POSTING # 35

“Baked from….Scratch” in Virgil; the Luther Marsh: Part II; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

“Baked from….Scratch” in Virgil

We had guests coming and I was trying to find a new restaurant to try in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Browsing through the Tripadvisor.com website I found that the website shows 55 restaurants for NOTL

The three most popular are The Charles Inn, The Hillebrand Estates Winery Restaurant, and the Peller Estates Winery Restaurant. Each is a distinguished restaurant with a renowned chef.

And then a surprise.

Number four in popularity, The Pie Plate, is not a restaurant at all but a bakery, with a few tables for café fare.

How does a bakery join those illustrious restaurants?

By producing world class pies, “Baked from…scratch’, as their slogan says. The crust is flaky, and the fillings are fresh, juicy and deep. So far, we have tried and unreservedly recommend the apple, peach, strawberry/rhubarb, grape and lemon meringue. And the quiches are outstanding.

The Pie Plate is on the Virgil main street (Highway 55, aka Niagara Stone Road) on the way to or from Niagara-on-the-Lake old town.

It is closed on Mondays and busy on weekends and holidays but it is always worth the wait.

Try it on your next visit. It is very, very special.

The Luther Marsh: Part II

In last week’s posting (Posting #34, August 23, 2009), I told some stories about the Luther Marsh, which is about 10 miles north-east of my hometown, Arthur, Ontario.

There is another story about the Marsh that I have wanted to tell for years but have never been sure how to do justice to it.

The facts are not complex but the context is. How to be fair to the two parties involved: the Guelph detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and an elderly farmer whose ancestors had been among the 1850s settlers to the Marsh from Northern Ireland.

I suspect that from the RCMP’s point of view both the facts and the context were straightforward.

In the late 1940s, the Guelph RCMP detachment had reports that a farmer in the Luther Marsh was making whiskey, and selling it in the Arthur beer parlours on Saturday nights. If the allegations were true, the farmer was guilty of breaking a slew of provisions of Canada’s liquor laws. The production of illegal liquor was a Federal offense and that gave the RCMP jurisdiction, even though normal criminal and traffic offenses were handled by the OPP or the town police.

Now, there was no way the RCMP could have planted an undercover officer in an Arthur beer parlour to catch the farmer selling his illegal booze. Everyone knew everyone else.

In any event, the RCMP wanted to catch the farmer red-handed making whiskey so they could charge him with illegal distilling, possessing a still and a long list of other offenses.

They developed a plan.

A neighbour in the Marsh was persuaded to watch for unusually heavy smoke---the kind that is produced when someone is operating a still---coming from the suspect’s farm and to phone the RCMP detachment.

When the phone call came, they would set out for the Marsh in a couple of cars and a truck (to carry away the still and all the other paraphernalia used in whiskey making).

So, from the RCMP’s perspective this was a simple case of a person flouting the laws of Canada. He must be caught and punished.

Now let’s look at the situation from the farmer’s perspective.

He was in a bind.

His ancestors had been lured to Canada by settlement agents who told glowing stories about rich farmland in Ontario. The government would give them land on the understanding that the title to the land would be turned over to them when they had cleared a few fields and built a house and a barn. The government would also give them some grain, and farm animals to get them started.

When the farmer’s ancestors arrived they found that the land they had been allocated was in a huge marsh that, as we found last week, the surveyor in 1831 had said was unsuitable for settlement.

Despite the problems, the settlers had managed to clear some fields on heights of land and put up some humble buildings.

They grew enough grain in most years to feed a few hens, some pigs, a cow or two and a team of horses. They sold eggs and cream in Arthur on Saturdays to get some cash.

When there was surplus grain, the ancestors could have sold it to a mill in town but it is probable that they decided to use some of the skills passed down from generation to generation in Ireland to turn some of surplus grain into a liquid product that would help them get through the travails of trying to farm in a marsh.

And living and trying to farm in the Luther Marsh was hard. In addition to trying to grow crops on poor land the farmer and his sons had to maintain a long lane from the township road to their dwellings on a little hill, a lane that the Marsh kept trying to swallow up. It was a constant battle to haul enough gravel to keep the lane above the swamp and to maintain culverts for little streams to flow through.

The problems of surviving became more acute after World War II as prices shot up on the commodities the farmer couldn’t produce but had to buy---such as clothes, gasoline, tea and sugar. He was finding it harder and harder to cope.

One can see that the temptation must have been great to raise some cash by sharing their home-made whiskey with people in town.

So that’s the context for my story.

Now for the facts.

When the suspect’s neighbour called the RCMP to report a plume of dark smoke, the Mounties set off at once for the Luther Marsh in their cars and a truck.

When they turned off the township road onto the farmer’s lane they could see the plume of smoke on the hill in the distance.

They sped down the lane until---they came to a culvert that had been removed.

They jumped out of the vehicles and stared at the meandering stream that was blocking them. There was no way they could drive around the missing culvert. The shores of the stream were boggy and the bottom looked, to use the surveyor’s word we encountered in last week’s posting, ‘mirey’.

One of them said, “That son-of-a-gun [as everyone knows, Mounties don’t swear] takes the culvert out when he runs the still.”

They talked about what to do. Should they give up and return to Guelph, or should they wade the stream and march up to the house?

As they looked up at the house, they could see that the plume of smoke was growing less dense.

The officer in charge realized that just as they could see the house, the people on the hill could see them.

He told the others that they were going to cross the stream and go to the house as quickly as they could. They crossed the stream.

As they marched smartly up the grade to the farmhouse, they noticed that the smoke had disappeared.

An elderly man came out to greet them and the officer in charge handed him a search warrant.

“Go ahead and search”, the farmer said.

In an out-building with a chimney, the Mounties found a few innocent-looking pots and pans hanging on the walls but no still.

Then they went to the pig shed. The officer in charge had grown up on a farm in Saskatchewan and knew a lot about pigs. These pigs were not behaving normally. Some were rolling on the ground, while others were walking around unsteadily. They were all oinking with delight as though they had just had a recent, surprise treat.

The officer in charge sniffed the pig trough. A mix of chopped up feed, water and whiskey. He shook his head.

The Mounties took turns stabbing a hay mow with a pitch fork but didn’t find anything.

Empty handed, they walked back to the missing culvert, forded the stream, turned their vehicles around and returned to Guelph.

The story of the abortive raid spread quickly through the township and the town.

I overheard my father telling my mother the story. I suppose the RCMP might have consulted Dad about the raid since he was the local Ontario Provincial Police officer in the area that covered the marsh. But, the Mounties seemed to prefer to run their own show.

Dad didn’t seem upset that the Mounties had stubbed their toes and been out-smarted by a farmer in the Luther Marsh. In fact, I seem to remember him chuckling about it.

As I noted in last week’s posting, a dam was built in 1952 and the moonshine farmer’s land, which should never have been settled, was given back to the Marsh.

I wonder if there is a whiskey still mired in the mud at the bottom of Luther Lake?


Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

Coming home the other day, I was saddened to see a dead raccoon on the road. It made me think of some of the raccoons we had met while camping.

On one trip, we had put all the food into a very sturdy, steel Coleman cooler before going to bed and put the cooler on a picnic table. The cooler had two locking mechanisms. A clip at the front that was easy to open---it allowed the top to come up about half an inch. The clips at either end were trickier. They could only be opened if the top was held down with one hand and the clips removed with the other.

In the middle of the night, I heard a loud banging. As I peered out of the tent I saw a huge raccoon rocking the cooler back and forth. He had managed to lift the front clip but he couldn’t open the end clips.

I could sense his frustration--- the lid was open only enough to let him smell the food inside.

I shouted at him but he kept on rocking the cooler.

I threw some pebbles and he finally waddled off into the forest.

As he went, he spat out a stream of what I assume was raccoon profanity. I couldn’t understand it but the range, energy, rhythm and volume of the swearing would have done any sailor proud.

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Another time, we did an unwise thing. We took some leftover stew and instead of burying it, simply dumped it a good way off from our camp site by an old tree.

Sitting around the campfire, enjoying some toasted marshmallows we heard angry hissing and growling coming from the direction of the old tree. We crept close to the tree and saw a family of raccoons surrounding the stew. The male, with his huge, fat back to us, was gorging himself on the stew while the female and the young ones watched. Whenever the female or a young one came close to the food, the male would hiss and snarl.

Our daughter, ever the feminist, was outraged. “That’s not fair. Look how fat he is!”

She wanted to throw something at the male but we told her that that would drive away the whole family and the female and babies would never get to sample our stew. It would be better to let the male have his fill and then the female and the young ones could eat.

We went back to our campfire with our daughter still muttering about how unfair it was that the male was allowed to eat his fill while the others had to wait their turn.

When we tell that story now, she still gets upset.

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See you next Sunday for Posting #36 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.