Item From the Past: The Butchart Gardens

There's a lot to be said for traveling without a camera. Or at least not bothering to unpack the thing. I used to go places and not take pictures most of the time -- pretty much everywhere I went during the '80s.

For instance, I made no pictures of the Butchart Gardens, an extraordinary spot in Victoria, BC, during my June 1985 visit. The only image I have is the guide booklet above. But I remember the colorful evening light show the gardens puts on. After wandering around the fine floral displays in late afternoon, I waited in my rental car, reading, for dusk to come so I could see the variable colors sparkling among the plants, generated by strings of lights and well-positioned flood lights.

Quite a sight. I'm glad I wasn't fumbling with a camera at that moment.

Item From the Past: Mt. Fuji & T-Shirt

This is about as close as I ever got to Mt. Fuji, during a short visit to the area around the spring equinox in 1993. The remarkable thing was that the peak was actually visible, rather than obscured by clouds.

A short while before, a graphic artist friend of mine created a t-shirt to commemorate her wedding, and she sent one to me (note the cartoon characters holding hands). I told her in a fit of exuberance that I would have pictures made featuring the shirt in famous places, and send her copies. This was one of the first such pictures, if not the first, and I made a few others, but eventually the notion fell by the wayside.

A decade later, I received a Route of Seeing cap from Ed, and not-quite-seriously had the idea to do the same as with it as with the wedding t-shirt. Except now, in the age of digital photos and e-mail, it would be much easier to send him the images. During our trip in '05, whose ultima was Yellowstone NP, I managed to take a few pics featuring the cap.

The next year, I took it to Canada and documented its visit with a few more pictures. The cap seemed to have a penchant for continental divides.

And then I lost the cap.

Item From the Past: Canadian Waters

In July 2006, after visiting Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks, in Banff National Park in Alberta, I bought a postcard that depicted the famed vista below (which is my own photo, not the postcard's image) and sent it to my old friend Ed, who's well acquainted with the Canadian Rockies. On the card I wrote only: "Oh My God!"

Next is an image of the Columbia Icefield, on the border of Banff NP and Jasper NP. This vantage looks like we might have taken ice axes in hand and adventured our way up the icefield to reach this point, but of course we didn't. There's a bus that goes on to the icefield, and specific places you can wander around it without much risk.

Some miles to the north in Jasper NP is Athabasca Falls. It isn't known for its height, which is about 80 feet. But it's got power. All of the Athabasca River rushes to the precipice and drops over. The river's in a hurry to reach the Arctic Ocean.

Item From the Past: Montreal Movie Marquee 2002

May 27. The day was devoted largely to the Olympic Park (or Parc Olympique, as Baron de Coubertin might call it), which has a number of worthwhile attractions. The complex was built for the ’76 Games in a monumental concrete style common in the ’60s and ’70s. Perhaps at the time it was the look of the future, but now — in the actual future — it just looks like old concrete. Still, the vast Centre Aquatique, its pools now open to the public, was fun.

In the vicinity of the park is the StarCité Montréal, a multiplex. Not sure if there was any Canadian content among the featured attractions (does there have to be?). Star Wars II: L'Attaque Des Clones was prominently advertised. We felt zero urge to see any movies, even one that might benefit from dubbing in a language we don't understand.

[I checked the StarCité Montréal's web site today, May 23, 2010, and found that at least Le journal d'Aurélie Laflamme (which seems to be a Québécois movie) is playing, along with Millenium 3: La reine dans le palais des courants d'airs or The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, which is Danish. Also playing today: Alice au pays des merveilles; Dragons; Iron Man 2; Le plan B (would the L'Académie française approve of that title? Do the Québécoise care?); Les griffes de la nuit (Nightmare on Elm Street); Lettres à Juliette; Océans; Petite vengeance poilue (which stars Brendan Fraser, who is technically Canadian); Robin des bois and Shrek 4 Il était une fin.]

We also visited the nearby Biodôme, a kind of indoor botanic garden and zoo featuring all manner of leafy plants and small animals in distinct habitats. Among other creatures, it had a remarkable array of little poison frogs, exactly as colorful as on brochures for ecotours. The Olympic Park is also home to a famous inclined tower overlooking the Olympic Stadium — now as emblematic of Montreal as the Tower of the Americas is to San Antonio or the Space Needle to Seattle. The thing to do there is ride a funicular to the top and see greater Montreal. And so we did.

True North

Just as well that the Canadians won men's hockey at the end of the Olympics. Hockey's their game, they can have it.

Otherwise, there might have been war -- or at least motorboat raids across Lake Erie, skirmishing along the Manitoba-North Dakota line, or maybe a little cross-border shelling of Bellingham, Wash. Feelings seemed to have been running pretty high in Canada about that game. Nations have fought over less, such as El Salvador and Honduras (1969) or Freedonia and Sylvania (1933).

The Canadians in the U.S. would make a hell of a fifth column, too, with about a million of them in our midst. The subject -- Canadians in the United States, not fifth columnists -- came up while Neil Young was singing at the closing ceremonies. Yuriko said she thought he was a strange choice.

"Well, he is Canadian," I said. That was a surprise. She'd thought he was from California. Maybe he's lived in California for 40 years, I answered, but he's still considered Canadian. Not only that, he's the son of a Canadian sports journalist who wrote a lot about hockey.

Neil Young's voice has held up pretty well, I'd say. But where was famed Canadian William Shatner, he of golden throat? He could have done a number for the closing ceremonies, too.

Wildfruit Bugs, Chicken Bones & NB Power

Except for preventing scurvy, Wildfruit Bugs are nutritionally worthless, like most other fruit snacks. Take sugar, add corn syrup and corn starch, and a dash of fruit juice and other flavors; then glaze with mineral oil and carnauba wax; and color it up with various dyes, my favorite of which is Tartrazine Yellow 5 (Wiki asserts that Inca Cola wouldn't be yellow without it; now where can I get some Inca Cola?).

Nutrition isn't why we bought the box. Lilly wanted it because she's partial to fruit snakes from time to time; I wanted it because it's a third-string brand make by a company I'd never heard of, Ganong Bros. Ltd. of St. Stephen, New Brunswick. That and because of the demented cartoon bug on the box.

Maybe I should have known about Ganong, a confectioner of some renown in Canada, it seems. Or at least in the Maritimes. Or maybe just in New Brunswick. I know and admire confections from a lot further away than that -- Yorkie, Ritter Sport, Toblerone, Lotte -- so there's no reason I shouldn't have heard of something with a fun name like Ganong Chicken Bones, one of the company's products. It might sound like something you'd see on a dim sum cart, but it's actually a candy formed by a pink cinnamon shell over chocolate, and apparently beloved in Canada, or the Maritimes, or at least New Brunswick, especially around Christmas.

I suppose if we'd stayed longer in New England, we would have visited New Brunswick by now, but as it is, NB and the rest of the Maritimes are a stretch of a destination from the Midwest. But if we ever get it in our heads to see the Bay of Fundy, we'll have to drop by the old Ganong factory en route.

Lately Ganong has been in the news for something other than its candies. Something about the chairman of the company participating in a formal report to recommend the sale of NB Power of Hydro-Québec, and how that's drawn the ire of some New Brunswickians -- Brunswickers? Brunswickis? I'm in no position to comment on the merits of that transaction, but it strikes me as an odd kerfuffle for a candy company executive to find himself in.

Ilanaaq

I didn't look into it until today, but I did recognize the logo of the Winter Games as soon as I saw it. That's because of a curio I bought at the airport in Toronto a couple of years ago:

Among a selection of key chains, coffee mugs and t-shirts, this bit of glass sculpture stood out. Made, the label took pains to assure buyers, by a genuine First Nation artisan, not a chap who speaks Cantonese. It's supposed to be reminiscent of the cairns (inukshuk) built by the First Nations of the Arctic, or at least one kind of the cairns, the man-like variety.

The Games logo, known as Ilanaaq, is likewise supposed to evoke the cairns, though the one built in Whistler is a good bit larger than my two-inch curio. Naturally, not everyone is happy with the design, since there's no pleasing everyone. I'm curious why the logo wasn't more British Columbia-specific, though I'm not sure what that would be.

The cartoon mascots of the Winter Games -- based on native mythology and called Miga, Quatchi, Sumi and Mukmuk -- are more forgettable than Ilanaaq, and about as pre-school as Olympic mascots usually are, but at least they're supposed to be British Columbian (I think). Still, something's missing from this group of mascots. A cross-dressing lumberjack, maybe?

Up Vancouver Way

What, no flying acrobats or 2,010 Dancing Mounties in the opening ceremony of the Winter Games? Lilly said she was a little disappointed with Friday's ceremonies, compared with the big-do that Beijing put on. I pointed out that dictatorships are fond of mass spectacle. I'm not sure what she made of my geopolitical soapboxing, but she's young yet, and hasn't seen the likes of this or this.

I skipped most of the opening ceremonies myself, but did sit down with the rest of the family to watch the parade of nations, which always gives me a chance to field geographic questions from the girls. Every other answer to their questions this time around seemed to be, "It was a part of the former Soviet Union."

Lilly had heard about Jamaica being in the Winter Games, and we paid special attention as its team paraded by. No bobsledding this time around, it seems. But the island nation did send a fellow named Errol Kerr to do some freestyle skiing. I hope he does well. That might encourage more people (at least more Jamaicans) to name their baby boys "Errol."

I'm not planning to watch all that much of the Games this year, but I might take the time to learn the difference between luge and skeleton. It was hard to miss coverage of luge, considering what happened to Nodar Kumaritashvili. Skeleton gets less attention, but seems just as insanely dangerous.

"The Loyalist"

Here's something unusual: a song about a loyalist in the American Revolution. Or to be more exact, it seems to be about the ghost of a loyalist musing on generations of his descendants who lived in the place that he and his family fled to. The place is described in the song as "Shelburne Bay," which I take to mean Shelburne, Nova Scotia, which is known as a settling place of loyalists in Canada.

The singer is Dave Nachmanoff, with some backup by Al Stewart, whom I've written about before (beginning here). Nachmanoff is clearly a fine musician in his own right, but he's also a protégé of Stewart's, and tours with him. His singing style and song content, at least in this case, owe a great deal to Stewart.

Back in May, Lilly and I went out to the Woodstock Opera House to see Al Stewart, and Dave Nachmanoff was playing with him. "The Loyalist" was not on the playlist, but there were plenty of other songs about people and times no one else writes songs about, such as Hanno the Navigator, Joseph Stalin and aviatrix Amy Johnson. So I enjoyed it. Lilly wasn't quite as entertained, probably, but she humored her old man.

From May to June: Items from the Past

The May-June junction came on a weekend this year, and both days were pleasantly clear and warm (unlike the bizarre chill of last Tuesday). It was also a pleasant weekend in other ways, mostly in the company of my family, at home or within a few miles of it. But some years have found me further away. I never thought about it before, but they all involved heavy rain:

June 1, 1983.

We woke fairly earlier and assembled in the common area for a breakfast of egg, ham, toast, canned spaghetti and tea. I sat next to an old German and a young one, and near the English schoolboys, but the Australian was missing. Soon I headed into town and spent the rest of the day by myself, wandering around Cambridge.

Early in the day, I visited a sizable bookstore, then King’s College Chapel and its magnificent ceilings & intricate stonework & stained glass. It was partly cloudy and cool, so I walked a long way along the banks of the River Cam, eying the famous flatboats on the river and the ducks on the shore, which seemed to be everywhere, feeding on a harvest of earthworms that washed up in last night’s tremendous thunderstorm.

June 1, 1994.

Yesterday we were supposed to leave early from Bangkok, but Olivi Travel made a mistake, booking us to leave for Ko Samet this morning. We pointed this out, and they arranged for us to take a bus leaving in mid-morning. Along the highway SE of Bangkok there seemed to be an endless variety of warehouse space, but then we turned onto a smaller road, passing agricultural land, but also a surprising amount of unused land – bumpy green hilly tracts.

So today we are on Ko Samet, a smallish island in the Gulf of Thailand, not to be confused with Ko Samui, which I’ve read sports a much larger tourist infrastructure. Our bungalow is partway up a hill from the beach, a little wooden shack, really, but the bed is fairly comfortable and has its own mosquito net, an essential item in these parts. Last night a large storm blew through, rattling the walls, tapping heavily on the roof and whooshing the trees around the shack in various directions.

At the moment, I’m sitting under the trees at the shore of Ao Phai, one of the island’s beaches. The sand is very fine and very white. Yuriko is bobbing up and down out in the surf. There’s a wind from the sea strong enough to cool me & drive away most of the biting insects while I read short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

May 31, 2002

Our last full day in Montreal was punctuated by thunderstorms. We sought shelter in various places around the Quartier Latin that morning, including Café Croissant de Lune on Rue St. Denis, for a fine breakfast, and various parts of the University of Montreal.

By afternoon, we went to St. Joseph’s Oratory, which includes a large basilica and some other religious buildings set on a hill some miles from Old Montreal. Its founder, one Brother Andre, was reputed to be a healer, a circumstance attested by piles of crutches near his tomb. The view of Montreal from the steps of the basilica was grand, but the interior (completed in 1960) was not — it was austere enough to pass for some kind of Protestant church. My favorite part of the complex was a small museum devoted to nativity scenes, displaying scores of them from dozens of countries, made from an amazing variety of materials, including a chocolate one.

This Way to the Labyrinth

A fine Memorial Day to all, or at least everyone for whom it's a day off. For everyone else, have a tolerable Monday. Back on Tuesday.

Here's how to joke about death. Years ago, I remember Johnny Carson mentioning in his monologue that, statistically speaking, there were going to be x-hundred traffic fatalities nationwide over the upcoming holiday weekend. He asked Doc Severinsen or Tommy Newsom whether he knew that, and they bantered a little, and then Johnny turned to the camera and said, "Goodbye."

Today was Ann's last day of preschool. Come September, she'll be on that long toboggan ride known as K-12. I picked her up, and felt a small twinge of melancholy. For me, because when this child is grown, I'll be old. For her, because you can't be six on Sugar Mountain. Well, maybe seven. It passed quickly, this twinge. The kid needs to grow up over the normal span of a couple of decades; the world needs grownups.

A few more Canada notes. Squeezed in between a mall called Toronto Eaton Centre and a hotel -- the one I stayed in -- is the Church of the Holy Trinity, part of the Anglican Church of Canada and a fine Gothic structure. It was there long before the mall or hotel, of course, and most of downtown Toronto for that matter, dating from 1847. I saw this plaque. The other photo featured at that link is of the front entrance. Off to the right and behind the entrance is the mall, and also -- in its own little space -- the church's labyrinth. A sign I saw elsewhere said, This Way to the Labyrinth.

Inside the church sported hard pews ready for kneeling (no folding kneelers), some excellent stained glass, various social activism banners ("Compassion for Cameroon") and a couple of bums -- homeless men, I mean -- parked on benches at the side of the building. The outdoor labyrinth was interesting, but looked better from about 20 stories up.

I attended a meeting in a nearby skyscraper, and was able to take a picture of the old city hall (until the mid-60s) from about 20 stories up:

And the new city hall. Newer than the old one, anyway. Compare and contrast:

Transit to and from Toronto was amazingly smooth. No delays either way, not much in the way of rough air, and customs was fairly straightforward on either end. Canada didn't stamp my passport, though. I like passport stamps.

The Air Canada flight to Toronto was on an Air Canada Embraer 135, small but not the smallest regional jet I've been on. While waiting at the gate in Chicago, I actually witnessed my bag go into the plane. A first.

Approaching Chicago on the return flight, I saw the arc of the North Shore, all the way from the Bahai Temple in Wilmette to the familiar shapes of downtown, and then we headed west over other familiar territory – such as Ned Brown Forest Preserve, an enormous track of undeveloped land roughly east of where I live. The plane then went further west, turned, and headed east in such a way that I could see Lilly’s elementary school. The sight of it guided my gaze to a fuzzy spot nearby: my house. I’d never seen it from the air before.

Wild Boar Bacon & Hudson Bay Pickerel

The Everest Cafe might have been mediocre (see yesterday), but when I ate with other members of the tour, at places picked by people who know more than I do about Toronto, the meals were much better. So much better than I didn't feel like taking notes, which dampens the urge to write in detail later. At Chiado on West College St., I ate fish caught off the coast of Portugal, drank Portuguese wine and noticed that even the sugar packets on the table were imported from Portugal. The art on the walls, I was told, borrowed themes from the old country. Even the name was a Portuguese detail: Chiado is a square in Lisbon. The restaurant of the same name in Toronto is in a Portuguese neighborhood.

I haven't spent nearly enough time in Portugal. None, in fact, unless you count Macao under nominal Portuguese administration. None of the places I've lived have large diaspora populations, either, so my exposure to Portuguese cuisine is fairly limited -- a couple of places in Massachusetts, and that pigeon I ate in Macao. So it was good to go to Canada to experience something Portuguese. Chiado is as excellent as its web site would have you believe.

The next night, all of us ate at Perigee, a place tucked away at The Distillery. And I mean tucked away: the signage might be deliberately meager as part of the restaurant's cachet. Read about it here in more detail than I can muster, but I agree with the reviewer that it's a jim-dandy place. Shoot, it even has a name chef, even though this is his first big gig.

I picked my meal based on how unusual the description sounded. Langoustine as the appetizer: "Seared langoustine topped with wild boar bacon over roasted blue foot chanterelle mushrooms with butter poached asparagus, rhubarb purée and tatsoi greens tossed with preserved Meyer lemon." It had me at wild boar bacon, and my only complaint is that there was only one slice of it.

For the entree, Hudson Bay pickerel: "Roast fillet of pickerel with a salad of Dungeness crab and celery spaghetti over an artichoke purée in a crab bisque." Pickerel isn't something I see much, or ever, on menus, though I understand it isn't a rare fish in certain North American waters. In terms of taste, persentation, etc., it was a fine choice. What got me, though, was its Hudson Bay origin. Remote, enormous, essential to giving Canada -- and North America, for that matter -- its distinctive two-lobe shape.

Not the Roof of the World

On the menu at a place called Everest Cafe on West Queen St. in Toronto, there's a dish called the "Free Tibet Platter," described as Tibetan momos (dumplings) surrounded by chow mien. I didn't order that, but I did have a thing called phing sha (or maybe phing sho or shu, since my notes on it are a little garbled).

I went in hoping for a Tibetan food experience along the lines of Tsampa in New York City (see Oct. 7 & 8, 2004, BTST the Original Blog), but no such luck. The place wasn't bad, but it was terrifically good either. For one thing, the decor was sleek and dark, more like a shot bar in Roppongi than an outpost of Tibet. There were no distinctive Tibetan art or figurines or prayer wheels, and not a single picture of the Dalai Lama, though there might have been one around the corner that I didn't see. In fairness, I don't think the place was supposed to be Tibetan, since only part of its menu was. But still, a nod or two to the Roof of the World would have been nice.

Phing sha is sliced beef or chicken, sauteed with beanthread noodles, sliced potatoes, green peas and moru (muru?) (dried mushrooms), flavored with ginger and emma -- which I understand is a peppercorn-like spice -- and served with basmati rice. Sounded good, from that description, but the noodles were soggy, putting a damper on the rest of the dish. Not bad, as I said, but not worth walking around Toronto to find.

"That was the most politically correct kind of food you could have eaten," joked one of the other people on the tour, when I told him about the place later. Whatever that means. I'm all for a free Tibet, myself. Anything to annoy the tyrants of Beijing. But I also wonder at the selectivity of causes célèbres. I don't know that I've ever seen any "Free Western Sahara" bumper stickers.

On a different note, I didn't know Will Elder, but I will note his passing here. I've known his son Martin for some time. At one time, Martin was the managing editor (in New York) of a magazine I was editor of (in Chicago -- such are the possibilities of e-mail and phone connections). I did know that Martin was the son of the cartoonist back when we were working together, because one time he mentioned that his dad had created "Little Annie Fanny." I wasn't a big fan of that strip, but I knew about it. Until I read some of his obituaries this week, I knew a lot less about the elder Elder's involvement in the early days of Mad magazine, which is detailed in this NYT obit. RIP, Mr. Elder.

The Tallest Thing in Toronto, Anyway

Unlike my walkabout in parts of Toronto this time around, the first time -- July 2, 1991 -- I actually took a camera along. On that day, I made it to one of the city's top tourist destinations, of course:

At about 1,815 feet, the CN Tower is frequently billed as the tallest something-or-other in the world, though since it doesn't feature habitable floors all the way up, it isn't a building along the lines of the Sears Tower or Taipei 101. Still, it's a fine structure and has a remarkable knack for being in the skyline from a lot of different angles. As I walked around town last week, and later rode our small green tech tour bus, I kept seeing the thing, regardless of where I found myself. There it is again.

I passed on the opportunity to ride up to the top again. It's a fine view, but twice isn't necessary. Also, I read that merely going up and looking around costs C$21.99. I don't remember what I paid in 1991, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't remotely that much, even adjusted for inflation. Just another case of a tourist attraction unconscionably jacking up its prices.

I revisited Chinatown, where I had lunch that summer day in the early '90s. I think this pic is on Spadina Ave., one of the main drags through the neighborhood.

I didn't note the Pearl Theatre this around, but wasn't looking for it anyway. The brown area at the left edge of the photo is a telephone pole covered with staples and torn bits of old posters. Finally, I have to wonder: what's that guy walking toward the camera up to now?

The Largest Distillery in the British Empire?

What do you do with the following description: "The largest distillery in the British Empire"? I don't know about other people, but I turn it over in mind. It's an historical description, of course, since everyone except Lyndon LaRouche knows that the British Empire is a thing of the past. Still, distilling more whiskey and spirits than anybody else in that 19th-century world-spanning polity, the one-fifth of the globe that was pink, would have been a fairly impressive activity, if that's what the phrase means. I heard it used more than once to describe The Distillery district in downtown Toronto, a pedestrian-only mainly retail redevelopment of a massive former distillery.

Is it accurate? I didn't hear how being the largest was measured, but I did find out that by 1871, the Gooderham & Worts Distillery, which is what the establishment used to be called -- at other times it was Worts & Gooderham, apparently -- was producing 2.1 million gallons annually, and throughout the decade of the 1870s exported a million gallons a year to other parts of the Empire and the world. High Victorians, indeed.

Or maybe "largest" was measured in physical size. The site has 44 buildings totaling over 300,000 square feet on 13 acres. We arrived for a look at the complex late in the afternoon last Wednesday, just in time for a serious rainstorm, which added a touch of noir atmosphere to the brick streets and looming brick structures. But from under an umbrella, it was a little hard to appreciate their style, which I've read is called industrial Gothic. Impressively solid, I'd say. Something important was made here, the otherwise mute bricks say: Whiskey to get through those long Canadian winters, and to put Canada on the map among the whiskey-drinking nations of the Empire.

Either there's a serious monograph out there somewhere that quantifies how Gooderham & Worts was the "largest distillery in the British Empire," or that's the claim of a Victorian copywriter handed down through the decades unquestioned. Either way, Google the phrase in our time, and you'll see that it's still repeated often.

No whiskey has been made at the Distillery since 1990, but between then and the time it became a retail property in the mid 2000s, a number of movies were made there, more than 800. Famously (infamously, in Chicago), Chicago was filmed in Toronto, at the former Gooderham & Worts Distillery.

These days, no chain stores are allowed to lease space at the Distillery, so we visited some one-of-a-kinds, such as a clothing store named after Galileo and a coffee shop named after Balzac. I didn't quite understand the reasoning behind the choice of Galileo, but I do remember that Balzac's coffee-drinking marathons are part of literary lore.

Much, much more about the history and architecture of the place is here.

The Brick Works, Then and Now

Amanda Castleman's short article, quoting me, has been published (See April 13). For now, it's the first article of five at this MSN site. Fortunately, there's an option to turn off the chatter that introduces the site.

Someday soon, Toronto's former Don Valley Brick Works, which includes 15 husks of old factory buildings on about 250,000 square feet of land, will be a redevelopment site sporting various cultural uses, with an emphasis on environmental activities and education. But for now it's a collection of spooky derelict structures, though I was told they've been stabilized. Presumably that meant things wouldn't fall on us as we toured the structures last week, and nothing did. But the floors were dusty and punctuated with irregular holes and outcroppings of former rail lines, and there was always the risk of tripping over pieces of bricks, bits of metal, trash or unrecognizable industrial debris.

Step inside and it's like one of the places where Alex and his droogs took unfortunates for a little ultraviolence, or maybe where Clarence and Robocop had it out in the first movie of that series. According to our guide, however, the former brick works has mostly been overlooked as a movie set, even as Toronto became a location of choice for directors looking to dodge high costs in California.

Musty and dark, even in the middle of the day, the largest of the buildings is very large indeed, and includes a several enormous kilns. I expected the kilns to be big and squat, but they were as long as a football field and only a few feet wide. In its heyday in the early 20th century, the Don Valley Brick Works made 100,000 bricks a day or so, most passing through one of the long kilns. I couldn't do any of these kilns justice with photography, but I did get a few shots of the graffiti that was most everywhere. Some of them were more artful than others, if you can use that term.

According to our guide, the old factory is sometimes still used to hold raves. None of us were really young enough to fully appreciate that -- I know I don't really know what one involves -- but the old brick factory does look like a place, there only about 10 minutes' drive from the Apollonian downtown Toronto, to get your Dionysus on.

Toronto II, or Canada V

I’m happy to report that in the roughly 17 years since I was last in Toronto, the city hasn’t gone missing. I flew there on Tuesday last week and returned on Thursday. Someone more familiar with the city probably would be able to compare the differences between then and now in detail, because there must be some.

Not me. Large downtown with a variety of interesting buildings? Check. Busy streets? Still busy. A multiethnic population, including an extensive Chinatown that reminds me of Hong Kong? Got it.

I was a guest of the province of Ontario – thanks, Ontario! – on a “green technology” press tour. But actually it could have been the “really cool industrial sites, past and present” press tour, because among other things we saw an abandoned brick works, a fully redeveloped Victorian distillery, a plant that recycles solvents, a spanking-new green-tech water treatment plant, and some of the upper levels of a geothermal well field east of Toronto proper, among other places.

Those aren’t ordinary sorts of tourist destinations, except for the redeveloped distillery, since it’s mostly retail now. Looking for real off-the-beaten-path places? Nothing like standing among a forest of enormous color-coded water pipes or taking in the sight of hundreds of industrial-solvent waste barrels to satisfy that urge.

I did have a little time to myself, and managed to take a walkabout through non-industrial parts of Toronto, visiting West Queen Street and re-visiting Chinatown. A fine meal was had in the Portuguese part of town, and I was able to sit for a few quiet moments in an old Anglican church and examine its nearby labyrinth. And of course I ate some doughnuts at Tim Horton’s. But I didn’t have nearly enough time in the city, just like 17 years ago. With any luck, I'll make it back before 2025.

The Big Wink

The arrival of the mail is important to me these days, since I’m paid by checks that arrive that way. Usually the mailman shows up late in the morning, but occasionally – often after a holiday – he’s a little later. That’s what I thought today, until about dark. But mail delivery is never that late.

Then I realized that the federal day of mourning probably also extended to the USPS, meaning that it would make no deliveries. I checked, and sure enough it was a postal day off, a curious way to honor the recently deceased Gerald Ford, but there you have it.

When Lyndon Johnson died in January 1973, we schoolkids of Texas got a day off for the funeral, one that didn’t have to be made up at the end of the year. I believe that was by act of the Texas legislature. I don’t remember doing anything Johnson-related that day. And I don’t know if the mail stopped.

I heard a bit of the eulogies for Ford on the radio, especially the one by the elder Bush. Remarkably, at one point that he actually mentioned Chevy Chase by name, to illustrate Mr. Ford’s sense of humor about that sort of thing, and perhaps in unspoken contrast to his predecessor, who wasn’t known for his sense of humor.

There was no speaking ill of the dead during these eulogies, but even before he died, not many people I knew spoke ill of Ford. Except, that is, for a Canadian I met at a gaijin party in Japan in the early ’90s. I expect it’s actually a fairly small number of people, but there is a brand of Canadian for whom every problem in the world is the fault of the US government.

He was one such. I remember little about him except he went on a rant about Gerald Ford and how he was really much more evil than people realized, especially Americans, forever the dupes. The evidence he cited was a diplomatic incident I later saw referred to as the Big Wink. Specifically, that term refers to US complicity in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975, not long after the Portuguese had bugged out. It was also right after a visit with Suharto by Ford and Henry Kissinger, who let it be known that the US wouldn’t make a fuss about Jakarta’s expansionism.

Despite that incident, the Canadian didn’t convince me on the point of Ford’s essential perfidy. I’m inclined to put the Big Wink on Kissinger; it sounds like a bit of his realpolitik to me. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. President. It will make the Indonesians very happy at no cost to the United States. No one in America knows East Timor from East Jesus, so no one will care.”

Meanwhile, Back at the Bunkhouse

Wasted a little time today looking at who’s reading BTST Vol. 2, and I was glad to see someone from Taiwan had spend a fair amount of time reading my entries on Banff and Jasper. He or she had apparently done a search of blogs for those two terms, and was directed to me. Maybe it was a matter of trip planning, so there’s a Taiwanese tourist out in Jasper right now buying a pastry at the Bear Claw bakery on the strength of my recommendation. Hope so.

Meanwhile, back at the bunkhouse, I make phone calls, do interviews, write articles, read other people’s articles, send and receive e-mail. A 21st-century-type desk job, including a lot of spam, of course, like everyone else who has a computer. I’m sorry to see that spam subject lines are now often snippets of real news stories, instead of dada strings of words. Most days I prefer dada to news. Can’t wait to dump my current e-mail address and see how long it takes for the barnacles of spam to attach themselves to the new one.

“Meanwhile, back at the bunkhouse,” was a catchphrase among my friends in high school in the spring of 1976. For some reason, it made us laugh. I can’t remotely remember why after 30 years. Haven’t thought about it in years, and then today I did, like you might find a shell or rock or some other souvenir that you only vaguely remember collecting. Still, you know it’s yours, and it reminds you of another time and place.

David Thompson, Canadian

One more thing about Canada, though not about my trip. If possible I like to pick up a book of local interest when I go somewhere. This time I bought Epic Wanderer, subtitled “David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West,” by D’Arcy Jenish. I burned through it in the days after we got back.

It’s well written, but that’s not the only reason I liked it. It fills a blank for me. I’m much more familiar with explorations of the US West than those of western Canada.

From Anchor Canada, the publisher: “Less celebrated than his contemporaries Lewis and Clark, Thompson spent nearly three decades (1784-1812) surveying and mapping over 1.2 million square miles of largely uncharted Indian territory. Traveling across the prairies, over the Rockies and on to the Pacific, Thompson transformed the raw data of his explorations into a map of the Canadian West. Measuring ten feet by seven feet, and laid out with astonishing accuracy, the map became essential to the politicians and diplomats who would decide upon the future of the rich and promising lands of the West. Yet its creator worked without personal glory and died in penniless obscurity.”

Thompson also thought that British diplomats were taking the easy way out (being weenies, even) when they agreed to 49 degrees North as the border west from Lake of the Woods, Minn. If he’d had his way—and nobody asked him, even though he’d made the best map of the territory north of the Columbia River—what we call the state of Washington would be Canadian, and the map of the Lower 48 (Lower 47?) would, to our eyes, look a bite had been taken out of the Northwest.