Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Canada Read online

  Lynne

  World’s Largest…

  Most Canadians aren’t prone to untoward levels of bragging, which makes it all the more notable when they claim a superlative. Here’s one category—cities and towns that say they have “the world’s largest” something or other.

  •Gold pan: Burwash Langing, YK

  •Wagon wheel: Fort Assiniboine, AB

  •Cross-country skis: 100 Mile House, BC

  •Concrete potato: Maugerville, NB

  •Fly rod: Houston, BC

  •Chuck wagon: Dewberry, AB

  •Tree crusher: Mackenzie, BC

  •Tractor weather vane: Westlock, AB

  •Tripod orchard ladder: Summerland, BC

  •Honeybee: Tisdale, SK

  •Dragonfly: Wabamun, AB

  •Sundial: Lloydminster, AB

  •Blueberry: Oxford, NS

  •Cookie jar: Deloraine, MB

  •Hockey stick and puck: Duncan, BC

  •Curling rock: Arborg, MB

  •Lamp: Donalda, AB

  •Putter: Bow Island, AB

  The world’s largest totem pole stretches skyward in Alert Bay, B. C.

  •Totem pole: Alert Bay, BC

  •Totem pole from a single tree: Victoria, BC

  •Piggy bank: Coleman, AB

  •Illuminated fiddle: Sydney, NS

  •Badminton racquet: St. Albert, AB

  The world’s largest wooden beaver resides in Beaverlodge, B.C.

  •Wooden beaver: Beaverlodge, AB

  •Softball: Chauvin, AB

  •Tomahawk: Cut Knife, SK

  •Mallard duck: Andrew, AB

  •Western boot: Edmonton, AB

  •Inukshuk: Schomberg, ON

  •Painting on an easel: Altona, MB

  •Fire hydrant: Elm Creek, MB

  •Bathtub: Nanaimo, BC

  The Golden Curse

  Canada legend says that in 1870, two prospectors broke off from their group searching for gold in the hills of southwestern Alberta. Lemon and Blackjack, as they were known, spotted small bits of gold in a mountain stream and followed the water until they found the gold’s source—and nuggets as big as their fists. Eureka! That night, after the men argued about whether to keep searching or to return home, Lemon crept over to the sleeping Blackjack and drove an axe into his head. A group of natives camping nearby saw the crime. When they told their chief about it, he put a curse on the entire area. Most people couldn’t find the mine after that, but those who did (including Lemon) suffered terrible consequences: insanity, alcoholism, and grisly deaths. Today, gold hunters are still looking, but most historians and geologists think this story is just a campfire legend. They contend that gold is usually associated with volcanic activity, and Alberta doesn’t have a lot of that.

  An ad entices prospectors to the gold fields.

  An Ice Place to Visit

  “You can never step into the same river twice,” observed Greek philosopher Heraclitus, describing a river’s constant changes. At the Hôtel de Glace near Quebec City, you can never stay in the same room twice…

  The 2011 Hôtel de Glace welcomes visitors.

  This Room is Freezing

  In the world of cool places to stay, the Hôtel de Glace is one of the coldest. Enjoy your room, because soon enough, it will melt away. So will the lobby, art gallery, tables, chairs, bed frames, and even drinking glasses and serving dishes. All are made of ice and snow. Canada’s only ice hotel, the Hôtel de Glace resembles its European sister ice hotels in offering strictly seasonal (January to April) accommodations. When the spring sun arrives, the hotel self-destructs—only to rise again in a completely different design the following winter. The Hôtel de Glace first offered its less-than-warm hospitality on January 1, 2001, with 22 rooms available. More recent versions of the hotel have had up to 85 rooms, as well as an ice café, nightclub, art gallery, and even a wedding chapel rated by Ireland’s Independent newspaper as one of its top-10 “Dream Wedding Locations.”

  Ice Specs and other Cool Facts

  •Half a million tons of ice and some 15,000 tons of snow go into the construction. Machines produce the snow, adjusting the mix to control humidity. Workers also use “snice,” a mixture of sticky snow and ice, in place of mortar and cement.

  •Ice shelters have a reputation for pro-moting deep, refreshing sleep. Writer Herman Melville called heated rooms one of the discomforts of the rich. He advised those wanting a good night’s sleep to “have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

  •The beds at the Hôtel de Glace are made of ice, but are lined with deer-skins and covered with mattresses and arctic sleeping bags.

  •The cost of a one-night, one-bed stay during the 2014 season ran between a few hundred and $1,000, depending on the extras and amenities guests chose.

  World’s Biggest Islands

  Of the world’s 100 largest islands (Greenland is the biggest) 22 are Canadian. Here they are, listed by rank:

  5Baffin Island

  8Victoria Island

  10Ellesmere Island

  15Newfoundland

  24Banks Island

  27Devon Island

  32Axel Heiberg Island

  33Melville Island

  34Southampton Island

  40Prince of Wales Island

  43Vancouver Island

  46Somerset Island

  54Bathurst Island

  55Prince Patrick Island

  61King William Island

  68Ellef Ringnes Island

  71Bylot Island

  76Cape Breton Island

  77Prince Charles Island

  89Anticosti Island

  95Cornwallis Island

  100Graham Island

  Rugged cliffs line Baffin Island, Canada’s largest, and the fifth largest island in the world.

  Graveyard of Buried Hopes

  Author L. M. Montgomery led a life of quiet desperation. Details of her emotionally wrenching private world—and possible suicide—give extra poignancy to her beloved character’s most famous line: “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”

  L. M. Montgomery

  Maud of Cavendish

  The author of the Anne of Green Gables series, Lucy Maud Montgomery earned the love and admiration of millions of fans for more than a century. Her first book, Anne of Green Gables (1908), has inspired adaptations to film, TV, and stage, charming children and adults with the life of misplaced orphan Anne Shirley and her life on Prince Edward Island.

  Readers familiar with the story of Anne Shirley—an orphan girl sent to live with a strict, morally upright elderly foster brother and sister—will undoubtedly see similarities between Anne and her creator. As a young child, Montgomery was sent to live with a strict older couple—her maternal grandparents—after her mother died and her father left to seek work in Saskatchewan. Living in the small town of Cavendish on Prince Edward Island, Montgomery found herself isolated, lonely, and constantly under the disapproving gaze of her grandparents.

  Like Anne, Montgomery also completed a teaching certificate course in one year and went on to teach before studying literature at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. And like Anne, she began writing for publication in her early 20s. Unlike her heroine, though, Montgomery seemed unable to rise above her surroundings and forge her own happy life.

  That wasn’t clear from the surface. Three years after the publication and immediate success of Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery married a Presbyterian minister named Ewan Macdonald. When Macdonald took a position in a church in Leaskdale, Ontario, the couple moved into the church rectory where, over the next 15 years, Montgomery wrote most of her tales about the people living in the fictional town of Avonlea.

  Journey’s End

  By the time of Montgomery’s death in 1942 at “Journey’s End”—her home in Toronto—she’d published 20 novels and more t
han 500 short stories and poems. But it turned out there was much more of her writing that hadn’t seen the light of day: her journals. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that the journals first appeared in print, giving an intimate view of the author’s internal life.

  Those journals reveal a woman who, near the end of her life, was worn down by the demands of a 31-year loveless marriage to a husband who suffered terrible depression, and the disappointment in her older son, Chester, who had moved back home after losing his position at a law firm, fathering a child out of wedlock, and then marrying and subsequently divorcing the baby’s mother. By the standards of the time, all these “scandals,” particularly her husband’s shaky mental health, would have been seen as unacceptable to discuss in public, especially for a minister’s wife. So Montgomery was left to suffer in silence.

  A month before she died, Montgomery declared, “I shall be driven to end my life.” A week before she died, an old friend from Leaskdale visited. At the end of the visit, the friend remarked that she would come back the next week; Montgomery responded cryptically that she had doubts she’d still be there to visit. Lucy Maud Montgomery was found dead on April 24, 1942, aged 67. Her death was ruled to be the result of congestive heart failure

  The kitchen in the Green Gables House on Prince Edward Island

  But Was It Suicide?

  In the reports of Montgomery’s death, no mention was made of a handwritten note found at her bedside that spoke of the writer losing her mind in stages, asking for forgiveness from God and everyone else “even if they cannot understand,” and alluding to circumstances “too awful to endure and nobody realizes it.” The note finished with this poignant summation: “What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best.”

  In September 2008, Montgomery’s granddaughter Kate Macdonald Butler went public with a bombshell that she said her father, Stuart Macdonald—Montgomery’s younger son—had revealed to her. Shortly before dying, Stuart told his daughter that he’d found the bedside note and suspected suicide from the start. He told no one of his suspicions, though, silenced by the same stigma that had isolated his mother. Butler went public with the secret, she said, in an effort to encourage discussion about depression and suicide, and to help “sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us—and most certainly not to our heroes and icons.”

  The fictional Green Gables House (pictured) still stands on Prince Edward Island.

  No Absolute Answers

  Despite this information and other anecdotal evidence, debate still lingers over the exact circumstances of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s death. Understandably, her admirers are mostly unwilling to admit to such a disturbing possibility, but even among scholars, the matter hasn’t been closed. For example, Mary Henley Rubio at Ontario’s University of Guelph (and author of a Montgomery biography and coeditor of her published journals) says other possibilities should be considered. For example, says Rubio, Montgomery was taking several medications that, if mixed, could cause an unintended drug overdose. It’s also possible that what sounded like a suicide note might have been intended as a journal entry.

  No matter what the details are, though, Montgomery seemed to have led a life of emotional isolation and depression. Although spunky Anne Shirley could always bounce back, her creator appeared to be more like supporting character Miss Lavender Lewis in Anne of Avonlea, who said:

  I’m just tired of everything…even of the echoes. There is nothing in my life but echoes…echoes of lost hopes and dreams and joys. They’re beautiful and mocking. Oh Anne, it’s horrid of me to talk like this when I have company. It’s just that I’m getting old and it doesn’t agree with me. I know I’ll be fearfully cranky by the time I’m sixty. But perhaps all I need is a course of blue pills.

  These Boots Were Made for Noshing

  How hungry would you have to be to eat your shoes?

  Isaac Stringer, the bishop who ate his boots

  Where Am I?

  The boots that Charlie Chaplin ate in the classic silent movie The Gold Rush were made of licorice. But that scene was based on a real incident…and a real guy who ate the real thing. In 1909, Isaac Stringer, bishop of the Yukon diocese, spent a few months filling in for a bishop in the Northwest Territories’ Mackenzie River area. In September 1909, when the placement was over, Stringer headed back to the Yukon. The fact that there were 800 kilometers (500 miles) of mountains, brush, and snow between the two dioceses was just one of those Canadian problems that needed to be overcome.

  Stringer and Charles Johnson, his traveling companion, set off early in the month, hoping to beat the winter. No such luck. Hit by storms and carrying little food, the two soon discovered that they couldn’t even depend on their compass. Because they were so close to the north magnetic pole, it was giving them all kinds of incorrect readings. Pretty soon, they were lost.

  A sealskin boot

  At first, they managed to scrounge berries and kill some small birds and a squirrel, but by early October, things were desperate. Finally, the bishop made a decision: it was time to boil their boots, which were made of sealskin and had soles of walrus skin. The skins hadn’t been tanned, so technically, they were edible. (The chemicals in tanned leather can be poisonous.)

  Charlie Chaplin dines on a licorice shoe.

  Filet of Sole

  Stringer and Johnson cut the boots into pieces and boiled them for hours. That hydrated the flesh, sort of like reconstituting jerky. But the results weren’t very appetizing, so they roasted the pieces over a fire. In his journal, Stringer wrote that the dinner was “palatable.”

  The men ate the walrus soles first, and the rest of the boots did not last long. On October 20, the day they polished off the boots, Stringer noted: “Breakfast from top of boots. Not so good as sole.”

  At this point you’re probably wondering the same thing we were: These men were in the wilderness, in the snow, in the middle of winter, and they were eating their shoes. What were they wearing on their feet? Fortunately, they were handy enough to make two pairs of snowshoes out of tree branches and leather scraps.

  Somebody Up There Likes Them

  The very same day that they finished the boots, Stringer and Johnson discovered sled tracks and freshly cut trees; eventually they staggered into a campsite. They had lost 50 pounds each during the 51 days they were lost. The men at the campsite were aware that Stringer and Johnson were missing and quickly realized who their weather-beaten visitors were. One of the men, Andrew Cloh, lived nearby; he took the pair to his house and revived them with real food: fish and rabbit.

  Stringer and Johnson traveled the next 160 kilometers (100 miles) back to Dawson City in a dogsled—Stringer called that ride “perfect happiness.” But the experience in the wilderness so traumatized him that he didn’t speak publicly about it for a long time. (Once he recovered, though, he did so in a big way, in a series of speaking tours, giving vivid accounts of his days in the wild.)

  King George V, shown here in a 1911 coronation portrait by Luke Fildes, was particularly excited to meet Bishop Isaac Stringer.

  Speaking of the Frozen North

  On a trip in 1911, Stringer heard about a four-man patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police that hadn’t been as lucky: they’d frozen to death in the same area where he’d been lost two years earlier. The Mounties had eaten their dogs, one by one, to stave off starvation, but they had been done in by average temperatures of –46°C (–51°F) and brutal headwinds that generated a wind chill of –80°C (–112°F). Stringer was badly shaken by the news and wrote in his journal, “It is a sad day with many unwritten and unspoken chapters. No one will ever know the full story of the struggle.”

  Dogsleds are an ancient form of snow transportation still used today. The dogsled team shown helped deliver mail in and around Dawson City in the early 20th century.

  Gone But Not Forgotten

  Stringer lived until 1934 and continued his work in the church, but his boot-eating story followed
him wherever he went. For example, when he was in England in 1914 attending to church business, he got a summons from King George V, who specifically wanted to meet “the Canadian bishop who ate his boots.”

  Trade Canada for Guadalupe?

  In late 1761, readers of the London Chronicle found themselves enmeshed in a running debate about whether Canada (captured from the French two years earlier) was something worth keeping, or should be traded back to France for something more valuable—like, say, Guadalupe Island in the Caribbean. According to one reader, Guadalupe had already proven itself useful with its great location and bountiful supply of refined sugars. “As to Canada,” the Chronicle reader wrote, “it is too early to form any judgment about what the amounts of the imports from, and the exports to, that acquisition will be.” Other readers grumbled that the British should have taken Louisiana from the French instead of a cold land of dubious value.