Lake Ontario--Weather observations with regard to it--Area and
depth--No underground passage for its waters--Daily horizon of the
author--A sunrise described--Telegraph poles an eye-sore--The
pleasing exceeds the ugly.
Realizing the fact that the greater part of beautiful Lake Ontario
belongs to us, and, likewise, that the most densely populated portion of
our province is about its borders, a few facts and observations will, I
think, be acceptable to most Canadians. My remarks are founded mainly
upon my own observations, from a lifetime residence upon its shores, and
also in a measure from Dr. Smith’s report to the United States
Government on the fisheries on the lake. First, the lake is a perfect
barometer, in this wise: It will foretell the weather to come to us for
twenty-four to forty-eight hours in advance, to all who will closely
observe it. For instance, suppose we have our coldest winter days, when
everything about is held in the tight embrace of Jack Frost, and there
is no sign of milder weather, or any relief from the intense cold. Look
abroad upon the lake just as the sun is setting, and a light yellow band
hangs above the surface of the water. Then in a few hours Jack Frost
leaves us, and a thaw is at hand. Or, perchance, during the winter days,
when we wish for sleighing, and yet the ground is bare, and it will not
come; no sign of snow, nor the feeling of it (as you well know, one can
feel it before it really comes). But before that time look abroad upon
the surface of the lake, and see a black band extending as far as the
eye can reach. Now it is only a few hours, ordinarily about eighteen,
before the feeling of snow comes, and then down comes the “fleecy
cloud.” It is summer now, and we would know if it will be windy
to-morrow. Are there red rays and yellow skies at sunrise? Yes. It will
be windy on the morrow. But when the cumulous clouds move easily, and as
if not driven above the waters, fine weather old Ontario now gives
us--and he always tells the truth. Not to use many words, in the
glorious midsummer days, when his surface is just like molten glass, and
objects in a depth of sixty feet are clear and distinct, its entrancing
beauty comes. Molten glass; but watch, and a mile away you see a streak
of ruffled water coming towards you, for just there a puff of wind has
caught it. But it dies away and leaves the polished mirror once more to
me. Then he rises in his might and tosses our ships about just like old
ocean, and sends his spray far upon the shore, and his huge-capped waves
advance and recede.
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.”
But it never freezes so hard close by the shores as away from its
breath. Curious, also, to relate, in the fall it does not “freeze up,”
as we say in Canada, as soon as away from it, by two weeks usually. In
the spring, again, the frost is gone from the soil quite two weeks
before it is gone back from its influence, so I feel safe in asserting
that winters upon its shores are one month shorter than they are away
from its meteorological influences. And yet leaves do not appear quite
close to its waters just as soon as they do a few miles away, anomalous
as it may seem, for it does not get warm so quickly as localities more
remote. It is never so warm in the summer about it, as it is never so
cold in the winter. Dwellers upon its shores rarely, if ever, suffer
from extreme heat during the periodical torrid waves which sometimes
visit this land. Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes--being about
185 miles long, and of an average width of 40 miles, being widest
opposite Irondequoit Bay, where it is 55 miles in width. It is some
6,500 square miles in area, of which Ontario owns 3,800. It is 232 feet
above the sea, and usually fluctuates but little in height, though in
1891 it was three feet lower than ever before observed. Persons living
at Niagara, it is said, remarked on the unusually small amount of water
that year passing over Niagara Falls. I am unable in any way to account
for that small flow. We are told it is because the tributary streams and
the waters of the Falls were less. Granted, but why they were less is
far to seek. In most parts the depth of Lake Ontario is about 350 feet,
but off
[Illustration: SCENE NEAR BOBCAYGEON.]
[Illustration: A CANADIAN VIEW--LOOKING SOUTH-EAST FROM EAGLE MOUNTAIN,
STONEY LAKE.]
Charlotte, N.Y., it is 600 feet deep, and in some places opposite
Jefferson County, N.Y., it is quite 700 feet deep. The eastern portion
is the shallowest, being only about 100 feet about South Bay. At the
bottom are, in many places, vegetable organisms, furnishing food for
those fishes which feed at the bottom. Our sturgeon is a bottom-feeder,
and some others. About Stony Point is a rough, rocky and sandy bottom,
and the other parts are muddy and clayey. An underground passage to the
ocean has been mooted many years by persons who have thought the St.
Lawrence could not take away all the flow; that is to say, the waters
passing over Niagara Falls and those falling into Lake Ontario by
contributory streams, which add much to the flow from the Falls. It is a
fallacy; there is no such underground passage, and the St. Lawrence
easily takes all the waters from the lake. No current is perceptible in
the lake. Pieces of wood upon its surface do not flow as with a current
down Kingston way, but invariably come ashore with the first wind. In
perfect preservation to-day are many ships which have gone down and now
rest upon its bottom. Very probably too, the bodies of passengers upon
those ships, confined within the hulls so as to prevent their rising to
the surface, and thus getting the air, are there yet, and in perfect
preservation, for the waters in the depths are always cool and
preservative. Were some expert diver yet to go ghost-like among these
cabins, his nerves must be upset with the evidences of human tragedies
there so vividly to be seen before him. Mainly, the waters are melted
snow, and are manifestly pure, and blessed are those whose homes are
about this life-giving lake, as well as about all our other great
fresh-water oceans. About the shores of the Mediterranean have been for
ages the choicest spots for man’s life; that is to say, the regions
where the human family could develop most perfectly, and life there
passed was rounded and full. Our old Roman bards, you know, were forever
singing about the beauties of Mediterranean shores, their “golden apples
of Hesperides,” and sumptuous residences built partly upon the land and
partly over the sea. Living on the shores of our Great Lakes is
generally conceded now to be most conducive to human development; we
have left the Mediterranean shores in the background, and now want only
the population, for we have a better condition for human
life-development and happiness right here, and far more enjoyable, for
the great heat of the ancients’ country is absent here in our new land.
The earth all light and loveliness, in summer’s golden hours,
Smiles, in her bridal vesture clad, and crown’d with festal flowers;
So radiantly beautiful, so like to heaven above,
We scarce can deem more fair that world of perfect bliss and love.
Turn the eye southward, from the town, with its noise, bustle and smoke,
and look with me over my daily horizon, which indeed bounds a landscape
which my eyes have feasted upon all my days, for the past half-century,
save and except the years at college and years of foreign travel.
Manifestly at the first, the very first, in fact, the eye catches the
more conspicuous objects. And it is, in this instance, a great dead but
standing hemlock tree, denuded, it is true, of its foliage, but yet
bearing its limbs quite in detail. Like great men, it has died at the
top, and its impression upon my retina is always associated with the
crows’ congress which I saw in its foliage-less branches last fall. The
crow, you know, only partially leaves us hereabout for the winter. Many
of them do migrate, it is true, but here along the Lake Ontario shore
dead fish are always thrown up by the waves, and he can feed at any
time; consequently, he does not leave us. So, upon this elevated, dead
tree-top, I saw thousands of them gather, and heard one after another
deliver his speech in regular order. Oratory they must have, for their
voices were plaintive, defiant and grave, in turn, and I dare not deny
them intelligent utterance. Close beside this site of the crows’
congress are a few great, large, sweeping elms, whose branches alone
would each make very respectable trees. Always their greenness is
visible to me, and the quiet contentment of pose of their branches and
leaves is always a pleasure. Great blue-crested herons find convenient
resting-places on their highest limbs. Stork-like, these great, gaunt
birds stand upon one foot, and turn their heads side-wise, and so
wise-like, that one feels so near nature when beholding them that it is
uncanny to disturb them. I let the eye wander beyond the high elm limbs,
and Ontario’s ultra-marine blue waters are before me, upon the far
horizon, beyond my extreme range of vision. And when Old Sol rose this
morning from out of Ontario’s waters, he heralded his appearance by
throwing up into the sky shafts of light of various colors. Some,
indeed, were pure violet for a few moments, and others red, and yellow,
and blue, but not the blue of Ontario, so that the contrast may be
marked for us. He is coming up swiftly, and in a few moments the colors
have all changed, and almost before I can turn my head yellow has
suffused the whole in the immediate locality of old submerged Sol.
Again, the top of a wheel of fire we see upon the water, and now it is
all red about. Old Sol has risen, and a globe of fire is sailing upon
the waters’ surface. Could any facile brush only put upon canvas for us
these phantasmagorial colors, no one would believe the artist, but
accuse him of outdoing nature. And now he shines between me and a high
hill upon the lake’s bank, surmounted by trees, green at the top and
golden yellow along its sides with ripening grain. Our-red men
discovered the very striking beauty of this eminence before Cartier ever
sailed up the St. Lawrence, and even before the Indian population moved
backward and northward upon those backwater chains, and away from Lake
Ontario. To establish this fact most indisputably, we have only to look
at the many skulls, and larger human bones, generally, which the
ploughshare turns out. Then the red man enjoyed his pagan rites without
the intermeddling of the expectant Jesuit missionary, who only came ages
and ages after; for, among the bones, we find his flints, skinning
stones, and stone tomahawks, but no articles of iron, because the
Frenchman, who first came here, had not then given him tomahawks of iron
and old flint guns. Imitative whites, whose eyes travelled about the
horizon, as did the Indians’, drank in the beauty of the scene
inceptively, and they in their turn made it their place of sepulture,
and to-day it is the white man’s burial ground, embosomed among the
evergreen trees, which Old Sol’s rays are penetrating for me. While I
stand and worship at Nature’s shrine in the early summer morn, with the
sun’s advent a gentle breeze has risen. God has been specially good to
us in giving this sublimely beautiful vision:
“The south wind was like a gentle friend,
Parting the hair so softly on my brow,
It had come o’er gardens, and the flowers
That kissed it were betrayed; for as it parted
With its invisible fingers my loose hair,
I knew it had been trifling with the rose,
And stooping to the violet. There is joy
For all God’s creatures in it.”
Down the long, meandering highway my eye rests, and my soul is pained by
most irregular, unsightly, great bare poles on either side of it. A
beneficent Government has given some grasping fellows the power to put
these up and stretch wires upon them, and wrench my soul daily by their
ugliness. Europe would not for a moment tolerate such hideous marring of
the landscape, but long-suffering Canadians, most law-abiding and
complaisant, suffer the nuisance to remain. Not content with the great
warty poles, there are huge braces or props leaning to them at every
bend in the highway, and I, as the individual, must suffer the sacrilege
in silence. A long-suffering people may yet arise in their might and
tear these gaunt, denuded forest trees from the face of the earth. There
is a forest-covered hill, mainly of second-growth timber, before my eye,
and it gloriously crowns what would otherwise be a most unsightly, bald,
round eminence. But it is beautiful, dense, green and grand, and a
wealthy man, viewing daily this hill upon his horizon, bought the land
and keeps the forest that it may please him, and others as well, for
their entire lives. Five per cents, or any given per cents, are not to
be mentioned in comparison with this good citizen duly honoring his
Maker and helping his fellows by his generous act. A forest primeval is
before my eye as I turn my glance to the opposite side of the horizon,
and it stands high and strong before me. Our native maple has never yet
been surpassed for beauty and cleanliness, and here it is our emblem and
our pride. Mainly this forest has always been in my mind as the spot
where countless myriads of pigeons used to alight in the days gone by.
Another forest farther away, and almost out from my horizon, but not
entirely gone from it, formed the next nearest roosting-place for this
extinct migratory bird, strings of which would fall to my boyhood gun,
but now, alas! gone to South America, where food is more abundant and
more easily obtained by them. Lesser objects on the horizon do not
strike me so forcibly, but as I look more remotely and away over the
busy town and its forges, looms and benches, the ridges are clearly
marked upon the sky. Geologists have told us these hills were once the
shores of a broader Lake Ontario. Evidences of the rocks and pebbles go
far to establish that fact, but to us moderns they are very palpable and
valuable by keeping off the cold of the north during the inclement
season, that we may grow the succulent peach beneath their shelter.
“Companies are bodies, indeed, without souls,” for here, with us, the
railway company, which exacts its three and a half cents per mile in
contravention to its charter, has erected great, unsightly sheds, and
stained them a dull red, that their ugliness may be unparalleled. No eye
for the beautiful and harmonious can ever be reconciled to the gaunt
poles along our highways, wire-bestridden, or to the red architectural
sheds of our railway. Summing up, however, the pleasing and unpleasing
which I have touched upon, we see that the pleasing and beautiful
exceeds the unsightly and ugly. I am indulging the hope that some day,
in the near future, a way will be found by which we may enjoy all the
best facilities of communication and transportation without having the
landscape marred by unsightly poles or ugly railroad sheds. The
sensibilities of many of our citizens have been wounded by the act of
some individual or company, who, vandal-like, has removed a time-honored
familiar forest, or erected a most surpassingly ugly house, barn or
warehouse. These marrings of our horizon make life for all more
circumscribed, as well as grieve the souls of the cultured. As we love
our glorious country, let us beautify and preserve it.