Toronto and Ontario Trip (Part 3)

Have you ever seen a sunset so brilliant it looked like it was Photoshopped? A mansion so regal it looked like a Hollywood horror set? A farm so bucolic it looked like an Andrew Wyeth painting? These are the kinds of images you see in Ontario, the most populous province of Canada and home to its largest city, the vibrant and multicultural Toronto, as well as its seat of government, the stately and civilised Ottawa.

In Part One of this series I looked at Toronto, and in Part Two I focussed on the Royal Ontario Museum of Art. In this part, I’ve decided to look at the countryside of the St Lawrence Lowlands which surrounds Canada’s southeastern megalopolis. The region is much like the Midwestern United States, with farmland, lakes, fields, and old towns surrounding major cities like Chicago. Where southeastern Ontario has not been converted into farmland or built up into cities, it remains a primeval temperate woodland called the Carolinian Forest.

My mother’s cottage lies nestled in the midst of this forest.

So without further ado, I bring you my snapshots of the vast, fabled landscape of southeastern Canada. Heading east on the 401 past the high-rise suburbs of Toronto… …you pass a few exurban mega-malls and housing developments until you finally reach the pastoral, strangely English countryside of southeastern Ontario’s St Lawrence Lowlands:

And then you move into deeper country…

…and even deeper country (God, this reminds me of the Madonna song) until you reach full-fledged Carolinian countryside (aren’t the clouds stupendous?)

Then you reach Madoc, a village on the Trans-Canada Highway between Toronto and Ottawa. The village where my mother was raised:

Isn’t it quaint? It has a post office, a couple of banks, a few restaurants, a supermarket and hardware store, a bowling alley, a quaint pub, and a smattering of other local establishments. That is where my mother owns property.

Then there is Stirling, which is a little bit larger than Madoc because it has more industries based there. It has some amazing buildings:

The architectural style of the houses you see is called Second Empire. Remember when I mentioned how some buildings looked like a Hollywood set? It is the Second Empire style you see here that I was thinking of. It was common throughout North America in the 1860s and 1870s, and it has inspired numerous horror movies and television shows, like The Munsters, The Addams Family, and Psycho, as well as American Horror Story. Yay, Jessica Lange!

But then we move outside the towns into real wilderness, which is largely wooded. We move north to Lake Jarvis, near the edge of the Canadian Shield:

It is about a half-hour meandering drive from the Trans-Canada Highway, but imagine this being your destination:

A secluded cottage on a lake graced every night with the mournful call of the loon. And imagine this being your sunset:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Is it not spectacular? In Ontario the land is so flat that clouds take the place of mountains. Here we see mountains of the sky.

But Ontario’s brilliant landscape takes on a more earthy hue when we look at her rough, summery farmland nature:

Isn’t that a portrait worthy of Andrew Wyeth?

And this?

And of course the typical roadside barn:

Is this not eerie? It kind of screams Stephen King novel to me.

Anyway, that was just a slice of the photos I took while in Hastings County, Ontario. The sky is amazingly huge because of the flat land. That is something I’m not used to, being from Seattle, where there are mountains or hills everywhere you look. Everyone in Ontario should be thankful for their amazingly broad, cloud-filled skies, their bucolic farmland, their absolutely vast hinterland of forest, and the hauntingly beautiful call of the loon. Especially the call of the loon. It is otherworldly in its beauty, and it is one of my earliest memories as a child. That is how much it stands out to me.