Later in the evening, after returning from Kendrick Beach, Dad settled in with a book and I decided to go for a walk. Tomorrow we'd be exploring Lyndhurst proper, but it was about to rain so I decided to walk only a few blocks away from the cottage.
First I will explain that the cottage we rented was one of three, on a property not much larger than any small town plot with a big house in the front and a large yard in the back. Except this yard contains three delightful cottages and a steep hill down to Lyndhurst Lake, and a dock and boat launch. All the houses nearby are similar, minus the cottages. From the street front, though, I felt just like I was in any small town, quiet and seemingly deserted on a summer evening. About 100 feet east of our cottages, Oakel Street ends at Camp Hyanto, an Anglican church camp that was currently quiet but in two short days would begin to percolate with youthful voices singing hippie Christian campfire songs. Just past Hyanto, not visible but indicated by a sign, is the Lyndhurst cemetery. Across the road from the cottage property is a massive empty lot that I was later told became a veritable Dionysian revel of country music and vintage cars and human excitement during the annual Lyndhurst Turkey Festival in September (I never quite managed to figure out how turkeys came into it). To the west is the little hashtag of Lyndhurst neighborhood streets (#smalltown). I went that way (#adventuretime).
I took the first left from Oakel Street on to Ford Street and walked back towards the lake, which was further away as the line of it extended more southerly. A sign helpfully let me know about a public boat launch at the end of the street, but I never made it there as I ended up talking for a fair while with a friendly local on her deck. She hailed me by shouting "Are you a Lyndhurster?" and we went from there. We talked about her house, built by a Loyalist (#oldschool) but not of course during the revolution (#longmemories). We talked about the town and she shared some gossip I could make no sense of, no knowing anyone (#towndrama). She asked me if I liked antiques and did I want to come into her house to look at some (#strangerdanger?). She introduced me to her cat (#cute). I envied her beautiful cottage (#cottageenvy). She told me about a secret swimming hole on the west side of Lyndhurst (#lyndhurstawesome). We parted ways and she said she might drop by our cottage (#introvertsworstfear).
After that I walked back up Ford and turned left to continue west on Oakel. I knew from Google Maps that at the end of this street was a ravine with a river, and I was curious to see it. The street was almost completely silent except the occasional rumbling of thunder, and it was unnaturally dim on the longest day of the year because of the heavy clouds. Everything felt surreal, or hyperreal - like a dream. I'd studied this street online, in preparation for my trip, and now I was on it. It was like reading a book and then finding yourself a character in it. It was a miraculous feeling to have been in one place, thinking about another place, and then be there. To being seeing the same sights, but to be also feeling wind and raindrops on my skin, to feel my feet walking the earth, to feel my soul knowing this place.
To be here. To be there. To be.
I began to notice that many of the houses were clearly abandoned, yet strangely neat. One house in particular, an old farmhouse, had peeling white paint, and was on an obvious tilt, and when I looked in the windows only blankness and broken furniture looked back, yet the lawn was neatly cut and flowers were planted around the edge of the house and in a pot on the back porch.
This immensely increased the surreal feeling.
Near the end of Ford Street, just coming up to the ravine, I passed a man working in a garage that spilled yellow light into the dusk. He felt like the only other person in the world at that moment, and I felt acutely aware of my aloneness and my strangeness and my unknowing of this town. I rarely feel more stranger danger in downtown Kitchener than I did in this tiny corner of Eastern Ontario. I also felt as though in translating my image from Google Maps into reality, I'd overlooked the intimacy, the privacy, of real life. Who was I, this strange person, to come exploring into this domestic space? Was it my street, my neighbourhood, my ravine, only, to discover? What secrets and lives and worlds lurked in the shadows, lives unknown to me?
The rain was coming, so I walked back to the cottage, deep in thought.
From the screened porch, Dad and I watched the lightening flicker and spark over the lake, until it was time to sleep.
II
Tuesday morning's plan was to explore the main street of Lyndhurst (unoriginally but appropriately entitled Lyndhurst Road) and locate the swimming hole I'd been told of the night before.
In the bright light of morning, the strangely well-cared for derelict buildings of Lyndhurst were even more stark and beautiful. Lyndhurst is composed of, essentially, three types of buildings: a) well-maintained old buildings that are falling apart, b) well-maintained old buildings that are not falling apart (all of which have strange architectural quirks that make them even more delightful than most small town Victorians), c) bungalows built in the 1980s. The main street was an exaggeration of this pattern, with larger buildings that looked even more injured and preserved.
At the east end of the drag, up the hill, is St Luke's Church, and at the west end, the Canadian Tire, a big box far enough away from the downtown that it feels more like a marker of a return to urban society than an architectural disruption. Heading east to west, we checked out the Green Gecko, a funky gift shop (well maintained Victorian), the library (80s bungalow), several blocks of semi-occupied derelicts with haunting murals and attractively peeling paint, and the small town apartments and houses where people were living their domestic lives more or less right on the street. Then, the diner and ice cream place, Wing's Bait and Tackle, an old mill turned antique store, and, heart of the town, the oldest extant bridge in Ontario, flowing gracefully over the river, which featured a riverside park and swimming/boating dock.
Beyond the bridge, on the south side of the street, ancient mansions, gracefully ruined, with neat lawns, and gardens of wild trees and Canadian Shield rock, require an up-close look to tell if they are occupied. Dad and I looked for tiny signs of life, marveling at the impossibility of knowing for sure what lives were lived here, if any, the strangeness of small towns to our urban eyes. I wandered through gardens half overtaken by woods, lost myself among trees and massive Shield rock, while Dad strolled on perfectly maintained front lawns that led up to crumbling foundations, all the while wondering if Miss Havisham watched us from upper story windows. In search of lost swimming holes, or the mysteries of other people's old dreams.
In all of these wanderings, we had yet to seen any sign of a path towards the swimming hole. Not that I expected there to be a sign (this isn't, after all, Waterloo, home of the WaterlooLoop), although I did see a cool record of fish-catchings at the Bait and Tackle Shop.
We stopped for a while to rest on the swimming/boating dock. I lay down on the wooden slats and peered into the water. Unexpectedly, little river fish swam up, about the size of my hand, finger to wrist. I watched them move about in the dusky water, their little explorings and retreats. I bravely put in a finger and let them nibble. I lay there for a long time, until I felt like we would always be friends.
Dad returned from wherever he'd been during my break from the world of human interaction and we explored up the north side of the river, where it widened into a sunny, marshy vista. But no swimming hole.
Our last effort, we decided, would be to follow Jonas St (one block west of Ford) up from Lyndhurst Road and see where that took us. We turned off the main drag and made our way past yet more bungalows, Victorians, and derelicts. As we came closer to the lake, a new type of building emerged: fancy cottages. The road turned east along the lake and became more rural, with trees close to the road and a wide field to the north west. As the road curved again towards the south, we noticed a small plaque by the road, and just beyond it, down a steep, loose rocked bank, the river, catching up to us again.
The plaque indicated that the field we'd just passed had once been a fairground, although now it was someone's front forty. I guessed this rocky entry to the river must be the entry to the swimming hole. The river was clear, relatively deep, and beautiful in the sunlight through the trees. I scrambled down in a flurry of excitement. Dad remained on top and refused to come down, reasonably asserting that the loose rocks might cause him to twist his ankle. I climbed back up, and vehemently exclaimed that I would find an easier path down for him. We continued down the road and a few paces later we came to a bridge, where the river turned suddenly east to meet with Lyndhurst Lake just after it flowed under the bridge. To the east of the bridge, where it met the lake, piled ruins of an older bridge sat atop Shield rock, and between them the river flowed over a small series of a plateaus, everything gurgling and yellow white and deep blues in the sunshine.
I found a path to the water via the scrubby bank on the far side of the bridge and made my way down. I called Dad to join me.
Dad refused.
I cajoled.
Dad refused.
I described the ease of the path.
Dad refused.
I described the awesomeness of being down on the cool, watery rock while he was up on the hot, dry bridge.
Dad refused.
I started getting into the water.
Dad began to explore the edge of the bridge.
I started wading in the cool water, describing how the rocks created steps down into the deepening lake.
Dad located what I later discovered was an unnecessarily difficult way down and began to navigate it.
I watched fish and repressed thoughts of leeches.
Dad arrived on the rocks and took off his shirt.
He sat down in the water by the tiny waterfall where the plateaus met and looked content.
I sat down in the slightly deeper water beyond and looked out at the lake.
We let the sunshine warm us, and reflected on subtle wonder of us being here, in this place, together.
III
I emerged from a haze of heat-strokey sleep later that day in a sort of daze. My travels had caught up with me and I was tired to the very soul. Luckily I was in the absolutely perfect place to do absolutely nothing.
I spent the early part of the evening lying on my stomach on the dock by our cottage watching the fish. Had I known the number of fish that make their home under this dock when I first got in the water the day before, I am sure I would have been even more tightly curled in the fetal position. Happily, I had been unaware. Now, I traced my fingers on the surface of the water and watched them come up, little grey cousins to the fish I'd met earlier that day, just smaller than my hand, to nibble my fingers. The water was fairly still, reflecting the sky. I sipped tap water that tasted like lake water. The dock, only loosely tethered, slowly drifted back and forth, moving me back and forth over the weedy landscape, the fish coming up and down, but also back and forth, as I drifted near and far from them.
As the sweet, sunny evening wore on, I wandered again, this time on my own, back to the main street. It was very quiet; the few things that had been open in the day were now closed. A pre-teen boy drifted past on a BMX; a woman sat in front of the library looking like she was waiting for a bus, but surely no bus would ever come. I wandered down Jonas Street to the north, where it ended at the marshy widened river. Nearby, a man sat in a car by the side of the library; the pre-teen cruised into an empty basketball court and did some listless tricks; over to the west I could hear the distant sounds of men working on cars, drinking, laughing, listening to country music. A wild tree lot revealed a ruined boat among the greenery with an orange cat perched on it. The cat stared at me for a very long time in the stillness.
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I turned back towards the main road and walked all the way to the bridge and back. As I walked, people began to emerge into my visual field, like fish swimming up to the surface of my awareness. A woman and her husband had a small tiff on a porch. A group of chatting women emerged from the library and one of them got into the car of the waiting man. A portly man and his portly son sat on the bench outside the Tackle Shop. Not for the first time on this trip, I wondered what people do in a place this small and quiet. I tried to imagine myself being friends or lovers with any of them. I don't know if other agoraphobics experience this, but whenever I travel, I always on some level orient towards the new place as a new home. I'm not sure whether this stems from a need to feel at home, or from an anxious need to imagine if I could survive emotionally if I lived here, a sort of byproduct of so many years of trying to meet all my needs within a few city blocks of wherever I am.
Just outside the Green Gecko, I ran into the cottage proprietress talking with the owner of that store. I ambled up as if I was running into old friends, and walked home with the proprietress. Along the way she told me she had just come from a meeting of the Lyndhurst Rejuvenation Committee. This is when I learned that all the derelict buildings are indeed kept in good shape in an effort to revitalize Lyndhurst. I also learned about many other interesting efforts being made on behalf of this small but well-cared for town.
Dad and I spent the rest of the evening (and several hours over the next few days) watching Season 4 of Orange is the New Black, which had just come out. My memories of well-tended, serene Lyndhust thus mix strangely with images of sanitized prison violence. Such is a vacation where one has unlimited access to Wifi.
