Greenwich

 

This looks really familiar - I feel like I saw this archway in Enola Holmes. Queen Ann Court, University of Greenwich. Update: I was right!!

London has a different type of duck than Waterloo. An orange beak! 

Conestoga Mall

 I'm becoming more and more confident going to Conestoga Mall if Mike is with me. For a long time I was able to go on my own, and then I wasn't, and now I'm sometimes able again, but it's definitely easier with Mike.

The mall has a very particular feel to me - when I am there, I feel accomplished, since it's not easy to actually get there, emotionally. I also feel like I'm in this world I know is there, but don't have as much contact with: the world of ordinary people. I didn't go to the mall at all for years and years, during a certain time of my life when I was more agoraphobic and lived further away from it. When I started going again I realized how different life is when you mainly shop at smaller stores downtown, or a few big box stores in a neighborhood plaza. The mall is on an entirely new level.

First, there are just so many, many things. I've experienced a lot of consumerist limits as an agoraphobic person, especially before online shopping. I could buy the clothes and shoes near my house. There used to be a Reitman's uptown and that was the only place I bought work clothes. I went to Zellers before it became Walmart (though I rarely buy clothes at Walmart since it feels so low quality). I often bought things a Giant Tiger next to Breithaupt Park. And of course, thrift - there used to be a lot near by.

The first time I went to the mall again after a long hiatus, it was to get a cord for my Mac, and I walked through The Bay to the get to Apple Store and was blown away. Memories of endless hours of shopping in high school and university with girl friends came back, but there was also a new feeling of just incredulity at the abundance that I had not experienced in years. I even took a picture of myself outside The Bay, me smiling in front of the long, brightly lit and coloured hallway, very happy with myself and feeling very normal. The next time I went was because I needed bike shorts, something that would be nearly impossible to find anywhere near my home. The feeling that I could go to the mall that had a huge amount of products and choose on and buy it made me feel like I had the utmost of power and free will a human could had. Of course, I was very anxious the entire time, but the sort of anxiety you might have if you were exploring the Artic or meeting the King - nervous, but like, you're fucking doing it.

I've gone maybe ten or 15 time since then, over the past six years, and the thrill is definitely still there, though I am less overwhelmed. I'm still amazed by the selection and mildly disoriented by the lights and music. It feels like a theme park.

Today I was very strategic (and Mike prefers that since he does not like to drift within a mall) and got what I needed plus some other stuff hard to find near my house. I noted I did not quite feel so much the sense that I had to buy everything (feast or famine) or that I could never keep up, no matter how much I bought (social anxiety). 

Looking back over my life, I grew up without extra money for clothes and accessories. My youth and pre-teen years, I longed to fit in sartorially but we couldn't afford it (plus I had no sense of mainstream style, being, then as now, a weirdo.) Then it was the 90s and we all wore thrift and made judgements of mainstream culture, of fitting in, of buying expensive clothing with labels. Especially going to art school, we embraced weirdness. Next it was my university activism days, where aesthetic judgement was layered with moral judgement (I still cannot buy any product made by Nike). The AdBuster days, where I remember marching through Fairview Mall with a bunch of people drumming and yelling Buy Nothing on what is now Black Friday. 

Ok, I'm glossing a bit. There were lots of times in high school and university where I went to the mall with friends, as I said, for the quintessential activity of window-shopping and eating New York Fries in the food court. But it didn't matter whether I judged consumerism or yearned for style - I couldn't afford it, so I was ambivalent.

Fast forward a bunch of years where agoraphobia and other interests kept me away from the mall. I returned in my mid-thirties when I started my first well paying job. Now I had the money and I was starting to get the physical access again! Cue consumerist overwhelm.

That was about 6 years ago and I honestly still don't know how to relate to having the ability to go to the mall and the ability to buy what is offered there. How do people make these choices? I get being at a boutique Uptown and making the decision whether you'll drop 200 or not on a designer dress, the only one you like in the shop. I get how you can go to GT Boutique and drop 200 on an entire wardrobe for the season. But I don't get how you can figure out which of the fifty stores and million brands you should pay a medium amount of money to buy a couple products from. I really don't know how people make the choice. 

I found myself just settling on brands that either evoked not being at the mall (Roots, MEC) or brands that I desperately wanted to buy as a teen (Gap). Then Roots became crappy quality so recently its just Mike goes to Indigo and I got to the Gap and get a bunch of jeans so I don't have to buy more pants for a few years. That kind of shopping. But it's not because I'm truly a minimalist. I have come to really love fashion and understand it better than I used to. I just don't know how to make a decision within such abundance. I suppose if it was infinitely wealthy, maybe it would be easier - but then I would definitely feel morally uncomfortable with the potential waste.

Which leads me to my experience at the mall today. As my anxiety gets less and less at the mall and I'm more and more familiar, I experience it less like a theme park ride and more like a park. My mind isn't so engaged by the thrill of novelty and the hard work of cognitive behavourial therapy, mindfulness and breath work. My wallet can afford generally speaking what I want, and my aesthetic sense can, if not make a decision, at least understand the elements of wardrobe building, and balancing trends with classic and personal style. I feel more ... competent? I think my brain has more capacity.

After reading a great analysis of the connections between hyper-consumerism, hoarding/clutter and emotional needs in Tracy McCubbin's Making Space for Happiness, I realized that, as she says, consumerist culture to the level we are experiencing it is sick. That's what I saw the mall as today - a sick place. What I had previously only been able to process as decision-paralysis, overstimulation and craving, I now see as just a place that manifests a deep illness in our culture. I'm not incompetent to dress myself or buy stuff or fit in, and I'm not going to be a better or more loved person for having the latest look and tech. No. There is objectively too many things at the mall; too many versions of the same thing, and too many unnecessary things. More than any of us could ever need, and, we'll never be rid of them, either in our homes or in our landfills and oceans. 

While of course we do need things and can healthily enjoy buying some beautiful things, there is nothing to aspire to in this place. You might as well be walking around the emergency room in a hospital or a the rank and dirty mess of an extreme hoarder house. Our feast or famine biology deludes us into thinking this is a place of wealth, beauty, meaning and almost spiritual transcendence. It's not. In many ways, it's just a future garbage dump. 

"Though of course, for me," I continued, as I ranted this entire realization above to Mike as we were getting into the car to go, "It also represents emotional healing, wellness and growth. It represents great achievement." 

I sat in the back seat and ate the sandwich I brought in a Tupperware to avoid buying more plastic at the Food Court. As an agoraphobic, eating my own food in a mall parking lot on a sunny day feels like being a Burning Man to me, I feel so wild, free, counterculture and far from home. 

As we leave, I head directly for the trees at the edge of the parking lot, on the south end by the highway. I have always, in the twenty years I've lived here, thought this little woods was beautiful. I wanted to see them close up before I went east to exit.

"This is also how I play GTA,"I told Mike. "I just head for the wild edges, outside the border of how you would normally be expected to play the game."

Lancaster (Rainy Day) + Leaving Deptford, entering Greenwich on my way to Isle of Dogs

Waterloo 

It was raining finely, misting. I needed my poncho otherwise in time I would be soaked. I turned east, took the Spur Line Trail down to the crosswalk at Wilhelm, cycled past George Lippert Park and further down the trail. Traffic wasn't so heavy on Wellington this early in the morning, so it wasn't hard to get across. A car stopped for me, unexpectedly. Drivers are developing new relationships with bike paths.

Such an habitual route for me. East again on Breithaupt, a pang of anxiety as I reach what is still an edge, after all these years. No matter. Today I cross Margaret, anxiety increasing, and follow Breithaupt down to St. Leger. I feel real anxiety now, and I'm staying with it. My body is ramping up, but my mind is focused. The plan is to come back west on Wellington, since I haven't been on that stretch going west on a bike in a while. I bike through dirt parking lot and think about my pants getting dirty. No matter. Back up to Margaret, and then east on Louisa. Today is the day I'm going up St. Vincent on the big hill. My stomach tightens, I gear up. 

I'm parallel processing a relationship issue with a friend, trying to make sense of why our friendship failed. It's something that happens for me when I'm leaving my zone; thinking about things I don't always ponder in my day to day. I'm trying to feel my feelings, and then I cross that zone line, and suddenly all I want to do is forgive and love. This is my brain in survival mode, though I like this - agoraphobia makes me cut right to the chase of what will make me most happy and peaceful in life, even if in my day to day I tend to brood and escalate. Fear can bring clarity on what is most nourishing, and in this way, it is very useful.

I round the corner, and see the hill ahead. My mind tells me this is a terrible idea, that I will become a sweaty, miserable mess with my soul howling in a sort of quiet, early morning, misty-rained hellscape. I think, I can call Mike, if I need to (I always think this). But my training continues to operate, and I'm steady. I smile at woman walking her dog. There are often people doing the most mundane things alongside my extreme sport. 

I need to get off my bike, as expected. It's a bit of climb up the hill. I look down, I look up. When I look down, I ruminate. I accept. I look up, and I'm just a normal person. Been here many times, with the car. Just a normal place. Up and down, but not so much. Mostly just looking around now. 

At the top of the hill I turn right (further outside the zone) because now I'm a world adventurer with much less fear. Hill Street has the most charming architecture and a view to the horizon over the factories. I love this tiny street. I bravely continue on rather than turn around, onto Lancaster, past the giant skeleton that lives on the corner all year round. Still weird. On down Lancaster, past an old guy sitting with his work tools on a lawn, probably waiting for his morning ride. He's smoking and pulls back to give me room. 

Just prior to this I see a little flag, it reads, "When a cardinal is near, an angel appears". Because I'm moving and I can't quite read the words easily, I get OCD (yeah, I have that now too) and feel compelled to return to look at the flag. But a) I'm committing to not doing that and b) I don't want to go past the old guy again. So I keep going, cross  Lancaster on that cute little crosswalk (everything about this little fifties retail area is adorable) and decide to finally take a look at a secret park I've meant to find for about a year, since my friend told me about it. 

I though I'd come a block too far, but no, there is an entrance on this side too. I'm really anxious about the cardinal sign. People have told me they consider seeing a cardinal as seeing a passed loved ones spirit. This fills me with anxiety. I persist down the path and stop at the entrance to the park. It's medium sized, misty, with Scots Pine and a blurry background of trees I would just describe as 'green and leafy'. There is an older stone wall to my left and a small playground a little further on. 

I can hear the highway. I stand quietly, feeling anxiety and vibes, the vibes of rain in the morning with the sound of cars in the distance, the edge of fall coming in. Balancing the pleasure of feeling lost with the fear of it. A small strawberry plan pushing up on a wall. Dampness. Green. Smell of rain.

After a few minutes of really being there, feeling the anxiety and staying, its time to go. Maybe I go because of anxiety - I am sure I do, because if I didn't have anxiety, I think, I'd keep going and not come back for hours. But, I'm also damp and hot/cold as one is in summer when it rains. Anyway, it's ok.

Back on Lancaster I can't cross due to busier traffic and feel a brush of panic but my calmness kicks in as I cycle towards the lights at Union. Calming down about getting to the lights but still pretty anxious about the cardinal sign, and it mingles with agoraphobia to create a somewhat novel, monstrous hybrid of religious/death/OCD anxiety and fear of travelling. I can see this should be nipped quickly in the bud. I can't go back and check, so I don't. I keep going. Off Union I turn onto a sideroad and a path that goes along the highway. My anxiety is pretty strong. Unusually, for being back relatively in my zone. I borderline delight in it; well, I appreciate it. Feeling so anxious like this in my zone gives me opportunity truly accept it; when I'm leaving my zone I have more uncertainty in general, and it's harder to really say, I am here, since, well, I have more choice about leaving, since I have a safe place to go to. But in my zone, I have safer places, but only on a spectrum of safety, not the more black and white experience of zone exit. Thus, an opportunity to feel fear more deeply and healingly in a safer space. But no so safe that I'm not forced to feel and cope. 

This feeling grows as I decide to enter Breithaupt Park. I've had that here before though - those big hills, they take strength and courage, since they are all so high with long paths up! I really do feel uncertain but the training is there for me, so I enter and persevere. It's really beautiful in here, but the highway is loud. It feels more distressing than I've ever experienced it, which is normally, not distressing at all. I'm okay though. Soon I'll be away from it, deeper into the park. The climb is an effort, even on foot, but soon I'm at the top of the hill. I turn north to go the longer way out. So brave! I get lost, or, misdirected, which is frankly exceptional in a location I've been coming to regularly for 20 years, but the woods have grown so much and at this time of year, they are so full, it all looks different. Will I panic? No. I do not! I emerge in a familiar spot and bike down the hill. I say hello to my tree friends, the Black Walnuts at the bottom of the hill. Should I go a bit further north? No, it's time to get home to meet the contractor coming to give a quote on fixing the foundations of our home. I too am building a strong foundation.

London

I thought I had heard of a book called Remember Me to Russell Square, but actually it was Remember Me to Harold Square. In looking it up I found this strangeness: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/ycayxo/timeslip_premonition_or_something_else_russell/

A new sort of adventure!

I'm travelling London, England via Google Maps. I go road by road, and into parks where possible. My only rule is that I can't make any significant jump - I can jump back to go in a different direction, or to find my place again, but not forward and not randomly. In this way I am trying to mimic the experience of exploring neighbourhoods street by street on foot or in a car. 

In this blog, I'll post interesting things I see, with some comments. Enjoy! :)

August 23, 2023 - Deptford

Skulls and bones on the gateposts at St. Nicholas Church. You can learn more about this and other parts of Deptford in this great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9BWRIK46o. At 19:00, we find out that these skulls and cross bones were the inspiration for the pirate skull and bones image!

Christopher Marlowe is buried here. Not pictured, but the captain of the ship that was the inspiration for Coleridge's The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is also buried here (see more details in the link above). 

A cute dog.

An exquisitely basic parkette.

Well then.

... well then.

Bloomingdale Road

It was cool and damp this morning - Google weather showed that it was 17 degrees. I am trying to check the weather before I leave more often - it's impossible to tell from the sixth floor the actual temperature of the moment, let alone predict how the weather might turn. It is almost always much hotter or much colder than I have dressed for - almost by the day - one day hotter than expected, the next cooler - so that I can never learn from any previous experience but the experience of being surprised, and the best thing I can learn is to remember to check the weather report before going downstairs.

It was cool enough for Blundstones. The feeling of a firm hard sole on a pedal, forgotten over a few months of delicate Toms or flexible Keds - the hard press down, the purposeful spin of tires on a concrete that somehow feels different on a cool day - more textured, more nuanced, giving a perception or more a reality of less friction - is incredibly satisfying. I was equipped with two sweaters, one jacket, a rain poncho, lunch, water, a book, a baseball hat, gloves.

I took Union to Margaret and then turned onto Erb, crossing under the 8 by Breithaupt Park. The were very few cars on the road, which made for an easier crossing of the southbound on-ramp, which is sometimes terrifying. As I came out from under the pass, I noticed for the first time a trail of depressed grasses leaning from the road into the bush on the south side of Bridgeport (which Erb becomes somewhere in the mingling of the roads under the bridge). I've spent some time and had pokes and scrapes trying to access the far west end of this little woodlot, where once, many years ago, I saw a deer in the sunlight. Is it a new trail, or have I not noticed? I will follow it on another day.

Up the hill to Lancaster, and then I turned left and down the hill to the roundabout on Bridge. I crossed over the Grand River, where a fly-fisher was casting in the middle of the current while another sat cross legged on the stones by the low water working on his line. I followed Bridge to Bloomingdale and made my way toward open country.

I have something on my mind today - maybe nothing, maybe life-changing, certainly not something I want, but something that could be meaningful. A question about my life present in my mind. It was bringing on a familiar, fearful mental state:  many valiantly repeated rational thoughts attempting to find an anchor in a sort of wild, untethered subconscious storm of uncertainty. It was clear to me that it was the uncertainty that was creating the storm, not the possibilities. The simple not knowing, and not knowing how to not know. It reminded me vividly - because it was probably a flashback - of a similar situation many years ago, when managing the chaos in my mind overcame my capacity to leave the safety of home and the familiar streets of my neighborhood. It took me years - I am still working - to rebuild the confidence I had in travelling before that time, many years ago.

On the edge of my zone, the small neighhorhood of Bridgeport, I was pedalling slowly, and thinking about this current life situation, and watching the chaos return to my mind, like a person I hadn't had a conversation with in a very long time. How strange, and yet so familiar. Familiar because traumatic thoughts are always familiar, and familiar because all the progress I've made in these years has been in the healing of these original feelings - they may have been dormant, causing me to sometimes wonder "what all the fear was about anyways?", but they were the source, unconscious, informing my thoughts and my actions.

And my fear is: I can't live with this uncertainty in my mind, and journey into an environment that is not familiar. I don't have the mental ability to hold both of these uncertainties in my mind. It is too much. I will panic. I will be panic.

Still, it has been a year of great progress and I am not the untethered mind I once occupied. And also: I can't face it again, the shrinking down into the mundane, the end of adventure, the cowering in small woodlots with no hope of seeing a big sky, the closing of my mind into dull, empty fear menaced by the growing threat of panic in more, rather than less, areas of my life. These are the risks of backing down. I promised myself I wouldn't again.

What to do? I cast my mind around for the latest wisdom I had been using to navigate my life adventures and immediately remembered:

Panic attacks come from thinking.

A philosophy taught by my DBLT therapist, new to me this year, which had seen me through several fairly intense situations in which I had not avoided or escalated my panic, but simply calmed myself, and moved forward without trauma or phobia.

Just don't think.

I continued to pedal, this time with a renewed, if fragile and delicate, focus, consciously emptying my mind of all thoughts. And reasoned with myself, between the empty moments: After all, there will always be things in my life causing me stress, some more than others, and this day, this trip, is just another in a series of trips where I journey with my mind, wherever my mind might be: but I journey in silence.

Don't think doesn't mean force your mind to empty: it means don't try to use your thoughts to get your out of your situation. Don't try to think your way out of it, just continue to work towards your goal; distract yourself by any means possible.

I pedalled past the Woolwich sign and out into the fields. My body tension eased and my mind eased: I experienced an expansive peace in neuron and limb. This was my healing place - just on the other side of where my fear told me I couldn't go - the new place. Again this feeling, also familiar, where the areas beyond my zones were actually the ones without fear, the places where my ego can rest from the wearying battle it makes in the familiar landscapes of my daily life. This other place that I bravely burst out into, the empty unknown, fear lurking of course, but the wildness of this place requiring my full presence, my full commitment to confidence. The uncharted space of the unconditioned. Where the necessity for confidence breeds it, builds a boat that can navigate the storm.

There was a damp, open, rainy quiet on the fields like nothing I hear in the city. The yellow and pale green waving fields to my right; the dark green fields and trees to my left, the grey blue sky overhead, were incomparably beautiful and rich to my eyes. I stood by the road, mostly quiet with an occasional car, and listened to the birds and the wind. After a time, I crossed over to turn back, stood for a while, and then, with renewed energy, crossed back and bicycled a little further. I didn't get all the way to the curve, but I felt a peace in the fields which is progress, the feeling of doing maintenance today, rather than pushing further. Deep maintenance, which is another form of growing.

Lyndhurst Part 2 (June 22, 2016)

1

The next morning Dad and I went again in pursuit of rumoured swimming hole - this time, a beach we'd seen distant and white across the lake the day before, rumoured to be "west, just beyond the Lyndhurst cemetery." We both wanted to see the cemetery, and also the Nearly New Shop at St. Luke's Anglican Church, so we followed Oakel Street east into Camp Hyanto.

Camp Hyanto is everything you would expect a small Anglican church camp to be: painted bunkhouses, fire pit with a a large cross planted firmly into the nearby earth, and the occasional cheerful youth with a guitar bustling around in preparation for campers to arrive the following week.

Within moments we were through the camp and entering the cemetery. A long hill of deciduous trees with open spaces between them rose on our left, to the north; to the south, the cemetery sloped down towards a treeline and then the lake.

I was suddenly overcome by a most wonderful feeling of home. Maybe it was because it was the first time I'd been close to a significant number of trees - a woods - since I arrived. Maybe it was because the trees and the hill reminded me so much of the rolling and steep hills of Southern Ontario, rather than Canadian Shield. Maybe it is because I spend a lot of time in Mount Hope Cemetery in Waterloo and this cemetery was reminding me of that. Wherever their source, the feelings I often experience in my beloved home parks unfolded themselves on the land around me. Peace, stillness, presence, a subtle magic - with a feeling of familiarity now made novel by being so far from home.What a gift, to be in a strange place and find my home again, and know I could return whenever I wanted.

Dad, meanwhile, was going on fairly enthusiastically about how this place reminded him of a Steven King story where people enter a small town and then later are eaten at a BBQ. I was semi-ignoring him so I'm still pretty unclear about how his brain had made that connection.

Near the end of the road through the cemetery, a tall monument rose from a circle of hostas. Beyond this was a long, thick, high hedge, marking the end of the cemetery on the east. The path continued through a high, arched tunnel carved into the hedge, and I could see a sunny, grassy field though the opening at the end. We stopped so I could take a picture of the monument, and then turned to enter the tunnel through the hedge, since surely this was the way to the beach. How idyllic it all was!

Quite suddenly, something bit me on the upper arm. I jumped, and looked at my arm in surprise and dismay.

"Something BIT me!" I remarked to Dad.

"Oh yeah," he said, glumly, "A horsefly."

I recalled a vague memory from childhood travels, as well as stories from friends who camp. Yes. Right. Bugs with teeth (or or pokers - or stingers - or stabbers - or chompers - I don't know exactly how the mechanism works).

Bravely ignoring the little biter, we pushed on through the archway. But now the Steven King-esque townsfolk of Horsefly Castle Rock had all been made aware of the BBQ meal and descended en masse to land on the broad and delicious expanses of my own and Dad's body. We started to run madly. I took a moment from my mad flight to take a picture of Dad.

Dad captioned this:  "urban male is confronted with nature...the 'Wildman' within him is running from his troubles"

The pretty field turned out to be not the idyllic Eden it had appeared moments before, but rather a stabby, pokey, stingy nightmare of sunshine and biting. I had just enough time to look down the hill and see absolutely no sign of the beach and then we turned and ran back to the cemetery. We continued a brisk pace, Dad continuing to tell his grotesque Steven King story, me taking a last longing look at this lovely untouchable place.

Ah well, at least I have my own sweet horsefly free Southern Ontario woods to come home to!

2

Our next destination was St. Luke's Anglican Church Nearly New Shop, north of camp and up the hill. On our walk towards the shop, we saw more of the camp and encountered several enthusiastic and sweaty young adults moving around with purpose and cheerfulness preparing for camp season.

We passed the barn-like church hall and turned left towards to the rectory. A sign by a small door at the back of the rectory showed us into the Shop. In a low roofed, linoleum floored addition, shelves of trinkets and households object lined the walls. Another room, an addition to the addition, perhaps, housed books.

I had only moments to take this in before we were immediately greeted by a friendly, comfortable, slightly dominating woman of indefinable age. Dad and the Shop lady immediately got into an escalating one-up-manship game in which each tried to prove to the other (and possibly me, and possibly God) the superiority of their knowledge and appreciation for the Shop. As fast as the Shop lady could tell us where things were located, Dad was equally quick to to guess where they might be. As quickly as she covered the bases on what the Shop held, Dad was replying saying that he was looking for that very thing. As quickly as he spoke of his needs, she was proudly cutting in with even more important information about this illustrious centre of retail. I'd never seen two people more on the same mental wavelength about how to engage with a space, while at the same time sounding more like they were in battle. As an introvert on the verge of "too much vacation", I took a conscientious objector position and avoided eye contact with either of them. 

The conversation went on, but I lost track of it for a while as I got lost in knick knacks, jewelery, and books. I drifted to the original rectory building, passing through a 60s looking kitchen converted into a workspace, a small hallway piled with boxes and then into a room that was probably once a dining room or a study, with white walls, tall windows and the look and feel of a pleasantly or gracefully haunted house. I absorbed myself in the women's clothing there, looking for a dress for a friend. She had recently watched several episodes of Friends and developed an obsession with 90s style Phoebe Buffet dresses, but was having a hard time finding them. I felt certain there would be no better place than St. Luke's Nearly New Shop in Lyndhurst, Ontario, to find a dress from the 90s.

While I sorted through old clothes, Dad and the Shop lady's conversation continued, drifting in from the kitchen. It had transitioned into an intense bout of name-dropping related to the Anglican Diocese of Ontario. Between the two of them, they knew every deacon, priest, server and lay person in all of eastern Ontario. It was like a gentle buzz of who's who in the heady world of Anglicanism in my ear.

My attention was caught when I suddenly heard,

"Perhaps you would like a coffee while your wife is shopping?"

I was half way into a dress, over my tank and shorts (while still wearing Dad's Tilly hat), and I went back to the kitchen in this state of semi-undress.

"Did you think I was his wife?" I asked.

"Well, anything goes these days, you know!" said the woman.

"I'm his daughter," I said, laughing, and went back into the other room.

 For some reason, I found myself feeling really flattered. I thought it over while continuing to shop. I wasn't flattered necessarily at the idea that my dad would have chosen me for a wife or that he was a great catch (though given his extensive knowledge of Anglican society and his confident attitude in orienting towards her Shop, certainly the Shop Lady might admire him), but that I had somehow, at the age of 37, transitioned to an age where I might be a reasonably aged wife for a man in his early 60s (although the "anything goes" part of the comment suggested I can probably still pass for a dewy young trophy wife). It was the sort of feeling one might get if one overhears a parent's friend remarking on one's maturity as one enters the teen years - a sense of finally belonging to a limited and status-y club. A feeling came over me, standing half dressed in a rectory  in a small Ontario town, that I was finally a grown up. And it was a good feeling.

I bought: four glasses, two shirts, a Phoebe Buffet dress for my friend, and a YA romance novel. The glassware reinforced my grown up feelings, while the YA reminded that no aging could truly alter my destiny to be, as a friend once called it, "quietly eccentric". A fine balance.

3

The rest of the afternoon spent itself lazily in more antiquing, wandering, Netflix and eating, interspersed with intermittent feelings of irritation with Dad's basic existence in my world mixed with feelings of immense love for him and gladness for his company (classic family vacation mode). After an early dinner, we decided to go canoeing.

Canoeing had been an high point in my imagination leading up to this trip. From the agoraphobic perspective, canoeing represents Amazonic strength and freedom. To be able to not only leave your home or neigbhourhood, but also THE LAND, and then KEEP LEAVING IT, further and further way, until you are floating over a dark abyss requiring your ongoing brute strength and mental perspervance to continue to not die in it - well. I pictured my strong, tanned arms matching Dad's equally powerful strength as Group of Seven like landscapes passed by, the wind in our hair, like characters from a Fitzgerald or Irving novel, strong, beautiful, tanned, healthy, better than other people ... that was going to be the apex of my vacation, I knew it, the moment I could say: I AM A NORMAL PERSON DOING NORMAL THINGS and thus I AM A GREAT PERSON!

Regretting my choice not to bring my Crocs on vacay, and rueing the necessity of leaving my knock-off Tom's on land (perceiving they would be getting wet pretty much immediately), I somewhat anxiously bare-footed into the canoe which we'd managed to flip over from the grass near the dock and shove into the slime at the edge of the water.

Oh the slime, the slime! Memories of family camp on the Rideau River, where once a year some unlucky bastard would fall in and the cry would go up, "So and so fell in the slime!" and all the other kids would run down the hill to laugh and point at the child whose tears were mixing with slime as his mother comforted him.

I cast a mistrusting look at the slime, took a deep breath, and sat down in the front of the canoe while Dad sweated and grunted to get the canoe launched. I've never seen anyone have such a hard time getting a canoe into water. It was as if the very water did not want me in it. I was certainly not feeling like I wanted to be in it either anymore. I had forgotten how high up one sits in a canoe, trembling there above and yet so close to the water, unable to avoid looking down into it's hellish depths. The slime was perilously close. And under the slime: who knows what! It wasn't even so much the one foot of water that felt primally frightening to me so much as the certain knowledge that soon it would deepen into a yawning abyss of darkness, on which I would be floating like a tiny perishable bug ready to be snapped at or tentacled by any lurking sea monster.

Dad finally got the canoe into the water and we were afloat. As we paddled out into the lake, the water did indeed deepen and now I could see longer weeds (oh god, their ghostly fronds lurking up to caress unsuspecting ankles! I felt like Sam and Frodo in the Dead Marshes).

Then came the darkness of the deep - but oh, it was sparkling like diamonds on the surface in the wind as the wind picked up.

Heart-breakingly beautiful in the sunshine.

Strong tanned arms! Group of Seven Landscapes! Wind in my hair! F. Scott Fitzgerald! Normal person!

The canoe continued to bob and shift in the water as Dad pushed us out further into the lake. The wind on my face was like magic, but my brain could not come to terms with the water and soon my moment of euphoria was lost to feelings of dread. The canoe was like a fine skin separating me from the existential void if the unknown. It was like standing on the top of a very high building, except the building is located over an alien planet that forces you to review everything you understand about physics. Oh for solid ground! Oh for plants that poked rather than insinuated! Oh for logs that were seats rather than foot catchers and fish-hiders! Oh for empty spaces that were light filled vistas rather than dark nights of the soul!

I tried to keep looking at the surface. Just look at the surface! It was filled with light.

"Dad," I said, "I'm not sure I can do this."

"You're fine, "he said.

"Mm. No." I said, "I don't think I can do this."

"It's good," he said.

"Nope. Can't do this! Can't do this!"

"You'll be ok," he said.

"RESPECT MY CHOICES!" I commanded, in a voice that suggests that although I don't have kids, I'd probably be a very good at bossing them around if I did have them. "BACK TO THE SHORE! NOW!"

"Ok! Back to the shore!" said Dad, without a trace of irritation or judgment in his voice, bless his heart.

In a very short time we were lugging the canoe back onto the shore. I was deciding whether to feel ashamed or not. Should I be mad at myself for failing at the thing I felt like it would be the apex of success on this trip? Thinking back over the many things that I'd done over the past few days, I decided not to. It's ok sometimes to realize when you've reached your limit; it's ok to rest after you've achieved a great deal already. And well, after all, this IS a vacation. I felt proud of myself for everything I'd acheived thus far, and decide that facing my primal fear of lakes (something I had WAY before agoraphobia) was an adventure of another day.

Yet - I didn't feel quite ready to quit.

"Can we go out in the rowboat?" I asked Dad.

"Sure!" he said.

Soon Dad was rowing me back out on to the lake while I sat in the bottom of the boat. It was wonderful to sit there, nestled down low within the sturdy walls of the boat, unable to see into the water, my eyes in line with the horizon rather than the abyss. The early evening was warm and pleasant in the boat sun-warmed boat. I watched my Dad row me and remembered him rowing me and my sister around the Mississipi Lake when we were kids. I felt like crying in a nice way.

At my request we hugged the lake edge where I could easily ask Dad to "pull over", if I needed to make a mad dash onto the back forty of another cottage. Every dock felt like a bus stop does when I'm challenging myself to take a bus - a reassuring exit point. Dad said hi to a guy on his dock. I checked out people's boats and lawn furniture.

As we came around the lake to the opening where the river flowed into it, the place where we'd gone swimming the day before, the light shifted and we were bathed in the direct warmth of the deep yellow of a 5 o'clock sun. The wind picked up and fine strands of my hair blew in front of my eyes. I squinted at Dad as he pulled at the oars above me in the boat. My dad. My father. I felt safe and protected and loved. I felt completely cared for, taken care of. Yes, I was floating above an existential void in a small craft with no bailing bucket, but my father was at the helm of this vessel.

We passed beyond the river and out into the lake. The wind picked up more and the lake was a wide expanse of white ripples and glittering reflections and cool air.

Dad was reflecting on how unnecessary it was to purchase insurance which would provide coverage for returning your body to Canada should you die in another country.

"Who cares if your body comes back?" he mused. "They can bury me wherever."

I admired the Group of Seven shoreline of craggy rocks and bending pines. A loon popped up and down. We explored further along the shoreline and I wondered again about the lives of the people who lived in this beautiful, yet (to me) isolated place.

After a while, we went back to the cottage straight across the lake. This was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, with the sparkling and the light and the air and the distance from shore and the abyss and the sky. Back near the shore to the east of the cottage, Dad got me to pick a yellow water lily, and later he carefully put the lily, some lake water and some rocks in a little tupperware container so he could bring the flower back to Kingston with us, carrying a little bit of its home with it.

Lyndhurst, Part 1 (June 20-21, 2016)

I

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.

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.