After three difficult days, I had to admit defeat. Toronto and I just hadn’t made the most of each other. With the bus pulling out of the station, I pondered over my very brief relationship with North America’s fifth largest city. A first-timer there, I’d slogged on foot around the bustling downtown but failed to connect with the Toronto vibe my friends had raved about. Even the spirit of the city’s dramatic waterfront eluded me, as I stared bleakly across Lake Ontario at the executive jets zipping in and out of the shoreline airport. A gang of sparrows were bathing happily in the dust of the adjacent parking lot. They seemed to enjoy life here, why couldn’t I? I decided to leave the city and redeem myself in a different Canada.
The Royal Ontario Museum's Crystal extension. Perhaps the most interesting building in the city, but then...
I headed north-east towards the town of Lakeview, lured by the promise of open countryside, with rivers and forests which I imagined were full of beavers, eagles and moose. Maybe even bears. An eager face in the town’s quaint information bureau told me about her childhood in Staffordshire and then reeled off directions to her favourite places around Lakeview, including the ‘secret pond’ and a site famous for petroglyphs or rock carvings. I saw a bear there once, she added.
Incised into an outcrop of grey marble centuries ago by native peoples for whom this remains a sacred place, the petroglyphs had lain forgotten under a tangle of vegetation until a hiker stumbled upon them by chance in the 1950s. Once open to the cosmos, today they are subdued by a vast glazed dome, installed to protect them from careless walking boots. Inside, visitors spoke in reverential whispers and no photographs were allowed. I gazed down at the ancient, hand-chiselled forms of reptiles, deer, birds and other sacred backwoods wildlife, musing on what ceremonies must have taken place here.
Forest pond, with beaver dam. Mosquito paradise.
A few miles away, the rock creatures came alive in a ritual of their own at the ‘secret pond’, deep within the forest. Like smoky paper planes, black terns dipped and skittered above the lily pads on which their downy chicks were precariously poised, waiting to be fed. Many of the other birds around the pond were supersized compared to their British relatives: an ironing board in the sky slowly unfurled itself into a great blue heron as it descended, landing on a jetty and dwarfing the disconcerted egrets alongside. Diminutive hometown coots were replaced here by torpedo-shaped loons, which surged through the water and exploded into noisy territorial spats, their winnowing cries pulsating through the hot and humid air. Even the smaller creatures were aiming big: a saucer-sized monarch butterfly powered by, an insect so strong it is capable of flying to Mexico for the winter and even of crossing the Atlantic. As I sat watching, a turtle of Jurassic proportions slid off a half-submerged log, sending a mini-tsunami across the surface of the water. You don’t need bears with turtles that size, I thought.
Everything's big in the New World: a monarch butterfly overwhelms a clover flowerhead
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