Author: admin

The drive to survive and grow is potent.   Glance around. You’ll see plants determinedly making a life for themselves in the most improbable places. Cut down trees rush to thrust out new growth from their bleeding stumps. Maple keys sprout in sidewalk cracks. The garlic bulb in the fridge, taking to the cool and damp, starts greening up as though it nestled in fertile earth.

On the farm, cedar trees, uprooted by storms, continue to grow, flat on their backs, if they have a thread of root left in the ground. Daisies bloom on the barren rock farmyard. The bicycle shed reveals prickly ash saplings managing on the glimmers of light seeping through the knot holes. On the stair railing outside the door, a morning glory is doing well, thank you, in an empty screw hole in the metal that can’t be more than half an inch deep. It even proudly produced a blossom.

Need heartening up? Take a look at the skinny green stems heaving asphalt aside or the ruffian tree squeezing skyward through the seam where pavement meets wall. Excuses don’t cut it here.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

Six heavy trucks, each bearing a massive square of concrete, rumbled past. Hummm. What could they be hauling?

Anything to do with the bridge?

A short bike ride revealed the secret. They were hauling the bridge itself.

The squares of concrete were sections put together over the water like Leggo pieces. They even have tape over the joints like drywall. And they were placed there by super crane which visits our neighbourhood when there is a really BIG lift required. Still no hand shovels in sight.

So now do they just have to fill in the spaces and slap some paving on the road on top?

Next week we’ll see.

Gail Hamilton’s books

Well, it now looks as though we are going to get a real bridge and not just the creek pushed through a culvert.

One of the construction monsters managed to crawl right down inside the hole where the old bridge used to be.

Brandishing its jackhammer head, it chewed out great squares in the limestone bedrock.

Here the feet of the bridge will stand—I expect. Also, wooden concrete forms are piling up and I saw the Pumpcrete truck snort past.

But I still haven’t spotted anyone with a shovel.

Gail Hamilton’s books

Does anyone even think about the hordes of pick and shovel labourers needed for any public work in the past? From the pyramids to Sir John A.’s railway cuts, straining muscles did the work. At our little bridge site, I doubt there is a hardly pick or shovel to be found.

Men in hard hats stand back and watch the monsters hammer the bedrock, scoop up the dirt, pack down the new gravel roadbed. I see the machines go past on their massive trailers and ride back again when their turn is done. How many sweating bodies have they put out of work? How many bodies are ever so grateful to seek air-conditioned employment?

The gap where the bridge was remains as big as ever. I’m cheering for the monsters to get their jobs done soon.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

Well, I was right,. The little village bridge is now a memory and a gaping slash in the landscape has taken its place. Big machines sit hungrily around and our merry, historic stream is confined to a metal pipe. From the size of the gap there must be big ambitions for the replacement crossing. This is just one week’s work and there are seven more weeks to go.

Dump trucks whiz down the road along with snorting transports hauling yet more giant diggers and such on their trailers. Except for these privileged monsters, the road is closed. It makes a perfect bike rural bike jaunt where I can ride right down the middle of the pavement and weave recklessly back and forth across the centre line all I want. A glorious break from hugging the shoulder and hoping to survive.

Too bad I can’t just whiz on over the bridge.

Gail Hamilton’s books

 

This week they start tearing down the little bridge over the creek at Demorestville. They say it has developed a crack underneath. After many decades of service it no longer likes carrying the heavy trucks that roar across. So down it comes. For the next two months we’ll have to find a different way to get to town.

At a glance, the bridge is small and unremarkable but it holds a vital history. It sits at the very spot where Guillaume Demorest, in 1783, found the waterfall foaming over the escarpment.  He decided he would he build his home beside the water power so needed by those first settlers into the virgin wilderness.

Guillaume’s family, of French Huguenot (Protestant) stock, had been driven from Europe by violent Catholic purges and settled in the Duchess colony of New York. After bravely serving Britain during the American rebellion of 1776, Guillaume had to uproot himself and seek a home in the new lands offered to such Loyalists by the British government. He founded Demorestville and his mill was the first to occupy the spot. Others followed. At the end of the 19^th century, one of the largest mills in the country sat where the bridge is now. Five storeys above ground, one below. It burned spectacularly in 1905 and is successor has long crumbled. Now there is only a patch of weeds where the great mill once stood and an unremarkable road bridge over the source of Demorestville’s early power.

As a child on the way to school, I hung over the rusty railings, ever fascinated by swollen waters roaring down the limestone ledges in the spring or tossing up ice palaces in winter. Like every other child, I longed to clamber down to edge of the torrent, despite grave warnings to stay away, and play where the mill wheel used to turn. I never managed it.

Now from the looks of the large metal pipes unloaded nearby, the new bridge is going to be only another section of pavement laid over culverts. Tidy, modern, efficient with no allowance for a mill. Guillaume won’t mind. The waters he chose to power a village will demand their passage long after the new bridge is washed into the stream of history.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

It’s that time of year again. Turtles on the road. Big ones, small ones, and, alas, flat ones who will never make it to the other side. Females, of course, on their annual heroic quest to nest. In my neighbourhood, they start from the marsh, perform the awesome feat of ascending an almost vertical, brush covered, limestone escarpment—and then are faced with the road at the top. The broad blacktop is the most deadly barrier to the nesting ground the brave little turtle has set her heart upon.

A wise turtle would wait until after midnight when the road can go for hours without a single car. Perhaps some do and we never notice their successful crossing. The ones we do see are the daylight adventurers who dare the dump trucks, roaring tractors, speeding SUVs and pickups hauling ATVs. Small turtles take a long time to get across, often halting in confusion as vehicles whizz past. Most drivers try to miss them but can’t always manage, resulting in yet another turtle fatality,

Sometimes people screech to a halt, back up and carry the turtle across the road. Unfortunately many folks imagine the turtle wants to get to the marsh and is mixed up in direction so they send the little creature down the hill towards the water. All that happens is that the turtle makes her laborious way back to the road and starts trudging the death gauntlet again.

Some turtles wimp out, lay their eggs on the tempting road edge gravel, and head back home. By morning, there’s nothing but a hole and some eggshells showing where the skunks and raccoons have treated themselves a midnight feast.

Due to road mortality for mothers-to-be, the gender ratio in some species has been reduced as low as one female to twelve males. Devastating for species survival. So do not hit a turtle on the road. If you can do it safely, stop and help them across – in the same direction they are heading. If it’s a snapping turtle, shoo it across or pick it up carefully by the back of the shell to avoid discovering how the turtles got their name. A fair sized snapper can easily take off a finger. Never lift them by their tail. That causes internal damage. Do not move them to “a better place”. Turtles have their nesting range and will only undertake the wearisome journey to return—which probably involves yet more roads.

Whenever you see a turtle, appreciate the valour of its mother and applaud the string of lucky happenstances allowing the creature to stay alive. Protect it if you can because now you know why the turtle crossed the road.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

I’ve got to put my new deer whistles on the car.

Last week there was calamity just past the barn. I missed it all, of course. It was after dark and people in accidents no longer have to drag themselves to the door begging to use the phone. I did notice an ambulance go past but never supposed it might stop on my rural corner.

Not until my neighbour and I went for our morning hike did we see the wide bloodstain that continued in a band many yards down the centre of the road. At the abrupt end was the really big stain and the drag marks where a heavy body had been lugged across the shoulder into the ditch. Some unfortunate driver had hit a deer head on, probably at about 80 kph, in the dark. Major damage to the vehicle, no doubt. And, if the ambulance was involved, also to the driver.

Deer have moved into the county in a big way. They graze with cattle, gobble up gardens, and bolt across the road before you can blink. My closest encounter was a ghostly deer face pressed against the driver’s side window in the Big Swamp at night as I missed it by a hair. The itinerant nurse who visited my old dad said she had hit six deer so far in her travels. She tossed them into the back of her pickup as bonus meat for the freezer.

Deer hunting season is only a week in December, a time to watch grown men shivering for hours in sleet and wind hoping a deer will obligingly run by. The deer go into hiding or dodge along the fence as if knowing hunters can’t take pot shots toward the road. In the summer, the Ministry of Natural Resources put up deer cameras to measure the population. Coyotes, they concluded, were taking more than their fair share of the fawns. I can see no reduction in deer tracks.

So I’ll stick my deer whistles onto the bumper and acquire that peculiar high pitched screech that is supposed to repel the deer in the headlights. My humble effort to keep more blood off the road.

Gail Hamilton’s books.

How do you start a novel that wants to take a big chunk of your life?  You pay too much attention to an off-hand suggestion from your literary agent.

I’ve just posted an author review on Goodreads for my historical novel, The Tomorrow Country, telling the tale.  Find out the two little words that propelled me into breath-catching world of Victorian social upheaval, crime, romance, desperate causes and staggering idealism.

I wouldn’t have had the guts to face all that, but my characters sure do.  I cheer on every one of them.

Read The TomorrowCountry review here. 

 

 

Hey folks,  I just did an author review for my latest romance, Will He Be Mine?  This is the first volume of the Love Potion Chronicles.  

Two more books in the series are to come.  In them all, I have some fun with the idea of a modern love potion.  The next book, due out in June, is called Man on the Run. We will see whether a love potion catch him, or just screw up his life.

The author review for Will He Be Mine? is here.