200701 canada

  I have lived in Toronto almost all my life, except for being born in Vancouver. My father was born and raised in a small prairie town and brought my mother home from England after the war. She embraced Canada as her new home and spent her first Canadian winter in Biggar, Saskatchewan! The young  couple lived for a while in North Battleford while my father trained pilots with the Air Force. Then to Vancouver where Dad earned an engineering degree on the government's nickel while Mother ran a boarding house and raised two boys. We came to Toronto just after I came along. 

  By the time I was grown up, I had travelled to the west coast three (more) times and as far as Alberta a couple more times. I had also been east to Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. My big brother learned to say "deux patates frites", and we stopped at every chip-stand all the way across Quebec. Also in Quebec we discovered butterscotch and chocolate spreads that came in big square jars with red lids, that we collected and used for sugar and coffee at home. At the east coast we ate lobster, and mackerel that my father caught from the shore with a long ocean fishing rod. My mother insisted on tying an old lobster pot onto the car to bring home and showed us how to hunt for cockles and boil them in a billy can on a little beach fire of driftwood. Perce Rock (Perce, acute accent on second e) was the one of the first places I recognized as sacred. I knew it before I even learned the word.

  On the west coast we clambered among the giant driftwood trees on the shore, and walked in the redwood forests, among the "cathedral" trees* and alien ferns and the moss-covered dead bones of old forests. I have seen a wild grizzly bear, high up on a mountainside, huge and ancient and grey. I have stood, jeans rolled to my knees, bare feet in the rushing icewater from a high snowcap.

  In Saskatchewan I stood in the middle of a wheatfield so big it ran to the horizon in every direction. We hunted for agates along the gravel roads in Souris, Manitoba, walking west toward the setting sun. The slanting sunlight caught the agates, which shone translucent and polished by the cars. We went to the quarry itself, outside of town, and dug for lumps of rough unpolished agate and fossilized wood. We searched for dinosaur bones in the badlands of Alberta before Dinosaur Provincial Park was born, and rubbed elbows with dust-covered paleontologists who were excavating and preparing dinosaur skeletons and forests of trees turned to stone. We wandered through heady-perfumed wild sagebrush and cacti to look for lizards and snakes, along miles of riverbanks and lakeshores for frogs and crayfish. 

  My brothers and I knew every corner of Ontario and the Great Lakes , because if we weren't going east or west in the summer, we explored our own province. Early in September each year we drove, seven of us in a four-door sedan, to Niagara Falls. Not a cent went to tourist attractions, boat rides, tunnels or ice cream, but we climbed among the rocks and caves and collected baskets of chestnuts to play at "conkers". Does anyone remember conkers? On the drive home we stopped at the roadside by the vineyards to harvest wild grapes that grew along the fences, and once, quinces from an old twisted tree in an abandoned farmyard. My mother made jam and my father made wine. Mom was crazy about eating from the wild bounty of Canada, wild cherry jam at the cottage, mushrooms, wild asparagus, fiddleheads. On the ancient grey humpbacks of the Canadian Shield we knelt among the stout shrubs of wild blueberries and gathered the tiny gems. And Dad was a fisherman. Every stream we saw, "There's trout in there." Every river and lake (and stream) drew him with his creel and rod through thicket and bramble to cast in a line. 

I grew up to love Canada coast to coast, one country, one nation, because I have explored it, met its people, seen its riches. Now that we can tour the world from our living room, we can stay home and see what magic we can find right here in our local and country-wide back yards. One day, when we can travel again by car, train and bus, travel this country, share in the wealth that is Canada.

Happy Canada Day. 

*The name of an actual tourist site:http://www.cathedralgrove.eu/text/01-Cathedral-Grove-1.htm