Chapter 1: On the Edges "So, we going to The Cool Spot?"That question was usually asked late on aSaturday just before we headed home, usually aftera bunch of beers while we were partying either in thewoods, in my townhouse garage (my mom used to tolerateus gathering there), or at the home of one of the guyswhose parents happened to be away that weekend. The Cool Spot was a Sunday retreat for our gangthroughout our late teens and into our early twenties.Over five or six years we probably made the trek morethan thirty times, in all seasons. We even camped out acouple of nights at our ramshackle forts. Sunday morning came, calls were made. I''d collect myleftover beers in my pack and stand out on my driveway.A few minutes later I''d hear the lawnmower-like engineof my buddy Lee''s old Mazda coming around the cornerwith Zeppelin, the Doors, or Crosby, Stills, Nash, andYoung blaring from the tape deck. I''d jump in, and Leewould grab his pack of Du Maurier regulars, pop one inhis mouth, and throw one my way.

Car lighter popped,smokes lit, we were off to pick up the other guys. A stopat the Jug store for some dogs, buns, and more smokesand we''d be rolling up Trafalgar Road to Dundas Street. As we turned off Dundas, we''d descend into thefloodplain of the Sixteen Mile Creek at Lions ValleyPark in Oakville, where we''d meet up with more of ourgang. Fully assembled and looking like a pack of hooligansdecked out in red-and-black-checkered lumberjackets, army pants, and all manner of bed-head, we''dstart toward the unmarked trailhead, well away from thedozens of park patrons laid out on blankets, throwingFrisbees, and tending portable barbeques in the grassyparklands on the other side of the pedestrian bridge. Then we''d take a path straight up the valley wall, aforty-five-degree incline. The red clay and shale crumbledunderfoot as we''d wind our way through thestunted trees that clung to the slope. At the top, theland opened up into an old pasture bounded by forest.Here we''d stop and catch our breath before continuingnorth along the valley rim trail at the edge of the pasture.

We''d walk single-file along the thin path, duckingunder the low, heavy boughs of the trees perched on thevalley edge. On the far side of the pasture, the trail enteredopen woodland and was blocked by a deep tributaryvalley of the Sixteen that we''d bypass by scalingdown the valley, crossing the tributary, and climbingback up the other side. By the time we rejoined thevalley rim trail, we''d have a good sweat going, and we''dskip along with greater ease. The rising wind signalled our destination was close.A few more steps and the trail opened into a grassy flat.We''d reached The Cool Spot. The slope, which dropped forty metres to the creekbelow, was populated by grasses and clutches of cedar.From the flat we had a wide view of the Sixteen valley,with its forested walls and shaggy floodplain willows.

Inthe centre of the flat was our firepit, and within minuteswe were seated on logs around a roaring fire, drinkingbeer and whittling weenie sticks. I had my best fire-cooked dogs at The Cool Spot,when the sun was shining and a warm breeze blewthrough the valley. We never saw anyone out therebesides a few folks on horseback from the farmsalong nearby Burnhamthorpe Road. The Cool Spotwas our place -- a place to relax and act like sillyteenage boys. After our campfire cookout, we''d roll rocks downthe slope and listen for the splashes, then scale down thecliff and huddle in the cedar copses and smoke cigarettesand cook hash bottle tokes. When the winds were high, we''d head for cover inthe woods where we built a couple of half-assed fortsthat we''d throw together with hammers, nails, andhandsaws -- started but never finished. Here it wasmore of the same, sitting around a fire, cooking dogs,drinking beers, making up games, and taking the pissout of each other. We''d return home by late afternoon,exhausted, hungry for Sunday dinner, and a little moreable to tolerate another week of high school.

The Cool Spot was our gathering place and, withoutever saying it, we knew our pilgrimage to it wasspecial. There was something that drew us teenagersthere. I later learned that that pull was not uniqueto The Cool Spot. It exists throughout the entireGolden Horseshoe. Meeting Place It''s been repeated many times for many years that thename Toronto comes from a First Nations word for"meeting place." Other interpretations have included"land of plenty" or "land of abundance." Accordingto University of Toronto linguist John Steckley, thename Toronto actually originates from the Mohawkword tkaronto , which translates as "where there aretrees in the water." So, how does an error like this get repeated for somany years? It''s because we want to believe it.

It''s stuckin the collective conscious of the citizenry becauseToronto and the Golden Horseshoe feel like a "meetingplace" and a "land of plenty." The Dish With One Spoon treaty, negotiatedthree centuries ago between the Anishinaabeg andHaudenosaunee peoples of the Great Lakes/St. LawrenceValley regions, actually does acknowledge the gatheringand abundance qualities of this land. The treaty refers tothe land as a place to be shared; a metaphorical "dish"from which all were free to hunt, gather, trap, and fish,while eating from a common "spoon." It is one of theoldest treaties in the New World, and unlike those negotiatedbetween the First Nations and the colonial powers,it has never been broken. The Niagara Peninsula and the north shore of LakeErie were also known as a land of plenty. In EarlyNarratives of the Northwest (1634-1699) , French explorersDollier and Galinée, while camped in Port Dover in1669, marvelled at the richness of the land around them: I leave you to imagine whether we sufferedin the midst of this abundance inthe earthly Paradise of Canada; I call it so,because there is assuredly no more beautifulregion in all of Canada. The woodsare open, interspersed with beautifulmeadows, watered by rivers and rivuletsfilled with fish and beaver, an abundanceof fruits, and what is more important, sofull of game that we saw there at one timemore than a hundred roebucks in a singleband, herds of fifty or sixty hinds, andbears fatter and of better flavor than themost savory pigs of France.

In 1822, the feisty Scot Robert Gourlay, in his Statistical Account of Upper Canada , also commentedon the fullness of Niagara: "If there is one [spot] onearth intended for paradise more than another, it isthis. In point of climate, soil, variety, beauty, grandeur,and every convenience, I do believe it is unrivaled."It''s no wonder St. Catharines is called the GardenCity and Niagara is Ontario''s prime production area fortender fruits and wine. The bounty of the Golden Horseshoe has been attractinghuman life since the retreat of the WisconsinIce Sheet more than twelve thousand years ago, whenthe earliest Indigenous People hunted caribou andother barren-ground mammals in the challengingtundra-like environment. As the climate warmed, theland was transformed from muskeg to boreal forest tobroadleaf forest. The increased biodiversity spurred thedevelopment of more populous and socially complexIndigenous societies. Trade networks that ran fromLake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond wereestablished.

Sophisticated political systems blossomed.Subsistence based on hunting and collecting was replacedby sustainable horticulture. Camps became villagesthat were no less complex than their counterpartsin medieval Europe. Five hundred years ago, the Golden Horseshoe waslargely the home of the people known to history as theNeutral Confederacy, a sophisticated and independentgroup of Iroquoian-speaking communities that livedin a "neutral" position between the Wendat (Huron)Confederacy to the north and the Haudenosaunee (SixNations Iroquois) of what is now western New YorkState. Tens of thousands strong, their villages rangedfrom Niagara north to Hamilton, as far west as London,and across much of the north shore of Lake Erie. With the arrival of Europeans, and the economicallydisruptive trade goods that they brought with them, theFirst Nations of the Great Lakes basin found themselvespulled into longstanding European rivalries. As the demandfor the pelts of fur-bearing mammals grew, theFrench and English pitted nation against nation in a proxywar for control of the fur trade. European writers of theday, who often emphasized Indigenous savagery for obviouspolitical reasons, claimed that the Haudenosaunee diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, and influenza.

Those who survived were most likely adopted by theSeneca, the westernmost nation of the HaudenosauneeConfederacy, whose culture, lifestyle, and language wasprobably most similar to their own. The Mississauga, a nation of strong, politically astuteAnishinaabeg fur traders from the north shore ofLake Huron, moved into the Golden Horseshoe in the1690s to fill the resulting void. The Mississauga enjoyedanother century of hunting and gathering in this landbefore increased European settlement in the late 1700spushed them into land surrenders they did not wantand onto reserves where it was much more difficult topursue their traditional lifestyle. Since that time, millions have made the pilgrimageto the Golden Horseshoe, and today it is one ofthe most concentrated gatherings of humans on theplanet. Almost nine million people -- a quarter ofthe total Canadian population -- call the GoldenHorseshoe home, with another four million projectedto move here over the next twenty-five years. Morethan one hundred different languages are spoken hereand Toronto is recognized as the most culturally diversecity in the world. But this gathering of life extends well beyond humans,to reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, insects, andalso to trees, as the Golden Horseshoe is the meetingplace of three biomes.