Canada 3 Challenge - first book done!!

I am a

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I'm a

Spiritual Romantic Tree Hugger

Fun! Not many people are like me, only .14%! Well, of those who took this quiz, anyway. I also made my list up, 43 Things To Do in My Life, it's on my sidebar now. Rhinoa at Rhinoa's Ramblings has had something similar up on her blog for quite some time now, and I'm in awe of everything she has accomplished, as well as what is on her list. As I do things,I will cross them off, though some are ongoing, for every year. Like read 100 books a year!

As to that, well, I've made it to 50! Hurray! I'm still behind, but after reading 12 books in July - this is an all-time high for me, I think! - it's not looking quite so bad now.

Canada 3 Challenge



It's about time I posted about the Canada 3 Challenge! Hosted by John at The Book Mine blog, this is the third year of this challenge which celebrates everything good about Canadian writing. This year I am taking a different attempt to get to 13 books - 13 because we have 13 provinces and territories that make up Canada - I am reading a wide variety of authors and kinds of writing that interest me. Thus, I already have poetry - Slip/Strike, by Don McKay, from Newfoundland; a play - The Rez Sisters, by Thomson Highway, and for the first time Aboriginal writers are represented - not because I haven't read any, but because I had wrote much of what had been in print already, and now there's new books come to my attention: Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson, Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, and the aforesaid The Rez Sisters. The Rez Sisters is a reread for me, and I found it both hilarious and tragic the first time I read it, long ago in univerity. I have listed the books on my sidebar, and have left blank spaces for books to come to my attention this year. I might read some Lucy Maud Montgomery, or some Robert Munch with my kids, and catch up on Tanya Huff's fantasy series, as well as some books by Charles de Lint that I didn't get to last year.

Despite the fact I have not succeeded yet at this challenge, every year I am determined to, and this year is no different!

And to that end, I am very proud to say, I have already read one book!!! I am so delighted.

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, by Anna Brownell Jameson



This is not my cover, as I found a used edition that is out of print now. It is the journal of a woman who came to Canada in Dec 1836 to Sept 1837, to join her husband the Attorney General of Upper Canada. Their marriage was not a happy one, and this was one of her attempts to make the marriage look good. When she went back to England, it was with a settlement from him; they never divorced, but their marriage was over. While she rarely refers to him - at least in this abridged version - there is an air of painful loneliness relieved by the friendly people she met on her travels. The journal wasn't written to him, and it is full of matter-of-fact observations of everything she saw around her. It is now an invaluable record of early pioneer life in Ontario, and a glimpse of what the largest cities first looked like.

For those of us in Canada, there are those who are from Toronto, and those who are not. I'm one who is not, and I really loathe it. I've been several times, and it's one of the most unremarkable cities in the world. I was so happy when I read the very first paragraph of Winter Studies:

"Toronto - such is now the sonorous name of this our sublime capital - was, thirty years ago, a wilderness, the haunt of the bear and deer, with a little ugly, inefficient fort, which, however, could not be more ugly or inefficient than the present one. Ten years ago Toronto was a village, with one brick house and four or five hundred inhabitants; five years ago it became a city, containing about five thousand inhabitants, and then bore the name of Little York; now it is Toronto, with an increasing trade, and a population of ten thousand people.
What Toronto may be in summer, I cannot tell; they say it is a pretty place. At present its appearance to me, a stranger, is most strangely mean and melancholy. A little ill-built town on low land, at the bottom of a frozen bay, with one very ugly church, without tower or steeple; some government offices, built of staring red brick, in the most tasteless, vulgar style imaginable; three feet of snow all around, and the gray, sullen, wintry lake, and the dark gloom of the pine forest bounding the prospect; such seems Toronto to me now. I did not expect much; but for this I was not prepared."

Two months later she writes:
"There is no society in Toronto", is what I hear repeated all around me - even by those who compose the only society we have. "But," you will say, "What could be expected in a remote town, which forty years ago was an uninhabited swamp, and twenty years ago only began to exist?" I really did not know what I expected, but I will tell you what i did not expect. i did not expect to find here in this new capital of a new country, with the boundless forest within half a mile of us on almost every side - concentrated as it were the worst evils of oour old and most artificial social system, with none of its agrements, and none of its advantages. Toronto is like a fourth- or fifth-rate provincial town with the pretentions of a capital city."

The bold last sentence is mine. Because, that pretty well describes Toronto ever since. Even after the capital of Canada was moved later to Ottawa - chosen by Queen Victoria when she was blindfolded and picked out the capital with a pin, or so one legend goes - the more real version is that Kingston was too close to the US, and so was Montreal, both of whom were more logical choices due to their water proximity, but we had just fought two separate battles with the US, (1812, and the Rebellion of 1837) so Ottawa, which was far enough away that it couldn't be attacked within a day's march or so after landing on Canadian soil - was picked. I do wonder what she would have made of Ottawa, but she never came back to Canada. And despite becoming the provincial capital of Ontario, Toronto still acts like it is the central body of Canada, the most important city, through which all news and views of Canada should come. There is Toronto, and then there is the rest of Canada. Of course, in every province, there is that feeling! But Toronto is proud of the TV and movie industry centrally located there, the stock market located there, the big Bay Street Firms, and still imagines itself the center of Canada. So the rest of Canada hates it.

There, a quick lesson in Canada! Back to the book:

Anna spends a long cold winter in Toronto. The first part of the book is entitled Winter Studies because from Dec to April it is, of course, winter in Canada, and she could not really travel far. She takes one trip to Niagara Falls, but other than that she is house- and city-bound until spring finally, at last, arrives. As soon as the first steam-boat arrives from St Catharines and the south side of Lake Ontario, she is off exploring more of Upper Canada, and this is where the books becomes an absolute wonder and joy to read. From darkest coldest depths of winter, Canada changes to hot, humid summer days with frequent storms. Anna is tormented by mosquitoes and black flies as she journeys down to London, to Windsor, Detroit, and then up to Fort Michillimack, Sault Ste Marie, Manitoulin Island, and back down again to Toronto. She did this in four amazing months of traveling, mostly by canoe. This was an extraordinary voyage. She is witness to meetings between Indian agents and different Aboriginal tribes, and records the speeches, what the different kinds of people wore - she noted that Cree were different from the Huron, and from the Chippewa. She made friends easily wherever she went, and she is interested in everything she saw, and tried to record it as accurately as she could.

This is an interesting record of Upper Canada in 1837, as it was still being settled. I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys history, who is curious about the early days of Canada, who likes reading journals, or enjoys travel books. It is filled with Canadian beauty - our forests, our rivers and lakes, our lovely islands in the Great Lakes that are synonymous with images of Canada, especially as painted by The Group of Seven, the most famous artists to come out of Canada.

And for those of us who love books, I was heartened to read that in the depths of her only winter in Canada, Anna Brownell Jameson turned to books to get her through the darkest and coldest days.

It's a holiday Monday here in Ottawa, and it is rarely, a sunny day! So I'm off to my garden before I do some more reading: Book #52: In the Woods, by Tana French. Over half-way to 100 books now!!

I leave you with one of my favourite passages from Winter Studies and Summer Ramblings:

"We breakfasted this morning on a little island of exceeding beauty, rising precipitately from the water. On front we had the open lake, lying blue, and bright, and serene, under the morning sky, and the eastern extremity of Manitoolin Island; and the islands all around as far as we could see. The feeling of remoteness, of the profound solitude, added to the sentiment of beauty......Our island abounded with beautiful shrubs, flowers, green mosses, and scarlet lichen.....
This day we had a most delightful run among hundreds of islands; sometimes darting through narrow rocky channels, so narrow that I could not see the water on either side of the canoe; and then emerging, we glided through vast fields of white water-lilies; it was perpetual variety, perpetual beauty, perpetual delight and enchantment, from hour to hour."

The Canadian Settler's Guide - Catherine Parr Traill

Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill were sisters, who emigrated to Canada after their brother Frederick settled in Canada. It was 1832 when Catharine arrived in the Peterborough area of Ontario (northeast of Toronto). The Canadian Settler's Guide is her guide for women emigrating to the backwoods of Canada to settle. It was written in 1852, distilling her 20 years experience of living in the backwoods - deep in the dark forests that made up most of Ontario at the time. The settlers would arrive, and begin the painstaking work of clearing their land and setting up a cabin, a barn, and eventually clear enough to be able to farm. This is the guide that showed the second wave of settlers - especially the huge wave of Irish settlers arriving after the potato famine - in the 1850's and 1860's, as well as most other European countries beginning to emigrate then. The Canadian government was welcoming - encouraging - immigrants, as a way to secure hold on the land and grow into a nation. In 1832, when Catharine and Susannah arrived, Canada wasn't even a nation yet. It was under the control of the British Empire, and had settlements only as far west as London and Toronto. All the rest of western Canada remained to be developed. Canada was divided into Upper Canada (now the modern-day province of Ontario), and Lower Canada (Quebec and the Maritime provinces). Her book is based on her 20 years in the bush of Ontario.
I read this book with great interest, partly because I love history, and partly because during my own genealogical research I have discovered that one of my great-great grandfathers arrived in 1832 from Wales. He went to the Welsh settlement just outside London, which had begun to be settled in 1820 by Colonel Talbot. The Canadian government was anxious to put settlers in the area after the War of 1812 with the Americans. Detroit was well settled, but the peninsula between Toronto and Detroit was not. Another set of my ancestors arrived from Ireland in the 1850's, and settled in London Township. So as I read Catherine's instructions for building a log cabin - a shanty - and how to clear land, I thought of my own ancestors and what they must have gone through. Everything had to be done by hand (of course!), but what the book makes clear is that nothing went to waste -everything was used - because most often the settlers in the backwoods were very poor, and had to rely on their own skills and hard work for everything.
When Catherine wrote the Settler's Guide, it was directed towards women, who she felt had no instructional guide on what to expect when they landed in this new country. So she advises that those women coming from a village or town with a bakery, to learn how to bake bread, because they will have to bake their own if they are living away from a town in Canada. She discusses fermentation for bread, and advises growing hops for the fermenting process as brewer's yeast was always in demand and short in supply. How to grow an orchard, and begin a garden - there are so many useful tips for building a garden that work as well today as well as 150 years ago! She advocates growing as many vegetables as you can, and an orchard for the fruit, because these along with brown bread are the greatest for health! It is a book filled with sound, practical advice, and yet she doesn't forget about beauty - she says some flowers should be grown that will delight the eyes and spirits, and pretty an otherwise ugly yard, and for interior decoration, a rag carpet made up of the scraps of clothing, both kept the feet warm and added to the colour of the various rooms. She makes no bones about the poverty that most settlers are coming from and will experience the first few years as they wrest farming land from the forest; but she is also direct enough to say that only the lazy fail and fall into abject poverty in Canada; a comfortable living and the pride of owning your own home is what awaits those who come with an eagerness to work.
My favourite line is, in the section on fires (which were a great menace for most of the 19th century): "In cases of emergency, it is folly to fold one's hands and sit down to bewail in abject terror: it is better to be up and doing."
She adds little things like : "Canada is the land of cakes. A tea-table is generally furnished with several varieties of cakes and preserves."
If you are ever in Canada and driving in the countryside, most of the older farming houses have a verandah. She explains why: "Nothing contributes so much to comfort and outward appearance of a Canadian house as the erection of the verandah or stoup, as the Dutch settlers call it, round the building. It affords a grateful shade from the summer heat, a shelter from the cold, and is a source of cleanliness to the interior. It gives a pretty, rural look to the poorest log-house, and as it can be put up with little expense, it should never be omitted." Now you know!
Recipes for everything the backwoods settler would need to know are given, from potato bread to brown bread, to maple syrup and maple beer. Eating wildlife is covered, as well as keeping chickens and ducks. How to make cheese, 12 pages of corn - called Indian corn - varying from how to grow corn, to how to husk it, to how to make corn pudding, johnny-cake, hominy, fried corn, stewed corn, Indian pudding, supporne, and finally, corn straw beds and mats.
It is a fascinating compendium of early Canadian life, and is invaluable as a historical document of settler's daily life. She talks about the months of the year and what the settler generally did each month, and the weather to expect: for March, she writes: "The early part of March often resembles February,with this difference, the longer days cause a relaxation of the severe cold during the sunshining hours; the very surface of the snow thaws, patches of bare earth begin to appear towards the middle of the month; the weak but pleasant note of the little song sparrow and the neat snow sparrow in its quaker-like plumage may be heard and seen as they flit to and fro, picking the seeds of the rough green amaranth and tall woolly-stalked mullein which stand faded and dry in the garden patch or on the road side. The equinox is often attended with rough gales and snow storms: these past, the sun begins to melt off the snow, and a feeling of coming spring is experienced in the soft airs, and a look of life in the bark and birds. The rising of the sap is felt in the forest trees; frosty nights and sunny days call forth the activity of the settlers in the woods; sugar making is now at hand, and all is bustle and life in the shanty."

As I write this, we are beginning the second snowstorm for this week. Our sidewalks are not plowed yet from Wednesday's storm, so it is very difficult to walk anywhere. Buses let passengers off into snowbanks, which the city haven't had time to remove yet. We are expecting at least the same amount of snow, most forecasts are showing much more between tonight and early Sunday morning. If we get the 40 - 50 cms they are predicting (close to two feet) I will take pictures and post them here!!! The snow looks beautiful falling tonight - it began before I left work, and by the time I arrived home, the snow was falling in the lovely silence that comes with no wind, just the snow muffling all sounds so it is quiet and peaceful. I love this kind of snowfall. It is warm out (near 0 c), warm enough to not need a hat or mitts coming home. The tree branches and shrubs are covered with white (again!) and a couple of inches have already fallen. It is a beautiful winter night. Yes, Catherine Parr Traill was right - March is indeed like February! At least the early part of it so far......Tomorrow we get the winds and blowing snow. So from snowy Canada, I bid you goodnight, and I hope wherever you are, Gentle reader, you are warm and enjoying the weekend!