Memory conspires against nature. The forgetting can begin in the instant that a change takes place…
– J.B. MacKinnon
It was now the 1980’s. Educators were giving us a more sober, and more realistic message. Towards the end of high school we were told we would be the first generation that, on average, would not do as well as our parents’ had. That we were now noticeably into our decline and fall as a civilization, although of course they didn’t synthesize nor recognize this information as such, for what it was. It was just another soundbite to most. And it was also sometime in the early ’80’s, that Seasons magazine released a special issue about a special place in the world. The place was called “Long Point” – the longest freshwater sandspit on earth – and it was one of a handful of places in the Southern Ontario of those days that remained somewhat frozen, or at least significantly impeded in time, to the extent that while Niagara was succumbing to the blitzkrieg war on life that is modernity, Long Point and region, the last frontier of the area, was still a natural stronghold. Relative at least to the most of the rest of the south. The magazine appeared on the rack of the library at Beamsville District Secondary School, Squirrel Eating Jon’s incarcerating institution, and was one of those little rays of light that shone on an otherwise dark place helping to make the hard time served there endurable.
Long Point was spared the axe in large part when on May 4, 1866, just after the end of the American Civil War, a total of 14,934 acres of former public land was sold for a total of $8,540 to John Brown, George Hamilton Gillespie, Thomas Cockburn Kerr, William Little, David Tisdale, Laughlin McCallum, and Samuel DeVoe Woodruff. These purchasers, businessmen and sportsmen who had cottages at the point, immediately petitioned the government for a charter of incorporation as “The Long Point Company” for those lands which they now owned, being “desirous of promoting for fishing and hunting and otherwise to manage and make the land available for the purposes of the Company incorporated by this Act.” The Company managed the area better than any government agency could have, as they were not crippled by the burden of attempting to please an electorate.
Many of the earliest settlers to the Long Point region came from Niagara, including Squirrel’s home county of Lincoln. Seems the place has long been a draw for the daughters and sons of Lincoln County. The Long Point of today is most notable as a refuge for birds, reptiles and amphibians. One can only imagine what it must have been like in the early days of settlement, to have remained relatively rich until the present time. To Jon’s way of thinking, it is the herpetological element that is of most important note, nationally. This opinion is not entirely subjective. As the entirety of Canada hosts birds, there are plenty of places that are important for avian life. There are far, far fewer places in Canada that are important for reptiles.
As fortune would have it, Eating didn’t have to wait until he was able to drive to get my first taste of the region. He was privy to a trip to the Backus Woods, just north of the Point, at 14. Backus Woods was named for an immigrant from Yorkshire, England, another place Squirrel Eating claims in his own ancestry, his people settling there for a span during their migration from the Scotch Highlands. John Backhouse came to the environs of Jon’s home in Lincoln County, Ontario around 1791, after a brief stint in the United States. He was not there long before he heard Norfolk beckoning. Backhouse had three wives, though not all at once. His union with his first wife, Margaret Longbottom, proved especially fecund and produced from seven to ten progeny depending on who was counting (children rarely sit still.) She too was from Yorkshire, and all her children, most of whom ended up in Ontario, were as well. Margaret died in 1791 in St. Catharines, Ontario, where she and John initially lived after leaving the States. Age: thirty-six. His second wife was a dairymaid and acquaintance he went back to England to marry. Jane Moore White bore him three more children. She died in 1809 at the almost equally discouraging age of thirty-nine, and was buried at Backus. John Backhouse’s third wife, Hannah Haines, whom he married around 1814, bore him no children at all and lived to be 80.
The remnant forest named after this man is one of the highest quality old growth hardwood forests in Ontario and the best remaining example in the Carolinian Life Zone, which encompasses the Niagara Peninsula and Eating Jon’s home town of Vineland as well as the north shore of Lake Erie. An understanding of just how marginal the situation has become for nature in southern Ontario can be gained by contemplating the fact that this greatest expanse of woods in the southernmost forest region of the province is but 875 acres in extent – a minuscule pittance for a vast country that is mostly forest. For perspective, consider that this same country’s boreal forest region, a place attracting much environmental concern in recent years, is 1.4 billion acres in extent. Here you begin to get a picture of how things are in southern Ontario. To be fair, the discrepancy in these numbers is partially because the Carolinian Life Zone comprises less than a quarter of one per cent of the Canada’s landmass, but it is also because this life zone falls entirely within that tiny sliver of the country – the deciduous forest zone – that hosts 50% of our human population. We here have long considered this appalling statistic the strongest case for annexation with the United States. “The acquisition of Canada,” said Thomas Jefferson in the days leading up to the War of 1812, in which John Backhouse served in the 1st Norfolk Militia, “will be a mere matter of marching.” Had he not turned out to be mistaken, I imagine this would have been a great mercy to the land, flora, fauna, and people of southern Canada in her entirety, and southern Ontario in particular, as the pressure to settle this strip would have been greatly relieved were there no international boundary. The region would not be so grossly overpopulated as it has become as the result of being one of the very few sections of the nation with conditions of climate and soil fully supportive of settlement in what is otherwise primarily a boreal wasteland. Nonetheless, the midget relict patches of woods of Carolinian Canada are still home to 25% of Canada’s species at risk, a number of which occur in Backhouse’s Woods. Prothonotary warblers nest in deep wooded swamps, Jefferson’s own Salamanders breed in vernal pools, and woodland voles forage in runways beneath the litter. In addition, some of the oldest living trees in Ontario are found here, including Black Gums that were seedlings when Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534. Tulip trees, the tallest growing trees east of the Rocky Mountains, shoot 35 metres straight up and through the canopy of maple, oak, pine and hickory. And of course, there are the snakes.
During his first trip to the region, Jon received a guided tour of the inside of Backhouse’s mill. The first artifact he spotted, right there in the anteroom, was an old taxidermy mount of a very large Eastern foxsnake, twining up about a piece of driftwood, if you can trust his memory. He remembers being in awe of the size of this reptile. Certainly it was larger than any snake he had found to date. He asked the guide, (now probably a crone) if they were still around, as this was obviously a specimen of considerable vintage, and she said yes they were, in fact, the place was lousy with ’em.
Squirrel Eating Jon did not return to the place until he was sixteen, driving a borrowed car. It was a fine, early June Saturday, sunny, warm and clear. He was accompanied by his friend, Voice of the Mantis. (“The Voice” in some circles.) They took to the tobacco country, a romantic region-apart, more like Dixie in aura than like anywhere in Canada. Flatlands, mostly, but sometimes rolling over old dunes of sand, mostly covered now by growth; pine and sassafras and flowering dogwood: the Norfolk Sand Plain. Modest farm houses and rows of old tobacco kilns covered in green tarpaper and with red shutters that could be closed to control the climate within. Billboards advertising peanut plantations. Almost as soon as they crossed the boundary into this subtle yet romantic land, they began seeing their first reptiles. Hard at the side of Highway 24, up on a small sandbank, Blanding’s turtles for instance, nesting. Other turtles.
Their plan was to proceed down the fifty-nine highway to the Point proper, snake hunt where it seemed right, and then head on up to the Backus Woods and the environs of John Backhouse’s mill. Eating just couldn’t get the image of that great stuffed foxsnake from the mill out of his head. It was more compelling to him than the appearance of the world’s largest squirrel on a morning of sharpest hunger, maybe. He was looking forward to hunting the very different scenery of the Backus Woods and environs as much or more than the exotic marshes and dunelands of the Point. Perhaps this was because the landscape inland was more like that of home. Hunting it would be not at all unlike hunting the quieter corners of his squirrel-grounds, with the significant difference that the snake fauna was still significantly intact, not yet having met their version of the Seneca Cliff as had the large herpetofauna of Lincoln County during the 1970’s. But they stuck to their plan and forged first to the Point.
A few miles before you got there, the lands flattened out entirely to give the impression of a sort of Delta landscape. There was a belt of soil here, dark rich rural blood, not sand, and there was no tobacco being grown on this narrow belt. Houses passed were modest and thankfully few and mostly it was billiard-table-level fields, quite expansive near the lake. Then the highway dipped a little and we were on the causeway across the great marsh. The nimrods were on high-alert, yet they passed over the causeway – legendary scene of reptile carnage at the tires of the automobile – without seeing much more than a few painted turtles and one big snapping turtle. They began their search of the point, soon venturing like poachers onto prohibited conservation lands, the nearest thing we have in a ‘classless’ society to the Royal Woods, set aside for elites like card-carrying biologists and other notebook carrying scriblers. A smart move, denying access, given our unwarshed hordes in general, ever ballooning, seem unable to refrain from destroying that which they claim to be seeking, usually and mostly by their sheer, mindless numbers, but also on account of machines and of course, stupidity. Not that biologists aren’t self-serving also and prone at times to doing damage, just that there are far less of them, typically – although this seems to be changing too, at Long Point. But more on that in a future post.
The hunters were contented by numbers of black gartersnakes, their first such, and the abundance of these reptiles buoyed them on, hoping the locale would offer up a foxsnake or a hognose snake. It did not. They kept to the lee-side of the dunes, where there was more concealment for fugitives. They ventured down the point until they came to a place where the lake had breached-though, a narrow but deep channel resulting. This is a normal process on the point. Cuts appear and are healed over, a landscape carved in sand being plastic as compared to one carved in stone. They hadn’t long turned back when they heard a vehicle approaching down the beach. They hid in behind the dunes where a giant cottonwood lay prone, silently, like leverets in a form. The vehicle, which they could not see, stopped adjacent them, but on the other side of the dunes. They could hear the chattering of apes piloting the conveyance – doubtless old today, probably dead – giving tongue on two-way radio, without being able to hear the details, assuming there were any. Whether this meant they were being hunted or was just coincidence, they did not know. It was not long before the vehicle turned around and made its way back towards the nearer reaches of the Point. The strange pair rose and continued back themselves, leisurely, hunting as they went. It was time to head to the Backus Woods.
The Backus Conservation Area of which these buildings so far described were now a part, had yet to be a manicured as you will find it today. In its more natural state it offered the perfect set of the conditions to conserve both human and reptile heritage. Anyone who has been on a working farmscape as this once was can report that such a place can be rather cluttered, especially at its margins, with the all the leavings and after-effects of the previous genrations, decades and centuries, depending on the age of the farm. Artifacts from the golden age of the horse are often in evidence, as are older tractors, unused cars of every vintage from the Model T on up, as well as scrap lumber, entire sides of old buildings lying in the grass, still-standing outbuildings no longer in use, and scattered sheets of roofing metal and plywood. All this rubbish, most of it coming from the era before plastic, and unlike this latter substance which lends a cheap trashiness a place even when still in use, becomes rather part of the charm of the place, the romance, the aesthetic. It is something conservation authorities rarely seem to understand, insisting on cleaning such scenes up and manicuring the lawns, stripping the character and rendering the place sterile and unlike anything it likely ever was in life. Making these places more like a Country Club, a catering to the dull edge of the human blade. Aside from the negative effect this has on rural authenticity, it also has an effect on wildlife. On snakes, and on snake hunters. Snakes love these littered old farmyards, as they offer great opportunities for a cold blooded creature to regulate its body temperature at the same time as remaining out of sight. A snake that must resort to a natural feature such as a woodchuck burrow or rock crevice for shelter must necessarily reveal itself to get warm, to thermoregulate as they say, but it may not be in evidence for long, and when it is in its recesses for lengthy spans of snaketime, it is inaccessible, unknowable. A snake that is lucky enough to have one of these old farmyards as part of its territory, can conversely crawl under a thin old board, remain hidden, and yet the heat still radiates through and warms it. Not only that, but very often it can find a meal of rodents under there as well. Even better for this purpose on cooler yet sunny days is old roofing metal, and other types of thin metal cladding, when it falls into disuse and lies about on the ground. Here is a material that warms up very quickly in the sun. On warm sunny days, it becomes too hot in a hurry, and by then the warmed-up reptile either begins foraging or perhaps retreats into a rodent burrow which may itself be a feature of the landscape under the tin. If the day is just a little cooler than ideal temperature for the reptile, it may return underneath the tin again and again during the day, and certainly it will benefit from returning – hopefully with a full stomach – as dusk comes down. And here it can be readily known to the snake hunter.
They went now to the old Backhouse homestead. They spied the sheets of rusty tin in the long grass out behind Backhouse Junior’s old home as the day was coming onto one-thirty or two-o’clock. Almost as soon as they spied it they understood the error they had committed in their hunting strategy for the area. They realized they should have been focusing their time looking for more of this sort of old structure around these heritage buildings – perhaps the barn that they had passed near the south entrance to the conservation area, other such relics of a former time, the people gone, with the snakes perhaps housing their souls? Instead the hunters, young and still a bit stupid, had wandered about over the land hoping to randomly come upon their quarry. But here was a scene they knew might be relied upon to draw their game. The day was warm, but not so warm that it was inconceivable that a snake might not be coming and going from underneath a metal artifact, as described. They honed in.
Luck was on their side. As they leaned down to turn the first sheet of corrugated metal, there right under Squirrel Eating Jon’s gaze and close-up was the unmistakable spotted rear third of a foxsnake that was just then taking shelter beneath the cover. It was immediately clear before even turning the artifact that this was the largest snake either of the youths had found to date. The Voice of the Mantis sounded in approbation. And when they did turn the metal, it was equally clear that it was one of the most beautiful snakes they had ever found, one of the more beautiful sights in all of the wild. Closer to five than to four feet, average for this snake, hefty and with the beautiful rich brown blotches on subtle straw grading to a burnt orange that is typical of specimens this reptile, and of course the exquisite, copper-coloured newpenny head.
To be continued…
What Rough Beast 