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| Early 1900's image of Manitoba Street in Bracebridge |
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| Spring Flooding 1925, Bracebridge Falls without the Silver Bridge |
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT - THE BEAUTY AND THE HORROR OF THIS NEW-AGE WINTER
THE PRETTY PICTURE PART, VERSUS THE BITING COLD AND ENDLESS SNOW
SO, FOLKS, WHAT IS IT THAT YOU DON'T NEED HAPPENING IN YOUR HOMETOWN, IN THE LAST SNOWY WEEK OF A HORRIBLE JANUARY? WELL, FOR ONE THING, THE LOSS OF A TOWN YARD FACILITY (BUILDING) AND SOME OF OUR SNOW REMOVAL EQUIPMENT.....AND YES, A SIDEWALK MACHINE.....AND THANK GOODNESS IT WAS THE BROKEN ONE (OF TWO), THAT GOT TOASTED? THE TOWN FACILITY IS AT THE EAST END OF JONES ROAD, AND SUFFERED ABOUT A HALF MILLION BUCKS WORTH OF DAMAGE, ACCORDING TO INITIAL MEDIA REPORTS. NOT A GOOD WAY TO START OFF THE WORK WEEK. NO CAUSE HAS BEEN GIVEN FOR THE FIRE, THAT OCCURRED SOMETIME EARLIER ON MONDAY. I GUESS WE'RE GOING TO NEED A FEW "LOANER" PIECES TO FINISH OUT THE WINTER SEASON. ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT THERE WAS NO LOSS OF LIFE. WE CAN REPLACE MACHINERY AND A BUILDING.
MIGHT AS WELL RESIDE AT THE NORTH POLE
THIS MORNING, AFTER PUTTING OUT THE RECYCLING AND GARBAGE, FOR THE MONDAY MORNING PICK-UP, SON ROBERT MET ME COMING UP THE HILLSIDE, WITH FROZEN BEARD, MOSTACHE AND EAR-LOBES, AND HE SAID WITH NARY A GRIN, "DAD, YOU LOOK LIKE THE LONE SURVIVOR OF THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION." OR, "ONE OF THE FROZEN CREWMEN DUG OUT OF THE PERMA-FROST IN THE ARCTIC." WELL BY GOLLY, THAT'S EXACTLY HOW I FELT TOO. I STARTED TO CRY WHEN I LOOKED BACK AT THE ROOF, AND SAW IT, ONCE AGAIN, AT THE POINT OF REQUIRING YET ANOTHER CLEANING-OFF, WHICH WILL MAKE FOUR TIMES SINCE NEW YEARS EVE. WHILE OTHERS WERE SUCKING-BACK THE CHAMPAGNE, SUZANNE AND I WERE TRYING TO SHOVEL OFF THE ROOF IN THE HEAVY SNOW. I THOUGHT THAT I'D LIVED THROUGH SOME TOUGH WINTERS, HERE IN GOD'S COUNTRY, SINCE THE MID 1960'S, BUT NOTHING LIKE THIS WINTER SO FAR. WE'VE GOT TO BE SETTING SOME RECORDS HERE, IN JANUARY, ALTHOUGH THIS IS ONE CASE, WHEN BREAKING A RECORD REALLY SUCKS. GOT HOME ON SATURDAY EVENING, WITH EIGHT BAGS OF GROCERIES, AND FOUND THAT THE SNOW PLOW HAD DONE A CLOSE SHAVE ON THE BANKS, AND TUMBLED A DOZEN SNOW-BOULDERS INTO THE OPENING. WE ANTICIPATED HAVING TO SHOVEL, BUT NOT MONSTER BALLS OF SNOW. GOT UP THREE TIMES IN THE NIGHT, BECAUSE THE CATS WERE RESTLESS AND KNOCKING THINGS OVER, AND EACH TIME, I STOOD IN FRONT OF THE WINDOW, STARING AT THE ENDLESS DRIFTING OF SNOW OVER BIRCH HOLLOW. IT HAS BECOME A LIVING NIGHTMARE. I LOVE THE WAY IT LOOKS, BUT AS FAR AS DWELLING WITHIN THE SNOW-CAP, NOT SO MUCH.
The coldest winter I remember, as a frequent traveller, was the year I accepted a reporting job in the Village of MacTier, working for the Muskoka Lakes-Georgian Bay Beacon....circa 1979. Both ends of it, in fact. The start of 1979 and then the end of it, the following December. It tried to kill me many times that year. I had to rent a used Datsun, that started when it felt like it, and not a second earlier. I had to drive from Bracebridge to MacTier, five to even seven days a week, if I got the call to work the weekend. I had a lot of late arrivals to work that winter, because of the severe cold, and the fact, I didn't have an outlet to plug the car in at home; or even a spot out of the wind to park the miserable little beast. All my cars have had their wee quirks and I dare say, human-like characteristics. The Datsun, for one, was a bastard. It hated me, and I despised it! I had to park on the side street along the back end of Bracebridge's Memorial Park, and that was less than optimum. The heater started to work by Port Carling, and got nice and warm, by time I hit the entrance to MacTier. That's also when the windshield finally was free of inside frost. My feet were finally warm by about two in the afternoon. I called that car filthy names all that winter season, and it punished me in oh so many ways. I was on a first name basis with three of the area towing firms, and I made about thirty-seven cents above expenses every week, but God bless credit cards. I was nervous about moving closer to MacTier, because I had it in my mind that I was going to be editor of our sister publication, The Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge.....a hell of a lot closer to where I was living. I did everything I could to get that job, and if skullduggery was an asset, I was a wealthy man. When I got the chance, finally, to work closer to home, my acceptance of the offer, coming from the publisher, was stated to the affirmative, before he finished the sentence. I gave the Datsun back, kicked it in the arse-end once more for good measure, and it just gave me an icy stare, as if suggesting, "until we meet again." I bought a Chevette. It was worse. Those two cars communicated with each other, let me tell you, and at times, when I was driving along, I could swear it was whispering something to me, that sounded like, "I want to visit the mechanic, ...hole." And did we ever. I did save on gas mileage, but it was swallowed up by repair bills.
While editor of The Herald-Gazette, we seemed to run a lot of weather related stories, and actually had our own correspondent, in Milford Bay....Mrs. Webster, I believe, who used to keep us informed about average temperatures, and precipitation amounts throughout the year. I don't know why it was, back them, in the early 1980's, but we got a lot of photographs and stories about bad weather of the previous century. My associate editor, Robert Boyer, who had operated the paper as a family business, for many decades prior to my arrival on the scene, used to run a column of recollections from the old newspapers, we used to keep downstairs, at 27 Dominion Street. So we'd run pictures of the main street, for example, with snowbanks about eight feet high.....with the caption, "Unusually heavy snowfall fifty years ago." There were some scary pictures of winters throughout the town history.....and where no picture existed, there were editorial pieces going right back to the early 1860's, about the truly inhospitable times of the rolling year.....and January got a lot of ink, even in the earliest days of the community press. I learned a lot about weather related news, through history, thanks to Mrs. Webster's stats, and Bob's weekly column, plus the fact we often had oldtimers drop by to share stories with us, about weather worse than we were having at the time. This would happen every time we ran a photo, or story about the latest snowfall event, as being particularly harsh or record setting. By the time the door opened to the office, the day after the paper came out, we'd be inundated with these retrospectives; and after my eleven years served with the community press, I had also inadvertently taken a course in "weather 101"..... picked up by immersion, from all the kindly remeniscenses. Along with this, I also received a lot of weather related lore, and how to know when the very next storm was going to bury Muskoka in drifts.
I was also given an opportunity, to look over the log books, from the Anglo-Canadian Tannery, in Bracebridge, from the early years of the century; and every day made reference to the weather conditions, which was enormously insightful, and backed up the newspaper accounts that had been re-published by Mr. Boyer. I also had access to school journals as well, and weather reports were often included on the same page, that attendance was recorded; and often notations, where it was explained that pupil numbers were low, due to a snowstorm. So folks, this winter isn't strange or particularly nasty, if you were to look at weather over the past century, or more. Just because we haven't had one like this for a couple of decades, doesn't mean we've entered the next ice age. There are experts who blame it all on global warming, and I'm inclined to agree with them to a point; but as far as precedents go, how come we had even more aggressive winters seventy-five, and a hundred years ago? Did it have something to do with pollution as well, or the decrease of the Ozone layer?
What all this weather-related experience offers me, as the casual bystander-historian, is the ability, (beyond the annual "coming of the groundhog," and the shadow-thing), to predict one hell of a spring flood upcoming. If I was still editor, I'd be running stories about floods in the past, and what makes the perfect flood condition with too much melt, too quickly, on a water-logged or frozen landscape. Meaning, too much water entering the rivers and lakes, all needing to exit the Muskoka Lakes over the Bala Falls. So we don't need much more snow to create the potential for more spring flooding. Last spring we had a lot more rainfall, which added to the late melt in April, and because the landscape couldn't absorb the additional moisture, it headed downhill, all the way from Algonquin Park; and that caused terrible flooding to many areas of our region. There's too much snow now, and we need a February thaw to lessen some of the volume. I worry now about an early spring, with sustaining warm weather, as I have seen before; the quick weather change from wicked to tropical. I can remember one year, not so long ago, raking our lawn during the March Break. This seems impossible for 2014, but stranger things have happened, and already this year, it has been three months worth of severe weather inside a month....late December to the present. By the averages of a lot of winters in the past, in this region, there's a good chance we're due for a lengthy period of warmer weather.....the kind shore dwellers will not like. A slow melt would be much better. If history serves? Take to the high ground! Make preparations for high water, the best you can, in the coming months, because it is looking very much like a repeat of last year's flooding. I understand, from some of my sources, that the lake water is already high.....or certainly more than is optimum before the spring melt. It's just my opinion....now, as an oldtimer myself; but there's a relevance to history here, and it does repeat. I've got a lot of corroborating evidence. Last year I watched as a dock, with two Muskoka chairs on it, went over the Bracebridge falls. First thing, is that if you have experience in Muskoka at all, you would know that the Muskoka River rises every spring to correspond with the run-off. It doesn't flood over its banks every spring season, but it will be as close as spitting; and if there were stats on just how many docks have gone the same route, over the falls, well sir, safeguards would be built-in....and the Muskoka chairs would come out when the high water subsides.
On days like this, I like to think back to the winter Saturdays of my youth, when I used to watch the old Red Fisher show, taped from his favorite "Scuttlebutt Lodge," to learn more about angling and outdoors living.....while I was inside looking out. So far this year, I've been spending more time at "The Lodge," than out in the wilds.
A LOOK BACK AT THE WORK OF A CANADIAN ART PATRON - DOUGLAS DUNCAN
EACH GENERATION HAS HAD A CHAMPION OF THE ARTS
ANTIQUE AND OLD BOOK DEALERS ARE HOBBY, AND SOMETIMES, FULL HISTORIANS, UNDER THAT CASUAL, NONCHALANT SHOP DEMEANOUR. THE FIRST STORY THEY WOULD HAVE READ THIS MORNING, IN THE DAILY PRESS, WAS THE REVELATION THAT AN EXCAVATION BELOW A PARKING LOT, IN ENGLAND, CONTAINED THE LAST REMAINS OF A COURAGEOUS WARRIOR, FROM THE LEGENDARY I5TH CENTURY WAR OF THE ROSES. IT HAS BEEN PROVEN, BY RESEARCHERS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER, THAT THE SKELETAL REMAINS, FOUND IN THIS RATHER COMMON, URBAN LOCATION, WERE THOSE OF KING RICHARD III; WHICH, ACCORDING TO A REPORT IN TODAY'S TORONTO STAR, (FEB. 4, 2013, PAGE 8), WAS "THE LAST ENGLISH MONARCH TO DIE IN COMBAT." THE NEWS ARTICLE IDENTIFIES AS WELL, THAT DNA TESTING OF THE BONES, WAS ASSISTED BY CANADIAN RELATIVES OF RICHARD'S SISTER, "ANNE OF YORK," WHO ACCORDING TO THE NEWS TODAY, WAS A POSITIVE MATCH. WHAT A GREAT HERITAGE DISCOVERY. AND BELIEVE ME, IT FUELS US HOBBY ARCHAEOLOGISTS, WHO WOULD HAVE GIVEN ANYTHING TO BE ON THE LIP OF THAT EXCAVATION, WATCHING HISTORY UNEARTHED. WHILE IT PROBABLY APPEARS, WE ANTIQUE TYPES ARE BEST SUITED FOR INDOOR STUDIES, MOST OF US STARTED IN THE FIELD, HUSTLING FOR OUR DINNER. SO EVERY NOW AND AGAIN, THE URGE ARRIVES TO GET BACK TO HOW IT ALL BEGAN……AND THAT'S ALWAYS A CASE OF, WELL, A SINCERE, HONEST LOVE FOR HISTORY. IT'S ALWAYS AN EXCITING DAY WHEN HISTORY COMES OUT ON TOP FOR A CHANGE.
REVELATION AND CONTEMPLATION ABOUT BEING A PATRON OF THE ARTS
I AM A TRIED AND FAILED ARTIST. MY WIFE DENIES THIS, WHEN AT TIMES I SKETCH SOMETHING INTERESTING, ON A BLANK PIECE OF PAPER, WHILE I'M TALKING ON THE PHONE. SUZANNE HAS SEEN SOME OF MY WATERCOLOR LANDSCAPES, AND KEEPS ASKING ME TO PAINT MORE. I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO READ MY WIFE, IN THIS REGARD, BECAUSE IF ALL OF A SUDDEN I QUIT EVERYTHING ELSE, TO BECOME AN ARTIST, SHE'D LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS……AND THEN, UPON AWAKENING WITH A START, COMMENCE TO BEAT ME OVER THE HEAD WITH ONE OF MY ABSTRACTS, THAT I GUARANTEE, SHE WON'T UNDERSTAND. MY LANDSCAPES, BY THE WAY, LOOK LIKE ABSTRACTS. I GUESS SHE IS REALLY JUST ENCOURAGING ME TO DOODLE FOR THE FAMILY ALBUMS.
SOME OF MY CONTEMPORARIES THINK I AM A FAILED WRITER. THERE ARE MANY WHO WISH THAT I WOULD TAKE UP ART INSTEAD, AND LEAVE WRITING ALONE. SUZANNE TELLS ME TO CARRY ON, AND LIKE THE BLINKERS THEY PUT ON RACE HORSES, THAT I SHOULD FOCUS ON THE TASK AT HAND. THAT I WATCH INSTEAD, FOR THE FIRST SIGNS OF THE FINISH LINE; AND PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE PEOPLE GIVING ME THE FINGER FROM THE GRANDSTAND. IF ANYTHING I RECEIVED FROM MY UNITED EMPIRE LOYALIST ANCESTORS, IT WAS A DEEP SEEDED STUBBORN CHARACTER THAT DOESN'T THWART EASILY. AS I HAVE ADMITTED MANY TIMES IN MY LIFE, IF I CAN'T PAINT, THEN I SHALL WRITE AS A SECOND CHOICE. THE COMPROMISE HAS BEEN MY DESIRE TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH ART AND ARTISTS, AND TO WRITE OF THEIR EXPLOITS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS. I AM ENVIOUS WHICH, IN THIS CASE, I HOPE IS AN ATTRIBUTE, UNLESS OF COURSE, I WAS TO BECOME SICKLY SWEET WITH MY REVIEWS, AND PROMOTE SOMETHING THAT IS OF A MUCH LESSER QUALITY…..JUST BECAUSE OF AN INFATUATION WITH ARTIST-TYPES.
AT UNIVERSITY, IN TORONTO, I USED TO SIT AND WATCH MY ARTIST MATES, WORK AT THEIR PAINT BOARDS, IN A VARIETY OF ARTISTIC ATTEMPTS, AND ON EACH OCCASION, AT BED TIME, THEY HAD TO ASK ME TO GO HOME…..AND CEASE AND DESIST BOTHERING THEM. I WOULD BE BACK THE NEXT DAY AND THE DAY AFTER THAT, AND IF THE PAINT BOARD HAPPENED TO BE A STUDY, OR A PRELIMINARY WORK, I'D ASK IF I COULD HAVE IT TO DECORATE MY ROOM. WHEN I GRADUATED, THE HARDEST PART OF THE MOVE BACK HOME TO BRACEBRIDGE, WAS ACCOMMODATING THE FIFTY OR SO PIECES OF ART I HAD BEEN GIVEN BY MY ARTIST FRIENDS. I'M THAT KIND OF ART HOARDER EVEN TODAY, BECAUSE OF MY UNCEASING RESPECT FOR THOSE WHO ARE UNAFRAID OF USING A PAINT PANEL, AS I WOULD THIS COMPUTER SCREEN, TO AIR OPINIONS OF THE WORLD THEY SEE…..
I AM ALWAYS ENCOURAGED WHEN I READ OR QUOTE FROM THE MEMORIAL BIOGRAPHY, OF LEGENDARY CANADIAN ART PATRON, DOUGLAS DUNCAN. LET'S RETURN TO THAT WONDERFUL LITTLE BOOK, AS WE LOOKED AT IN YESTERDAY'S BLOG. NOW HERE WAS AN INTELLIGENT, FAIR, AND ENCOURAGING PATRON OF THE ARTS IN CANADA. FEW WOULD DENY, WE NEED MANY MORE LIKE DOUGLAS DUNCAN, TO BOLSTER AND INSPIRE THE ARTS COMMUNITY.
"The opening page of Evelyn Waugh's 'The Loved One,' introduces an Englishman, exiled in California, who is trying to make sense of an article in 'Horizon,' on Scottie Wilson. Scottie Wilson was, of course, one of that very large group of painters whose careers owed much of their success to a friendly push from Douglas Duncan, at a crucial stage. The 'Horizon' article speaks of Douglas Duncan as a 'refined and charming man.' The author of the article obviously did not know him, and the phrase is oddly out of keeping with the general tone of the article. It looks as though the phrase had been supplied by Scottie Wilson himself, or perhaps that he had insisted on some such phrase being inserted," wrote revered Canadian author, Northrop Frye, as published in the text of the short memorial biography, entitled "Douglas Duncan - A Memorial Tribute," edited by Alan Jarvis, 1974, University of Toronto Press.
Frye adds, "If this is true, as it may well not be, it would be a good example of the way in which those who were fond of, or grateful to Douglas, might struggle for phrases to describe him, only to have the right one elude them. Of course he was a refined and charming man, but so have a lot of other people been, who never got anywhere near being Douglas Duncan. The phrase suggests something of a dilettante, which he was far from being. My own association with him professionally, was through Victoria College, where my wife was for years chairman of the Art Committee. The year's activity usually began by getting hold of Douglas. When suggestions for exhibitions did not come from him, they almost always referred to painters he knew about and had done something to help. Whenever he spoke, his encyclopedic knowledge came out in a context of complete simplicity and candor. He seemed to be a still centre in the swirling egotisms and aggressions and intrigues which characterizes the art world in all cities, and his critical judgements had the kind of impartiality that only a genuine sympathy can produce.
"We all tend to like what is like ourselves; if we try to be objective, we may eventually come to like, what is like our best self. Canadian history and politics have always been polarized between two tendencies; one aggressive, exploratory, and romantic; the other reflective, observant, and pastoral. The same polarization occurs in Canadian literature and painting. In painting, the aggressive and romantic tendency is represented by (Tom) Thomson, the Group of Seven, and Emily Carr; in the second group I think particularly of David Milne and LeMoine Ftizgerald. Tolerant and catholic as Douglas' tastes were, he had a strong temperamental affinity with the second group, and he had an extraordinary genius for discovering painters of crisp, delicate, and precise drawing and coloring, whose work was close to a kind of pictorial calligraphy," writes Northrop Fry. "I never go into Alumni Hall, in Victoria College, where he had arranged so many exhibitions, without thinking of him, in the centre of a great mass of paintings, with his little pieces of green felt for twisting the screws, hanging the pictures, arranging them, disregarding the very considerable pain that his disc trouble often gave him. It is a picture of extraordinary selflessness; hard, conscientious, and almost anonymous work done so that the artist would have another exhibition to chalk up on his record, and Victoria students would have pictures to look at. Paradoxically, the memory of him is far more vivid than the memory of even the finest of the pictures."
"In 1936 the Picture Loan Society was founded, with Douglas at first one of a committee and then, after awhile, solely responsible," notes his friend Norman Endicott. "This soon redirected practically all special book buying into picture buying (he was a trained book binder, and avid book collector), and gradually his own profession (book binding art) was put aside for the time consuming activities of a gallery and exhibitions. He bound no books after 1944. His own aims as a collector were expressed in a brief statement, based on an interview, in 'Canadian Art,' May-June, 1961. One sentence runs, 'I have no mission. I have merely assembled a large collection of oils, water colors, drawings, and prints that I have liked and that I continue to enjoy.' Save for a few pictures sold, without profit, to the National Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario. I think he never resold pictures he had himself bought, so that, as his collection grew, so did the storage problems. Until his father's death head had lived in the large family home, where, as the family and its activities dwindled, he had taken over more and more rooms (the billiard room being especially useful). When the house was sold in 1964, he moved into two adjoining apartments, but soon overflowed into a third, all three naturally equipped with hardly necessary kitchens, save that one could be used as a dark room for photography. He made an attempt to house the framed pictures neatly in racks, the unframed ones on shelves or in wooden boxes. He intended to buy more bookcases for his books. But at the time of his death two of the apartments still presented an engulfing scene of shelves, stacks, trunks, boxes, and cartons - primarily of books, pictures, and gramophone records, but also of correspondence, old programs. Christmas cards going back to childhood, and various objects accumulated over a long time."
Endicott notes that, "For many years, in all weathers and in at least three of the four seasons, Douglas spent quite a few weekends, and in the summer longer periods when he could, in Muskoka. There were also expeditions to the handsomer shores of Georgian Bay. With the pride of an amateur, he took a full and competent share in building his own cabin, carefully planned, and even painted a gallery gray inside. But as usual making no distinction between himself and others as victims of procrastination, the pipes to bring water to his sink were still not connected twenty years later, despite the necessity of carrying pails of water after more than once suffering from a slipped disc."
He writes of Duncan, "Not in any scientific sense a naturalist, he was nevertheless very observant and knowledgeable about wild flowers and ferns, some of which he brought back to chosen locations in his own woods - and in his searches for these he came to know the maple and beech valleys, and the cedar swamps of at least a few miles of Muskoka, in topographical detail, as well as with a most accurate eye for every effect of shape and texture, especially, perhaps, the more delicate; lichen on old logs, maidenhair spleenwort in a crevice of rock, the shades of color in a hillside of hepaticas in early spring. The photographs he made of veined rocks and whaleback islets in Georgian Bay, stumps and roots in the water in Algonquin Park, patterns of lines and shadows in winter woods etc., or, at close range, of his colony of round-leaved orchids in full but delicate bloom, are very good standards. Naturally (artist) David Milne's feeling, for the same effects and landscape was a link between them, but Douglas also liked Milne's comments on his Hepaticas; 'Do you like flowers? So do I. But I never paint them. I didn't see the Hepaticas. I saw, instead, an arrangement of the lines, spaces, hues, values, and relations that I habitually use. That is, I saw one of my own pictures.' Unlike the Group of Seven, Milne did not reach epic rhythms or alien harshness and grandeur, but painted like an intimate and old inhabitant of the scene, and this, without making any invidious comparisons, appealed I think, to Douglas. But Milne also painted from whatever might be in front of him, from paper bags as willingly as from Hepaticas, and Douglas did not buy pictures for their sentimental associations."
Endicott concludes, "Most of what I have been recalling is in some ways related to Douglas as a collector and bibliophile. A collector with admirable taste and judgement, an ardent bibliophile, may be a bore, or a man of little personal feeling, or attractiveness of character. Those who knew Douglas did not think of him first as the owner of pictures or books or other objects. His best books are now available in public libraries, his pictures a part of galleries across Canada. Douglas' friends remember the imaginative awareness of people as individuals, the sense of humor and the sense of the absurd which made him good company as well as a good friend."
There is a lot more to explore, in the life and times of Douglas Duncan, Canadian Patron of the Arts. Please join me again tomorrow, for a continuation of this brief biography, of a man I deeply admired……and who greatly influenced my love of books and art. Thanks so much for visiting today. I always appreciate your company for these stories about collecting, conserving and respecting antiques, books, art and heritage relics. Farewell for now. See you again soon.
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