Wonderful Things #7: The Canadian Shield

The Shield

It’s not that great for farming, but nothing beats the beauty of the Canadian Shield. In Europe, they make a big fuss out of a small lake here or there, let alone a “lake district.” The Canadian Shield is about 50% lakes throughout its surface, cumulatively holding about 50% of the world’s fresh water. Eastern Canadians do not value enough the vacation paradise this puts on their doorstep—both lakes and hills.

Westport, Ontario, population 700.

Prettiest of all are the small towns that grew up in the Shield, often when a hill produced a cataract that could be used, once upon a time, to turn a mill. I grew up in one such town, Gananoque. When I first experienced flat land, it seemed to me something horrible—featureless, meaningless, without any sense of place. When, on the other hand, I first experienced high mountains, I felt they lacked all human scale. The Canadian Shield is just the perfect landscape.

Gananoque dam.

Wonderful Things #6: The Canadian National Exhibition

Canada's Victory Celebration--1919.

I do not enjoy spending money; some do. Spending money is a real inhibition to my enjoyment of a thing. A sense of a good bargain is part of the fun for me.

And for the money, you can’t beat the Canadian National Exhibition for family fun. I expect state fairs across the US are similar; Ottawa has its SuperEx and Vancouver its PNE; you can try this at home in many places across North America; but I believe there is nothing as big as the CNE. I never bother with the midway, and do not shop. I look for the free shows all over, free exhibits, and food bargains in the Food Pavilion. There’s The Farm and the horse shows; the air show; performing animals; displays of hobbies; nature shows; sand sculptures and butter scupltures. There’s usually a great display from the Canadian Armed Forces. There are ancient traditions that must be honoured, like eating a batch of Tiny Tim doughnuts.

Prince's Gate.

And a day at the Ex traditionally ends with everyone tired but happy.

Wonderful Things #5: Forfar Dairy

Forfar, Ontario, population 31. Not counting cows.

The perfect summer outing in the neighbourhood of Kingston or Leeds County, Ontario, is a drive to Forfar Dairy for fresh cheese curds, still warm and squeaky from the vats. Part of the fun is looking for the town of Forfar, which seems to be no more than the dairy itself. (You be the judge.) The dairy now also has a website from which you can order cheese shipped. Forget about mail ordering curds, though—they have to be fresh. You may have a similar dairy near your home town, but having lived in quite a few spots around the world, I do suspect the finest cheddar does come from Eastern Ontario.

The web page

Wonderful Things #4: Seed Catalogues

Do you know where the term “corny jokes” comes from? Old seed catalogues included such jokes, along with the listings for seed corn. As an old technical writer, I find seed catalogues fascinating examples of what can be done to make technical writing, or any supposedly purely functional writing, interesting. Besides the humorous tone, any decent seed catalogue is full of great illustrations, too, sometimes highly educational—a lesson in botany on every page, if that’s your interest. They are also commonly stuffed with sidebar recipes, tips for preserving, craft ideas (how to make a corn broom, for example) and words of wisdom of all kinds. What a wonderful thing they are to look at in February, when the world is still white and you are getting fed up with the long, cold winter.

And, even better, they are free. An addict anywhere in the US can get hundreds delivered to their door free every year. Our selection was more limited in Canada, but I will always remember Dominion Seed House and Stokes Seeds.

Have a look at a nice online flip catalogue here. (http://www.rareseeds.com/flip-catalog/index.html). And here’s ahistorical perspective from the Smithsonian (http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/SeedNurseryCatalogs/intro.htm). Here’s a complete catalog from the 40s (http://archive.org/details/MaulesSeedBook1946), and here’s Luther Burbank’s own from 1915: (http://archive.org/stream/BurbankSeedNurseryBookExpositionYear1915/TheLutherBurbankCompanyCca79852#page/n19/mode/2up)

Wonderful Things #2: A&W Root Beer

The way we were...

Thinking of current halfway stops like the Big Apple reminds me of our old family halfway pit stop between Kingston and Montreal, the A&W at Cornwall. A&W root beer is still a wonderfully cheap thrill--the simple genius of chilling the mugs is still genius, and root beet itself is a terribly folksy thing. It's a bit of Americana, originally flavoured from the root of the sassafras tree. There are other "small beers" worthy of mention: birch beer, sarsaparilla, burdock, ginger ale. In Quebec, we had spruce beer. But root beer is the best known of them all.

And I love the retro theme A&W kept in their outlets, as if just to please me. They’ve frozen everything in the 50s and 60s, the era when I first started visiting A&W. Again, the lack of pretention is part of the beauty of the thing. Incidentally, I’m speaking of A&W Canada, which is apparently completely independent of A&W USA. Your results may vary.

Truro, Nova Scotia, A&W