The Senneville Time Warp

That's the title of a book by Hilary Hedges that I came across in the most unusual way.

Thanksgiving weekend was nothing short of phenomenal.  Our sons joined us, traveling from Vancouver and Toronto, and we had not one, but two turkey dinners with all the trimmings, one at home as a family with dear friends, and a second at my sister's with our two extended families.

That would have been enough to make for a fantastic long weekend.

But the weather, the weather, what can be said about the weather?  It was summer!  Not a late fall reprieve from the chill, but full-on, wipe your brow, squint your eyes, summer.  Temperature in the high 20's (high seventies for those where Fahrenheit rules), blue skies, warm breezy days, all the way from Saturday through Monday.  Never do I remember a Thanksgiving weekend like this.

On Monday afternoon, our out of town guests began to hit the road headed for home.  After cleaning up the brunch dishes, I jumped on my Vespa for a joy ride out to Senneville.

The warm breezy afternoon; the lovely winding road out to Senneville along the lake shore; the company of motorcycles; other scooters (including a man on a Vespa GTS and a woman on an LX; I followed them for a quarter mile or so before they turned down a side road); vintage sports cars; once I got to Senneville, the sunshine-dappled country road; maple trees breaking into their fall colours providing a multi-coloured canopy; all combined to make the ride dreamy.  This is the kind of experience that sells Vespas.

Was there anything that could have made this day better?  Yes there was! But there was no way I could have imagined it.

My casual objective for my ride to Senneville was to check up on a historic monument that has gone missing.  How does a historic monument go missing?  I wish I knew.  Vandals are the obvious culprits.  But you would expect vandals to resort to spray paint, to deface the monument, not carry it off.

The monument in question is a bronze plaque measuring about two by three feet, mounted on a concrete slab framed by cast iron girders.  It is off by the side of the road, surrounded by a wrought iron fence.

I came upon it many, many years ago.  At the time I had a Solex moped.  I had just written my last exam in my last year of undergrad.  I had set off on a very long ride solo, with the objective of going around the western tip of the island.  I had never done this before.  It was the first time I had been to Senneville, the westernmost suburb on the Island of Montreal.  That was how I stumbled upon the monument.

The plaque commemorated a skirmish between the colonists of New France and the Iroquois tribe of the native people.  The engagement was the first counterattack by the colonists following the horrific Lachine massacre in August of 1689.

Billed as the Battle of the Lake of Two Mountains, the engagement was by a small force of 28 soldiers from the Montreal garrison against 22 Iroquois.  The monument marks the place where the battle took place.

Having once stopped to read the plaque all those years ago, I have stopped by from time to time to visit that spot.  It's kind of special to me because it was a surprise to find it in the first place, and that serendipitous find blended with its isolation on the Montreal shore of the Lake of Two Mountains lends a kind of magic to it, at least in my mind.

To add to the allure of the monument, at some time in the recent past, the bronze plaque has disappeared.  The wrought iron fence marking the place is intact, as is the concrete wall where the plaque was mounted, but the plaque itself is nowhere to be seen.

It was bronze, so it couldn't have needed repair or restoration.  Was it taken down because historians discredited the story it told?  Given activism on the part of the native peoples in the recent past, did they make off with the plaque because the plaque commemorates a vicious act of war against native peoples?  Did a history buff make off with it and is now hoarding it in his basement?  Did aliens take it for further study or to place in a museum on their home planet?

Did I imagine the plaque to begin with?  When something just disappears, you can begin to question your memory.

Riding a Vespa makes it easy to stop to investigate things.  The road is very narrow by the monument and there is nowhere to park a car.

But there is plenty of room for a Vespa.  So I pulled over right in front of the monument to take a closer look.

And that's when I found it.

Resting at the foot of the monument was a document in a zip lock polyethylene bag.

I switched off the motor, pulled off my helmet and gloves, plucked out my earplugs, put the Vespa up on its centre stand, and picked up the bag.

Inside the bag was Ms. Hedges' book, Senneville Time Warp.  There was no time to sit and read the book.  That might be the subject of another ride.  I did snap some photos of this remarkable piece of ephemera though.   I love ephemera.  Surely that book in that bag will disappear, maybe even find its way to where the plaque is.  Who knows?

The book is a fictional account of the battle, seen by the eyes of time-traveling kids, with the Iroquois as protagonists, I think.  It's hard to tell when you only take five minutes or so to examine a book.

The particularly wonderful thing, is that there is a picture of the missing plaque in the book!  How cool is that?  Here is a photo, of the photo of the plaque, in the book:

So I wasn't imagining this all along.

I also took a close up of the picture in the book, hoping that when I got home I'd be able to read the inscription.  As luck would have it, I was able to read it.  It says (said?  It may no longer exist, after all):

"The Battle of the Lake of Two Mountains

Following the Lachine massacre in August of 1689, the Iroquois continued to terrorize the Montreal area.  In October, Governor Denonville sent out a scouting party of 28 under the Sieurs Dulhut and d’Ailleboust de Manthet which came upon a party of 22 Iroquois in the Lake of Two Mountains.  In the mêlée that followed this surprise encounter, 18 Iroquois were killed, three taken prisoner while one swam to safety.  This victory did much to restore the shaken confidence of the inhabitants.

Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada."

I carefully returned the book to the zip lock bag, took care to re-seal it, and placed it back at the foot of the monument exactly as I found it.

As soon as I got home I dove into Google.  What more could I learn about the battle, the missing plaque, and Hilary Hedges and her book?

Well the monument has a web site.  So that's a start.

And then, even more curiously, the only reference I could find to Senneville Time Warp was an entry on a Swedish web site (how weird is that?) where the title is misspelled.

Of course, as you might expect, there is no shortage of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn pages for Hilary Hedges (or Hillary Hedges, but I'm guessing she didn't get her own first name wrong on the cover of her book).  I'm sparing you those links.  I don't have time in my busy life to figure out if any of them belong to the real Hilary Hedges of Senneville Time Warp fame, and you shouldn't either.  If I'm wrong and you have taken the time to figure it out, please put up a post here and share your find.

Hilary Hedges, if you come across this page, please, please, please, post a comment to fill in the rest of this story.

Pretty cool for a Thanksgiving weekend, no?

Maybe one day I'll tell the tale of another disappearing monument from my college days: the modern granite monument to Dollard des Ormeaux in Carillon Quebec recreating the fateful stockade on the Long Sault along the Ottawa river where Dollard and his small band met their demise at the hands of the Iroquois during the same war between the French colonists and the native people of Canada.  It's kind of Canada's Alamo story.  At least that's the way it was told to us in grade school.  Dollard supposedly lit a fuse in a powder keg, tried to heave it over the stockade wall at the attacking Iroquois, snagged a branch overhead, dropped the keg inside the stockade, and BOOOOM! That was supposedly the sorry end of Dollard and his men.  The truth?  Who knows what the truth was.

Unfortunately the native people were ill-matched not only in numbers and weaponry, but also in spin-doctoring.  So all these accounts are mostly one-sided.



 That's all for now.

Epilogue: There is more to this story.  Interested? Check out the History Lessons page.

I couldn't resist

As soon as I opened my Financial Post this morning my dragon red Vespa LX jumped off the page at me.  The article citing Apple designs as among the most iconic the world has known is one of several tributes to Steve Jobs in today's edition of the Financial Post.  In my humble opinion, they could have added my mid-life-crisis-red Miata to the top of the list as well.

But who am I to quibble?  The Vespa LX topping the list made my day.

A peak behind the curtain

Some of you have had problems posting comments.

I have tweaked the comment settings in the hope that the changes will make things easier. For instance, you shouldn't have to fuss with that Turing word-test thing designed to tell if you're a human and not a machine.

If many machines start commenting, particularly if they are complaining about the difficulty they're having figuring out how to ride a scooter they bought on Ebay, I may have to turn the word verification back on. [EDIT: there was indeed too much spam, so I turned the word verification back on.]

If you are experiencing any issues on the technical side of things, and you're not a machine, drop me a line, and I'll see what I can do to twiddle the levers behind the curtain to make the problem go away for you.

Going back behind the curtain now...

Milestone!

I had to meander a little on side streets to capture this picture of my odometer at the momentous 10K milestone.

The Westmount Lookout

I took a sandwich and a bottle of water up Mount Royal for lunch today.

Mount Royal defines Montreal.  It sits alone and prominently on the south side of the Island, just northwest of the downtown core.  It's a kind of camel-back mountain with a pass that traverses the mountain on a southeast-northwest axis.  The southwestern peak belongs to the City of Westmount.  The Westmount Lookout gives beautiful unrestricted views to the south including Montreal's skyline, and, on a clear day, the Adirondack Mountains in the United States.

There are sighting guides cast into the lookout's balustrade to help you identify the landmarks.

To be honest, I didn't know that there was a Mount Johnson within sight of Montreal.  You learn something new every day.

Westmount is home to a good proportion of Montreal's well-heeled elite.  The palatial homes of every type and description perch on the mountainside and compete for the views.

If you look carefully at the river in the preceding picture you can see the Victoria bridge, Montreal's first permanent link to the south shore, completed in the nineteenth century.  Click here for my post on the Victoria Bridge.

A little further to the west, in the foreground, is Westmount Square, a group of buildings designed by famed Bauhaus architect Mies Van der Rohe.  He also contributed a similar grouping of sleek black boxes to the Toronto skyline, and I am certain, to many other cities in the world.

Beyond Westmount Square, there is the Champlain bridge, our mainstay route to the south and New York State, about an hour's drive to the south.

Here's another peak at a multi-million dollar view.

Refreshed by the quick sightseeing lunch break. It's time to head back to the office.

This video shot as usual with my Iphone, allows you to come along for the ride. Better mute your speakers because I didn't delete the noisy windy soundtrack.

Morning in Pointe Claire

The sun rises later now.

That means I need to use my Iphone in the morning to shed some light when I rummage through my sock drawer.

It also means I get to enjoy early sunrise views of the lake on my morning commute.

Case in point: the recent shot you see here is of the point that puts the "pointe" in Pointe Claire. The picture was taken from old Lakeshore road in Beaconsfield, just east of the Beaconsfield Yacht Club.  I took the picture from the saddle with my Iphone using the Camera+ app.

I really like Camera+ because it gives you separate controls for focus and exposure, among other goodies.

Commuting in the fall

Last week was very busy work-wise so this post is more of a historical account than I planned it to be.

It's difficult to believe that fall is here. Last Monday morning came with a hint of chill but by the time I rolled into the underground garage at the office, it felt like summer.

At lunchtime I took a good 50 minute walk. By that time it was truly summertime hot on Montreal's streets.

I meandered through the new entertainment district, the Quartier des Spectacles. It was there that I stumbled upon an exhibit of photographs taken from space by Guy Laliberté.

Many countries have space programs, including Canada.

Guy Laliberté, a fellow Quebecker, is a special case. He made up his own space program of one.

The Cirque du Soleil founder became mankind's first clown in space. He brought along clown noses for his space station comrades, but none of the astronauts chose to don them. Real astronauts don't clown around.

Guy took some stunning photos.

That's all I know about clowns in orbit.

Riding in the fall is no big deal. It's certainly nothing like space travel.

If you pick a nice day and you live where the foliage puts on riotous colours, it's a very pleasant feast for the senses.

Commuting on a Vespa in the fall is something completely different.

To do it well, and do it safely and enjoyably, requires discipline and good gear.

Good waterproof rain gear sitting in the pet carrier and ready to deploy is a first must have.

The next thing to consider is how well your scooter is equipped.

With the days getting shorter, an increasing number of commutes will be in darkness. I've added auxiliary rear running, brake and turn indicator lights.

I opted for an Admore Lighting mini light bar. It's a bar of very bright LEDs that combines all the lighting in a single unit. The turn indicators flash in a sequential pattern and the brake light modulates before coming on steadily. The Admore unit increases my visibility substantially.  If you click on the link above for the 'Gear Posts', you'll see the project post that explains everything you need to know about the Admore unit and how I installed it.

My riding jacket (a Corazzo 5.0) has very prominent reflective stripes. My Tourmaster Caliber pants and Icon Patrol gauntlets also feature reflective material.

Cool fall weather makes for pleasant strolls in cardigans and light jackets. Cruising on a scooter calls the wind into play and that changes the equation substantially.

Without a windscreen that extends in front of your hands, and good winter gauntlets, the cold can thoroughly chill you. With those Icon gloves, my Corazzo Underhoody under my armored jacket, and the liner zipped into my armored pants, I'll be able to ride comfortably all the way through October.

As long as it doesn't snow. Then I'll be done for the season, and ready for the commuter train.

Milestone looming!

I find it hard to believe. Yet it's plain to see that my dragon red Vespa will soon roll up to the 10,000 mile mark. All but 1,304 of those miles are mine.

I'm hoping to post a similar photo when that momentous event happens. I'll have to start paying close attention to the odometer.

It's been a busy week for me. I have a more substantial post in the works. This tid bit will have to do for now until I can pull this week's post together.

Pointe Claire Yacht Club

 Today's weather was glorious.  Sunny, unseasonably warm, and just about as perfect a day as anyone could hope for.

 I stopped briefly at the Pointe Claire Yacht Club this morning to admire the sailboats tethered to their moorings, waiting patiently for a weekend sail on the lake.

 The mouth of the harbor and the lake beyond the breakwater were quiet, no sails to be seen.

Perhaps on my return home the slips will be empty and the flotilla will be out taking advantage of what could well turn out to be the last great sailing day of 2011.

Here's hoping this wonderful weather will hold for the weekend.

Crossing the canal

This is something I do very often. Last year, I would have done it ten times in a week. This year I'm more adventurous, and my repertoire of routes has expanded, but I still take this bridge at least four times a week.

The Charlevoix bridge gets you from the south side of the Lachine Canal, to the north side.  It's a good way to get across the canal.

If you prefer tunnels to bridges, there is also the Atwater tunnel a little further west that serves the same purpose.  When I was a kid and we would take the Atwater tunnel on our way to visit my relatives on the south shore, my sisters and I would always bug my dad until he honked the horn in the tunnel.  With the windows down in the summer you'd get the mad echoing of the horn that always made us giggle.  I haven't gone that way on my Vespa.  I'll have to do that before the season ends to see what a Stebel air horn sounds like in the Atwater tunnel. 

Today both sides of the Lachine Canal are being re-developped with condos and lofts.  The building you see in the picture above is a condominium loft development.  The shores of the canal are a linear park with bicycle paths that take you from the old port downtown, all the way to the shores of Lake St-Louis in the west end.  What was once a dismal and decaying industrial zone is now a really nice green space.

Here's a Google maps satellite view of the bridge and its surroundings.

 The canal is open to pleasure craft and is the easiest way to take a motor boat from the lake to the port of Montreal.  From there, in theory, you could sail for Europe.

You might have a shot at it in a decent sailboat, but first you'd have to lower the mast to get through the canal.  Back in the 1960's when the canal was still a vital commercial waterway, all the bridges would open to allow the taller shipping to navigate the canal.  Since pleasure boats don't need the extra clearance, the mechanisms have been dismantled and the bridges are all permanently fixed.

The Charlevoix bridge was a turntable bridge rather than a lift bridge like the Gauron bridge further west.  If you venture under the bridge on the pedestrian path or the bike path, you can still see the turntable mechanism with some of its gears.  None of it is in working order and it's obvious that some of the key ingredients are no longer in place. 

The bridge deck, like many movable bridges, is a metal grid that you see pictured below.  With the decommissioning of the turntable, portions of the grid were filled with concrete to make the ride more comfortable for people in cars, and presumably safer for bicycles.

If you ride a scooter or a motorcycle, you can choose to ride on the grid portion, or the concrete portion.

I used the grid portions all last year and early this year as practice for my assault on the Victoria bridge. For an account of that crossing and what it feels like to negotiate a long metal grid deck bridge at speed, click here.

Ray Bans©

 I love my 35 year old Ray Bans^©.

They're the Outdoorsman model, said my optometrist appreciatively.  "They don't make them anymore" he said with the same fond, wistful look that a car buff might have talking about 1956 Corvettes or MG TDs.  He felt bad for the hard wear I inflicted on them, so he meticulously cleaned off the accumulated grunge when he fitted my new lenses last week.

This morning the dismal weather we've been having began to clear. The sun finally made an appearance so I pulled into Stewart Hall to put on my shades.

Standing beside the Vespa, paces from the lake, I took a minute to absorb my surroundings.  I felt blessed.

The freshness of the cool September morning air, the stately willow to my left, and the stillness of the lake made me want to linger, empty my mind for a spell, and just be.

I stood there surveying the scene, the air fragrant from the freshly mown lawn, enjoying the moment.  I took a breath, then strolled closer to the water's edge.  The only sound was the Vespa purring on its centre stand behind me.

When I got closer to the shore, I saw a couple of jet skis sitting on a boat-lift, close to shore behind a waterfront home on my right.  The jet skis made a pretty picture, the yellow bonnets of their shrouds popping out in the pastel scene.

It was time to 'shake a leg' as my mother was fond of saying, so I shoved off and continued on my way to the office.

Memories of Expo 67

Expo 67 was the 1967 World's Fair that was held in Montreal.

Montreal's mayor at the time, Jean Drapeau, had ambitious plans for Montreal's future.  He single-handedly put Montreal on the world map, first with Expo 67, then with the 1976 summer Olympics.

His administration shepherded Montreal from city to metropolis: the 1960's and 70's in the run-up to the fair and the Olympics were frantic times.  Incessant construction brought us soaring expressway interchanges and bridges, the Metro, Place des Arts, Place Ville Marie, Place Victoria, and the Olympic stadium.  Those buildings and public works define Montreal today;  they are prominent among the landmarks that are the signature of this city.

Political turmoil soon followed and the financial markets and institutions that gave Montreal its pre-eminent place in Canada soon fled to the relative peace and tranquility of Toronto.

Montreal eventually got over that economic hump, and growth returned early in the new millennium.

The challenge Montreal faces today is renewing all the infrastructure that was built in the 1960's and 70's.  Bridges, tunnels, and those soaring expressway interchanges that were so daring and futuristic in the late 60's, are now falling apart bit by bit, and chunk by chunk, as the government scrambles to repair and renew.

One way to forget what the future wrought, is to take a trip back to those magical days of the late 60's.

While most of the fairgrounds were recycled for other uses, some landmarks remain.

My Vespa allows me the luxury of lunch-hour ventures.  So I took off south through the downtown bustle, down to the port, past the Port Authority HQ, and headed to Ile Ste-Hélène, one of the two islands that made up the fair grounds.

To get to the island you can either take the Jacques Cartier bridge to the east, or the Pont de la Concorde which was the route I chose to take.

The Pont de la Concorde is one of the surviving Expo 67 landmarks.  It's not a particularly inspiring bridge, but it is fairly long, and extremely wide.  During Expo 67 the Pont de la Concorde, so named in honour of the motto of the City of Montreal Concordia salus, was one of the main gateways to the fair.

It's a challenge to get pictures of the bridge.  Here's one taken from Ile Ste-Hélène.

 Here's another taken from the Montreal side.

A light rail line was built to take fair goers over the fairly large distances between the city and the two islands given over to the fairgrounds.  The double-tracked rail line ran down the center of the Pont de la Concorde.  The remainder of the bridge's ample width accommodated throngs of pedestrians, me among them as a boy, wide-eyed with the wonder that was Expo 67.

One of the other signature landmarks so closely associated with Expo 67 is Habitat 67.  When you head for the Pont de la Concorde, Habitat 67 is the building right before the bridge.

Habitat 67 was architect Moishe Safdie's daring concept of concrete modular apartments.  I don't think that his vision actually ever got any real-world traction, other than that one concept project.

Today Habitat 67 is still futuristic, and is now all much sought-after condominiums, each with spectacular views of the river and the city skyline.

One of the other remaining landmarks has a second career as the Biosphere, now a museum on the environment.  During Expo 67 it was the American pavilion.  Designed by Buckminster Fuller it is a massive 200 foot high geodesic dome.

 Like Seattle's Space Needle, Montreal's geodesic dome is a prominent 1960's tribute to a George Jetson future that hasn't quite materialized. Where the heck are those flying cars?  I was really looking forward to those flying cars.

Mind you, if you buy a condo at Habitat 67, with a view of the Montreal skyline and of the Biosphere, you might begin to think that the Jetsons could be your next-door neighbours.

I can tell you that when you zip around town on a Vespa, and you glide through sweeping turns, you can't see the wheels under you, and it certainly feels like you could be skimming along on a wheel-less air scooter, or a Star Wars imperial speeder bike, or something like this:

With my photos all snapped, off I went back downtown to grab a quick bite before settling in for an afternoon at the office.

Here's a brief video showing the ride back to downtown from Ile Ste-Hélène over the Pont de la Concorde and past Habitat 67 which you'll see on the left after the bridge.

The ride home

In the evening I rarely stop to take pictures.

The day's work has worn me down, and all I want to do is get home.

Don't misunderstand, the evening commute on my Vespa is something I look forward to. There is no better way for me to unwind than riding west along the Lachine Canal and then the lake shore all the way home.

Nevertheless, I'm much less inclined to take the time to snap photos, unless the scene is compelling.

This evening was one of those days.

The weather began to clear at noon and the day evolved into a perfect late summer day. Warm but not hot; a gentle breeze; clear blue sky punctuated by great big white voluptuous clouds.

In a word, a sailor's dream of a day.

No surprise then that the west island sailors were out in force by the time I got to Pointe Claire.

The only unfortunate part of this nice little story is that my Iphone was woefully inadequate to capture the beauty that made me interrupt my evening commute.

As you can see, I took several shots, playing with the exposure, hoping to get it just right. In the end I couldn't decide which was best, so I've posted them all.

It's a shame that the sailboats don't translate in the photos they way they appeared to me. It's the flotilla of boats that got me to pause to take these photos.

If you click on them you'll see them in a separate page of your browser. Depending on your operating system, you can zoom in until they fill the screen. Only then will you see what forced me to stop, if only briefly.

Irene's wake

On Sunday the outer reaches of Hurricane Irene's scythes brought sporadic power failures, tore branches from trees, and littered the ground with leaves.

Monday's commute to work was chilly and windy but with clear blue skies. 

I paused on the lake shore to snap a few pictures of Lake St-Louis, still pretty choppy from the high winds.

It would have been interesting to see the same scenes at the height of Sunday's storm.