people you're supposed to care about, but don't. What happened on Earth? What kind of desperation put these eight people in space at the likely risk of their lives? What's going on back home that nags them, constantly reminds them of why they have to stay sharp, dedicated? Nothing this movie shows you (at least not till the last ten seconds).

This was, so I'm told, a low-budget movie. Well, they blew the budget on outer space CGI, so I don't see why they couldn't have devoted five minutes at the start of the movie to The Terrible Conditions On Earth That Sent Us Into Space. You want to do it cheap? Fine, I'll tell you how. Opening scene, exterior. New York skyline in winter. Two people sitting on a park bench. They look pensive. Maybe they're breaking up. Conversation reveals one of them is about to go into space on a long mission. They're going to miss each other. But the other person understands why this is so important. Brief pause in the conversation. One of them suddenly muses about how Memorial Day Weekend used to be about heading up to the cottage in the Adirondacks and opening up the cottage, shorts, flip-flops, the first drip in that freezing cold lake. Imagine how cold that lake would be now... Audience goes: Ah ha! So this is New York in May! Wow, this is serious. You film this in January, it costs you a pittance, you get the point across with little or no computer enhancement.

Instead we had eight people butting heads, and it was hard to care about most of them. It works pretty well because they turn out to be highly, highly expendable. See? Even the writers didn't care.

Danger, Will Robinson! Spoiler! DANGER!

Warning warning warning if you actually want to see this movie and don't want to know the McGuffin, stop reading now. Because I'm gonna tell. Because it was, well, dumb.

Haunted house movies are scary. Crazy sickass murder guys are scary. This was kind of both. Except the ghost isn't dead, despite all common sense. It turns out there was a first mission, and it turns out its captain went nuts. But the captain was apparently so sure this wouldn't be the last word on the matter that he actually in one scene, in a broadcast sent back to Earth years before, refers to his ship as "Icarus One". Apparently he had ESP or something and knew not only that there'd be a second mission years in the future, but the name of the ship, too. Anyway, it turns out the captain went nuts, decided humanity's time had come, and bakes the crew in the solar observation room. How ironic! But here's my question. Given that we don't even let guys this unstable command nuclear submarines, river ferries, or even tugboats, what are the odds that the future of the entire human race would be entrusted to a guy with a one-in-ten-million predelectation for wanting our entire species to die to make room for the roaches? You'd think they might, oh, run a Rorschach test or two... "Just say the first thing you see in the ink blot." "Mankind burning to death in hellfire... mankind drowning in its own sewage... mankind freezing to death in its own inhumanity..." "Ummmm... thank you, we'll get back to you, Captain." Guys like this usually don't go off the rails in a couple of months or something. No. They usually write poems like "All Must Die" in grade ten and stuff, and most of the people around them know not to let them run, walk, sit, or even be in the same room with scissors. Oh, but not in the future. Any nut will do. I can only imagine Haliburton was running this mission and Captain Pinbacker put in the lowest bid.

So, anyway, this is a haunted house movie in space. The car breaks down, the kids decide to hole up in the abandoned mansion, and they disturb That Which Should Not Be Disturbed.

But I mean, maybe the captain of the first mission was a ghost, because despite the fact they show cameras everywhere, and the computer can tell them where everyone is on board, they didn't catch the fact that the airlock between the ships was being opened, and then being sabotaged. No, their first indication anything strange was going on was when the airlock between the ships was blown up. It's a wonder the crew didn't try to blame Canada for letting the terrorists on board.

Schmuck of the Irish

Cillian Murphy, who may have been around a while but strikes me as an up-and-coming actor (probably because he's younger than me) is central to the movie. He's Irish. But of course, he can't be Irish in the movie. The Asian people can't be Asian. No, everybody has to be American. Or put on their best attempt at an American accent. The captain of the mission to save all mankind might have a Japanese name, and he might look Japanese, but it better be plausible or even likely he grew up in Seattle at worst. Really, have we come no further than this? If so, maybe Capt. Nutbar is right, and it is time for us to make way for a better species. Okay, I don't mind that everyone was speaking English, even though in 50 years it might more likely be Mandarin. But can't they at least speak English in manners suggesting they really did come from different places around the world, as you'd expect in a mission of this magnitude? Can't the goddamn Irish guy really be a goddamn Irish guy? Is that so hard to believe? Jesus, the last thing in the movie you see is a transmitted message of him talking American to his American sister... who turns out to be sitting in Sydney, Australia! For God's sake.

What I liked about this movie

Well, they did do a good job of getting across just how dangerous a place space would be to live and work in, especially in proximity to the sun (maybe too good; once the first thing went bad, it never seemed to stop). The technology they showed was believable, a little more advanced than what we'd expect today, nothing outrageous... which is pretty much how it usually turns out (compare an article from 1950 about what your life will be like in 2000 with how different life in 2000 really did turn out from 1950; not all that much in most respects). The characters seemed for the most part believable with the exceptions of Captain Fruit Loops and Harvey, the second in command on Icarus II, who again strikes me as unlikely to have passed the second or third hurdle in a battery psych tests for a mission like this... even Mace might have been a little too tightly wound, but he was interesting.

There's not all that much that actually appealed to me, but that's not the same thing as saying it was badly done entirely. There were things that really didn't work for me and if you've read this far you know what they are. But I can also see enough of quality in it that I can understand how it could work well for others who don't have the same issues with the film as I do. Just didn't work for me.

Today, his name is Mr. Mirvish

I’ve just read the news that “Honest Ed”, Ed Mirvish, has passed away. I hardly know what to say. Something is gone from the heart of Toronto. It’s as though the Empire State Building could speak, and then one day was suddenly gone. If you’d asked me yesterday to name the one person who “was” Toronto, I would have told you without a moment’s hesitation it was “Honest Ed”. Today I wouldn’t know what to tell you.

Of course I knew this day would come, one day. He was 92. But that day having come, I can tell you that, on a personal level, the last time I felt a presence like this pass from the scene was when Pierre Elliot Trudeau died.

Ed Mirvish was a wholly remarkable man. Born in Virginia, he spent his early childhood in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., where as a boy he sold newspapers on the street corners. His family came to Toronto when he was 9, and what a favour they did us, though they could not have known it at the time. His father passed away when Ed was 15, so he dropped out and went to work. In a few years, he opened his own discount store, which became the foundation of an empire of business, theatre, and breathtaking philanthropy. An entire neighbourhood, anchored around his iconic emporium, was named for him during his lifetime: Mirvish Village. The street signs there have for years attested to it.

“Honest Ed” created the Theatre District of Toronto, making us the second most important centre for theatre in North America and the third most important in the English-speaking world. In 1963, he saved The Royal Alexandria Theatre in Toronto; he rebuilt it and gave the city a gem. He went on to build The Princess of Wales Theatre here, and saved the Old Vic in London, England, at a cost of millions to himself over the years, for which, in part, he was made a Commander of the British Empire by the Queen. This was only one of his many accolades. “Honest Ed” was also an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of Ontario, a Freeman of the City of London (England), was inducted into the Canadian and American Business Halls of Fame, and held honourary degrees from six Canadian and Israeli universities.

But his real philanthropy was on the street. His streets; the streets of Mirvish Village. The streets of Toronto. Every December for years he distributed free turkeys to anyone who came; they lined up for hours. Every year for the past 20 years he threw himself a birthday party where he gave out the presents to the people who came to celebrate. The charities he supported, both official and of the moment, is a list known only to God. A man who, no matter how rich, celebrated, and successful he became, never forgot his beginnings, and made a real difference in the lives of thousands upon thousands of people.

The one bright spot I can see in all this is we knew what we had in him. We didn’t take him for granted; we understood we were being lent something very special that we could not have forever. And we appreciated it, and him. Toronto is poorer in a number of ways today, but forever enriched by his presence here. He is survived by his wife, Anne, and his son, David.

We knew him as “Honest Ed”. But today, his name is Mr. Mirvish.

If they'd understood spin in 1945

August, 1945 Speaking on behalf of the War Department, General G.I. Brasshat admitted today that "ongoing investigations" had revealed that there had, in fact, been civilian casualties in the recent atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The War Department had been previously denying the allegation as "absurd, unfounded, and circulated to tarnish the reputation of our forces and thus hamper our war effort and give aid and comfort to the enemies of freedom".

"We had anticipated, and had every reason to expect, that there would be no civilians in the area of what were plain and legitimate military targets," said the general. "Clearly, the Japanese, who as you know have absolutely no respect for human life, not even their own, moved civilians into the target zones to serve as human shields. As a result, a certain amount of collateral damage occurred in the operation." Initially vague as to the scope of the "collateral damages", the general finally allowed that he had "heard there were seven, possibly eight people injured, with the unfortunate possibility of some loss of life."

When reminded that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are (or rather, were) cities, and thus already had thousands of civilians resident within them, General Brasshat shuffled some papers and said, "In that case, clearly the Japanese deliberately placed military targets in civilian zones in order to frustrate our ability to neutralize them. But I can assure you that the atomic bomb is a weapon of great tactical precision, and that unintentional effects were kept to a strict minimum in the pursuit of our military goals."

At this point, the general was sliced in half by an angel with a flaming sword.

Daniel 13:52-59 (Catholic Bible; Protestant Apocrypha)

Twelve and Sixteen

On a couple of websites now I've seen photographs of tall, empty supports for a bridge that isn't there anymore, accompanied by a much larger one that is. I knew it to be in Halton Region on one of the many creeks that breaks the towns up, many of them only bridged at last in the past decade or so. But this was an older one, and I had it in mind that it was the Queen Elizabeth Way bridge over Sixteen Mile Creek. Trouble is, I was there in 1999, right at the base of that bridge, and there were no such remnants. I checked the aerial photos up and down the QEW, even on the Niagara Peninsula, but saw nothing. Could they have been removed? Had I missed my opportunity?

Last week, I happened to check one of those sites on a hunch. Sure enough, it turned out I had the wrong route. It wasn't the QEW. It was Highway 5... Dundas Street, over Twelve Mile Creek (a.k.a. Bronte Creek).

P-Doug came along with me on Saturday morning to check it out. An interesting walk was in the offing as well. Heading north, Burloak Drive (initially on the border between Burlington and Oakville, hence the name) is, as I remembered, closed for a chunk that makes it useless for cars trying to get between Dundas Street and Upper Middle Road, but I figured it should be just the ticket for hikers. To my surprise, when we arrived at the intersection of Burloak Drive and Upper Middle Road, we discovered Burloak had been permanently closed, and very recently. It looked like we wouldn't be dodging much traffic as we walked.


On the right, as we headed north, was the very sharp drop down to Twelve Mile Creek. On our left, through a very narrow line of trees, were the monster homes that have been being built there since around 1990. Oddly enough, about half way to Dundas, we came to a stretch of Burloak Drive that was still open! They had had to build a new access to it from the western subdivision, but it had to be done because a score or so homes still front onto Burloak itself, and those people needed access they couldn't get otherwise now that the road is closed at Upper Middle Road. A couple of minutes' walk through that small, privileged knot of homes and we came to the start of the ancient road closure, the one I had actually anticipated, that has been closed since at least some time in the 80s. There, the road closed in a little to become more of a trail; the decades had seen the course's partial return to nature. Beyond that, it opened up again, to a wider path that represents what was, till recently, the other open end of the road, now itself closed off all the way to Dundas Street. This section I can remember, barely, driving to explore way back around 1990, just to see where it went (nowhere, really).

This brought us to Dundas Street, Highway 5. Not a 400 series highway, but aside from the traffic lights, people pretty much treat it as one. It's on the verge of the countryside in Burlington, but even in Oakville, I've seen the city creep up to it, and then close in around it. What was countryside when I got my license 20 years ago is now the "new" upper fringe of suburban Oakville. Where we were in Burlington, it represented the northern limit... for the moment.

Traffic hurtled along Dundas Street as we made our way out on the sidewalk on the southern side. There, below us, were the pillars that once carried the traffic across the valley, dwarfed by the bridge on which we stood, but their very height and existence underlining just how high up we actually stood above the valley floor. I knew from my reading that those lonely supports carried a bridge was actually the third of four (the fourth being the current on) going back well over a century, I imagine. The third was built in 1921. P-Doug's investigation revealed that the cost of that bridge, back then, was just shy of an astounding $76,000. It's hard to imagine building something like that for less than seven figures, even in the 1920s; the current bridge must be worth tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars for all I know. While not as high or long as the current bridge (which is level with heights on both sides), and requiring drivers to descend a bit to cross and ascend again on the other side, the 1921 bridge must still have been impressive, especially in its day. Heaven knows what simple span down at the level of the creek it actually replaced; it must have seemed like a wonder of the world, out there at the edge of nowhere, one of the few means across back then. It served until 1948, when it was replaced by the current bridge, which was itself expanded to four lanes in 1979.

To me, the pillars look beautiful, seen in a line, long ago relieved of their burden and retired to the role of forget-me-nots. They remind me of fallen cathedrals at the edge of the water. Millions of people must drive by them every year with no idea they're even there.


On our way back, we wandered into the brush a bit to see if we could get to the little platform that was the western approach to the 1921 bridge, which you can just glimpse from the modern one. There was an overgrown slope, and I was curious enough to make my way down. P-Doug sat this one out, which is ironic because in my experience it tends to be him, rather than me, who will push exploration the extra yard. I got a handful of shots and made a climb back up to Dundas Street (path of least resistence), worrying about the suspicious three-leafed plants coating the place since I was barelegged and, moreover, barefooted since I'd come down the slope. I met P-Doug at the junction of Dundas Street and Burloak Drive, and we retraced the course back south to the car. I never did develop an itchy rash, thankfully.

[Oct. 9, 2008 -- I've since learned that the what you're looking at in the shots below -- the green carpeting, the shoots, the vines clinging to the trees -- is in fact a sea of poison ivy.]

[Sept. 20, 2010 -- Actually, no, now that I look at it again, I'm doubtful it is poison ivy. Poison ivy springs off in alternating sets of three, long middle stem bracketed by shorter ones on either side. This stuff has recurring pairs along the stem with just one odd leaf at the end... I don't think that's poison ivy.]


A thirst was upon us. The map indicated that malls nearby were few and far between, but when we got to Great Lakes Blvd. and Rebecca Street, we were greeted with the sight of a new plaza that featured a place called Wild West, apparently specializing in chicken wings. Right of out the 1880s, the sign said "ICE COLD BEER". Sold. We stopped. We did, indeed, have beer. I had a chicken wrap and the guilty pleasure of fries I shared with P-Doug, and he had cajun wings. The menu there was unlike anything I've ever seen. It must have listed 80, 90, 100 different flavours of wings. And the portions you could order them in ranged from a "single" serving of 10, right up to a "Hillbilly Deluxe" serving of a 1000 — the very definition, I think, of conspicuous consumption. It just begged for a shot.


By the time we left, it was early afternoon, and we were still game to visit a place I'd been before. At P-Doug's suggestion, we had on our agenda trekking to a closed part of Burnhamthorpe Road, bisected and isolated in the 90s by the construction of Hwy 407. It's tricky to get to; the first time I was there, I was really just guessing that a tiny creek shown going under the highway might yield a means. It does: an 8'-wide tunnel that was probably constructed to let wildlife in and out. We parked and made our way beside corn rows to the tunnel, then sloshed along for two minutes to the far side.

Also: in May, I acquired a used Canon PowerShot S70 and sent it to Australia to be reconditioned to shoot infrared images (previously I'd been using a Canon PowerShot G1 for this, but the S70 is of higher quality and yields images more than twice as large). As we set out, I asked P-Doug to man the S70, and from here on in, the black and white images you'll see are infrared images taken by him.

P-Doug took this infrared shot of yours truly wading to the end of the tunnel under the 407.



The closed stretch was shorter than I'd remembered it. It must be a trick of the lens; the photos from last time, all I really had to go by, exaggerate the distance by about double. Just after you join the road, there's a section about five feet wide that's been washed out to a depth of about three feet. Oddly enough, there's a large black and orange traffic cone there, to warn off traffic that ought to never arrive (but just might in the form of ATVs). Hornets had made a home in it, unfortunately for P-Doug, who put his hand on it and drew back a finger stung.

P-Doug, as I said, was wielding the infrared camera. When we arrived at the field at the end of Burnhamthorpe overlooking the creek, we separated for a couple of minutes. He waded into the field where he took these poetic shots of wild grass from the hip. Personally, I think they're the best work the day produced; as I said to him, not merely a record of events, but something iconic.


The above four shots show the valley of Sixteen Mile Creek from high above it. The drop off is clifflike, and probably over a hundred feet. It's a beautiful view.


You'd have to look closely to see it but there's a living room chair up in this tree. The first time I saw it, last summer, I imagined some teenagers had put it up there as a joke. Later on it occurred to me that it was up there to give a hunter a perch from which to spot, and shoot, deer.



We followed the road along the way I'd gone before to a large, deep arroyo carved into the land. We went a bit beyond it and found ourselves at the far end of the same field along the line we'd come in on; essentially, we'd travelled a semi-circle; a beautiful walk through the forest. On our return, we found a spot in the grass at the edge of the cliff overlooking the creek, and we settled back to sunbathe for an hour an a half before making our way slowly back down the closed road, under the highway, and then back to town.