fool’s paradise

Time is relative, we are told. Our charting of it is ultimately without meaning beyond our points of reference.

And yet, just as years represent our planet’s revolution around it’s star, our lives revolve around years. We see significance in the dates of events; birth, death, celebration, and commemoration. We measure ourselves, our societies, and our world in years. We remember the anniversaries of these dates and mark them with ceremonies, holidays, and reflection.

But there are some anniversaries we wish we could forget. For me, today is one of those.

I didn’t see the planes crash, or the buildings burn or fall, but I know it happened. I didn’t see anyone die, but I know many did. I had no family, no friends in danger. I sat safely in an office cubicle as news of the day filtered in, and I was petrified.

Time has passed, and taken much of the fear with it, leaving only anger and sorrow, to be renewed once each year as our planet revolves around it’s star and the date comes up once again on the calendar: September 11th.

I know it’s just a date, a measurement of relative time, meaningless outside of our limited points of reference. But it’s a reminder - a familiar symbol that triggers feelings and memories from a painful time I wish I could forget.

To the rest of you, suffering in your own way, my sympathies.

Tonight is my last night camping. I’ll check out in the morning and drive back down to Toronto for another night in the hotel before flying back home. I think I’ll have lunch at Fare and Fowl in Tweed just so I have an excuse to take some pictures of the place. But what I’m really looking forward to is the hotel breakfast Sunday morning. A plate of eggs and some jellied toast sounds so good right now.

It rained last night. I heard the spattering against the cloth roof of the yurt as I lay on my open sleeping bag staring at nothing. It rained most of yesterday and the night before as well. Outside of the sealed and insulated buildings of civilized culture, the moisture in the air permeates everything. Even my dry clothes were damp. My passport wilted, the paper towels were soggy right off the roll, and my sleeping bag felt as if someone had been sweating in it all day. It was a clean wetness, but it was everywhere - on your skin, in your clothes, in your food. Today was the first day it didn’t rain, and things are starting to feel dryer - a good thing too, since I have to pack it all up and head out, and I’d prefer to find as little mildew as possible when I get home.

I didn’t do much yesterday because of the rain. A short walk down to the main gate in the morning when it was just drizzling to find out how to rent canoes. By the time I got back, it had started pouring down. It lightened up a little in the evening and I made a fire, but had nothing to cook except marshmallows, a can of beans, and a potato. I ate a few marshmallows, opened the can with a knife and cooked the beans in the coals, and wrapped the potato in tin foil but never got around to cooking it.

I tripped over a log in the dark and had a nasty fall, giving me an opportunity to try out my new first aid kit to patch up the hole in the palm of my hand.

This afternoon I went canoeing. On my way out to the lagoon, I saw a deer and managed to get it on video for a few seconds. Then I rented a canoe and went out on Mazinaw Lake.

The lake itself is gorgeous - maybe 10 kilometers long and mostly narrow, water thick with life and a deep ocean-colored bluegreen. A good portion of the eastern shore is a massive rock face rising a hundred meters straight up out of the water. I bet there are some fantastic rockdiving spots out here.

There’s a memorial carved into the rock for Walt Whitman, called Old Walt. I got one crummy picture of it - although I’d hoped to take lots of photos of the lake and the rocks, the batteries in my camera picked that as a good time to die, and I left my spares back at the yurt.

old walt

So instead of making a visual record of my adventures, I contented myself with paddling softly along the rock face and enjoying the scenery. I somehow missed the native pictographs that this rock is so famous for - I checked the map after I got back and apparently they are just past the Whitman memorial. I must have gone within spitting distance of them, but somehow never noticed.

Still, I wasn’t really out there for the pictographs. I spent several hours on the water with a rag wrapped around my head to avoid adding more sunburn to the tender rosy skin I managed to injure with my careless drive up in the convertible. After I got past the typical touring area I was mostly alone on the water except for a stray motorboat going by. I saw several houses on the lake and thought what a grand place that would be to live…if it wasn’t for the tourists like me I suppose. Perhaps one day I’ll have to find a nice lake that doesn’t border on a campsite and buy or build a house there. Of course I’ll need high speed internet and it would be nice to have some way to get my groceries delivered…

I returned very tired but not quite worn out. The wind had fought against me most of the way back. Canoeing is a fine form of exercise partly because by the time you realize you’re ready to go home, you’ve still got to turn around and paddle all the way back.

I took a shower and a nap, decided not to bother with a fire tonight since I had nothing worth cooking, and started sorting through my stuff in preparation for packing. It’s late now, and the bugs that found a way into the yurt are flittering around the fluorescent light and occasionally finding their way onto the laptop screen. I guess I’ll relax for a while, maybe read another short story, then decide whether to pack tonight or in the morning.

I really can’t wait until I have a proper meal. I’m down to a small bag of homemade trail mix, a kiwi, and 4 of a 6-pack of moosehead lager.

Tomorrow I’ll try to rent a canoe, maybe find a place out on the lake that’s far enough away from all these people to hear the wind, the birds, and the insects.

Right now, I’m exhausted; it’s been a hectic couple of days. And laying here on a vinyl fold-out mattress in what amounts to the tent version of a mobile home, listening to all the families in the surrounding campsites laughing and carrying on…well, I guess for something like this, the novelty is either in having someone to share it with or getting away from other people entirely, and I did neither.

The scenery was really nice on the way out here. Cattails by the side of the road, looking just ready for picking - I would have loved to grab some and cooked them up tonight, but never saw a good place to stop the car. Lots of farms, with hay bales and silos and barns, ran along both sides of the road. Trees of various colors and shapes, natural rock formations, and unpaved side roads leading off into the woods, with worn metal signs: ‘private property’, ‘no trespassing’, and ‘beware of dog’. It was cool and overcast the whole way, 16-18 degrees celsius and sprinkling on occasion but never enough to make me want to put the top up. It was about a three hour drive, so I was grateful to have some reprieve from the sun along the way.

I stopped for a short time in a little town called Tweed on my way up here. The whole place couldn’t have been more than a kilometer long - a quiet community with mostly just the essentials, a grocery store, a drugstore, a barber, a thrift shop, a clothing store, a movie rental place, and a couple of restaurants. Most of them were small time operations, not the franchises you see in the cities. Simple names, often with the name of the town or the proprietor; Tweed General Store, Martin’s Menswear, and my favorite - Fare and Fowl, grill and eatery. A bald old man stopped me as I was pulling out of a parking lot and struck up a conversation about cars; he asked how I liked the PT Cruiser convertible I was driving, I told him I had just rented it and it was my first time driving a convertible, so of course I liked it just fine. We joked about letting the wind blow through our scalps and he told me about his last few cars and what he thought of the auto industry. Eventually he got a funny look from someone walking by, and seemed to realize it was possibly a bit odd to stop a strange traveler for a 15 minute chat, since he suddenly looked a little embarrassed as he took his hand off the car and told me to take care, now.

There was a police officer standing in the middle of the road as I first drove into town, watching the cars go by. I guess he was there as a gentle reminder that we weren’t on the freeway any more - we were in his town, and until we came out the other side we were to mind our manners, thank you very much. He just stood there in his wide-brimmed hat, watching all the cars slow down as they approached the town. He smiled and turned to watch me as I passed. I think I’ll stop by again on my way back - I liked Tweed.

It took a while before the compression of the big city started to spread out after I first left Toronto this morning. To go from a place with lots of one-way streets and where people park in all the turn lanes to a typical country road is quite a change. I didn’t find a place to park and put the top down until I’d been on the road a full 20 minutes.

The hotel, at least, was a highlight. Parking is ridiculous in Toronto, and the hotel offered valet services at a price significantly cheaper than what you’d pay at any nearby garage, a nice little perk. The hotel itself had recently opened so everything was shiny and new, including the elevators - quick and quiet, which was nice since they put me on the top floor of their 22 story building. There was a complimentary breakfast with plenty of hot food, and my room was spacious and comfortable - they upgraded me to a suite for some unspoken reason, maybe they oversold and I got lucky.

Everyone has heard airline horror stories of course, and my experience flying into Toronto doesn’t come close to qualifying as even *my* worst, so it’s probably not worth getting into. Let’s just say something about having to deplane for an hour because someone overfueled and leave it at that.

To catch the flight, I had to get up bright and early at 4am after staying up late packing and inventorying all my stuff. I guess it’s been about 40 hours since then, and I’m bushed. I grilled up a nice supper of steak, corn, and filberts, then washed it down with some mandarin slices. It’s early yet - I don’t even think it’s dark out - I can’t tell for sure since I buttoned up the canvas windows, but I’m going to try to get some sleep anyway. I really hope I get a chance to go canoeing tomorrow - being out on the water sounds like a lot of fun, especially if I can avoid the sunburn.

I can’t remember the last time I actually took a vacation.

You never really earn vacation any more, just like you never really buy software - you buy a license to use it, according to the terms set forth by the company that actually owns the bits. Likewise, you earn a license to take vacation, redeemable over a specified period, subject to the approval of the company that issued it to you. If you don’t use it or can’t get it approved in time, you’re out of luck. So you’d best put in for some, whether you have plans or not. A week or two in the comfort of your own home is hardly a prison sentence, of course. But it’s not really a vacation either.

So this time, I’m taking a trip - I’ll fly to Toronto, spend a day and a night playing tourist, then drive through the country for a few hours to arrive at Bon Echo park and camp out for the rest of the week. I’ll swim and canoe in the lakes, hike through the forest and hills, and feed a wide variety of exotic insects. I’ll return tired and calm, with pictures to show and memories to share and enjoy.

Stay tuned.

So last night, while sitting at home, I heard a loud buzzing sound out in the hallway of my condo building. Turns out the elevator was stuck with someone inside, and she was hitting the alarm button and calling for help.

Concerned for her safety and happy for the opportunity to play hero, I called 911 for rescue service and set about trying to get her out while waiting for them to arrive (if there is an after hours maintenance number for our community, it’s not well advertised).

I had hoped that there would be some kind of safety mechanism that would let me open the doors even when the elevator wasn’t responding - maybe a spring activated feature that would release when I put enough pressure on them or something. But no, these things were hard steel and not designed for emergency escapes.

I could only force the doors open an inch or so, and only at the bottom. But then I remembered a trick an old friend of mine and I discovered while rock climbing and pushing boulders downhill in Arizona - laying on the ground and propping yourself up against something gives your legs an incredible amount of leverage.

So I wedged myself against the wall and stuck my toes between the doors and gave a good hard shove, feeling great satisfaction as the door went *crunch* and locked into place at a respectable angle. I repeated this for the other side and the inner doors, and the poor girl who was stuck inside was able to get out through the opening.

I called to cancel the rescue request, but they showed up anyway. I was still feeling a bit like a superhero when the tall blonde square-jawed firefighter came in, looked at the elevator and asked “Who did that?”

I said, “I did.”

He looked at me, looked back at the elevator, and inquired, “With WHAT?!”