Mindfulness at Stinson’s Creek

By Conrad Beaubien

Certainly the Millennium Trail is not a mountainous journey if you were to make a pilgrimage of it. There are not the dramatic rises and scenics of southern France, nor the clusters of towns and villages of antiquity like throughout Great Britain. Nor is it the descent through the province of Quebec’s eastern Matapedia Valley and its wondrous paysage of collective rivers bound as one and destined to marry with the briny deeps of the Baie des Chaleurs and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

I imagine that of all the terrains of Canada, laying track over top of the mostly flatlands of Prince Edward County was very much a railway builder’s dream. Close to lake access and intertwined with the then primitive land roads that essentially followed the shoreline, the Prince Edward County Railway offered alternative passage to the outside world and the main east/west corridors of travel.

Long forgotten survey maps tell of former plans to link outer corners of the County— from Rednersville, to South Bay to Milford, Domorestville and Northport- then rounded up like a spider web of steel to bridge the gap of the Bay of Quinte at Green Point before moving onwards through Deseronto and finally connecting with the rail corridor passing through Napanee.

If you wanted a westbound destination, after boarding the train at Picton, your ticket in hand showed nine stops to be made including downtown Trenton before meeting up with the then Grand Trunk system at Trenton junction. The politics and financial ambitions of many also intersected at the junction where local aspirations of a railway became mixed in with an international money game to see who would conquer who in the contest of rail monopolies.

It’s a groggy morning and a slow rain drenches the branches and stems of new growth and yellow daffodils along the way. I’m travelling with both of my donkey friends, Thunder and Joe as the hush of the silent woods shelters birds and their song, all of it taking refuge beneath the debris of brush and ground cover along the creek before us. No matter that the rain competes with my brimmed felt hat and thuds against the oiled canvas cloth of my outback coat. As for my fourlegged companions, their stoic posture and scruffy heavy coat of winter buffers them from the soak of the day. I love to dig my fingers into their damp wet fur and give a back scratch here and an ear scratch there simply to remind them in the simplest of terms that I care. It’s generally our mission, these walks, mini pilgrimages I guess you could say; encounters with the sublime of the grasses and forest that offer both mental and physical exercise, uniting with the sounds and signals of the natural world are part of it all. Actually, if truth be told I mostly feel like an honoured guest under the royal guard of two Standard bred donkeys who, rescued from abuse elsewhere are now well fed and content to show me around a mythical land of the five senses. I say mythical because it feels that way; there is silence, no agenda, nor guidebook, how-to or technology. This kinda thing often feels like the stuff of storybooks, yet words are elusive when trying to get a handle on how to speak of higher meaning.

I find the trick to remaining in these intermissions, the one effort to be applied is to be aware of the invasive mind-speak that surely wants to attest to the practicalities of reconciling finances, or dealing with a broken shock absorber on the truck and what if and what if, it wants to say. It seems it’s the way we are wired and the more we allow ourselves to be entangled in the mind debris that rains upon our modern world the more entangled we are and the harder it is to reclaim the solitude of these moments, to recognize the invasive voices and banish them as they have nothing to contribute to these hiatus. This time I speak of is about an old heavy railway trestle crossing a generous and hardy creek. Besides, being in the comfort of animals whom you can chose to talk to or not is grace in itself, because no explanation or justification for walking in the rain is needed. Small talk and the world with all of its noise is put on hold; it’s about simple pleasures sans time and bother.

We, I and the donkeys that is, have stopped at a place listed on the earliest of train schedules like the one of Monday, September 6th, 1880. Having discovered the old schedule has prompted a curiosity to identify former stops that have been obscured over time. This one is listed as Stinson’s Creek. Aside from the larger centres like Wellington and Bloomfield, places like this were called Flag Stations or Way stops. According to the train schedule I have in hand, a train leaving Picton at 9:30 on a possibly slow morning as this one, made a stop at Bloomfield and then twenty minutes afterwards announced itself with a short blast of the whistle as the huge forged locomotive wheels came to a stop, clanging its bell at 9:51a.m. The stops, this one in particular, half way between Bloomfield and Wellington were marked with an asterisk meaning you had to call in a previous notice or take a chance on certain days to give a wave or pull the lever on the pole near the tracks that raised a metal flag to signal a halt. Often these stops were for freight or milk cans headed to a creamery. You would see crates of live chickens or a set of bedroom dressers or a travel trunk tagged and waiting to be loaded aboard.

But my thoughts now are not about nostalgia or about change, but in a way this trestle over a fast chasing creek bound for West Lake via a sea of bog and marshlands offers a message of time. Thunder and Joe are nonplussed about pausing to take in the sounds and rhythm of the moving water. I think about renewal and renaissance, the societal changes for the better that are apt to follow in the wake of present time. It seems that such changes have come about after each wave of pandemics that have traced back to 3000 B.C. Perhaps this pause, like standing on this bridge will help us see more clearly that the truthful fabric of joy and fulfilment does not rely on material gain and distraction, but holds a constant presence in our being, asking nothing more than to be acknowledged and cared for.