Our journey to the North had been born of practicality. I wanted to take a trip during my spring break from work, and I lacked the funds necessary to take any voyage that would demand air travel and hotels. My travel partner Adam, on the other hand, is currently recovering from shoulder surgery and likewise had time and limited funds. Canada presented itself as a viable option.
Some days after deciding to head to Canada, I came upon an article in the New York Times. The author had written on a number of places in North America that served regional and seasonal foods. One of the places listed in the article was Shaw's Pancake House, a place about 100 miles north of Toronto (our destination) that only opens during March and April each year. All the syrup served atop the pancakes at Shaw's is produced on their 100 acres of maple forest. I clipped the article from the newspaper, and we decided that Shaw's would be the final destination point of our trip. I am not sure that we realized at the time the extent to which the syrup quest would come to inhabit the entirety our thoughts and actions.
Everything began smoothly, perhaps even better than planned. Adam and I left New York/New Jersey on Monday afternoon and headed in a northwesterly direction. We made an unplanned stop in Buffalo and tasted the local (original) Buffalo Wings (see previous post) and headed up to Niagara Falls on Tuesday morning.
The falls at Niagara were impressive, but the weather was severe and not very conducive to extensive gazing upon the thousands of gallons of falling, near frozen water. Standing atop the lookout points on the American side of the border, we felt briefly energized by the rising mist. The sensation was soon overtaken by the lack of feeling in our extremeties and my own fear that I might soon lose my rather pointed, skinny nose to frostbite.
After a short drive around the area, we headed to the border to suffer through the annoying and (for me) typically excessive frontier control. Rather than being passed through directly to the other side, we were subjected to extensive questioning, our passports were briefly confiscated, and our car was searched. Now, perhaps this had something to do with our general scruffiness, and maybe my garb (I was wearing all the clothes that I had with me, including the thick camel wool African robe that can be seen above) aroused a bit of suspicion. Nonetheless, the process was annoying, and after we finally got through we felt as though we had passed through yet another interesting obstacle on our journey.
It was perhaps around this point that our conception of our trip to Canada began to undergo a certain metamorphosis. See, orginally the trip was planned as a trip to Toronto. Pancakes at Shaw's were to be a sidenote. Adam and I both started to notice, however, that our talk of pancakes and of finding our way North of Toronto had begun to dominate our discussions. We both obviously loved the idea of visiting a pancake house 12 hours from home. It was exciting and absurd, and seemed to lend the trip a sort of eccentric feel that appealed to us.
It wasn't many hours later, now in Toronto, having met up with my friend Alejandra (with whom we were staying), that we came to another realization. The article clipping that we had religiously carried with us through days in New York and along the entire car ride had somehow been discarded along with common trash found in the vehicle. We had lost what we would come to refer to as the map for our Holy Grail. Our ties to Shaw's Pancake House had been cut!
Now, the most obvious answer to our problems was quite that--very obvious. A quick search on the Internet turns up Shaw's Pancake House. We had Internet at our disposal. It would be easy to find the place. In a fit of quixotic thinking, however, we decided to pursue a different route--We would find Shaw's sans internet--without the help of the information highway. We would do this analog.
Immediately, the entire trip changed. EVERYTHING was now somehow connected to Shaw's. Could we stay out late at the Toronto bars? No! Impossible! We needed to be up early to get to work on our research. See--unfortunately, we remembered the name of the place, but the town name had completely escaped us. We both had our theories as to how the word started, the letters that dominated, the number of hyphens involved, etc. Still, all that our combing of maps and lists of Ontario towns seemed to prove was that we both had crappy memories. Nothing seemed to fit. We would have to hit the field, meet syrup purveyors, talk to distributors, check bookstores and libraries if necessary. We decided that we would stop at nothing. Even more, we decided that if we failed to find anything in Toronto, we would simply drive north and start asking people about Shaw's. The plan was archaic, but simple and failproof.
We started off Wednesday morning by heading toward St. Lawrence market, known as a place filled with people selling artisinal foods (ie gourmet, real maple syrup). It took us a while to track the place down, as we seem to have accidentally followed a truck route through the streets of Toronto. Nonetheless, just finding the place felt like a small victory.
Inside, we were shocked by the number of people selling maple syrup. Still, nobody that we interviewed seemed to have ever heard of Shaw's. We spoke to people throughout the market, telling them of our quest and our problems. Some were sympathetic to our search, but none seemed to offer much help. By the end of our time in the market, however, we had achieved success on a few fronts:
1. We found some really, really delicious mustard. We tried tons of varieties of mustard. We bought highly priced bottles of said mustard.
2. We found numerous geographic clues based on the origins of other syrup brands being sold in the market (all clues were carefully annotated in a notebook temporarily requisitioned for the purpose of annotating clues).
We left the market with renewed optimism and resolve, realizing now that our quest would not be as easy as we had half-hoped. We began to see all in a new light. Toronto was not merely a delightful city, but the setting in which two syrup-searching heroes would have their wits tested with riddles and bodies tested with wind chill. The waters of the Niagara of the day before became a purifying baptism, and our run-in with Franky Carcioffi quickly converted from a frightening encounter with a mobster into a dangerous temptation to leave the quest and pursue easy women in the whirlwind of an unholy bender. Every moment on the trip was somehow tied to our quest to find Shaw's.
Energized by a wholesome lunch in a strange and postmodern Torontonian atrium, we headed off to the University of Toronto library. Along the way, we stopped in a bookstore and got back to work. Tourist guides and the food section turned up little of interest regarding Shaw's, but Adam found out some interesting things about the mythical history of Maple Syrup.
As the story goes, Waksis (Great Hunter), an Iroquois Indian, buried his axe in a maple tree before heading out to go hunting one day. As luck would have it, a receptacle of some sort happened to be sitting beneath the axe. This container was positioned perfectly to receive the dripping "tears of the maple" that poured from the wound of the axe. In a continuing string of luck, Waksis's wife stumbled upon the pail while he was still out hunting, and took the liquid back home to use in a stew. She heated up the liquid, made a stew, and waited for Waksis to come home. When he did, he ate and declared the meal the most delicious stew he had ever tasted. In this way, maple syrup was born.
(Later, Adam fashioned the drawing below as representation of Waksis)
We left the bookstore and continued to head toward the library. Apparently UT students aren't all that interested in libraries, because we had to ask a few students for help in finding it. The last guy we asked responded slowly, scratching his scabby chin in earnest, obviously thinking hard.
"Well....let's see....you go to the end of the road here, and make a right....and go down a bit...and, uh, um...you'll see a big building...it's...uh....brown, I think..."
We walked down the street, following his directions, when we suddenly saw the most monstrous of buildings looming in the distance. We had never before seen a building that looked so much like a monster. No edifice that ever seemed to be so intent on eating all those that entered. This was the library for which a student had provided as a sole description the word "brown". Why, we wondered, wouldn't he have just told us to head up the road until we saw "a building that looks like a big frigging monster with a big ass mouth that wants to eat you"?
After accidentally skipping past a line of students waiting for the computer catalog, we began our search in earnest. We hoped to find some sort of list of Canadian syrup producers, and began searching terms such as:
1. Syrup
2. Maple Syrup producers
3. Canadian syrup
4. Maple Sugar, Ontario
We came up with a small and useless number of hits, and went off to collect our 1970's government pamphlets on syrup production, our topographic maps, and our detailed road maps of Canada. We found nothing, of course. Stumped again, we tried the phone books, attempting to guess in which area the restaurant was located (having no idea of the town's name). Again, no luck.
Like a flash, the solution suddently occurred to us. It was so obvious, and so easy, and we were amazed that we hadn't thought of it much earlier. We merely went looking for back issues of the New York Times to find the original article. This took a few minutes, as I couldn't remember exactly when I had read it, but we soon found it, and after whopping loudly (severe looks from the librarian), we burst out of the library and headed to the bar to celebrate our success and plan the drive up North.
Coming Soon: The Trip to SHAW'S PANCAKE HOUSE!
I CANNOT wait for the next chapter in this saga.. when are you going to post already?!?!!? :)
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