Friday, September 01, 2006

Our Ontario Holiday

Our vacation planning was haphazard this year.  We received sweet place-to-stay offers from friends on both coasts, but we had only a week for our car trip, and anyway, the kids wanted to visit another country. We also forgot to get passports, so the other country had to be Canada. We settled on Ontario, a mystical land that is visible from some parts of Detroit.

Ontario, its fans said, is a lovely province, with nice coastal towns, excellent plays, that sort of thing.  Before I knew it, we had planned a drive around Lake Huron.

Our first excitement came at the Canadian border.  Would our car be searched?  Would our shoes be x-rayed?  But the customs agent recognized us as bland Midwesterners and waved us through.  Soon we pulled off the highway in a small town where a young woman walked out to pump our gasoline.  A cash machine handed over colorful $20 bills with an elderly Queen Elizabeth on them. A waitress taught us to call the one and two dollar coins loonies and toonies, and the children chose candy bars they’d never seen before.  We were very easy to please.

The next afternoon in Stratford we saw a wonderful production of Oliver! Our kids rooted for the singing orphans, and I was touched by the soft-hearted criminal Fagan who is afraid that someday he will be old and penniless and alone.  During the final standing ovation, the audience enthusiastically booed the wonderful villain, Sykes.  Good, evil, the vacillations of the human heart – they have those things in Canada too.

That night, in our first shore town, Kincardine, four dozen kilted bagpipers and drummers young and old marched through the streets, drawing a crowd of hundreds behind them as they played.  The next morning we climbed to the top of the lighthouse, and the bookstore owner directed our serious knitter to the fanciest wool in town, in the back room of the Chinese grocery.

And north we drove, over the rolling hills that stopped the waters of Lake Huron.  The white blades of gigantic windmills turned lazily above the trees and fields.  We visited a farm where a husband and wife raised sheep and sold wool and knitted goods.  They had given up academic careers many years before, and their bountiful shop showed off the brilliant colors and traditional forms of everyday life.  They told us a little of their story and we told a bit of ours, and commerce didn’t get in the way.

In Tobermory, we snapped pictures of a sunken ship and had a picnic overlooking the harbor.  On Manitoulin Island, the children swam in the rocky pool at the base of a waterfall. They let its waters splash down upon their heads and shoulders, just because they could.  In Massey, on the north shore of Lake Huron, the roadside motel was full of original art.  Sculptures of horses in the front, huge portraits, photographs in the breakfast room, paintings in all the rooms and halls.  Why not?  And the owners started a street painting festival in the same spirit. I was getting the impression that Canadians liked to invent new lives.  And these inventors were fun to talk to.

Back in northern Michigan, we made a ritual pilgrimage to the fudge shops of Mackinac Island, and our trip was almost done.  One last luxury awaited us.  Neighbors had invited us to visit them in their lakeside cottage.  We enjoyed a boat ride, then had lunch in the mottled shade of their deck, where we started to cross over from neighbors to friends.

So what did our vacation add up to?  Does it have a theme, like a novel? Maybe this: on a good day, people who make or build things are much more interesting than tourism.  You can talk all morning, but you can only eat so much fudge.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on September 01, 2006
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