Wild Fell by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771481601
Publisher: ChiZine Publications
Published: 2013-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

THE ROAD TO WILD FELL

I drove north in my father’s boxy Volvo station wagon along a winding sweep of highway that rose and fell as the city faded from sight, replaced by great stretches of highway bordered on either side by a thick green phalanx of spruce pine bracketing occasional glimpses of open fields and rolling farmland. Highway 400, connecting Toronto to Barrie in a two-hour stretch of uninspiring blacktop, abruptly became a wasteland of strip malls and fast-food joints as we approached the city. Past Barrie, I continued north along the west of Georgian Bay, passing Orillia and Midland before continuing to Parry Sound. Then, still farther north. As the 400 became Highway 69, the vista became spectacular.

I’d spent the two-and-a-half-hour drive in a deep, gloomy guilt over having left my father at MacNeil, but the sudden burst of jagged beauty outside shocked me out of my melancholia. I pressed the button that rolled down the Volvo’s windows and let the wild northern air surge inside the car, clearing my head and snapping me completely out of my blue funk.

The city I’d left behind had been smothered in a sullen layer of foul brown smog. By contrast, the air rushing past the car windows was almost savage in its lucidity and I could smell the bright cold of Georgian Bay. The terrain itself had been formed from battered ice age granite rock that had been left rounded and smooth by the passage of millennia, forming islands studded with the ubiquitous windswept white pine. From the shoreline, as seen through dense patches of maple, juniper, and birch, the water was impossibly bright, reflecting the argentite sky. I made a right turn off the highway at the outer limits of the town of Adelphi, still fifty kilometres from Alvina. On the side of the road, sunbursts of goldenrod asserted themselves amidst patches of pussy willows and new-growth cedar as the newer highway gave way to the interconnected web of town roads that had bound these rural communities one to the other for a hundred years or more.

The temperature outside gradually dropped from refreshing to chilling as I drove deeper into the countryside, and I rolled the window back up.

The topography also grew bleaker—was that really the word, though? Bleak? Perhaps stark was a better word, because while the dull green of southern Ontario had given way to the craggy granite vistas made famous by the “Group of Seven” artists, the outlook from the windows of the car was far from unappealing.

In truth, I felt the first genuine flutter of exhilaration, even excitement, since buying the house on Devil’s Lake I had yet to even see.

Even more, I had a preposterous anticipatory notion of familiarity, even ownership, as though the terrain outside the window stirred some memory from my childhood of time spent in one of these towns along the shore. But I knew this to be false: I’d never been here before, though I had seen paintings of these scenes in various art galleries over the years.

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