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.