Note: Today's installment is a paid advertisement from the Gus Wants You to Move to Canada Foundation.
The house lights dim, and the projector starts to play on the movie screen:
Available in French upon request.
Well, it was time to begin another beautiful day up here in Canada. The Gissing family, filled with delight at being able to show the wonders of Canada to Lorrie, their houseguest from far-off California, leapt from their beds to begin the day.
Laureen, a hard-working Canadian housewife, eagerly prepared a hearty breakfast of Cream of Wheat for her hungry clan, topped with brown sugar, cinnamon, and fresh Canadian-grown mangoes and back bacon for a special treat, all served with fresh-brewed Canadian beer -- especially for the tots! After breakfast, Peter and Margaret, Gus and Laureen's beautiful Canadian-born children, have a special something to share with their guest -- why, it's a welcome banner! Lorrie promised to take a picture of it to show to all her friends, but it unfortunately slipped her mind, product of an American education.
After breakfast and a fine Canadian bath, the Gissing family, with their honored guest, was proud to drive to a nearby Heritage Village and display hundreds of years of proud Canadian history and know-how. All the roads were clear of slow, thanks to the diligent efforts of hardened Canadians and their trusty snowplows, which unfortunately meant Gus couldn't show off his prowess at driving the family dogsled -- perhaps next time!
When they reached the heritage village, Gus, proud father of Clan Gissing, held Lorrie's hand as she crossed the light dusting of snow, of about ten centimetres, that covered the parking lot. Her borrowed touk covering her delicate American ears, Lorrie tottered carefully towards the heart of the Heritage Village: the Maple Fest.
Yes, friends, here in Heritage Village, hardy Canadians boil countless gallons of maple sugar, gathered at great personal expense from genuine Canadian maples, rendering it via a time-honored, painstaking process into that noblest of all sugars: maple syrup. Here are some pictures from our state-of-the-art maple syrup processing plant.
Unlike crude American tree-butchering methods, here in Canada maple trees give up their sap freely, with just the slightest help from taps like these shown above. The one at the right was graciously volunteered by one of the local maple trees themselves, working in cooperation with Canadian sap-gatherers.
Once custom-fitted with a tap, each tree is given a bucket into which the sap will fall. After one unit of sap is drawn, the tree will be led to a comfortable canteen where it will be fed juice, cookies, and Miracle-Gro under special Canadian Grow-Lights.
Once the sap has been gathered from a willing family of proud Canadian sugar maples, it must be boiled down into maple syrup. This time-honored, painstaking process ensures that only the best, freshest, and most Canadian maple syrup makes it to tables across the Canadian nation -- and occasionally to the States. The process takes at least three kettles, which must be stirred near-constantly over carefully monitored fires of select Canadian hardwoods.
Once syrup has been successfully created, only specially selected draft horses of the finest Canadian pedigrees are allowed to pull syrup-laden wagons to market. So strong, in fact, are the draft horses of Canada that it only takes the two shown here to pull a wagon carrying enough syrup to satisfy the needs of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal for a whole year. Let's see you do that with your silly American trucks!
Once Lorrie had had her fill of watching Canadians make one of their most prized exports, Canadian Maple Syrup, she and the Gissings walked further into the Heritage Village to observe more native Canadian craftspersons at work.
Oh, look, here's a lady at her loom!
She was only too happy to show Lorrie and Gus around her workshop. Unfortunately, she was so busy being polite to all her visitors, she didn't have the time to fix her loom, whose American-made spacer had unfortunately broken, and her skeining wheel, one of whose arms suffered from a cylinder on its end losing its traction, due to the inferiority of American-made carpenters' glue.
Gus, filled with good old Canadian know-how, and Lorrie, fortified by her breakfast of hearty Canadian Cream of Wheat, leapt to the rescue. Gus pulled out his trusty Bowie knife, which he had last used to skin a deer for his family's supper the night before while fending off a hungry pack of wolves, and set to work whittling a twig of genuine Canadian maple to replace the American-made wooden pin. Meanwhile, Lorrie snatched up a piece of carded wool, grown from genuine Canadian sheep, and wrapped it around the pin, re-attaching the part. After sharing thanks and a frosty mug of beer, our heroes snapped a couple more pictures, then ventured further into the Heritage Village.
For instance, here is some Canadian wool dyed with naturally grown Canadian herbs. The writing on the labels, unfortunately, was written by an American; that's why it's illegible. Sorry!
Meanwhile, another project, apparently some lace, is being tatted by a native-born Canadian lace tatter.
After helping out the hapless weaving woman and sharing a thick Canadian beer, our friends Gus and Lorrie wended their way around the village green...
The film breaks, flapping to white as the chipper "O Canada" soundtrack warbles to a halt. Lorrie, Your Author, strides out onto the stage:
Sorry, folks, she says, but I've really had just about enough of this. Besides, the Foundation paid me in Canadian dollars, which were only enough to fund this far. Now, where was I? Oh, yes...
After fixing the weaver's equipment (with no beer -- there was no beer at all that morning, thank you), we found that Margaret and Peter had gotten off the tourist cart (which doesn't haul any maple syrup) at the telegraph/railroad station. Gus is quite active in the SCA, and we had good conversations about the value of archaic technology as we went through the whole village. In the telegrapher's station, I snapped these:
Above and below are a couple of the telegraphs they had on display. Like most displays in the village, these were fully intended to be touched and played with -- the telegraphs were wired up and clicked when you tapped them, complete with a Morse Code cheat sheet tacked to the table between them.
There's a scene in one of the later Little House on the Prairie books (don't laugh, dammit, those are some of my favorite books), where a teenaged Laura Ingles (soon to be Wilder) is at a social with other young people in De Smet. One of them, I think it was the telegrapher's son, has them all hold hands in a horseshoe, and puts one wire in the hand of someone at one end, and the other at the other; they feel the shock and hear the sound as he clicks the telegraph key. Then, he tells them, "They heard that all the way in Saint Louis."
I was as awed at the implications of that as they were. I'm just as awed, even now, to get that far -- and my words go a helluva lot farther than De Smet to Saint Louis. It's the same feeling I got when I looked down the railroad tracks from the Berkeley Amtrak station and thought: "These go all the way to Chicago."
And now look where I am.
Anyway, back at the Heritage Village, there was also a neato old telephone:
On the wall behind it, too small to see at this resolution, are a crazy hashwork of names, phone numbers, and other notes, scribbled right onto the panelling in pencil. One of the reasons that they don't repaint in here is because the phone, when it was in service, belonged to... damn, I forget, but she kept track of all the phone numbers she called. People would still come by there, peer at the wall, and find their grandmother's phone number. If Laura Ingles Wilder's telegraph awed me in terms of distance, this awed me in terms of time, far more than people dandied up in period costume might (I admit, I'm somewhat inured to period dress anymore). Of course, time and distance are the same thing, so it's the same awe, right?
The children were hungry, so we started wandering toward the exit. I couldn't help but open one of the sap-drawing buckets (aside from the one in the picture, most had simple lids to keep litter from dropping into them) and taste the contents.
It was only slightly sweet. I appreciated the concentration of syrup all the more for it.
We passed through a couple reconstructed stores on the way out, but there was a turnoff in the path we hadn't taken coming in, leading to the blacksmith's shop -- we managed to hold the kids at bay long enough to wander over that way, as Gus counts blacksmithing among his many charms, and likes to see how other smiths and shops are put together. Now, you SCAdians will find the next bit boring, but my audience is wider than you just now, so pray pardon me a moment while we have a little Show and Tell.
Here, the blacksmith is pumping at what I'm told is a double bellows. More air fed to the coal fire in the forge makes it hot enough to hammer.
That cheerful glow happens at two thousand to twenty-five hundred degrees. It's now malleable and ready to hammer out on the anvil. This is what we mean by "Strike while the iron is hot."
This is that same bit of iron, cooled a bit and curved into a hook. The smith inserted the point into that square hole you see in the anvil and banged on it to make the hook -- a similar process will straighten it out, as he's about to do here. There were all manner of little iron doodles hanging in the shop and for sale in the gift shop, of course.
Okay, all you bored SCA people can come back now.
After the obligatory stroll through the gift shop, we piled back into Gus's van (he doesn't even own dog, let along a dogsled), and drove back to Kitchener. We dropped the wee ones off and headed out to lunch at a local Hungarian restaurant that specialized in schnitzel: a boneless pork shop pounded thin, then breaded and fried and topped with various things. Prices appeared to be comparable to lunch in California... until I realised those were all in Canadian dollars, and so were really about one-third less than they appeared. I ensured my Visa card would work in these unfamiliar climes, and we sped off to other errands.
Gus wants to start a rune class under the auspices of the local New Age shop. I gave him pointers to several of the California crew with experience in same, and we visited the shop, billed as the only occultish shop between London and Toronto (so within a sixty-mile radius). It was very relaxing and unassuming, although rather to the fluffy for my tastes, with little shelf space devoted to pagan or heathen topics. Gus knew the proprietor, and he let her know he wanted to run a class, and we both offered opinions on the rune book selection, because there it was right on the shelf, Blum's Book of Runes.
If we ever drew up a Tenth Noble Virtue, Blum-Snubbing would be a strong contender for the title. Besides, she had other, better volumes, and Gus said nice things about them.
The next stop on my Tour of Gus's World was a park he knew well, but before we went in, I thought it prudent to have some water and stock up on drugs, so we had a tour through a Canadian drugstore. Canadian drug laws are a bit different from those in the US, and a couple allergy drugs, only available in the States by prescription, would be nestled right next to the Sudafed, a concept I found fascinating. Some muscle relaxants are available, billed for back and ache relief, too. What's more, you can even get aspirin-caffeine-codeine tablets, called 2-2-2's, but for those you have to ask the pharmacist and there's a limit to how many you can buy at one time.
This all, of course, being part of Gus's Reasons Why You Should All Move to Canada. I hated to tell him it'd only happen when he put Greyhaven on jacks and rolled it down the highway...
After our explorations into Canada's position on opiates, Gus drove us into Bechtel Park, a place outdoors he knows well. Our feet crunched and slid through the snow on the trail, marked already by countless boot tracks, dog paws, and more than one pair of cross-country skis.
A creek, runoff from the nearby water treatment plant, neatly bisects the park, which is primarily maple, although a few beech trees cluster in small groves. Their leaves do not fall when they lose their green, giving them fair frocks of pale blonde throughout the winter. Sometimes, they giggle and call to you when you walk by...
Those of my readers with a disinterest in woowoo and non-corporeal beings can skip the next couple paragraphs.
The train wound through a gate, and up a small rise, where a spring fed a marsh. I could see the cattails standing tall, their seedheads mostly intact upon the dried stalks. This was a great place to Gus, where he had pledged himself to the service of the Northern gods, in the presence of the lady that dwelled in this spring, who had dark hair...
Happily, I was in a frame of mind to see what he was talking about. I'm not like some of my other friends, who can blithely sit in a recliner and give a thorough reckoning of all spirits in a ten-mile radius. I peered, although it wasn't the eyes behind my thick glasses I was necessarily seeing with. "With pale skin? Fondness for silver? She's wearing white now, because there's snow on the ground..."
Gus nodded, "Well, you know, the clothes change with the season... in spring and summer, she's in green."
I smiled, and repeated, "She's in white now, because of the snow."
He nodded happily.
Now, perhaps that was a set of no-brainers, which is something I'm always wary of, but it at least jibed with what Gus hadn't told me about her, so that gave us both those corroboration-of-evidence warm fuzzies that you don't always get in the magical sensing game. Besides, like Patricia and I had agreed on her couch a couple days ago (good heavens, only a couple days?), and like a one-eyed wise-cracking kernel hacker pointed out a few months ago, I, and she, and he, are at all at our base agnostics: I can believe all I want (and I do believe), but I don't know for sure, and -- here's the key of agnosticism as opposed to just being undecided -- I know I can't know. There's a little wiggle of 'maybe' between the yes and the no... or the zero and the one, if you prefer. The gods and magic and I all dwell there.
I came to peace with this long ago; there's no shame in it, and it keeps my bullshit meter functioning. I live in mystery, and it holds me up.
Gus gave the lady of the spring some coins by way of offering, and offered a choice of ways back to the car. I peered up the hill.
"Wouldn't it be faster just to charge up the hill? I seem to recall the parking lot's at the top."
He blinked, "Well, yeah, but you don't have on proper boots, and I didn't want your feet to get wet and cold.
Well, he had a point, but hell, we weren't going to be doing much more outside today, so what the hell. I shrugged, grinned roguishly, and charged, hoping that I wouldn't suddenly be floundering in three feet of the stuff. Gus came along behind.
About halfway up the hill, I deliberately fell to my knees, then to my face, just to have that fleeting snowy fun moment. Grownups aren't supposed to have these; we're supposed to be too dignified. However, I've always maintained everyone needs a good, swift kick in the complacency from time to time, and I've never excepted myself from that, so flump I went.
On considered reflection, and drawing upon the fullness of his naturalized Canadian reserve, Gus fell on his back likewise.
We laughed at the moment, the snow, each other, and the grey sky. Gus had declared that this was more his place than almost any other, so I rose to my knees, scribbled a gebo (for Gus) and an othala into a bindrune in the snow, laughed at my cleverness and pretention simultaneously, and ran the rest of the way up the hill and to the van.
Evening was drawing near, and the folks back home would want dinner. Once upon a time, an artist decided that dough was a better way to make bread than whatever he had been doing, but he saw no reason to discard his previous outlook and sensibilities. He founded the City Bakery of Kitchener, and has been making bread with his dough ever since -- and, not content with pugliese and tarts, he has pizzas made, too. This is where we'd pick up dinner.
This is on the front door of the bakery, as well as a couple other times on the side windows, and should give you a feel for the ambience.
Here's what's inside, if a little blurred. Note, please, that the one price you can see, for sandwiches, is four dollars, a whole dollar amount, which will be important in a moment. Most of the rest of the prices on the menus are likewise. The pizzas are denoted by card suits on the big chalkboard: there are four kinds served a day, one for each suit.
This is the cash register at the City Bakery. There was exactly one employee in the store when we were there, and she was very busy baking more bread. Most things on the board are in whole-dollar increments, making this part easier. Doing it like this, though, lends a sort of negotiability to the whole pricing structure. She did offer to make change, although I'm not sure how that would be done, exactly. The glass part of the box is usually filled with colorful Canadian bills, but I had just shoved it all into the iron part with a stick kept conveniently nearby, just as it was when this box was installed in a real bus. Really, the ambience of this place is unique unto itself, and you should all visit Gus and sample it for yourselves.
We took the pizza home and ate it, of course, shuffling laundry all the while. Gus preferred to hang his laundry on the line, so I let him do that with mine, although I was nervous that it wouldn't be dry by bedtime. Then, he pulled out his boat plans.
Gus has been planning on building a Viking longboat for the longest time, but circumstances have been conspiring against him. He actually has plans, though, and he let me see them, take pictures, and share them with you so we can all dream about the same longboat. He threw a few runes on them, too, to both divine something about the boat and make the photos more interesting, but I can't remember what they were.
The clothes were not yet dry when it was time for bed, with a projected wake-up call of five forty-five the next morning, to make a train pulling through at six forty-four. We resolved just to pack them tomorrow, and went to bed.
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