Day 3: Midland-Collingwood
First stop today is a place I've been wanting to see for a while: Sainte-Marie-Among-The-Hurons. This is a painstaking recreation of the first European settlement in Ontario, ca. 1639. As always in places like this, I can feel...not so much presences exactly, more a kind of weight, a conscious awareness of standing in a story, or rather, many of them. It's not at all an unpleasant feeling, but it demands sober, almost solemn, contemplation.
It was interesting to me to learn that the Wendat (the proper name for the people the French called the Hurons) not only coexisted peacefully with the missionaries, but welcomed them, traded with them, and, according to accounts, grew quite fond of them. The Wendat are a matriarchy, so the culture shock must have been intense both ways. Some of the Wendat converted to Christianity, and the site reflects both cultures. A product of the Wendat/French collaboration is a song you may have heard, or perhaps even sung. This carol was actually written by Father Jean de Brébeuf, one of the two priests martyred at the hands of the Iroquois, a neighbouring tribe that had warred with the Wendat many times before. The Iroquois themselves were fortified with firearms acquired from the Dutch. Proxy wars take many forms.
On March 16, 1649, Brébeuf was captured during an Iroquois attack on the Huron mission. He chose to stay with his people instead of fleeing. He was dragged, received a shower of stones, was beaten and bound to the torture pole. Boiling water was poured over his head in a parody of baptism, a necklace of white-hot tomahawk axles was slipped around his neck, and a hot iron was shoved down his throat and anus. He was then burned alive and his body was cut in several pieces with knives. Following his death, his heart was torn out and eaten.
Imagine for a moment my sense of utter horror and shame upon learning these details from an Indigenous person on site, in response to my question. I was so mortified by her brief dark expression and her words "we don't like to talk about this" that I could not bear to ask if she herself was Iroquois. But given that expression and those words, I believe she is. This is going to bother me for a while, an ill-thought-out question. I was practically riven with conflicting moral impulses. I was born and baptized Catholic, but have rejected that faith and everything associated with it...nevertheless, I felt oddly complicit somehow..in all of it. I feel very strongly against evangelism of all kinds. How to tell this lovely and wise Iroquois woman that I deeply respect indigenous cultures, so much so I believe I'd feel much more at home in one than I do in my own society? Is that in itself presumptuous? It feels as if it is. I was struck entirely mute by embarrassment and a renewed sense of history pressing down on me, this time almost crushing, and I awkwardly took my leave and shuffled away, head down.
We were both quite fascinated with the minutiae of Jesuit and Wendat life. Two and a half hours passed in an eyeblink. I could actually have stayed longer, but we wanted to see the neighbouring Martyr's Shrine.
We felt even more awkward here. We hadn't realized until we entered it that this place is still a fully functioning Catholic church. (We were told one of the chapels on site at Sainte-Marie still preaches the Mass every Sunday, but oddly, I didn't feel half as conflicted there.) Here, it felt disrespectful even to take pictures. This is odd, because if you haven't guessed, I respect nothing about Catholicism at this point at all, and Kathy is emphatically non-religious herself. Yet there was still a sense of the sacred here. We could feel it.
It really is a gorgeous edifice.
_______________________
From here, we made the hour long trip west to Collingwood, to stay at the Blue Mountain Inn. Our initial impression of this place was favourable: the room is perhaps the nicest we've stayed in, marred only by a bathroom that belongs on a plane, not in a hotel room.
But then we went out to Blue Mountain Village and...
Okay, look, I'm not stupid. (I AM, but not in this.) I know to treat tourist destinations in my own country as if they are in some other place that uses some other currency. But the prices here were beyond insane. $3.50 for a single bite sized chocolate? $5.25 for a 600ml bottle of Coke? $100 for a hat? It got worse.
There were three things we had wanted to do here. I did research prices before leaving home, but somehow missed that in order to do even one of the things -- a gondola ride to the top of the mountain -- would require the purchase of a day pass. Another -- minigolf -- was an add-on not covered by that $70 pass...at $35 a head, a ridiculously priced add-on. Under no circumstances are we paying $70 for a round of minigolf. The third thing -- that suspension bridge I mentioned earlier -- was of course on a different adjacent site requiring a different day pass to visit, and, well...Blue Mountain seems designed to clinically, surgically, separate people from their money. We declined to be operated upon. It's fair to say we were disgusted. So much so we have no intention of visiting this place ever again.
And there are no pictures, to reflect this fact.
West to Thornbury, where we found "the Fishway" as seen from the "Bridge of Kindness". Beautiful little village.
Dinner was at The Corner Café and Grill. We love finding these little local gems: the food is always tastier and often less expensive than at a bland chains. My club sandwich was exemplary.
We came back to the top of Blue Mountain, to a stunning lookout we had visited before, and lo and behold Blue Mountain had clutched its greedy little tentacles around it in the interim: merely to park there required that damned day pass. This just cemented that we would not give this highbrow tourist trap one more penny of our money or attention.
Then to Northwinds Beach, which cost $10/hr to park at -- payable only online. I've never encountered that before, but bit the bullet and relaxed on the beach, where Kathy got what might be the best shot of the trip:
Back to Blue Mountain Inn. I'll give this place one thing: the beds are quite comfortable. So much so I laid down just to shut my eyes for a minute and woke up the next morning.
Day Four: Collingwood-Owen Sound-Waterloo/Woodstock
Another plus for the Blue Mountain Inn: the Pottery. Breakfast here is (sigh) expensive but (smile) very worth it. I had a farmer's breakfast and Kathy had French toast she pronounced the best she's tasted.
Checkout was painless. The suspension bridge nixed, we drove to South Bay Fields Lavender Farm.
You can't tell, but all the sunflowers are pointing at Kathy
I enjoyed this place more than I thought I might. Adirondack chairs dot the lavender and sunflower fields and it's just a really nice place to spend some time.
We decided to visit Webwood Falls (since waterfalls are obligatory on our treks). This is a pretty little cascade, very easily accessible.
Another falls resisted our attempts to find it. We pulled into the road marked Indian Falls and at the end of that road is not a falls but instead two or three private residences.
One of the best things about our road treks is that we may be disappointed...in fact, we expect to be at this point...but we always find alternatives that work out well. I think it's at least partly because we are people with simple tastes. As such, there is always beauty to be found even in the simplest things. Like, for instance, this tree, in a bayside park in Owen Sound:
We lunched at an honest-to-God Mexican food truck called Ted y Gracias. I think Kathy was initially hesitant, but this turned out to be one of the best values of the trip. For $23, we got two delicious and substantial soft tacos (messy as hell, but yummy), a massive order of loaded fries -- three pounds if it was an ounce -- and drinks.
We dined al fresco in the park overlooking the Bay, chatted for a bit with a biker couple we found, and then, with a mix of emotion, headed for home.
____________
We're looking at, perhaps, one more abbreviated trek this year, not counting day trips, and hoping circumstances permit that great circle trek next year. I said that that trip was 1006 km, not including detours? Well, all in all we travelled almost exactly that far in the last four days. I think it's doable. Might be doable. Hope it's doable.
Reiterating some thanks I have already given, and adding some: a hearty and sincere thank you to the people in Kathy's family who ensured this trip could happen at all, by making Kathy's "side chick" -- her name for her car -- purr. Thank you again to my father and stepmom, who gifted us with that unforgettable dinner cruise, joined us for lunch, and invited us to spend a couple of hours at their home.
And of course thank you to Kathy, who put up with me for FOUR WHOLE DAYS. AGAIN. I must be doing something right.
No comments:
Post a Comment