Every once and awhile, something written in this chronicle elicits a response. And last week was one of these rare occasions. Two readers, one from Alexandria and one from Greenfield, reached out to comment on my column’s very last sentence: “We all know that real men never ask for directions after missing a turn.” In addition to these two readers, another kind soul lent me a book that offered an explanation of why men are so reluctant to seek route guidance. In it, the author referred to a 2000 study reported in Nature Neuroscience that examined brain responses to spatial puzzles and found that the area of our brains that deals with this type of thought was activated more frequently and intensely in men than women. The suggestion was that men evolved with better neural compasses because, in prehistoric times, they foraged far and wide hunting for wild game.
The headline of an article by Sandra Blakeslee in the May 26, 1992 edition of the New York Times offered an even more concise answer: Why Don’t Men Ask Directions? They Don’t Feel Lost. She reported that after studying how male and female college students move through mazes, Dr. Thomas Bever, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, concluded that men and women use fundamentally different navigational strategies. Dr. Bever concluded that men relied more on their memories of direction of travel and time spent. Women on the other hand rely more on landmarks. “Neither style of navigation is superior,” said Dr. Bever. “Both men and women get from point A to B just as efficiently and neither sex gets lost more often than the other.”
Nevertheless, the purported reluctance of the male of our species to seek directional guidance has remained fair game for jokesters through the ages and spawned countless variations on the riddle: Why des it take a million spermatozoa to fertilize just one human egg? Because none of them will stop and ask for directions.
Sounds about the same
If you’re under the impression that winters one hundred years ago were vastly different than today, a story from December 3rd, 1920 that I came across while traipsing through back issues of the Glengarry News begs to differ. The front-page article entitled “Hydro-Electric Progress Throughout Glengarry” detailed how the region’s good weather conditions were helping spur on the completion of the high-tension, 26,000-volt transmission line from Cornwall that would finally bring electricity to Alexandria. The News reported that, to speed up the line’s completion, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario had just sent a gang of 20 men to bring it southward from Alexandria and meet up with the crew of 22 working north from Martintown.
While papers of a century ago didn’t have those cute infographic weather summaries in the masthead, I’m assuming it must have been pretty mild if these two crews were hoisting transmission poles into holes they probably dug, and then backfilled, by hand. I’m guessing there weren’t many backhoes around in those days, if any. The article went on to say that the low-tension line from the Martintown substation to Apple Hill and Maxville would follow once the Alexandria run was complete. There was no mention of when hydroelectric power would finally reach Dunvegan. Until then, residents would have to continue to rely on kerosene lamps for lighting and battery power for their radios.
A wintery harvest
Until around the mid to late 1940s, hay was not the first “crop” of the year that many Dunvegan-area farmers would harvest. It was ice. Assuming, of course, they were lucky enough to have a creek, stream or small river they could dam. Before rural electrification, ice harvested in the cold of winter and packed away in sawdust or straw was the only refrigeration option for many Kenyon milk houses and farm kitchens. And it was a process as old as time. Archaeologists have found evidence that early Greeks, Romans and Chinese also stored ice and snow for use when the weather turned warm.
Ottawa reader Ken McEwen vividly recalls when ice cutting was a minor, but essential farm activity. Mr. McEwen was raised on Kenyon’s 7th Concession. He left the area in the early 1950s for a career with the RCMP and the family farm was subsequently sold to Jack and Linda Fraser.
The annual ice harvest was a joint venture for the McEwens, one they shared with their then neighbour to the east, Edgar Smith. Mr. Smith had built a concrete dam in 1938 on the east branch of the Scotch River just to the west of his bush road bridge, south of his farmstead. Each fall, he would slide thick planks into the sluice gates to raise the water level to create a larger “field” of ice. As Ken described the process in an email to me, Mr. Smith’s approach to the ice harvest was fairly sophisticated. “Edgar had an ice cutting machine, a sleigh-like set of runners, with a circular saw mounted on one end of a shaft… driven by a small, single cylinder, gasoline engine.” To produce uniform blocks, the rig also had a spike to one side of the saw that would etch where the next cut should be. “The blade didn’t sever the ice completely,” Ken recalls. “The cuts then had to be finished with an ice saw.” For those of you who have never seen one, an ice saw looks like a long crosscut saw. It has wide-spaced, jagged teeth with a longish tang at one end to which a wooden handle is mounted at right angles.
Ken also remembers one other farmer who cut ice on the east branch of the Scotch: Dan MacKinnon. The river ran north through his farm in the 8th Concession. But unlike Mr. Smith, Mr. MacKinnon cut his ice all by hand. “It was hard, wet, cold work,” Ken laments. “Dan was the hardest worker I ever knew. I’m sure he was the only person who ever built a cement silo single-handed… he mixed the cement by hand, built the forms and carried the cement in buckets to fill them.”
Winter ice was also harvested on an industrial scale in the area, but that’s a story for another day. In the meantime, if you’d like a rare glimpse at how blocks of ice were cut in the Poconos, Pennsylvania in 1919, I’ve got something precious you should watch. It’s a 10-minute back & white film with no sound. Nevertheless, this gifted amateur documented the process from beginning to end: from measuring the thickness of the ice to lifting the blocks into storage using a nifty auto-unloading, horse-powered elevator. It’s yours for the asking on YouTube. Just search for “Pocono Manor Ice Harvest in 1919.” If you like history, it’s time well spent.
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