The King's Highway 2 Part One: A Poetic Pilgrimage

 Forgive me, patron, for it's been 4 and a half years since I posted last...

You can forgive me, I'm sure, given that the last 3 years have been consumed by a sweeping pandemic and travel wasn't really the first thing on anyone's mind. The year and a half before that, well, I was spending all my free time writing things other than this blog, to tell the truth. I'd completely immersed myself in developing and drafting what was to become my novel LefTturn and finishing the final editing on a short story collection I call 'Virtus', which is now looking for a publisher.

That said, I've had a fairly active summer with driving this year now that things have opened up again and it seems only logical that I would accumulate ideas for a new entry for The Drive Between the Lines, so here I am.

Out of all those trips the one that I feel would be most interesting is Highway 2, which, in its entirety, runs from Windsor, carving a line southwest to northeast through Southern Ontario to just outside Cornwall. This article however, will concentrate more on the stretch eastward from Toronto to Morrisburg. It will be a two parter, the first from Port Hope to Ameliasburgh, then the second yet to come, which will highlight from Kingston to Morrisburg.

The first time I drove down that highway was in August 2017 when I was heading back home to Ottawa after a visit to my sister in Etobicoke. I'd been telling her that I wasn't looking forward to the gruelling ordeal of driving the 401 and I really didn't feel like paying a toll for the convenience of the 407. Liza suggested I take Highway 2, which would take me through some picturesque small towns and still bring me to Kingston where I could visit my other sister Margaret for a night. Looking briefly at Google Maps, it looked like something I could do. I'd known about Highway 2 for it's stretch through Gananoque, but that was all. Yes, it was something I could do...

The route out of Toronto, connecting from the 401 at Port Hope, was like any other urban stretch, infested with the same stores you will see anywhere in North America, all the Walmarts, McDonalds, Subways and Home Depots. I soon also found that the highway was really a patchwork of localized roadways that didn't necessarily connect, or connected only in name and didn't form a straight line from A to B. Instead they would present a mess of elbows and doglegs, ending at one intersection and resuming a fraction of a kilometre further afield. To make things worse, a highway of that length only comes up on GPS as whatever had been searched previously by other befuddled travellers, not necessarily supplying directions from your present location. Frustrated, I surged on, and once I was free from the urban tangle and out into the pastoral sensibilities of the country, things finally started making sense.

Approaching Brighton, I was reminded of some family visits where we would take the kids to the town's Railway Museum, which is really just an old train station that has a couple steamers outside to admire. Though everything is closed up, it's still an interesting place to take the kids. Also worthy of note, Presqu'ile Provincial Park is right south of Brighton, and still further south in Picton, there is Sandbanks Provincial Park is the beach is your thing.

Driving on, seeing signs for Trenton reminded me that somewhere out there was Ameliasburgh, the home of Al Purdy's A-Frame. I knew this from Purdy's mentioning of Trenton in many of his poems. The poet had grown up there and returned to live there again in the late 50's with his wife Eurithe in a self-made cottage on the shores of Roblin Lake.

In my lifelong appreciation for all the poets of CanLit from the early Sixties, Al Purdy's name was always brought up with reverence as a cornerstone of the movement and frequent mentions from such artists as Gord Downie, Bruce Cockburn, Sarah Harmer and Dave Bidini showed me how much he'd embedded himself in the Canadian ethos. That said, by the second decade of the new millennium it seems like the average Canadian has moved on from Purdy and his colleagues. Their books have been frustratingly hard to find, and whenever I bring Purdy up in conversation with non-writing friends, they don't know who he is.

In 1957, Al and Eurithe bought a plot of land fronting Roblin Lake and took it upon themselves to build their own house using plans from a decorating magazine. That soon became a frequent meeting place for Canadian literati for years and years, hosting such writers as Margaret Atwood, Milton Acorn, Michael Ondaatje and Steven Heighton, with Al and Eurithe offering beer and wild grape wine along with heated discussions and raucous laughter. Almost anyone of any prominence in Canadian letters in the last 50 years will have a story about their time at the A-Frame.

However, after the Purdys moved to BC to only spend their summers in Ameliasburgh, Al was diagnosed with lung cancer and died, an assisted suicide, it was sadly later disclosed to be. Alone, Eurithe's visits to Roblin Lake became scarce and over time, and the A-Frame was starting to age and fall into disrepair. The world was beginning to forget about Al Purdy and it looked like the small lakeside house was going fade away, until 2008, when a fundraising campaign was started to try to preserve the structure. The campaign was a resounding success and now the property has hosted a residency program for writers since 2014.

I wasn't even sure if I was allowed to, but I didn't want to pass up an opportunity to at least see the place and pay some homage to one of my favourite poets. I pulled off to the shoulder and thought about what I might punch into the GPS. I didn't know the address, so I just typed in 'Al Purdy A Frame', which brought up nothing. I then typed in 'Ameliasburgh' and co-ordinates came up. I was already close, so it was a no-brainer at that point. I followed the instructions Google Maps was giving me and ended up at the Town Hall first, thinking I could get some information. Oddly enough, on a Wednesday at 1:00 in the afternoon, it was locked and empty, not even any lights on inside. Not much going on in municipal politics in Ameliasburgh, I suppose.

Thankfully, a museum was right across the large gravel parking lot, so I went over and, adding to the absurdity, there was nothing pertaining to Al in the museum. There was a young fella staffing the museum, so I asked him if he knew how to get to the A-Frame. He laughed and said "Well, if you throw a rock out that way, you just might hit the roof." He gave me a sheet of paper with a simple photocopied map to the place I was looking for and I took it with thanks. I paired up the name of the road it was on, Gibson Road, to the GPS and, remembering the young man's description of where on the road it might be, as he'd warned me that you wouldn't see it from the road, set off to find it.

It took a couple passes to find it, going only a hunch that the driveway I'd found was the right one, but as I parked the car and rounded the shrubs and trees, there it was, that unassuming cottage made of barnboard and the guts of old railroad buildings.

Standing there, I wondered what I should do. Being the summer I knew that the writer-in-residence would be there and I felt like I was intruding just standing and gawking. I nervously knocked on the door and the poet for that month, Oana Avasilichioaei came to the door. She was friendly and open and said it was perfectly fine for me to take pictures around the place. She also told me that Al's grave site was very close and gave me directions to it. I hadn't even thought of it, but indeed a visit to the grave site would complete this pilgrimage and allow me to pay proper respect to the man that had inspired so many creative minds in this country.

Out back, I had such a wonderful feeling standing on that little parcel of land that jut out into Roblin Lake. I could imagine Al seeing it for the first time and realizing that this was where he wanted to build his homestead. I could envision him and Eurithe sitting in their lawn chairs enjoying that view, Al probably pounding back a few beers to add to the experience, regaling visitors with his philosophies and buffeting them with questions and arguments. I plucked a poplar leaf from one of the trees, and a maple leaf from another, then went around the front to take

the obligatory shameless selfie with the A-frame in the background. I looked at the utility shed that had once been Al's writing room and the outhouse where so much inspiration had come to him, as he reputed, while having a dump. I saw the remains of the cinderblock garage that doubled as a guest house before burning down one fateful night. I took it all in, as there has been so much lore about this place. It was special. I had to be careful where I was stepping as there were little frogs hopping about underfoot through the grass, and I thought that Al, sensitive brute that he was, would have written about them were he there, the way that he would include the feral and the mundane, the natural and the artificial. I wish I could have had a conversation with him about that, but in a small way, I wonder now if maybe that moment had been that conversation after all.

I looked at the map and it showed where the gravesite was. It was clear enough that I wouldn't need the GPS that time. I rounded the west side of the lake and found Purdy Street. There were small shops there at the turn, but the town still had a very sparse, small country village feel, unadorned and utilitarian. I could see why Purdy would have loved this town. As full of bluster and pride as he was, he had no tolerance for artifice or bullshit, so the lack of pretensions to the town suited him. I turned down the gravel road that was Purdy Street and it led me down to the cemetery. It wasn't hard to find his gravestone, a stand of gleaming black granite fashioned in the shape of a book. Approaching it, I could see that other well-wishers had left some stones for him, signify what, I do not know, their meaning left between Al and the person that left them. I stayed for a while, appreciating the view of the mill pond that the site overlooked, soaking in the moments.

I could have stayed there all day, but I still had some way to go before I got back on Highway 2 to finally get to Kingston where my sister was expecting me. I wanted to stay, and Al would have let me I'm sure. He'd always had an open door policy for anyone that wanted to visit. The only price of admission was a willingness to discuss and debate and I felt like I had so much I wanted to say to him, to ask him and argue about. He would have loved that. But all the same, bound to finish my itinerary, I got back in my car and silently said goodbye.