‘Wait … this is a two-way street?’

Long, wide, flat, good gravel. Just how I like 'em.

PRINCE OF WALES RD. – A great cheer went up. I’ll admit: I was one of the people cheering. We hadn’t taken Joe the truck off pavement since that oh-shit-we’re-gonna-die road in Georgia last summer.

While we relax in Wasaga, Trevor’s spending the week at Unicamp, an hour’s drive away, halfway down a long strip of gravel road. It’s well maintained and just enough country for me to put a little Kane on the iPod and belt out tunes.

We were early, though, so Melani wanted to keep driving to see where the road would take us. And it was an easy road, like I said, so I humoured her.

We waved at the farmer hauling hay and when we passed the horses, I pointed at the pinto and said, like I always do, “Let’s slap his butt and see what happens!” Trevor laughed, because that’s how I’ve raised him. Melani didn’t, because she knows I’ll love her anyway.

But then we crested a hill and road just fell away. True, I exaggerate, but it was much steeper on the downside and narrowed to barely Joe-width.

“Sorry, guys, the fun stops here,” I said, reversing into a farm lane to turn around. I’m very good at ignoring “Awww, Mom,” and “C’mon, loser!”

We doubled back to the highway and meandered along till we found a roadside stand with green beans that tasted exactly as green beans should. A little farther along, we stopped at a full-service gas station where we paid twenty cents less per litre than we would at home. Nice. So with Joe full of gas and us full of beans, and nearly completely lost on back roads, we set the GPS to take us back to Unicamp.

Shoulders? We don't need no stinkin' shoulders.

We’d done a three-quarter loop and the GPS looks for the shortest route between A and B. You know what’s coming, don’t you?

Back on gravel, Joe bopped along. The rocks were loose but the road was flat. There was nothing but fields to our right and left, old, swaying trees far in the distance. Melani started to giggle. “We’re coming at it from the other side. That hill’s going to get you coming or going.”

The hill I’d scorned at the beginning wasn’t so bad, it turned out, but that might have been a matter of perspective, as getting there meant being jostled along loose gravel and mud for more than ten kilometres, on a road barely wider than Joe.

“Go faster!” Trev encouraged.

“Yeah, and what happens when I meet a car going the other way?”

“Wait … this is a two-way street?”

Yeah, that’s right. Because that’s the way we roll.

Wasaga Beach is no Jackson Hole (thank god)

Our little piece of Wasaga, Beach 4

WASAGA BEACH – I totally get why people holiday in places like Pigeon Forge – they’re overstimulating like cheap street drugs. I don’t get why people go to places like Jackson Hole, which doesn’t have much going for it outside ski season besides too many tourists and the fact that Harrison Ford lives nearby.

So if I sighed deeply when Melani told me we’d be staying in Wasaga Beach, I sighed with all the power of those prejudices. Great, I thought, a tourist trap within spitting
distance of Toronto. Drunken college kids and overpriced surf shops. Yeah, I can’t wait. I hadn’t met Elena yet, so I hadn’t been reminded of the folly of prejudging.

And let me say this: There’s a lot of traffic on the main strip, Mosley St., and there appear to be plenty of overpriced shops and not a few hooligans (I’m 40, so I can call
them hooligans, especially when I’m shaking my cane and yelling at them to get outta my yard). But. But.

Melani and Baby J. (21 weeks)

We’re in a little strip of quiet and just a short walk from the bay, and the secret to loving Wasaga is to wander down to the longest freshwater beach in the world. It’s not
the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen – there are no rocky outcrops where we are and there are precious few shells or other treasures to hunt. But the water! When we dipped our feet into the water on the first night, it was with the trepidation of any traveller who has sunk their toes into an ocean or Great Lake.

Yet the water here is warm. Summer-afternoon-puddle warm. Not the deceptive warm your feet are okay with but sneaks above your knees to make you shriek with chill. We walked easily along the sandbar, now up to our thighs, now our midsections, knees, then shoulder deep and up again. We walked in the bay and watched the sun set and tried not to use cliches like “warm as bathwater.” We fought the waves or rode with them and laughed till we were in danger of cramping up and going under.

This. This is why people come here. I get it now.

Things aren’t always as they seem

Birch Haven by the Beach, Wasaga Beach

WASAGA BEACH – Elena says sometimes first-time guests at her Birch Haven by the Beach cottages are disappointed when they arrive.

“They have an image in their mind, maybe, and it’s not what they thought it would be.” Elena is bright and sunny and guests’ discomfort hits close to home.

Seen from the road, the prefab cottages look like a motel, perhaps, or a series of trailers all stuck together. They’re not woodsy log cabins, but this is Wasaga Beach, not the wilds of Georgia, and the cottages are roomy, efficient, comfortable and spotlessly clean. There is a gazebo in the common area, and a small playground. More than half the guests here are return visitors.

Elena talks about the hundreds of people she’s met while running Birch Haven, but she could as well be talking to future guests.

“There is one lesson I have learned, and that is not to judge. You can’t tell right away what the people will be like. You just can’t tell, and you just shouldn’t judge.”

I lived in The Beaches; I went to the beach

Rowhouses are my favourite thing about Toronto.

TORONTO – “Oh, this is my Toronto,|” I said as we turned onto a narrow street crammed with trees and rowhouses, each with a sliver of yard.

My companion snorted. “It’s fake Toronto.”

“But it’s the Toronto I know. It’s exactly like my street, only we were in The Beaches.”

“The Beach.”

“The what now?”

Funny, I’d no idea there was a great debate over whether to pluralize the area I lived in. I was a teenager, of course, and didn’t give a hoot about municipal politics. I lived in The Beaches; I went to the beach.

I lived in the little white house on the right.

I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what was up with the neighbourhood that is bordered by Fallingbrooke, Kingston, Woodbine and Lake Ontario: “The dispute over the area’s name reached a fever pitch in 1985, when the city of Toronto installed 14 street signs designating the neighbourhood as ‘The Beaches.’ The resulting controversy resulted in the eventual removal of the signs, although the municipal government continues to officially designate the area as ‘The Beaches.’ In early 2006 the local Beaches Business Improvement Area voted to place ‘The Beach’ on signs slated to appear on new lampposts over the summer, but local outcry caused them to rescind that decision. The Beaches Business Improvement Area board subsequently held a poll (online, in person and by ballot) in April 2006 to determine whether the new street signs would be designated The Beach or The Beaches, and 58% of participants selected The Beach as the name to appear on the signs.”

But me, I lived in The Beaches. And that is my Toronto.

I left my bra at Coyote Ugly* and other stimulating tales of New York City

Coyote Ugly of movie, uh, fame.

NEW YORK – The best way to handle New York is to give in to it. Have a plan, sure, if you feel you must, but keep it loose. Start walking. Wiggle your way to your destination. Stop to look at the graffitti. Take a picture of the great store names – the pun is alive and well in America.

Gone but not forgotten in N.Y.C.

I’ve described New York City as overstimulating before, so in the spring, when it’s the barest bit less so, you take your stimulation where you can, perhaps with a trip to the Museum of Sex. It’s within walking distance of the East Village (where I stay with my friend Zon when I’m in town) because everything in Manhattan is within walking distance. I love the Lower East, with its wrought-iron fire escapes, corner-store psychics, restos and bars representing every country, culture and taste. I love it in the spring, when the trees are considering blooming and the crazy heat of summer hasn’t started to cook the alley garbage into retch-inducing piles of stink.

We got to the museum late because we don’t walk in straight lines and we never rush. It took us a while to leave the apartment since it was nigh-on beer o’clock and we knew a cold drink would fuel us for the hike uptown. And then, along the way, we were distracted by Good Beer. We spent an incredible amount of time browsing the mostly local, mostly organic bottles and nearly ruining a video podcast being produced in the back: “Okay, so what you’re saying is it’s got a front-end bitter and a back-end sweet … umn, can you move a little so you’re not right in front of the camera?” Front end bitter, back end sweet. I’ve got friends like that.

Zon's first memory is drinking from a lion fountain just like this one, which is on display at Olde Good Things.

Good Beer wasn’t our only stop. We found a vintage shop – truly, truly vintage, with frilly chartreuse dresses from the ’70s and banded sweatshirts from the ’80s – a place that sold architectural details, a diner that served chicken fried steak and green beans on a TV-dinner-style plate, and a gargantuan Italian grocery where the old tiled ceiling was as interesting as the thousands of items for sale.

And so it was dusk when we bought our tickets and ambled into the den of iniquity. The Museum of Sex doesn’t ease you into things. The first room is a tribute to sex on screen and the soundtrack is damp with passion. There are screens everywhere. It’s hard to read the panels; your eyes are attracted to the platform where the first porn film, made in the early part of the last century, is projected, or to the small screen where strangers tape just their faces as they reach the little death.

Eventually a staffer approached us, warning us the museum would close in about 40 minutes and maybe we wanted to see the rest of the place? Not much time – what should we see? “Well, there’s the comics,” he said, “you know, if you don’t like the porn.” If we don’t like the porn? Because we’ve spent more than half an hour in this one room … 

Robot exhibit at the Museum of Sex.

We headed up the stairs to the robot exhibit, where a diorama showed steampunky ‘bots inside and outside a porno theatre, tools well in hand. We touched the silicone love dolls, giggled a little, exclaimed over the falling-out-of-love artwork and The Nudie Artist: Burlesque Revived. I could have spent hours more in the Comics Stripped section, which laid out the evolution of nudity and sexuality in comics. But there wasn’t time, and we were spent.

What does one do after an evening of sex, when a nap isn’t an option? First a stop at Good Beer for a growler to take home – a large brown bottle we had filled with a smoky brew that left an intriguing bacon aftertaste. And then – “Coyote Ugly,” I said, even though Zon had warned me that its heyday was firmly in the ’90s, just before the film starring Piper Perado and John Goodman (!) bombed at theatres across the continent. There were bras hanging from pipes in the bar; the barmaid was cute and perky. We sat at a booth and I watched baseball, sipping Pabst and not thinking about whether my feet would explode when I took my cowboy boots off later that night. We were almost done our pitcher when the barmaid, moved by some mysterious cue or her own boredom, I suppose, hopped up on the bar and started to dance.

The barmaid at Coyote Ugly.

 “Omigod, she’s going to hit her head on the ceiling,” I gasped, alarmed. She was bouncing quite vigorously. “She’s going to kill herself!” Dancing and danger, all in one. Plus the bounce. It ain’t the Cirque, but it was a great end to our day of moderate stimulation.

* I didn’t actually leave my bra at Coyote Ugly. I was too shy. Maybe next time.

‘To a Zwillinge, from a Zwillinge, Love Inga’

 TORONTO – Her arrival is announced by a rattling at the key hole. Aunt G and Uncle C share a look across the room. Their relationship with their neighbour is more than a friendship – it is a safety net, because they see each other every day. A missed visit would be a red flag.

“You call me Inga,” she says as we are introduced.

Her shirt is light pink and has a large appliqued butterfly on its collar. Her sweater is a darker shade of pink, marked with black and gold swirls across the shoulders and chest. Her leggings are white, have huge black polka dots, and end before her white ankle socks. Her hair is cut short and fashionably. Her glasses are stylish, with dainty white arms that end in a diamond of negative space near the lenses. Her face is open and friendly; when she is not smiling, the memory of her smile lingers. Her voice is well-used to laughing.

Today she comes with a small gift – a toy from a kids’ meal – to pass on to my niece’s three little girls. While my aunt pulls open the plastic wrap, my uncle and I talk about coal mining.

An abandoned coal mine entrance in Glace Bay, Cape Breton.

His father spent 30 years in a colliery in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. He was one of the lucky ones – black lung didn’t get him. A few years ago, we toured a colliery in Glace Bay and heard the Men of the Deeps choir. I’ve been hooked ever since and could spend all day listening to mining stories. That the miners eventually received paycheques rather than cash was the women’s doing, my uncle told me. Otherwise, cash in hand, the workers were inclined to stop at the bar on the way home and their wives might not get their household allowance.

On the room’s large TV, an anchor is chatting with an astrologist about the possibility that we’ve all been living under the wrong sun signs. My aunt asks me what I think.

“I’m a Gemini,” I say. “It depends on my mood.” Inga’s head whips up. “A Gemini? When?”

“June,” I tell her. “The 11th.”

“It’s not! June 11! That’s my birthday!” She gets up and comes to stand beside my chair, and she asks me again.

“June 11, 1971.”

“I am June 11, 1933.” My father’s birth year. I think – I hope – that maybe I’ll grow into the same sort of smiling, friendly, energetic senior Gemini that Inga is.

“It’s a little Frisbee,” Aunt G reveals in her soft voice, holding up the two plastic pieces that are the kids’ meal toy. She carefully inserts it into the green launcher.

You could put an eye out with that.

“It shoots out?” Inga says in alarm. Too late, she snaps at my aunt: “Don’t you do it!” The little Frisbee flies up and out, ricocheting off a glass shelf of knick-knacks and disappearing behind a wrapping-paper bag. Inga moves fast, before I can begin to lift myself from my chair. She rummages in the corner, plucking the disc from a deep corner and holding it aloft. She doesn’t say it aloud, but “tsk tsk” is written all over her fine German features. She snatches the launcher on her way back to her chair.

“I’m serious,” she says, because the three of us are giggling. “If they point it this way –” she pokes the disc against her cheek beneath her eye. My aunt does not look chastened. She looks delighted. Inga is shaking her head and trying to look stern, but there’s a telltale glint in her eyes. The corners of her mouth are twitching upward as she fits the disc into the launcher. My aunt is smirking now. She tilts her chin toward the long hallway. “How far do you think it will go?”

“Do it.”

She aims carefully and pinches; the miniature Frisbee soars along the hallway, straight and smooth as a glider. It seems like it’s moving in slow motion down the hall at waist height, arcing upward slightly before beginning its descent into the bathroom. It makes it all the way to the far wall. We’d been holding our breath, but release it in giggles. Inga retrieves it and shoots it again. Then I have a go. None of us loses an eye.

All's Good

Inga disappears back to her apartment for a little while. It is filled with dolls, Aunt G tells me. Many of them are porcelain; some of them have been painted by Inga herself. There are teddy bears, too. When she comes back, she has a bear for each of my little great-nieces. She has me say their names as I put them in a bag, so I won’t get mixed up: A classic, jointed bear for Lily, one with a book for Emma, a polar bear for Sophia. And she has something for me, too: a thumb-sized green bear delicately stitched together by her sister in Germany.

But best of all, she’s brought me a beautiful card with a cutout faerie that says “Alles Gute.” All’s good. Inside she’s written: “To a Zwillinge, from a Zwillinge. Inga.” From one Gemini to another – friends even after so short a visit.

The little VFW of Bigfork

From April 28, 2009

The VFW in Bigfork is about a quarter the size of the one in Kalispell.

It’s a shack on the side of a hill and most of the parking is for the handicapped.

Park in a disabled person's spot, buy the drinks.

There’s a small table inside reserved for the unnamed soldier. It has a white tablecloth and white dishes and there is no dust on the cutlery or glass. The seat is draped with a black cloth that has POW/MIA stitched in white.

It was here – since it was our fourth Miller-time stop of the day – that I started to feel a little drunk. It was here than Aunt V started telling family stories while Aunt L played the machines.

I grew up in the east, so I never saw The Aunts more than once a year (and rarely that much). Yet I am so much like them.

A pay phone at a bar in The Middle of Nowhere, Montana

This summer, my brother was shocked (and somewhat appalled) at how much I look like our mom. But Aunt V and I are the ones with blonde hair and blues eyes – everyone else is dark. We all put too much salt on our food and though we’re interested in what everyone has ordered, there is no picking off each other’s plates. I hate sharing my food, but in Montreal that’s seen as weird and maybe selfish. Apparently in my family, that’s just the way it is.

The other thing we share is a talent for attracting … uh … characters. One of these is J.R., the old Mexican man who takes care of Aunt V’s Montana house. He’s 83 (and so’s his girlfriend) and he says he doesn’t drink, so Aunt V had to offer him a scotch twice before he accepted. He sat down to chat and Aunt L and I lit cigarettes.

“When are you going to stop that?” he asked me.

I said: “Tomorrow.”

Then he told me a story. Seems that back in 1973, he was living near San Francisco. He was driving along in an old black car. A big old boat of a thing. He had the windows down and he was smoking and just enjoying life. All of a sudden, he couldn’t catch his breath. He managed to pull the car over and stumbled out, got around to the front and draped himself over the hood till he got his wind back.

“The next day, I was driving in the same car, going the same way, and it was the same time of day – it happened again!”

“I would have started taking a different road,” I suggested.

He turned to Aunt V and said, “She’s a quick one. You’d better watch her.” The moral of his story was that he quit smoking right there and then. Good for him – 83 looks great on him.

I have more J.R. stories, but my flight’s about to board and I’m anxious to get on and get home. Meantime, please enjoy this picture from the inside of the washroom at the VFW in Bigfork. Why yes, that is Ronbo hanging on the wall. He watched me pee several times.

The ladies' room at the VFW in Bigfork

I smoke like a Canadian, too

This's one classy place, especially around Cinco de Mayo

From April 27, 2009

When we left the VFW in Kalispell, we started down the highway to Bigfork. It’s a twenty-minute drive, though, and Miller time happened halfway home, so we found ourselves at the Tall Pine Saloon, where an old biker was tending bar. The guys were ragging on him because he’d just gotten his bike out the day before and the snow was falling was like December.

The barmaid was in her 50s, pin thin and she had a head of huge, teased, curly hair. She was wearing bottle-thick glasses with frames that took up most of her rouged face.

The guy sitting next to us tried talking to us, slipping into the conversation a few times that he was a “one-hundred-per-cent disabled veteran.” The Aunts, who spend their days going from one VFW to another, were unimpressed.

“I like it when it snows like this,” he said.

Aunt V snorted at him. “Well, you did say you’re disabled.”

We had to backtrack about a mile to Grizzly Jack’s. The bartender there greeted us in Spanish and so Aunt V answered him in Spanish.

“Uh, I just used up all I know,” he said sheepishly. “It’s my one line. I’ve got no follow through.”

She was going to let it pass till she saw the poster on the bar fridge. “CINCO DE MAYO – MAY 4.”

“May 4? You really don’t know Spanish at all, do you?”

He took a pen and wrote right on the poster, between Cinco de Mayo and the date: “Pre-party.”

See? Classy

We only wanted to tease him because he was so beautiful. We would have listened to him speak gibberish, just to watch his lips move. The food was amazing, too. I had a pepperjack cheeseburger with bacon and jalapenos. The meat was so thick I didn’t even try to eat the bun.

Aunt L and I lit up while we finished our beer and cutie-pie barkeep came over. “I don’t really care,” he said, “but you’re not supposed to smoke in here while the kitchen’s open.”

“We’ve already eaten,” I said. “Are you going to kick us out?”

His eyes got wide and he started laughing. “Did you just say ‘ewwwtt?’ Are you Canadian?”

I’m pretty sure I blushed.

Mr. Dill Pickle

Montana is so beautiful, it hurts.

From April 27, 2009

At the VFW lounge (Veterans of Foreign Wars, which I guess means no Civil War vets need apply), Aunt L made beeline for the machines while Aunt V and I sidled up to the bar.

The VFW is a fairly large building, with a room in the back for gambling and pool tables along one side. The bartender, with a short beard and curls coming down from under his ball cap, has a tattoo of a Hawaiian girl on the inside of his forearm.

We weren’t there long before a gentleman made his way over. He stood between our barstools with a hand on each of our backs. He was rubbing the back of my neck with his thumb and, judging by the long-suffering look on Aunt V’s face, he was doing the same with her. His round face was clean-shaven and he was bald under his red hat; his smile was an incredible centrepiece to his round, friendly face.

Apparently in Canada, if you come into a Legion wearing a hat, you have to buy everyone a round. Only high-ranking officers are allowed to wear their hats off-duty, so that when someone with hat walks into a room, you know who’s in charge. Every second man in Montana wears a hat, so that wouldn’t go over too well here, or anywhere in America, as a bartender at another VFW later told us.

“My name is Dill Pickle,” announced the gentleman with his hands on our necks. I knew his name already – Aunt V had pointed him out to me. “Dill’s my last name and they call me Pickle.”

She told him that I was the visiting niece and he asked whether I like my aunts.

“I’ve got four aunts,” I said, “and three of them are fantastic.”

He hooted and hollered and made me promise I’d come back, because he wasn’t going to visit me.

“I’d travel to see that gorgeous smile, but I ain’t goin’ to the far east, not even for you, beautiful.”

‘Whatever shall we do, ladies?’

Near Aunt V's home in Montana

From April 23, 2009:

How are you all doin’?” asked the waitress, and Aunt V said: “We’ll be better once we have some beer.”

This isn’t funny because it was before noon; it was funny because those are the very words I use in restaurants.

Aunt V hasn’t stayed at her Montana house since January, but her soon-to-be-ex husband has been down here three times. Last night, when Aunt V was putting away the beer we hadn’t drunk in the truck, she clucked her tongue.

“He’s left five pounds of cheese in here,” she said, nodding at the fridge. “Who does that? That’s all that’s in here besides two bottles of champagne and some orange juice.”

“Mimosas for breakfast!” I said.

She opened the door of a small cupboard between the kitchen and dining area. “There must be fifteen bottles of liquor in here.”

Aunt L jumped up to take her place kneeling before the cupboard. “Seventeen!” she declared, “… on the top shelf! There’s twenty-three bottles in here.”

This morning, Aunt V came up from the basement and told us: “I found three more bottles of champagne and seven Kokanees. What are we going to do, ladies?”