We started by visiting the chickadees at a neighbouring nature reserve, more properly the black capped chickadees. These small, pretty, woodland birds are very curious - or perhaps have evolved genes which tell them that large bipeds are apt to give food if closely approached. If one stands still on a woodland path where they are to be found, they will gather in nearby trees and if you hold a hand up they will come down to it, in the hope and expectation of edible reward. They did not stay long on my hand as I had not thought to bring anything in the way of rewards, but they did come.
We rewarded ourselves in a restaurant in Ingleside, a sort of restaurant known locally as a hole in the wall, being a unit in a strip mall. Very good it was too. I had chicken noodle, soup, spaghetti bolognese and pumpkin pie. The first of these was adequate but nothing special, but the second and third items were really good, despite the spaghetti actually being some other kind of pasta. I don't think I would have known that the pumpkin pie, baked that morning, contained pumpkin, being so different from the sort of thing that we used to manage from the pumpkins that I used to grow, admittedly not the sort of pumpkin that any self respecting Canadian would eat. We were served by the young lady owner, who had excellent table-side manners.
And so onto pumpkin inferno, along with hundreds, if not thousands of others, fully on the scale of a Bank Holiday Monday car booter at Hook Road Arena, albeit in the dark. Cloudy, so no stars, which was a pity as out here, far from any big town, the stars would have been quite something on a clear night (the reason why Tupper Lake runs to a public observatory).
The inferno took the form of a circular path winding its way through the village, marked by ropes of small white lights and pumpkin posts, these last being posts made of three or four cut & illuminated pumpkins, one of top of the other. The main business was a sequence of large pumpkin tableaux, a lot of them the work of local artists. It did not matter than the pumpkins were actually plastic replicas; they looked and cut like pumpkins and stood the damp weather a lot better than real ones would have.
Some of the tableaux were just arrays of artfully cut pumpkins, with some of them being really clever. Some of them achieived tonal effects by cutting away varying amounts of skin and flesh. Some were enhanced with clever lighting.
Some of the tableaux were, in effects, pictures made out of pumpkins. Very clever, but I did not like them as much as the others; they were not playing to the medium, with the grain, they ran rather against the grain. Making pumpkins be something which they were not. I associate to Pugin who thoroughly disapproved of trying to make ordinary pictures out of stained glass. See http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/search?q=letters+condolence for a not very helpful reference to a book on same.
The tableaux which I liked best, and one small part of which I think I have illustrated, might be called the ride of the pumpkins. There was music and the interior illumination of the pumpkins had been linked up with the music, rather as if the pumpkins were an orchestra made up of a whole lot of different instruments. The music had been well chosen and the whole thing was tremendous. The illustration is a very pale imitation indeed.
A bonus was a pond full of huge carp, some of them a yard long, apparently wild carp who have learned to come to this pond to be fed. Very striking in the half light.
At the end of the visit, before you got back to your car, there was a well stocked shop, selling all kinds of pumpkin related paraphrenalia, some of it edible and most of which would be hard to find back home.
Reference 1: http://www.butlersrestaurant.ca/. Gmap reference 44.996664, -74.989875.
Reference 2: http://www.uppercanadavillage.com/index.cfm/en/home/.
Reference 3: http://hookcarbootsale.com/.
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