Five Mile Road
This photo is largely for the benefit of Uber Kayak Woman, who is, I hope, regularly riding a bicycle on this road. And yes, it is a road. Except it doesn’t look like this any more. It is now a 60-foot wide (or whatever) paved street with big ugly McMansions on it. Colonial style and whatnot. Just perfect for the Great White North. Yes, that’s sarcasm. I knew I had some old digital photos of Five Mile around somewhere and yesterday I found them. Right here on my cute little cyber-beastie.
Five Mile Road was beautiful when I took this picture. It was November back in the year 2000 and walking it that day made me feel like I had gone back in time to a day when people still traveled by horse and buggy sometimes. The years when Grandberry would end a summer day of work at the bank in Sault Ste. Siberia, board the train (yes, the train), disembark seven or eight miles away at Gladys (yes, Gladys) and walk the last mile or so down to the old log cabin on Fin Family Moominbeach. The tracks are long gone. I don’t even think they were there when I was a little kid. Time hurries on…
The photo is pixelated because I took it that day in 2000 with our newfangled Sony Mavica digital camera. It saved photos to a floppy disk. Remember those? I had to remember to keep a good supply of blank floppies around because I think those things held maybe 40 photos at the most. They filled up quick. And I knew jack-doodly about Photoshop back then. I think some free version of it came on our strawberry iMac. I couldn’t even figger out what a layer was, fer kee-reist. So my photos were largely unprocessed. It was a good old camera but time hurries on…
The day I took this picture was an amazing day when three generations of Fins and some of our friends hiked a road/canal that a developer had blasted through some conservancy land adjacent to our land. At the time of our hike, the DNR had stopped the road but later on they were bought off or whatever people do to assuage the DNR and the road continued and we now have new neighbors where there was only wildlife before. We are coping. At least it isn’t condos. Or Walmart. Time hurries on…
It was a wonderful hike and I have a lot more photos from it and I think maybe I’ll repost them one of these days. But not today. For one thing, I don’t have time to reprocess the pictures. For another thing, I have to rephrase some of the angry captions I wrote back in that time. We aren’t happy about the road or having new neighbors but, as we have no choice, we need to be friendly and not act like somebody stabbed us through the heart or something. Time hurries on…
October 20th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
I’m glad you found the photo! I wish I remember 5 mile road from those days. And yes, I have been biking on the loop that uses the Five Mile Road connection to TNC land preserve. The last morning I rode it there was a large dog barking that was fairly intimidating, but thankfully not loose. Then there were the footprints of Mr. (or Ms.) Bear to ponder. I hope to explore it again tomorrow. Leaves continue to fall here, moving from color to the far sweeping views of bare branched trees.
I have another route in mind that might head more directly towards Cedar Point, I let you know how it rides. . .UKW
October 20th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I love the trees. They seem like they are making their own path. We have also lost many trees to development here in the PacNW. I have never even heard of that kind of camera. I came late into the digital age!