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Food
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Urban Exploration
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Museum Watch
Anachronism
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Subterranean
FOOD
Curdsmiths
WHAT’S PUNGENT, raw, blue and found
in abundance in Quebec? Some of the best
artisanal cheeses in the world.
Dozens of the province’s 300-plus varieties
will on offer from June 18 to 21 at the
Festival des fromages de Warwick, about
150 kilometres northeast of Montréal.
Canada’s recent listeriosis crisis not withstanding,
festival president Alain Faucher
expects about 25 cheese makers and 50,000 visitors to attend. “All the cheese
makers are in tasting and selling mode,” he
says. “They want to prove to the public
that there is no problem in the industry.”
Warwick has hosted the festival since
1995. Visitors sample local wines and
ciders, listen to live music and, naturally,
taste an array of cow, goat and sheep’s milk
cheeses, all the while learning how they’re
made. “The best part of the festival,” says
Faucher, “is that people can talk directly to
the cheese makers and hear their stories.”
Marie-Josée and Gilles Blackburn, from
Fromagerie Blackburn in Jonquière, are
returning for their second festival this summer.
Only in production for three years,
they’re already making their mark on the
industry. One of their cheeses, Blackburn,
is a finalist in the firm cheese category at this
year’s Canadian Cheese Grand Prix.
For more information, please go to
www.festivaldesfromages.qc.ca.
— Margo McCaffrey
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URBAN EXPLORATION
Walking on water
WATER IS THE REASON most of us live
where we do. Its capacity as a current of
transportation, to provide drink and food,
to produce power, and its ability to carry
away our waste, has served humanity well.
Trouble is, in industrialized cities the same
waterways that afforded prosperity became
sources of disease. By the early 20th century,
most of Canada’s urban creeks and
brooks had been banished underground
into sewage pipes, where they could continue
to serve without assaulting the eye,
nose or immune system.
“We know what’s right about water
management because we’re not dying of
cholera,” says Toronto “ecological literacy”
advocate Helen Mills, “but do we know
what’s wrong?”
Mills is the founder of Lost River Walks,
a project created 13 years ago to document
hundreds of the city’s forgotten waterways
and bring them back into the civic imagination
through free, guided walks. You
might ask what there is to see if the rivers
are hidden, but, as Mills makes clear, waterways
are more than liquid. The invisible
ink they left behind after flowing for centuries
takes the form of ravines, hills, sandy
cliffs, sudden hollows filled with willow
trees, the sound of rushing water under
manholes, perennial basement flooding
and strangely serpentine streets. One such
alley in downtown Toronto used to give
Mills whiplash every time her car dropped
down onto it. The lane’s mysterious dip
and jog, she eventually learned, was a relic
of the Taddle Creek riverbank.
Mills, who leads the river walks along
with a rotating group of volunteer historians,
geographers and biologists, always
enjoys that “aha!” moment when she lifts
a sewer grate above Taddle Creek, a tributary
of the Don River that runs beneath the
University of Toronto’s downtown campus.
“People can see and smell the sewer,
which is what the creek has become.”
For more information and a schedule of
walks, go to www.lostrivers.ca.
— Bronwyn Chester
MUSEUM WATCH
Peak experiences
THE COMPLETION OF the Canadian
Pacific Railway in 1885, with tracks perched
high on mountain precipices, opened up
dramatic new vistas to westbound travellers.
As a promotional gambit, the CPR
granted free passage to artists. The resulting
paintings and photographs (right)
made a significant contribution to the
young nation’s artistic identity.
THE BIGGEST MUSEUM IN THE WORLD
If the Glenbow’s mountain paintings make
you pine for the great outdoors, hit the highway
and explore Alberta’s Kalyna Country
Ecomuseum. With two million hectares of
parkland, prairie and farmland, and cultural
influences ranging from Cree and Métis to a
strong Ukrainian flavour, the region east of
Edmonton is billing itself as a unique holiday
experience. This summer, four of its communities
— the towns of Tofield, Viking and
St. Paul, and the village of Holden — will be
celebrating their centennials with events such
as traditional feasts, a beard-growing contest
and a barn dance. www.kalynacountry.com
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Several of these pieces will be showcased
in “Vistas: Artists on the Canadian
Pacific Railway,” a new exhibition running
from June 20 through September 20 at
the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. The
focus is on works created under CPR
patronage from the 1880s through the
early 20th century. Some portray prairie
icons such as bison and First Nations peoples,
while others depict the Pacific coast.
But the real stars of the show are the mountains.
“That was the focus of the tourism
campaign,” explains curator Roger H.
Boulet. CPR schedules, he notes, bolstered
the bias: “Most tours crossed the prairies
at night.”
The artists used a range of media to
convey the scale and palette of the alpine
vistas. Some of the paintings are enormous;
a striking example is George Horne
Russell’s Kicking Horse Pass, a two-metre by
one-and-a-half-metre canvas dominated by
brooding, twilit peaks. In a detail typical of
the CPR-commissioned work, viewers are
subtly reminded that the setting is now
accessible to them: perched on a ridge,
tiny in the foreground, shine the string of
lights from a passenger train.
A simultaneous Glenbow exhibition,
“Connections to Collections,” features
work that responds to the main show, reexamining
depictions of First Nations and the
railway’s notorious use of Chinese labour. Go
to www.glenbow.org for more information.
— Peter Norman
