Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Previous
Whispers of history
A “historical” site is a relative term, no question. Back in university, I used to wander occasionally down to the banks of the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton. If you strolled east for about a mile, you came upon a group of buildings collectively known as “Walterdale”.
The village had been established by an early Edmonton businessman named John Walter. Some of the buildings held furniture from his time. Some also had flood marks from when the river had forced the settlers permanently to higher ground.
It was the late 60’s when I discovered Walterdale, and the buildings only dated from about the time of the First World War. A 50-year-old building was “historical” at that time in Alberta.
Things moved back a bit when I arrived in Dawson City ten years later. The revered and carefully preserved crumbling relics of the Klondike Gold Rush were at that time about 80 years old, but they were the oldest structures for hundreds of miles around.
I gained a bit more perspective on Canadian history when I came to Ontario in 1995. Here, a 50 or 80-year-old structure was built yesterday (unless it’s architecturally unique like the Foster Memorial, only 73 years old). Our oldest building, the Quaker Meeting House on the Sixth Concession, just celebrated its bicentennial. Now we’re talking historical.
But keep going east. In Quebec or Nova Scotia, there are buildings approaching 400 years old. And if you carry on across the Pond, that’s when things really begin to get ancient.
My first trip to Europe was in 1976, when I took a Russian liner across the Atlantic in hopes of reviving a fast-fading relationship. After brief stops in France and England, the Alexander Pushkin made its way to Bremerhaven on Germany’s north coast, where the lady in question, who’d been working as a nanny in Switzerland, was nervously waiting for me on the pier.
We then proceeded across the Baltic to Sweden, where we spent a few days visting a friend of hers in a small city called Mjolby. A fast-rising band called Abba was playing a concert down the road, but we had other priorities.
One day I found myself with a few hours to kill, and I headed out into the countryside. About a half hour beyond the city, on a dirt road, I came across an old stone church. It was still used by the locals, but visitors were encouraged (if you made a donation).
The sign outside, in English as well as Swedish (just about everyone speaks English there), told me the church had seen few renovations since first being built in the mid-thirteenth century, more than 700 years in the past.
This was new ground for an Alberta boy. Seven centuries. I ventured inside, not sure what to expect. It was late afternoon, and the slanting sunlight through the windows cast a golden glow on the old stone. I stepped carefully, thinking, I suppose, that even stone had to get fragile after 700 years.
Time passed. I was alone in the church. Then I thought I heard whispers outside. I poked my head out the door. No one. But the whispers persisted. I sat down in a pew, closed my eyes and listened. The whispers never got louder, but it took about ten minutes for them to finally die down.
Maybe the sounds were just a quirk of the local topography, slight breezes that made themselves heard, if not felt, through the cracks in the masonry. But even though I couldn’t distinguish any words, I remain convinced that the sounds were voices, voices that were perhaps as old as the church.
Since then, I’ve visited a lot of very old places (I even toured Stonehenge on that same trip), and and I’ve never heard such whispers again. Mind you, I’ve never visited them alone, as I did that old Swedish church.
Except once.
It was thirteen years later, late fall of 1989. I was returning from a fascinating couple of weeks in a cottage on the Isle of Skye, heading back to London for the flight home.
Winter was coming on, and the mists in the Scottish lowlands were starting to bite right through you. But I’m a sucker for a ruined castle, and my companion and I decided to visit one more before the home stretch.
It was a chilly day, and there was no one in the parking lot. Tourist season was long over, so there were no guides either.
After a few minutes on the hillside, my friend wimped out and went back to the car. A few more minutes, I said. And I approached one of the stronger-looking walls of the castle, to investigate the interior.
Suddenly, I heard whispers again. Lower and harsher than at the church, but there was no sunshine here. This time I thought it must be the wind (I was on an exposed hill), but after a few moments, I was sure the whispers were coming right out of the stone.
A couple of weeks ago, while on a Caribbean cruise, I finally paid a long-overdue visit to a Mayan ruin, Tulum on the Yucatan peninsula. It was breathtaking, but there was no magic. No whispers. How could there be with 300 other cruise ship passengers there at the same time?
Sometime I’ll go back when I can be alone. Because it’s then, it seems, that history comes alive for me.
I couldn’t tell you the name of that Swedish church, or the Scottish castle. I’m not even sure I could find them again. But they, more than any places I’ve ever been, are responsible for the hold that history has on my imagination.
