VI. August 2020: Quarantined on a Canadian Isle
Leaving your country of birth to live elsewhere is complex and fraught with difficulties one could never foresee. I cannot even begin to fathom the resilience and strength of a soul who travels from an entirely disparate culture, often without the benefit of language or money or family, to leave behind the despair of their homeland. Some travel long distances by foot or leaky boat, some never to make it and others to be turned back at the border. My story has no comparisons to such hardship and heartbreak. But once feet are planted on foreign soil, bureaucracy is bureaucracy in any country. The amount of paperwork that goes into securing visas is daunting. Navigating unknown byzantine systems, even in one’s native tongue, makes my eyes glaze over. After years of going through a process akin to learning to operate on one’s own leg, we secured our long-stay visas for Italy. We have just now applied for our Canadian visas, a lengthy process that requires compiling all matter of personal documentation. What is already difficult is made even more so with Covid-19. Working from home, people in government are trying to figure it all out while dealing with the same fears and apprehensions we all have. When my go-to emotion impatience rears its head, I chide myself; if there ever was a time to be civil and generous with others, now is it.
Summer mornings, quiet and early and not yet dripping with humidity, are ideal for working in the garden. Entering into a small, green world of my making, I am instantly at ease. The simple act of filling a bird feeder is appreciated by the Blue Jays, their greedy ferocity making even the crows cower. Old window panes laid atop seedboxes are thrown open, their fecund soils now carpeted in unkempt rows of spicy micro-greens and tiny radishes. Radicchio seeds, smuggled in from southern Italy years ago and planted the week prior, are finally extending teeny shoots. A dozen different varieties of tomato plants are tied, bondage-style, to copper posts, their splayed, thickish branches coating my arms with a viridescent, resinous, stinky pollen, making my limbs itch in a most delightful way.
Armed with a pair of oversized Spanish kitchen shears, I examine a large raised bed, now spilling over with leaves the size of baby elephant ears and sprouting curlicue tendrils grasping desperately at an old bamboo trellis firmly situated in its midst. The plant is a volunteer, one of many in the garden; a rogue outgrowth from a lazy man’s compost pile. The plant was left to languish but instead dug in its roots and flourished, announcing its feat with dozens of bijou blossoms the color of a two-day-old jack-o’-lantern. I snip a baker’s dozen of the gaudy flowers, filling my basket just as the mid-morning sun muscles through pewter skies, humidity already puddling in the folds of my fat.
While rinsing the delicate flowers, two stunned ladybugs are liberated by the water and sent fluttering from the gossamer folds. Sheep’s milk ricotta, a spreadable delight sold in tubs from the flock at nearby Lighthall Winery, was mixed with several eggs, a dozen gifted from the sheep farm across the road. The shells were each different shapes, thicknesses, and sizes, their yolks consistently an amber yellow hue. Tiny leaves from a proliferate Globe basil bush were added, along with a mitt of Sicilian pine nuts, the edges charred brown on cast iron. Flaky salt, coarsely ground black and white pepper, and a hit of allspice to fool the palate were gently folded into the mix. Each flower was filled with the goodness before twisting the ends tightly, sealing their fate. The blossoms were brushed with whipped egg and dusted with freshly grated crumb before being blasted in a roasting hot oven. We stood at the stove, dirt from the garden still encrusted on our bare feet, and ate them straight from the pan.
To ears jaded the color of Bakelite bangles, the most beautiful sound in the world is rain hitting parched Earth, especially when it’s just coming into August and the well is bone dry. Starting in slow, fat drops with a low murmur of thunder, the storm develops into a hard, pounding rain, only to shift away after a scant few, delicious hours, like an afternoon lazed away with a young lover.
John from Crowe Well Co. carved time to talk drilling. Who the fuck knew there were different types of wells? At the very least, for gawd’s sake, I should have had the brains to ask before we signed an agreement. Our three possibilities are an additional dug well (an insufficient 15–25 feet), a drilled well (65+feet), and a lake well (as many feet as the lake lies from the house).
John is like so many interesting men I’ve known: more at home alone in Nature, shy, slow to warm. I peppered him with questions, wanting intuitively to lean in to hear him speak, catching myself and pulling away. We pored over maps and county documents, researching nearby properties to ascertain who had a drilled well, where it was located, and how far down that well was drilled before water was found. The information can assist with finding groundwater, maybe even an underwater stream.
As we walked the land, John held a copper rod with a bent end. This divining rod supposedly moves when water is detected, an Ouija board to locate a resource for which humanity is already warring. In addition to finding water, divining or dowsing is employed to locate metals, oil, and even graves. Divining rods are often Y-shaped rods or even twigs, or the L-shape like John uses, but the old-timers will use most anything, the Earth’s vibrations navigating them.
John has been divining and drilling for water all of his life, gifted like his father before him, and now his son. He claims more than 90% success rate, which is a much better average than I have at anything at all.
Two spots on the property were identified as possible water sources and then staked and maypoled in yellow police tape. I ran behind John’s long strides, trying to keep up, huffing and puffing, but excited by the possibility of tapping into an underground spring. Culturally, Canadians lie somewhere between Brits and Americans; the scales tipped towards a stiff, upper lip. They are somewhat reserved and not given to hyperbole or effusive displays. John was deep in knowledge but needed to be prodded to spout, not unlike his accepted vocation. I liked him. But his calendar is full until at least next spring, and my charms seem to be waning (maybe my unkempt quarantine look?), and try as I might, I couldn’t finagle anything earlier. So we measure the well we have, use water with great conservation, and get a delivery when we’re stuck.
My wife is friendly with a Native American woman, who is an activist and entrepreneur creating projects to help her Nation. This woman recently wrote an editorial about having two separate, distinct lives. Her Navajo life hauls water from a well on her First Nation Reserve in the southern part of Arizona, and her other life is water on tap in an apartment closer to town, off the reservation. I think of her, about her relationship to water and our relationship to First Nations each time I wash a dish.
My admiration for municipal water systems knows no bounds.
It’s soggy hot. The Sunday NYT was delivered earlier, and I cooked yesterday. The doors and windows are closed, and the little passive house maintains a livable temperature. It’s out of the question to venture to one of the many beaches here. Even with the pandemic’s horrors, weekends are busy with people from Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto. Sandbanks Park is a huge draw, an attraction on the island since the early 1800s. Massive dunes were formed by glaciers 12,500 years ago, creating the world’s largest bay-mouth dune barrier. More than 7.5 miles of other-worldly sand formations wrap themselves around a portion of Lake Ontario, creating Caribbean-hued waters ideal for paddling and swimming. We occasionally hit the lake, early on midweek mornings, before the heat and humanity pervade, settling for a brief splash in the cool, calm waters before heading home.
It takes a while to understand the days’ seasonal rhythms, who owns what hours for song, for mating, for feeding, for swimming. The sweet spot for walks lies between the afternoon’s wilting heat and the mosquito feast at twilight. With each step in the golden light, we flush grasshoppers who magically fly up and away. Hay fields are filled with cicadas rapping their fealty to the midday sun, ceding the stage to the groovier jazz of crickets at night.
Before moving to The County, Henry baked bread in a backyard wood oven he built in Scarborough, a town not far from Toronto. When he lost his job as a construction manager, he and his wife, Natalie, took the leap and moved to Prince Edward County. They purchased a 140-year old red barn that sits on a back lane, which now houses his custom wood oven, made with reclaimed bricks from the town’s old Methodist Church. The imposing oven, six feet deep by 10.5 feet wide, was thoughtfully designed to be manned by one person only: Henry. What does it say about a person who does not plan to ramp up for exponential growth? And what does it say about a community supporting that small-scale operation, allowing Henry to feed, clothe and house his family?
Henry sources organic flours and sustainable ingredients produced by farmers in Prince Edward County, including the wood fed to the oven, which is cut to his specifications. Firing the oven to 800-degrees and then allowing it to settle to 600 degrees, the brick reverberates with heat ideal for baking bread. He doesn’t abide commercial yeast, emphatic his naturally leavened loaves of bread need only water, salt, and flour.
We found him by word of mouth, his reputation proceeding the introduction. He sells his small production at the Saturday Farmer’s Market, but understanding some people don’t want to shop with the crowds, mask or no, he thoughtfully sets up a table on the road alongside his barn before the market. For two hours, this make-shift drive-through allows paniphiles to retrieve their pre-ordered breads for the week. Not unlike the British, Canadians wait in line patiently and without complaint, and there’s always a line of cars queuing while Henry speaks with each customer.
Loaves of rye the size and density of my thigh can be had whole or bought in tranches. Golden sourdough baguettes that release aromas of San Francisco when warmed are on offer next to raisin rye, which in its later stages makes a life-affirming french toast. His bread is decent, but his bagels are better. Organic bread flour, spring water, wheat levain, malted barley, olive oil, and sea salt are risen slowly and baked in the wood oven. Along with plain, raisin, and poppy seed, Henry produces something called a pretzel bagel, the notion of which should send shivers down any purist’s spine. However, his sesame seed bagel stacks up against the best of his NYC or Montreal bagel brethren. Almost airy, but by no means croissant-lite, Henry’s bagels have a dark bottom from the wood oven and a deep primal flavor. Toasted until the seeds just singe, the perfume readies my appetite. Slathered with one full-fat finger of cream cheese (per side, ‘natch), the bagel is laid with thick slices of Black Russian tomato, its red and black striping scattered with flakes of salt like fake snow at a Miami Christmas.
And while the bagels are great, Henry roasts stupendous coffee beans. He uses live fire to roast single variety beans, a quicker process than conventional methods, yielding intense flavor without bitterness.
Two or three times a week, anywhere in the world, sipping a cappuccino or macchiato in a cafe in a ceramic cup with saucer was a prized, civilized hour. The first week of March was the last time we went for coffee in town, the barista handing us our cups with her hand around the mugs’ lips. That very day I ordered a carafe, filters, and a hand-crank coffee mill. On the occasional midday, when energy is flagging, we meet in the kitchen (aka the break room) and crank Henry’s beans for a pour-over served black with whatever cake is on the counter, or maybe just a square of dark chocolate. That half-hour to make and consume the coffee has become as ritualized and transportive as driving to a cafe.
Henry’s wide, goofy smile puts me at ease, even as his mask slips down around his chin, yakking about life on the island while the cars line up on the road. In any other moment in time, I’d muscle myself an afternoon with this man in front of his oven, watching, listening, learning. I get impatient isolating from people, from places, from inspiration, from mentors. We’ve met many talented people we’d love to befriend, but no fucking dice right now. In my frustration, I remind myself that I wouldn’t even be here, meeting Henry, if it were not for this damned virus.
In California, the Earth literally vibrates with possibilities. Here it feels solid, stable, less transient. The roots in this part of Ontario extend back generations, and familial bonds are as thick as the accents. But at this moment, it all feels so horribly, deliciously tenuous. Our world is this massive, complex LEGO building, damning Nature, damning nurture.
Preoccupied, I get lost in my daily tasks; making a frittata, a galette, pesto; tending to the small garden; hiking in the woods and getting through a tightly packed to-do list shackled to a self-imposed work-life. I can go for a spell without thinking about the pandemic, the deaths, the food lines, the economic blows to the already punch-drunk. Late at night, the monsters wake me with night sweats and terrible thoughts, and in the morning, I look as if I’ve aged a year, the crow’s feet around my eyes like those on an old smoker. But the sun always comes up. Gratitude helps to ground me, appreciating my health and my partner, good food, being near Nature, and even a distant sense of community. There is no right time, and our prophets are never perfect, but clearly, our planet requires a reset and its inhabitants in need of fresh voices and ideas.
My wife needs interaction with the world. I don’t. My work and projects make money, but no longer adequate for the Bay Area. Not by a long shot. So her work is necessary. Some days I feel like I’m not ambitious enough anymore. As Americans, we’re trained to push for our work to be bigger, better, outrageously successful, throwing off wads of cash. I realize how very exhausting that notion is. Why can’t it be enough that I just enjoy my gig, make enough to live, and have time for other things that I deem of equal importance? I speak with friends who work all of the time, whether or not they have children. They rise, exercise, catch various modes of transport, work in a box all day, catch the same transport home, live in a box, and get boxes of food delivered for dinner. Only Saturday and Sunday are theirs, and by Sunday afternoon, they speak of already being full of dread about the week ahead. I think they must be petrified of change to live that life.
Visiting Tokyo years ago, I was fascinated by the lunch counters with food stacked atop boats floating round and round on a track of water, the toqued chefs in the center preparing the food. Not unlike life, our job as a guest at this banquet is to choose plates with delicacies to our liking, taking only what we can consume, knowing sooner or later, the bill comes due. Inevitably, the belt gets jammed, the machinery gucks up, and dishes are either flying at us or what we want is just out of reach of our fingertips. Finding the zen of it all is crucial to mental health, but perspective is different when you know you’re not going to go hungry, and you can wait it out for the belt to get unkinked. Many cannot. Isn’t it our responsibility to see that everyone gets a seat at the counter? It doesn’t have to be even-steven, but the yawning disparity is unsustainable.
Yesterday was my birthday. I’m always so ambivalent about celebrating it. While grateful to have the opportunity to mark another year, I’m sad-to-Oxford blue to see it pass. News of California’s dreadful fires burning on the pyre of misery that is 2020 further deflates my spirit.
It is in these moments when I turn to Nature for solace. I spent the day creating a walk through nearby woods, laying downed trees from end to end, and spreading a mountain of barked hickory limbs onto the forested path; communing with monarchs, swallowtails and dragonflies while trying to decipher the chatter of cardinals and Canadian geese and blue jays. They have much to tell us about how we’ve fucked it up. Time to take heed.
Showered of a fine wood dust and muddy freckles from the forest floor, our aching bodies tucked into a kitchen picnic, the birthday candle a single beeswax taper. Our celebratory dinner consisted of my wife’s icebox pickles, a block of salty Pecorino Romano, an oft-produced carrot hummus recipe slathered on toasted rye bread, and tall glasses of Saison beer appropriately named “The Foggy Ruins of Time.”
Asleep by 8.30. Another one bites the dust.
Millions of monarch butterflies migrate to summer breeding grounds in the northeastern US and Canada, having flown from their winter digs in Mexico some 3,000 miles away. They can fly 100 miles a day, feeding and reproducing throughout the journey for several generations. It’s the fourth generation that migrates to the warmth of Mexico in autumn. This Canadian island is a designated International Monarch Butterfly Reserve. Indeed, they flutter by like it’s Sunday T-Dance in Provincetown. Butterfly spiritual energy signifies change and metamorphosis, but monarch energy speaks to an evolving perspective in perceiving our place in this world.
My arms are wide open for a monarch landing to provide insight because I’m fucking fresh out. My sights are set only on what’s immediately at hand. Thinking down the road and planning beyond stocking the freezer for our first Canadian winter seems far-fetched and full of landmines that even patron saint Princess Diana wouldn’t navigate. Instead, I busy myself roasting Red Zebra tomatoes and packing them into jars for hits of sunshine come blustery, intimidating January. Gawd, the last time I navigated winter was many full moons ago in NYC, slipping my way into a cab to go for a dinner I could never afford.
The monarch lays eggs on the underside of the extremely toxic milkweed plant. The hatchling caterpillars feast on the leaves, retaining that poison as armor against predators for all of the monarchs’ two to six-week lifespan. Kaleidoscope wings announce the poison to hungry passers-by and provide sensory overload to stoned voyeurs. Monarchs taste through hairs on legs and feet; this detail making me righteous about my quarantined (read: unshaven) state. They drink nectar and water with a long tongue (proboscis), then curling it like a spaghetti nest.
We each can encourage the monarch’s continued journey. Plant a native wildflower garden in your yard with milkweed and lobby your local governments to do the same in parks and public spaces. Lobby farmers to plant edge rows of flowers. Don’t use chemicals. And while I’m grasping at metaphors, please wear a mask so we can all metamorphosis to our next adventures.
Sweet Summer Stone Fruits
On the brink of turning.
Sending forth their most pungent perfume
just before death.
The colors brilliant,
the purples of royalty
the oranges and reds of a smoggy summer sunset.
skins just beginning to sag away from flesh,
lined with wrinkles from a chest that’s
seen too much sun.
Gently cut with a tomato knife
juices and peels intact
tossed with citrus
and a shake of an herby Elixer hauled home from Chateauneuf du Pape.
Pastry dough, pasta frolla
from a Sicilian cookbook,
its unadorned pages as authentic as the isle itself.
Sweet butter, flour, sugar, lemon peel, eggs.
An old nonna in her white housedress pocked with kitchen stains
adds a final pinch of sugar
to caramelize the first of summer’s stone fruits.
County Catch. The name says it all. The only fish he sells are caught by fishermen in Prince Edward County angling in Lake Ontario: yellow perch, brown bullhead, walleye, and grass pickerel. Walk-in coolers line the wall of a dilapidated mid-island farm, the property hugged by other fading farms with sheep grazing fields and osprey nests high on poles.
He’s a recent arrival, too, but for entirely different reasons. Of Syrian descent, he’s making a new life for himself, hawking lake fish. In another moment in time, we would have welcomed him to our dinner table to trade stories of life spent elsewhere, then plied him with wine and made him promise he’d set me up with one of his fishing buddies to go out on the lake. But it’s a strange time to be a stranger. So instead, the pickerel is left in a bag with ice in a cooler near the door for us to retrieve.
Known locally as sunfish or gunny, pickerel lives up to eight years and can reach 30" in length. They feed on smaller fish, frogs, mice, and flying insects, leaping out of the water to lunge at its prey, its teeth sharp as the razor Frank Pentangeli used on himself in the tub. A member of the pike family (Esocidae), pickerel are found in shallower freshwaters.
Living rurally, we don’t venture out much. Our food comes from nearby farmers through on-your-honor farm stands, CSA’s, and even from the largess of our bedraggled garden. The occasional chicken, duck, or sliced lomo will follow us home from the barnyard, but our plates are mostly composed of vegetables. In truth, birds are valuable to me for bone broths, and the cured pork more sentimental than craved.
But jones for fish we do. 🐟
The cavity was stuffed with lemon and basil and surrounded by hot Hungarian peppers, a handful of shishito peppers, baby new potatoes, cherry tomatoes, and oyster mushrooms from Nigel, a Brit from up the road who grows various fungi. The whole melange was topped with oregano from plants going to seed and even more garlic because, well… why the fuck not? Hit with olive oil and roasted in a blazing oven, the perfume rising from the moist, Snow White flesh is pure eau de summer on the lake.
A pair of sheepdogs from the farm across the street wander past midnight, leaving their charges unattended, their white-furred frames and oafish paws owning the empty county road, barking outrage at our world and stealing good sneakers from the front porch.
Where did we learn that everything is ours for the taking? When did we become the I-deserve-it culture, treating the world as our oyster from which to pillage and plunder for our sole benefit? Why are we so disconnected from the natural world, viewing it as a problem to be solved or dominated, rather than Nature being cycles of which we are integral to but not the only part?
I’m an idiot, roiled by fear, ruled by emotion.
When we arrived into Prince Edward County, I was running on adrenaline and menopausal stress. We hurriedly left California for Canada at the end of February, fearing an ugly denouement to the tragicomedy we’ve been forced to watch for the prior four years. A week later at the beginning of March, meetings in Montreal cancelled, we unpacked our meager belongings into an Airbnb, the world still spinning. We spent the next months selling or moving the last of our California lives, filling out paperwork for Canadian visas, trying to understand why our well was dry, reading about the world succumbing to Covid, and our country succumbing to madness.
I was fried and tired and scared. The owners of our Airbnb were solicitous of us in the beginning. They own several properties in The County, all large and grand in an area more farmland than Newport mansion. This house sits on ten acres, encompassing a forest that can never be touched, spilling into a finger of Lake Ontario below. We watch the sunset on the lake through the conifers, but the house will never worry about its basement flooding, an issue many contend with on this island. The small farmhouse is charming and tight, and I feel surrounded by Nature, which is comforting now. There is a large upper lot that is level and clean, and ideal for building. But we don’t want a building project or even ten acres in Canada. I don’t know as though I would want a life here beyond this stay. Understand me, Canada is quite beautiful, and this community of like-minded people has been warm and welcoming during a very anxious time. We feel safe here. The owners agreed to rent the house to us until 31 December, but they want to sell the house. They’re spread thin. Brokers and photographers would need access to the space. But don’t worry, the owners assured us, they’d wear masks. Or perhaps we’d be interested in buying it? They said they’d be willing to explore a severance of the upper lot and guaranteed the adequacy of the well, as well as the transfer of the vacation rental license, and since the house was essentially a new construct, it was an as-is, take-it-or-leave-it sale. Homes in rural locations were being snapped up over-asking on this island, as people from nearby Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal were looking to escape the cities. For sure, the house would be sold, and we’d be looking for a place to live in the middle of winter, I told my wife. We don’t know how the world will look in six months, I fretted.
Our lawyer and my wife both argued that we needed more teeth in our offer of purchase, a clear path out of the agreement if our conditions weren’t met. The outlined terms were clearly beneficial to owners, who were now stepping on the gas to sell the property. I was full of fear and anxiety and allowed my emotions to insist we capitulate to their terms. “They’ll sell this house quickly! We already know people here! We should stay! What if we can’t get into Italy for some time? What if friends and family need somewhere to escape from political unrest, from the California fires? What if the economy falls off a cliff and the dollar’s worth becomes a fraction of its value? Would real estate in Canada not be a good bet? A hedge play?”
So my beautiful, smart wife, who makes deals for a living, capitulated to my relentless harangue, my panic, and agitation and agreed to the sellers’ terms, with the only considerations the transfer of the vacation rental license and an adequate well. It seems neither stipulation was able to be fulfilled. But our crime was doing proper due diligence after we signed the contract. So, with guidance from our gentle, youngish lawyer, we started the uncomfortable process of getting out of our agreement.
