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so this driving a Ford F-150

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Today Charlie, my mum and I rented a car to head up to the Whetung gallery at the Curve Lake IR near Peterborough. Or, we tried to rent a car. All they had at 8 AM was a massive Ford F-150 pickup truck w/ 4WD option and enough clearance to safely run over a fire hydrant.

All that came in handy, though, as we left the highway to visit the old farm that my great-grandparents had bought near Bethany for their retirement. The property has since been sold, of course, and it's now a golf course. As I wandered around remembering things from my childhood (we stayed up there a couple of times before leaving Ontario in the early 80's), I discovered some news articles showing Samuel L. Jackson golfing at that site. Apparently he'd been there for some charity event; it was a bizarre discovery.

From there, we headed up the little-used country lane from the golf course. A road that quickly disintegrated into a deeply rutted track that alternated between large rocks and deep muddy bits. All that clearance and the 4WD were a sudden necessity.

We emerged from the wooded laneway caked in mud and with quite a bit less gasoline in the tank (thanks to the 4WD, I suspect), and took some better roads back to the highway. We passed through Peterborough and up to the Curve Lake Indian Reserve to attend a thing at the gallery where a number of artists were in attendance. I chatted for quite a while with an interesting fellow by the name of Sandy Cline, who does soapstone carving. He taught me a few tricks of that talent. My mum talked with the artists whose work she's been slowly collecting for the last twenty years.

From there we went to the Petroglyphs provincial park; Canada's largest First Nations site for rock carvings. It was a site sacred to the Algonkian-speaking locals, made at some point in the late first millennium to mid second millennium. I was surprised to learn that the locals had had a trickster god equivalent to the West Coast's Raven or the Prairie's Coyote. (S)He was called Nanabush.