I gotta get past Toronto...

Toronto was lovely, and I saw many friends, and spent three days there.It was fast and warm and fun. I think we saw a movie. Or did we miss it? Regardless, I was thoughtlessly hosted and fed by Mr. David Alexander, and was proud to say that I was the only truck/tent-trailer combo in the Toronto region to get three days worth of parking for five dollars from the friendly barely-English-speaking ladies at the donut shop across from Dave's beautiful multi-level condo. Evenings were filled with my Legacy-friends--those guys who I've known since newspaper work meant three beers between pages, and two-thirty am deadlines. The champions of history, trapped willingly in the text-based bustle of Canada's publishing hub.
Anyway, some people think Toronto has one of the best transit systems in Canada. The buses run on time, and the subway is the oldest and best the nation has seen.
But those stupid streetcars. Sure. They're nostalgic and they look cool, with their big red corpses dragging aboveground on busy streets.
But their tracks are the reason this story is at all interesting.
It's barely a memory now, but at one point, after a wrong turn downtown, the trailer hooks the trolley tracks. It results in a weird dragging-skid, but at the time, I don't even bother checking anything. I'm certain, if tracks were bad for tires, then they would have ripped them up years ago.
So, I'm just driving along, wheels turning, motor motoring, music musicking, when I feel a bit of a rumble. I think something is wrong with the motor, so I turn off the music for a moment to listen. There's a hum, and it's only when I accelerate.
There's no place to stop and investigate further on the 401, so I keep going.
Then the trailer starts jumping up and down on one side. It looks almost comedic in the rear view window, but, as much as I'm enjoying my trailer's destruction, I figure I should actually stop and take a look. By now, I'm pretty sure that there's a flat.
I look. Phew. It's not a flat at all. It's a shredded band of rubber horribly twisted around the rim of the wheel. And it's not an old tire--I just bought that tire three weeks ago. The 15-year old tire on the other side grins contemptuously at me.
I take stock of my options. The crank for the jack for the truck is under the hood, so there should be a jack in the truck somewhere. I take a look, but I can't find anything. I try to wedge one of the non-lifting stands that I have (basically, it's a post) under the frame of the trailer, and pull the trailer ahead so that it props up under the trailer and lifts it.
After plowing the gravel shoulder of the highway up, and dragging the tireless trailer 10 feet forward through numerous stupid-looking attempts, a thought pops into my head. "Hey. I don't know if I have a spare, anyway.
So I set up the rickety, off-balance trailer enough to get at the emergency compartment under one of the trailer's seats.
There is a spare!
Oh. My. God.
This is one of the tires that came with the trailer. It is cracked to hell, and patched with some sort of cave-man latex/pine tar. Not surprisingly, it's also completely flat. I guess it's been in there for 36 years, so the only thing that is surprising is that someone hasn't thrown it out yet.
After ignoring more logical answers like going back to Toronto and waiting another day to get a new tire from a proper store, I decide to roll into Kitchener, which is mercifully close. unfortunately, there's still no jack to get the wheel off the trailer.
Using the power of science, and with necessity being the whore mother of using junk to lift heavy things, I devise a system where I wedge a tire iron under one of the legs of the trailer, wedge a piece of wood under the tire iron to make a lever, and then lift the trailer up a fraction of an inch. Then I loosen the leg of the trailer, lower it to the ground, wedge the piece of wood and the tire iron underneath again---I know this doesn't make sense mechanically, and there's a piece missing, but I can't remember what it is. Needless to say, it's a long, slow process that becomes slower when I slip and the trailer falls back down.
But it gets up high enough, I take the tire off and throw it into the box of the truck, and speed off to Kitchener.
The Canadian Tire lifts my heart, and I smile, glad to know that a giant chain store might be my salvation. Considering they're the ones that sold me the shitty popped tire three weeks ago, I'm really excited to replace it with a similarly shitty tire, and have it pop when I ran over a bug or some air or a ghost.
Luckily, they're not open at all. It is 5:30 on a Sunday in a small town, I guess.
So, I take the only option available to me to the gas station across the street. I hook the 36-year-old tire to the air hose, and try to fill it, watching as the air pressure expands the cracks in the surface rubber.
Amazingly, it holds air. I pour some water on the tire to check for leaks, and there are none.
"Well, sure," I tell myself. "Wouldn't that be interesting if I could drive all the way back on this ancient tire?" It sure would, dummy. It sure would.
So, I get back to the trailer (with the overpasses and such it's about 20 km back, so I illegally cross the median on the 401 as soon as I see the trailer, and bottom out the truck) and remember that I still have no jack. I try the stupid pull-up-on-posts technique again, and then the amazingly-slow tire-iron jack system, and put the sad spare tire on.
I lower the trailer, fold it back up again, and begin to drive off. Less than five minutes later, on a random glance in the rear view window, I see a small black chunk of something fly off at the speed of sound. It's almost comedic, the velocity that this little fragment of tire flies. But the tire holds its pressure.
The Thousand Islands Bridge looms, taking me to cheap gas and New York State. Logic would dictate that it would make more sense to stay in Canada, where it's safe, and where I could get health insurance if something went wrong, or, most importantly, where there's another Canadian Tire. But I carry on. The Thousand Islands Bridge is huge, and the view below is beautiful. It passes over little green islands, surrounded by little boats, and covered with little cabins perched on the rocks. The lady at the toll booth tells me it's $4.75 to cross the bridge. I give her $3.27 and an apology, and cross back into the United States.

Lingering in lower Ontario

Southern Ontario is beautiful in the evening. Leaving behind Leamington, with all its Ketchupy smell, is painful, but the slow drive on the small highway is soothing and peaceful, especially after my dips in Lake Erie. I slept in and goofed around in town after I left the retirement campsite, so I didn't actually get back on the road until 5:30pm.
So I'm driving along, with Lake Erie in tow, wishing for nothing. Both sides of the highway are lined with yellow-green summer grasses, and each driveway leads to a hundred-year-old farmhouse. The sun politely stays out of my eyes, but still warms my arm as I lean it out the window of the truck. I barely break 80km/hour most of the way up through the deep south.
Then I slam on the brakes. Tillsonburg! My back still aches when I hear that word! Stompin' Tom Connors has jumped into the middle of the road, his siren song luring me into the small town, made famous by a fading Canadian icon. I considered following the call, but decide that a picture of the Tillsonburg sign will suffice. It looks like the camera might have enough batteries to take one more shot, but I fumble, and the flash goes off, and I take a picture of nothing, and kill the battery. Oh, Tillsonburg! What will I remember you by, now? Luckily, a bug flies into my mouth while I'm outside, so I'll always have the taste of that little fella's guts.
Back on the road, it gets dark. I get tired. It's been less than three hours, but I realize I'm not interested in driving at all any more. If I had my way (I did! Why didn't I?) I would have stopped right in that twilight paradise and set up a homestead. Instead, I drive into Hamilton, drive stupidly through that dull town, whose downtown is old and dull-looking, and lacking in anything to do with steel, from what I saw, and then into Burlington (around it, really) and then into Oakville. I don't think I want to wake up my friends at midnight, so I start looking for signs for campgrounds in one of the most build-up areas in Canada.
Finally, like a tarnished beacon, I see a sign for Bronte Creek Provincial Park. And there's camping there. I turn up the exit. The sign aims me right. I turn right, and it says 7km to the park. Then I get to another intersection, and it says 7 more kilometers, to the left. And then I drive back into Oakville, since I've been skirting the park the whole time, and do a u-turn.
The thing is, I can't believe there's a park here! It's really hard to see which part of this area has actually been preserved. There's multicoloured ugly houses and condos, and wall after plywood wall covered with cheap vinyl siding, all newly schlepped into place. Four lanes of residential roads sprawl off in all directions, and bright white new sidewalks shine orange in the glow of a million new streetlights. There are no stores in this area, just houses. Just sprawl, trying to feed Ontario's unflagging hunger for affordable and not-so-affordable housing. I gag a little.
Finally, I turn down a long road where some trees still exist. This must be part of the park. A park ranger is parked across the entrance to the campsites, behind the gatehouse, and wants to know what I'm doing there.
"Camping. Or I want to camp."
He gets it. He tells me I'll have to pay tomorrow. I say sure.
The campsite is almost empty, sitting at the bottom of a hill, with tall oak and maple trees on one side, and tall grasses on the other. I don't see a creek. Mind you, it's pitch dark.
I set up the camper in one of the treed lots, collect some firewood from the underbrush and neighbouring campsites, stuff some paper and wood into the firepit, and try to light it. The paper ignites and disappears, while the wood, slightly damp from a recent rain, slumps over onto the ashes triumphantly.
I grab the last of the paper from the truck, light it, and rush to the trailer. I'm having a fucking fire tonight, regardless of what the weather and the wood and everyone else think. It's the first time I've actually camped at an old-school campsite with firepits and trees and quiet, so if I can't have a fire, I'm going to have a fit.
Inside the trailer, I've got cans and cans of chemicals from my ex's garage. I find some carburator cleaner, check the symbols on the front (flammable? Check. Explosive? Check. Poisonous? Who cares.), rush back to the fire, and fuckin' lay that shit onto the smoldering fire. It takes a moment, but finally, an orange fireball erupts under the wood. I lay off, and the fire flounders. Frustrated, I fully go insane, pumping the chemicals directly into the core of the flames, until half the can is gone. The wood, which now smells like gasoline, finally starts to burn on its own. I throw the can into the trailer triumphantly, wipe all the disgusting chemical off onto my pants, sit in my lawnchair in front of the fire, crack one of the Alberta Genuine Drafts I got in Alberta (duh), and read my book. Finally, I can relax. Peace. Quiet. Stars. Rustling?
In the bushes, I see devilish, glowing eyes, and shit my pants a little. Then I see another pair of eyes, behind the first two. I crank up my rechargable flashlight to full power, and see two stupid raccoons, rustling through the underbrush, attracted, I guess, by the smell of cheap beer, since I haven't really brought any food. I throw something at them, and hope they don't come back, but it's too late. Every time I hear something, I think those damn eyes are going to show up behind me, or right in front of me.
Finally, I go to bed. It seems weird camping less then three hours from where I last stopped, and less than an hour from Toronto, but in hindsight, it seems sort of in-character to find the only natural space for miles and miles and use it as a refuge from what I know will be a three-day immersion in the biggest city in Canada.
The next morning, it's the city that wakes me up with the sound of I-beams being pounded into the earth just over the park boundary. Above the earth berm that's supposed to hide the deadly creep of condos and houses, buildings rise and peek in on the privacy of this little oasis. I'd talked to the guards the night before, and they said that just two years ago, there wasn't much of anything around the park, but now, Oakville was creeping up to all the boundaries.
This is when I first realized the stark contrast between that little, lost town in Saskatchewan, slowly fading into nothingness; returning to agriculture, and this town, this village, this faceless bedroom community, devouring everything living and natural around it.
I know this is how the world works now--you buy land, you carve it up, you sell it, you retire. But seeing this in action again, at this scale, outside of Edmonton, and in every other city I passed through made it so much more blatant. And scary. Where will we get food when we live everywhere? Where will we go to hide from cities when we can't get away from them? How will people get out to these houses when there's no more gas to burn? I also thought it was a small but amazing kick in the face to the developers that governments still have enough power to set aside little places like this. I wish they'd do it more.
All this development is a scary thought for me. I don't know why more people don't seem more concerned. I guess they've got other things to think about.
Regardless, I pushed all this shit back down into my brain, packed up the trailer, and, as I was walking to get some water to refill the blue water container, I saw that someone had half-stuck a Bronte Creek Provincial Park sign onto the campsite marker next to mine. I pulled it off, stuck it to the bumper of the truck as a memento, and drove-stop-drove all the way up Dundas Street to the house of one of my best friends.