A Surface Well Scratched

Before departing on our present venture I took a red highlighter to my provincial maps, marking all the places having a war memorial featuring a soldier statue. The contrast in the marked maps is striking: at the extremes, Quebec and British Columbia have a paucity of marks, Ontario looks like a bad case of the measles. It might take a long while and many miles to see all of Ontario’s; on this trip we could only scratch the surface. We picked a route that yielded a fair sample, and a diverse one.

To date we have visited 44 cities, towns and villages to contemplate and photograph cenotaphs. That is just the tip of the iceberg – a couple of hundred ‘statued’ memorials dot the country – but enough to understand and appreciate some of the variety. If you ask Jan the best part of the quest is the ancillaries that accrue as we wend our focused way across the landscape. At tiny Eugenia ON Jan pronounced the game plan brilliant. Not of course because she’s suddenly become as enthused a student of Great War remembrance as I am, but due to the pleasant surprises arising from going to places we would otherwise never have seen in our lives.

The Eugenia epiphany occurred in the lively Beaver River Cafe where we tucked into troutburgers and scored a boxful of pickled asparagus and other locally produced specialties. We went to Lindsay to admire the Emanuel Hahn sculpture topping the cenotaph but our memories of Lindsay will probably be commandeered by the ‘ribfest’ we joined across the street. Ribfest purveyors from far and wide compete loudly and colourfully to provide a quarter, half or full rack for a few or perhaps more than a few dollars. Local intel led us to the Camp 31 stand. We were entirely content with our proceeds.

We chat up people along the way. At diminutive Kenora ON – where the Thistles won the Stanley Cup in 1907 – we conversed with a small gang of people gathered on the steps of the cenotaph. One woman pointed out a name – M. Land – on the bronze tablet listing Kenora’s war dead. The M is for Moses, her grandfather; Moses, an Objibway hunter-trapper, enlisted barely out of his teens in 1916 and died a year later in the mud of Passchendaele. Our memorial guidebook – and essential companion on this trip – led us to Grunthal MB. It turns out that Grunthal is populated by the descendants of Mennonites – German pacifists. If there is a war memorial statue at Grunthal no one knows about it. We reaped rewards anyway – an excellent lunch of boiled perogies and farmer sausages, and the acquaintanceship of Ron Robbins who spends his retirement worthily: making low-power FM radio transmitters for African villages.

A sad moment interrupted an otherwise sunny morning as we made our way across Manitoulin Island ON, past groups of migrating sandhill cranes and turkey vultures. Jan’s CBC Radio app informed us that NDP leader Jack Layton had succumbed to cancer. After Jack’s shocking press conference of July 25 I had expected this outcome but the news nonetheless packed a wallop, and the wallop lingers. I am one of millions who grieve the loss of a great, big-hearted Canadian.

Now we are in Winnipeg, 5,000 km behind us, paused to visit Steve and Elizabeth. I spent most of Friday on familiar ground, helping with a construction project. On Friday evening we all went to watch minor league baseball. On a perfectly blithe summer evening, in a jewel of a ballpark, we saw the last home game of the Goldeyes' regular season. The hometown boys won handily over the Fargo-Moorehead Redhawks. I got peanut shells all over my new Goldeye tee-shirt. Regular season champions, the Goldeyes celebrated as though they’d just won the World Series. Players spilled Gatorade tubs on manager and GM, just like they do in The Show. The team owner thanked loyal and supportive fans by way of an impressive fireworks show.

Today being Saturday we’ll look to get into some suitable trouble with the kids. Tomorrow we’ll saddle up and follow unfamiliar back roads toward more memorials – and maybe a few more happy surprises.