Tale of the traipse
What is the essence of our identity? Alex Ballingall hiked part of the Trans Canada Trail and learned the answer is underfoot
Take it from someone with the sore feet of experience: If you walk far enough in this country, you’re going to pass through more than a single Canada.
This gigantic land of primordial remoteness and sky-scraping mountains, snow that never melts and prairies vast as oceans — I saw none of that on my journey.
The Canada I walked through on a recent monster hike was one of rural roads and motel rooms, paved-over rail lines and asphalt parkways. Suburban homes and barn-strewn pastures covered most of my vistas, and the people I met were so generous that one man offered to (ahem) help me unwind.
That’s the beauty of the Trans Canada Trail. It has everything from Group of Seven splendour to roadside propositions.
Timed for completion in this 150th year of Confederation, with a fresh infusion of money from the feds to boot, the trail is a long sequence of regional pathways connected under one banner, offering travel- lers an ostensible route by foot to all three coasts and across the whole of Canada. The project has some satisfying historical echoes of the great continental railway of the 19th century and the cross-country highway that runs from Victoria to the tip of Newfoundland.
And like those celebrated precursors, the trail can be seen as a thread across the breadth of the land, something tangible to point to and bring us together in all our geographic and cultural differences.
To mark the occasion of this country’s birthday, and to ruminate for long, lonely hours about what it means to be Canadian, I walked a 260-kilometre stretch of the trail, from Queenston Heights in Niagara-on-the-Lake to downtown Toronto. It was a relatively tiny jaunt on the trail that snakes through Canada for 22,000 kilometres but it took me a whole week, while my FitBit clocked my exhaustion at about 50,000 steps per day.
Being from B.C., I thought of it as a chance to slog through a stretch of this country that I don’t know much about.
Many of us don’t get to do that, and spend most of our lives in our own corners of Canada. But the trail is an invitation, a new conduit to connect with each other. So I took a walk.
The first dawn broke moments before I emerged from the woods onto the dew-slick grass at the top of the bluffs in Queenston Heights.
Sunlight touched the statue of Isaac Brock, who stood on his towering spire 56 metres above. I watched the light expand through the foliage of the maple, elm and other deciduous trees and soon illuminate the whole park where one of Canada’s first nationalistic myths was born.
It was an October morning in 1812. American soldiers had crossed into British territory to occupy these forested heights at the south end of what is now Niagara-on-the-Lake.
The story goes that Brock jumped on his faithful steed, whose name was Alfred, and galloped south from Fort George to lead a charge against the invaders from the foot of the heights. He hopped off Alfred and tore into the bullet-buzzing melee, where he was promptly shot in the chest and died.
Thus began his journey to posterity, for Brock’s troops — a band of British soldiers and volunteers joined by Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous fighters — took the hill back from the Americans, who scuttled across the nearby Niagara River whence they came. And though many others died that day, including Alfred the horse, it was Brock who was lionized as the “Hero of Upper Canada” and awarded a prime spot in the firmament of Canadian legend.
It’s a good story with which to begin my journey, because it highlights two things. The first is that our sense of nationalism has always been opaque. Is Brock’s story a tale of British pride at having preserved the colonies from American takeover? Was there even a sense of “being Canadian” at that time, and if so, how did the French and Indigenous peoples fit into that? How do we all fit into that now? The second thing the story shows is that, even before this country existed as “Canada” — a distinction we got in 1867 — our existence as a physical entity, and more recently as a cultural one, has been threatened by the United States.
I walked the paved path through Queenston Heights along the edge of the gorge that drops to the frothing Niagara River. On this side was the Canada that Brock and his troops helped preserve; on the other was our leviathan neighbour.
Canada has long been a precarious enterprise. With the threat of Quebec separatism roiling through the last half of the 20th century, and still burbling at a lower temperature today, the shadow of American influence has always prompted questions about what it means to be Canadian.
It’s been more than 50 years, after all, since George Grant famously eulogized Canada in his seminal book, Lament for a Nation.
He argued that not only our sovereignty, but our distinctive British Tory ideology of “peace, order and good government,” was eroding in the face of economic and cultural integration with our American neighbour and its attendant tide of modern individualism.
We were destined, in his view, to become little more than a “branchplant” society, a provincial outpost of the U.S. global empire.
Our answer to this has often been that we’re the “mosaic,” the collection of peoples and nations with various histories that are assembled in the shape of a country. None other than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said there is no “core identity” here, and most of the people I met on the trail agreed that one of the key markers of Canada is its ethnic and linguistic diversity.
I walked past the mind-blowing spectacle of Niagara Falls and carried on south toward Fort Erie. I found Dave and Wendy Wyatt, a retired couple, smoking cigars in camping chairs by the river, enjoying the shade and staring across at the U.S. side.
I sat on the grass between them and asked how we’re different from the people over there. Wendy quipped that she’s not visiting while Donald Trump is president. She said Canadians are different because we’re more accepting and open. I thought of Trudeau, photo opportunity or not, hugging Syrian refugees at Pearson airport.
Dave added that we’re different from Americans because of the way people act abroad when you tell them you’re Canadian. Plus, he said, there’s our health care system.
“You feel that you’ve helped people, right? You’ve been in a country that’s thought of other people.”
Our communitarian spirit versus their cowboy individualism — that might be the biggest difference. Who’s to say? We’re speaking in generalities here.
I trundled down the road for several hours. My bag was swollen with 30 pounds of camping gear, clothes and dried food, and it was starting to feel heavy.
I must have been a pitiable sight, because near the end of the day, as I passed a row of homes outside Fort Erie, a voice called down from the balcony of a home beside the pathway. It was Anne Yurkiw, who sat on a swinging love seat with her husband, Larry.
She said she’s a registered nurse, and insisted that I stop right there and come in for some ice water. It was some good, old-fashioned Canadian communitarianism.
The next day I walked in the beating sun along an old rail line west of Fort Erie. A cluster of cyclists approached. One of them was a man in spandex with a bushy moustache. He called out: “How far ya walkin’?!” “Toronto!” I said. “GOOD for you!” responded a woman who was biking in the group. She said it in the way you’d congratulate a teacher’s pet for acing a test that doesn’t matter.
I watched the cyclists get smaller on the path ahead, which was flat and dead straight, until they disappeared into the blurred-out horizon.
The immensity of Canada is one of its undeniable characteristics. Northrop Frye, the famed thinker from the last century at the University of Toronto, called it “our huge, unthinking, menacing and formidable physical setting.” The wild that surrounds us provokes a sense of “deep terror,” he argued.
Those of us who’ve walked alone in the woods at night or been lost in the backcountry, far away when it’s cold, will know what he’s talking about.
Frye thought the terror of our natural setting actually gave us the distinct Canadian quality of looking out for each other. The land itself, in other words, accounts for the communitarian quality that Dave and Wendy told me makes us different from Americans. Frye called it our “garrison mentality.” This country is scary and inhospitable, so we need to stick together to get by.
Bud Heussler was resting on a bench beside the trail just east of the town of Ridgeway. At 84, he had a gentlemanly air in his blue shirt and beige pants. He told me that after he retired more than 20 years ago, he started walking the trail to pick up the trash that people left behind. He’d do 150 bags a summer, he said.
He only stopped a few years ago when he got mononucleosis and suspected it came from the garbage.
I walked for a while with Bud as he finished the stroll he does every second day to loosen up his back after surgery a few months ago. He waved and said hello to everyone we saw.
“Whether it’s Canada or anywhere else,” he said, “I think people enjoy being out in the woods.”
It certainly wasn’t terror of the land. Like a vacuum, maybe the wild space of this country has a way of drawing us in.
I hobbled through the centre of Port Colborne on the third morning. The town sits on Lake Erie at the south end of the Welland Canal, that 19th-century engineering marvel. Hulking freight ships floated offshore as they waited to take the series of locks north to Lake Ontario. Jo-Ann Karn waved me over to where she sat smoking cigarettes with her friend Nancy Green outside the local taxi garage. They were cleaning and had taken a smoke break.
When you’ve been walking in the sun for days, and you’re sunburned and your backpack has too much stuff in it, friendly little conversations can seem like monumental gestures of humanity.
And so it was with Jo-Ann and Nancy.
Jo-Ann, who is 56, spoke with a rasp in her voice that made me think of my grandma. She had the same warmth, too. We spoke about Canada and the cost of beer and how JoAnn loved the prime minister’s father. Nancy joked about how drunk people get in town during the summer festivals, and told me she’d been to Ottawa once on a school trip in Grade 8.
When I left, I was hit with a selfconscious feeling. Jo-Ann had said she dreamed of moving back to Toronto, but that rents are too high. “I can’t afford it,” she’d said.
I walked along the lakefront neighbourhood of the town and on to the forested outskirts, and started wondering how they saw me, the reporter expensing meals and motel rooms to a media corporation, wandering a long road just for kicks and a whimsical story. Was there a gap between us, and if so, was there a way to bridge it? Nancy had mumbled something before I walked off about coming back for the Canal Days festival this summer, and then scrawled out a note for me. At the edge of town I pulled it out. She had written, “Come spend time with us.”
The trail veered back onto an old rail line. The path was bounded by leafy trees and clumps of fragrant lavender and daisies. Birds tweeted in the branches and bushes, sometimes flitting across the track before me and jumping from tree to tree as I walked.
That afternoon the trail merged onto a series of country roads, where signs at the end of long driveways advertised free scrap metal, firewood for sale, and opposition to the wind turbines that dot the area and sound
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else. This is where I chose to live the rest of my life, and this is where I’m going to be. I just love it. My kids have excelled here, done great. Yep.” DAVE MUIR ORIGINALLY FROM GLASGOW, MOVED TO HAMILTON IN 1974
sort of like landing planes.
There was a lot of roadkill. Festering raccoons were the most common. Frog corpses, too, smushed thin as cardboard and baked into the asphalt by the heat of the sun. Birds with necks twisted at disgusting angles popped up occasionally on the road’s shoulder, sometimes with wings flayed across the gravel where they had died.
The most interesting specimen was a turtle about the size of a rugby ball. Its shell was cracked open, presumably from the impact of a car, and flies buzzed around its face.
The scene was a fitting companion to my gathering dread at having taken this walk. I wasn’t even half done yet and my feet were swollen and blistered. Pain rang with each step, up the Achilles tendon of my left foot and through the out-facing ligaments of my right.
I somehow got to Dunnville without trying to hitchhike, and checked into the Riverview Motel. It was the 45th birthday of the proprietor, Chirag Kumar Patel, who moved there from India last year to buy the business and live with his mother, wife and two children. He told me with a glint of mischief in his eye that walking between towns is much more common in India.
I grunted, said thanks for the room and hauled my body to bed, where I slept like roadkill until morning.
If you ever find yourself wandering for hours in the gravel on the side of a rural highway in southern Ontario, and you’re beaten and bedraggled and barely keeping it together, I implore you to stop in on the good people of Cayuga. They’ll get you sorted out.
In my case it was the lady at the local pharmacy, who only needed a second to look at me before I was shown the extra strength Advil and had a set of soft boot insoles pressed into my hands. Also the women working the post office: They helped me mail back the mound of stuff I’d overpacked — two-man tent; camping stove; sleeping bag; propane canisters; bags of dried food; steel pot — and gave me a couple of cold bottles of water.
It may have been the exhaustion, but these people inflated my spirits like a Wacky Waving Inflatable Tube Man.
I floated on that high into the Back 40 Tap & Grill, where I slugged back a can of pop and devoured a chicken burger. Five men in their 70s and 80s sat around a wooden table drinking tea and coffee. Having inhaled my meal, I walked over and asked to join them.
Lloyd Kindree, a 74-year-old farmer in shorts and a T-shirt, told me that since they all retired they’ve come here five days a week to “shoot the breeze” and share a warm drink. His friend, a man named Bruce Miller who drove a truck he calls the “Kerosene Cadillac,” interjected about their retirements: “Put it this way, nobody’ll hire us!”
The men explained how they’d worked the land around here as farmers for decades. “Fella used to make a living off 50 acres,” said 80year-old Sam Rounce, bemoaning the rise of industrial farming that has squeezed out smaller businesses.
Miller riffed on the sentiment. “To me, computers belong in spaceships. Maybe hospitals.”
I left town not long after that, still feeling the buzz from my lighter backpack, the Advil, and the kind people of Cayuga. The trail continued for a while on the side of a country road, which snaked north up the west side of the Grand River, through a rolling landscape peppered with barns and crops, grazing cattle and bales of hay. The sky above was smothered with billowing grey clouds, which let through shafts of light that cut across the surrounding hills.
The men in Back 40 clearly felt a kinship with this land. It was the centre of their lives, and they’d earned the right to grouse about how it has changed.
But like every millimetre of Canada, this land has a deeper story.
Since at least the Beaver Wars of the 17th century, the entire area was the territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations, at least until it was gradually occupied by people from other places. Colonizers, you’d have to say.
The Haudenosaunee were a confederation before Confederation. The union of five, and later six, Indigenous nations occurred centuries ago — researchers have pinned their government’s creation to the year 1142 — and the group is believed to have been sovereign at one time over the land from what is now St. Louis to the Toronto area.
The nation also joined the British in the War of 1812, with a prominent leader named John Brant fighting with Brock at Queenston Heights. They were later promised tracts of land on both banks of the entire Grand River, from its mouth at Lake Erie to as far north as Orangeville.
And yet today, the region’s Haudenosaunee territory is officially confined to a much smaller reserve west of Caledonia.
I had hoped to hike the area with one of the nation’s clan mothers, who are respected leaders in the community, and had tried to interview people who live there, but arrangements fell through in the end.
I figured, as I passed along a wooded path by the river, where a boy fly fished and a heron took off in the orange light of dusk, that it’s not like anyone would need to explain their connection to this land to me.
But does this diminish the Back 40 guys’ bond with this place? I don’t think so. It just makes things complicated.
Let’s not forget that, while Canada’s 150th is an innocent birthday bash to many, to others it’s a celebration of colonialism and decades of forced assimilation, the anniversary of the political system that created residential schools and generations of trauma.
There’s a relevant and evocative phrase written by the Coast Salish poet, Lee Maracle: “Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?”
We have different worlds in this country.
I plodded along the leafy escarpment that bisects Hamilton on the following afternoon. Two men approached walking their bikes. I saw that they wore matching hats with Scottish flags on them, as well as blue shirts that said: “Keep Calm and Eat Haggis.”
John “Foxy” Fox and Dave Muir grew up in Glasgow on opposite sides of the River Clyde, but didn’t meet until after they both moved to Hamilton in1974, Foxy to work 33 years in the Stelco plant and Muir to ply his trade in electrical motor manufacturing. Their daughters were in the same class at school, and they’ve been friends ever since.
“It’s the best country in the world right now,” said Foxy.
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” Muir added. “This is where I chose to live the rest of my life, and this is where I’m going to be. I just love it. My kids have excelled here, done great. Yep.”
And while Foxy conceded that there’s no “black pudding or haggis or Glenfiddich” to serve as cultural touchstones here — that’s debatable, by the way: poutine, bacon and beer, anyone? — he thinks it’s great that you can feel at home in Canada no matter where you’re from.
Below the escarpment where Cannon St. runs through downtown Hamilton, Alex Gibaldo and Peter Hanson sat outside a café drinking coffee.
“We’re a cultural mosaic, right? That’s what they call it,” said Gibaldo, a 26-year-old who has lived in Hamilton most of her life.
“I don’t think there’s an overarching identity for Canada. Everyone associates with it a little differently.”
I asked them what they think holds us together, and Hanson told the story of when he moved to Hamilton from Nova Scotia when he was a teenager. It was the mid-’90s, and he took up with a group of skateboard- ers in town, who welcomed him and became a supportive group in his adopted city. They even gave him a nickname, “Popeye,” because of his sizeable biceps and origins in the Maritimes, where sailors live.
In other words, they were nice, he said. Most of us are.
“I think that’s one thing that does hold us together,” he said.
A storm broke that evening as I crossed the bridge into Burlington. Buffeted by wind and rain, a man who appeared unassuming and ordinary emerged from a park and offered an intimate encounter. Apparently, or so he told me after I had politely declined, the area is known for that sort of thing.
After wading through shin-deep puddles near the lakeshore, I found my motel. Once inside, I discovered a couple of deer ticks gulping blood from my lower limbs. Then I noticed my jacket pocket had filled with rainwater and short-circuited my iPhone. My recorder was soaked, too, but somehow survived the trauma.
On the last day, a thin mist pervaded the air and smudged out the line between the sky and Lake Ontario. The trail wound through Oakville and Mississauga and into Toronto, where I saw the CN Tower poking through the cloud-enshrouded cityscape of my destination.
I had asked maybe three dozen people what it means to be Canadian. Brittany Hall, who was eating a shawarma in a park in Burlington one day earlier, told me she thinks it’s how our plethora of cultures and traditions allows each of us to cherrypick elements of how we live — from the cuisine we enjoy to the god(s) we worship.
Jessica Pan, who moved here from China, said it means a better life and education for her daughter.
And Giovanni Ling, a 24-year-old who’s saving up to open a hostel in South America, told me that being Canadian is to be open-minded and polite, and to enjoy the opportunities we share.
I felt they were onto something, but figured Canada and what it means to be Canadian are elusive and multifarious concepts. The land, the people and our varied pasts mingle in some unknowable way to make us Canadian.
The trail, then, is a symbol not so much of how we are connected as one people, but of how we have the potential to learn about each other if we want to.
I met a lot of people on the trail, and though they were all friendly, I barely scratched the surface of who they are and what it’s like to live in their skin. It was the same with the path itself. The stretch I had travelled was but a sliver of the entire thing.
The rest of it is out there waiting to be walked and discovered — like an invitation.