Old roads

The thing I like about old roads is how they lie atop the land like satin ribbons. Roads and pathways once traced with low technology follow the natural bends of the earth, rising and falling through watersheds and across plains. Old roads remember the nature of geography.

The feeling I have this morning on the Old Danforth Road is one of continuity, of remembrance. The soft rattle of my bicycle fender reminds me of the imperfection of an aged road; the imperfection of my ancient Raleigh bike. Yet the randomness of the way before me opens to a banquet of the senses, which speaks to the randomness of me. The freedom of simply riding the contours of the earth is soulful. As I head into the sun that breaks through the line of far woods, this old road, my bike and I are one.

I’m not a spandex-100-gears kinda rider but rather a meanderer, a slow moving pilgrim on a wide leather saddle and two wheels. I come to a slope of hill by the dairy barn at Closson Road: sweet scent of manure; blood-red paint on wood; three barn cats by the milk parlour door. Now a dip into a shallow ravine: low light catches on polished marble—the markers of a cemetery hill. I climb an easy grade where clusters of pinot noir grapes cling heavy with the savours of limestone; wheat, black-eyed susans, brohme grass and goldenrod pour over the fields like bullion; all is still in the stillness of dawn.

Footpaths became trails that became delineated ruts made by wheeled carts. Many modern roads of England follow ancient Roman wheel tracks. Eventually carts were replaced by the stagecoach, the railway then highways, and so on. While speed offered time efficiencies, in many ways it shrunk the experience of moving over land.

Old routes like the nearby Carrying Place linked civilization. The Great Portage, as it was called, was part of an ancestral people’s travel way for thousands of years that was later adopted by arrivals from Europe and the eastern seaboard colonies of North America. Similarly, Davenport Road in Toronto follows the former ice age shoreline of what is today Lake Ontario. It, too, became a portage route connecting cultures and trade systems of the Don and the Humber rivers. Hwy 401 also follows the beach of the ice age Lake Iroquois of thirteen thousand years ago, its gravel riches offering ideal materials for road builders and engineers of today. While many roads are travelled matter-of-factly by today’s hurried drivers, beneath the asphalt are stored the memory of the earth’s folds.

Now I pass a family of leaning mailboxes that hang out at the corner of Niles Corners; then the historic Haight-Sutherland-Patterson House. Up ahead the shaved fields of September, the scent of warm flatbreads from the bakery, and I pedal on by two donkeys and Suzanne’s healing horses lazy in the morning light. Across the rail path-the Millennium trail—and round the bend at Swamp College and Benway Roads; here a duck pond, a drystone wall and bridge by the stream and beyond, row upon row of vines with fruit swollen in the season.

American engineer Asa Danforth Jr. built portions of what would become Queen Street and Kingston Road in Toronto. Born in 1768 in Brookfield, Massachusetts, Danforth was one of the first white citizens to live among the Onoda’gega, “People of the Hills,” (today’s Onondaga County in New York state) when he arrived with his father in 1788. Danforth accumulated heavy debts speculating in land in New York State and hoped to reverse his fortunes by heading north and investing in land titles of Upper Canada. He took on a contract in 1799 to build a hundred-mile road to connect Toronto (then called York) with the mouth of the Trent River. Danforth’s Road was finished by December, 1800, but his quest for fortunes never arrived. He returned home to what is today Syracuse, New York, where a school and a street have adopted the Danforth name. Danforth’s Road soon fell into disrepair and was replaced by the 1817 Kingston Road stagecoach route which followed his survey as far as the Trent River. Beyond that point, the two historic roads diverge.

With the pending war of 1812, the British military needed a route to follow the lakefront through Prince Edward County and on to Glenora Mills. Meanwhile, the Kingston Road served stagecoaches delivering mail. What began as the Governor’s Road of 1794 remained the principal means of winter travel until the Grand Trunk Railway connected Montréal and Toronto in 1856. On August 21, 1917 the Kingston Road was designated the Provincial Highway; the car by then was a mainstream of transportation.

And so I come to the sharp bend, around the zigzag of turns where the Old Danforth Road enters Wellington as Consecon Street. I coast awhile and ponder how old roads hold a language of their own; how they are teachers in many ways. Metaphors: like the path of life, its hills and valleys; everyday fleeting moments; awaking to our surroundings; appreciation for now and also new possibilities around the next bend. Somehow in the randomness of old roads, the jangle of a loose fender…in the imperfection of it all lays the sublime.