There’s much more to the roads of rural Ontario than meets the eye. What appears to be a post-war highway project may have a history dating back to the ice age and initially have more to do with cycling than the automobile. But you’re not here for a lesson in the history of Ontario civil engineering: you’re likely more interested in Ginny Cook’s ghost.
Several years ago Ginny moved into a home almost designed with a reader in mind. It’s not very big, full of wood tones and natural light, surrounded by trees that the copious glazing brings into your living space, and a wood stove that keeps you cozy late into the coldest January night. Ginny likes tinkering on DIY projects and so when she’s not plowing through her massive library she’s optimizing her space for that specific activity.
The ancient Chinese art of feng shui has its skeptics but homes like Ginny’s make the case that ancients were at least pointing to something that existed, even if their conclusions prove inaccurate. I’ve known Ginny my entire life and she has always had an eye for design and flow, particularly when it comes to rustic cozy spaces for good tea and literature. However, despite her best efforts, she just can’t get this objectively perfect canvas right.
The latest project has been screening the porch on the front of the house. There’s a babbling brook best viewed from said porch that is as attractive to mosquitoes as it is beautiful, which rendered the space unusable. However at the time of my visit it was a bibliophile’s oasis complete with hammock, stacks of books, string lights, and a lovely oiled-teak bistro set. She’s spent most of the summer in that hammock, devouring her current obsession: Haruki Murakami.
This project, however, has potentially revealed the core of the problem that has been eluding Ginny the past several years. Whenever she begins to drift off to sleep she sees a woman with a utilitarian backpack and anachronistic outfit wandering the yard, lost, out of the corner of her eye. Over the past seven decades Ginny and I have had our ups and downs but I remain the one she calls with her supernatural conundrums. Perhaps it’s because our mothers were spiritualists and our relationship was built during the times they spent making inquiries of the other side.
As is my habit I suggested we begin by walking the fence line. Exploring one’s boundaries can tell us a great deal about what they were erected to keep out, or in. Though here in this rocky region the most eternal boundaries, our famous stone fences, were often simply a dumping ground for the debris that came from cultivating colonial farmland.
In any case, Ginny’s fence line is complex. On the east is a simple page-wire affair running parallel with the original farm boundary from which Ginny’s property was carved. On the south there is the stream and a busy road. The north-west fence line is very much not straight, made up of two different page-wire fences from different eras, it has a section of cedar rail, weaves in and out of the stream, and is offset by ten feet or so yet not parallel with the earliest beginnings of a stone fence. If that’s not enough there are a few curiously arranged boulders, likely in the thousand-pound range, that would have required significant effort to move and arrange. Obviously there is a story to be discovered.
Perhaps most illustrative of that story, however, is the stream itself. Tangled in the upturned roots of fallen cedars are both the round logs pioneers would lay over muddy land to create the descriptively named corduroy roads, and also the square planks that replaced them. Adjacent to these logs is a section full of gravel and old cobblestones and adjacent to that are some earthworks that look like they might have once held up a narrow bridge. Each iteration of this river crossing is a short distance to the modern one: a giant culvert that flows so far below the regionally important highway that passing motorists have no idea they’ve crossed a stream at all.
The pièce de résistance, however, is the mighty and ancient oak tree bent at two right angles on the fence line just off of Ginny’s front door. Before European settlement it was common for indigenous people to bend saplings into specific shapes using ropes. The trees would then grow into these contorted shapes and mark paths or points of interest for up to a thousand years. Often these marked things like river crossings or where to find clean water.
A glance at the topographic map fills out the rest of the story. Behind Ginny’s house is a giant ridge running for miles that once made up the shoreline of Glacial Lake Iroquois, an earlier version of Lake Ontario from when a glacier at present day Montreal meant it was one-hundred feet deeper. In front of Ginny’s house is half a mile of lowlands surrounding the main river of the watershed. In other words Ginny’s front yard has been a choke point for the most direct seasonal migration route from the lakeshore to the lands north in this region. The current highway doesn’t fit with the tidy colonial survey grid because it follows a much older path with thirteen-thousand years of history.
What became clear as we relaxed on Ginny’s lovely porch, drinking Earl Grey cream and eating her famous strawberry-basil coffee cake, was that the motorists speeding down the highway were missing out. Clearly this landscape has had many different configurations over it’s extremely long history but all of them would have been beautiful. An oasis on a long journey where one may rest, snack, or even camp while drying off from their wade across the refreshing clean waters.
It’s hard to say how busy this crossing ever was. Indigenous people aren’t thought to have lived here but often hunted in the region, collected and boiled maple syrup nearby, and migrated through seasonally. In colonial times this would have been the main path between colonial farms and forestry to the north and the lakeshore markets in the south. Even today it’s not hard to imagine the whole of Canada driving past on their way to or from the capital or the cottage. The difference is that until we enclosed ourselves in our own climate controlled glass and steel high-speed worlds we probably would have stopped at Ginny’s for a rest and maybe a chat.
As we reflected on this I told Ginny about one of my favourite facts: that The King’s Highway, precursor to the modern Ministry of Transportation, was established because of the cycling lobby. The colonial urban planning project that we call Canada was designed around public transit (trains), shipping, and the horse. Yet two decades before the Ford Model T and four decades before anything resembling modern automobiles the safety bicycle became an incredibly attractive alternative to the horse. Capable of covering about the same distance as the horse but without the need for feeding, stabling, care, or special equipment early Canadians loved the bicycle. There was only one thing it needed that the horse didn’t: smooth roads. Thus the Ontario Good Roads Association was born. Bicycle touring was all the rage at the turn of the century and before cars made these newly MacAdamized roads hostile to human-powered transportation they would have been incredibly social places. Ginny’s little stream would have been the perfect place to rest or even spend the night.
I postulated that perhaps Ginny’s ghost is in fact a traveller or explorer now trapped by fences and highways hostile to foot traffic. Walking along salt-encrusted gravel shoulders littered with road debris and beer cans is a far cry from the quiet pastoral pathway lined with apple trees that it once was. I certainly know which I would rather choose. Perhaps if we found a way to open up the old path to let the energy flow the spirit of this traveller could move on. Satellite imaging shows clear remnants of the old path marked in the trees that align perfectly with Ginny’s front yard, perhaps all we needed were a pair of wire cutters.
Things got more interesting, however, when I asked if Ginny, who has dabbled in painting her entire life, whether she had thought to sketch our etherial traveler. Indeed she had, yet she was quite bashful about showing me. I thought perhaps it was because she had given up on painting for so long. Back in our youth we would often invent elaborate stories for me to write and her to illustrate. She had been an extremely talented artist yet gave it up when she married Russ and started a family around the time I embarked on my circumnavigation. Her second partner, an older woman named Jaqueline, offered a great deal of encouragement yet it wasn’t until she passed at the ripe age of one-hundred-and-two that Ginny was able to pick up the brush again.
The answer came when Ginny revealed the canvas: it was a striking likeness to County Fence’s own resident vagabond Rachael Boardman! Indeed the outfit was anachronistic with practical elements from several periods of history but the likeness was uncanny. Clearly a wanderer who had picked up bits and pieces of her kit from here or there it was Ms. Boardman’s freckles, unruly hair, athletic build, and self-assured countenance that clearly cares not for fashion or social norms, only for what makes sense and brings joy. I was gobsmacked, not least because Ginny had never laid eyes on Ms. Boardman at all.
Yet that’s not how Ginny saw the subject. Rather, Jaqueline having been a psychology professor and devotee of Carl Jung, Ginny thought she had seen yours truly. Or rather, I should say, my anima. In Jungian psychology we each have an element of our psyche representing the opposite gender and Ginny was rather embarrassed to think she had accidentally painted the feminine side of a person with whom she had once broken off an engagement.
Truth be told so much water has passed under the bridge of our relationship that the choices of our youth hardly matter anymore. I have lived my life and she hers. Both of us have eventually found peace and joy through nontraditional lives even if she did initially chose what appeared to be the safe route. And while it took some time we did reconnect because the older one gets the more one realizes how hard it is to know someone intimately. These sorts of relationships remain quite valuable even if they don’t play out quite the way we had anticipated. Life rarely does.
The solution we came up with that afternoon was twofold. First we clipped the fence to allow any wanderers through. Ginny says that one day she’ll put in a gate, and maybe some flowers — make it nice. But in the mean time energy can flow the way it has for millennia: across the stream and under the outstretched and contorted trunk of that great oak tree. She’s also committed to leaving offerings on the pile of boulders (we speculate that at one time it might have had something to do with collecting tolls) in the way people do in the neighbourhood shrines she and Jacqueline saw on their travels in Japan. In the fall it will be apples picked from her trees but I’m sure she’ll think of something else for the rest of the year.
Things often don’t go the way you planned. There are natural patterns we often fall into but sometimes resist. Other times we force a vision rather than discerning one and end up with something we didn’t expect or even want. I used to get frustrated about these things but Ginny and I both agree that the best thing is to simply accept what is and seek out whatever joy it comes with.
-Jules
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