The long way home

By Conrad Beaubien

It’s been a thing for most of the years I’ve lived down by the Hillier Wetlands; wherever I’m in the farther reaches east of here and coming home, driving along Main Street in Wellington I turn onto Consecon Street which, after a few short blocks of quieted homes, evolves into the Old Danforth road.

As it slips past the ancient cemetery that sits on a knoll of land at the edge of town, the narrow street lowers onto flatlands and launches into a zig and zag of something they call a gore. You find them throughout the County when for no apparent geographic reason the road makes a ninety degree turn left or right and often repeats the pattern within a kilometre or so. In today’s world whenever highways split off in directions, the triangular piece of land in between the roadways is one example of what I’m referring to.

Back in the day when primitive roads where in the works and attempted to make straight with survey lines, workers would come to a spot and look over the survey map and recognize things were not looking well. Damn! or even heavier expletives came from the mouth of the surveyor giving the signal to  the work party that a sharp left or right in the road was about to happen; at least until they met up with the survey line coming from the opposite direction. Think of it as building a tunnel under a mountain with work crews from each side digging towards the middle and praying that the two shall meet. The root of the word for a gore is ‘gar’, which means spear; it kinda describes it pretty well as a piece of land being in the shape of a spear head or better yet, a slice of pie. The more modern term for a gore in the British language is ‘nose’. I guess road surveyors of today have a sense of humour, but chacun a son gout as we say. Then again, you can’t blame early road workers for a lacked sense of humour, especially when it involved cutting down trees in mosquito season. They were landowners either paid or obliged to build and maintain sections of road on a contract that spelled out that “no stumps higher that two feet shall remain on the roadway.” No worries today as all we all we must navigate around in mosquito season are a few potholes.

And so it is late at night and the headlights of my car launch a beam onto a roadway bordered by darkness. I’m familiar with this road taken and anticipate its zigs and zags and what I call it’s ‘whoop dee doos’ as it rolls over the gentle rise and fall of land shapes. It rained earlier in the evening and the pavement’s contrast with the centre line of the road takes on a feel of illustrations from a children’s adventure book as my headlights follow the trail of white ribbon and mysterious woods and then shadowed fields and in the next turn carves a warren out of the fog and mist that has collected in the hollows. This ancient road itself is a page out of the region’s early days when the newly landed were fostering a new country.

The Old Danforth was brought into being as a way of linking one military garrison with another—Fort York with the fort at King’s Town, today’s Toronto and Kingston. Faded lines on old County maps show how branches of the road veered off and steered toward the shoreline where troops could be sent to protect from invasion during tensions with the United States across the big lake. Some of those passages remain as public rights-of-way today. The placements of small communities like Niles Corners, Hubbs Creek or the village of Hillier were connected to water-powered early operations milling lumber or grain or as in the story at the crossroads of Niles Corners, a dairy that through time, changing ownership and corporate merging became part a global food processor, Ault foods whose origins began in Eastern Ontario.

I call this the long way home because the road offers a tranquil stride, window rolled down, the feel and scent of land movement in time and space. I pass the series of communication towers, beacons for the training flights on regular runs through the night of various aircraft based at CFB Trenton, a subtle reminder of present day with the towers’ series of red beacon lights suspended in night sky.

Pulling into my driveway, I’ll often sit out a short while at this time of year to take in the breath of the lilac, the mumble of Slab Creek close by, the cry of the coyotes and the magic of the starscape in the now clearing heavens. I think of so-called modern change and pressures to build suburbs while urbanizing vast, former gracious and productive land and imprinting it into wastelands of everyday. My quiet message to the stars is about treasuring our natural inheritance.

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