Carl Ahrens Elora

September 26th, 2004

It was another early morning, aided tremendously by a dash across the street to Tim Horton's for mochas while my cousin, Chris, and I waited for my friends Mike and Wendy to be ready for the day's adventures. They intended to head back home from the furthest point north on our day's drive, namely Elora. Carl's mother, Isabella Laird, was raised in that town. Isabella's parents had been among the first settlers of the area and many of her siblings remained in the vicinity of Elora during Carl's childhood. His uncle, Joseph Laird, was a potter in town, and it is likely that Carl learned the craft from him.

We drove to Elora in separate cars, stopping every once in a
while for photographs along the Grand River. It looked quite
pastoral south of Elora, a nice lazy river, but I knew that just a
little way upstream, in the Elora Gorge, it was anything but lazy.

We parked close to town, and wandered around a bit. It was a
quaint village, full of specialty shops. The buildings on Main

Street were mostly limestone structures dating from the 19th century. I have heard a couple of stories of Carl's time in this town, including one of him leaning out too far over a cliff and falling
into the river, breaking his arm. He had mentioned a place called Lover's Leap in his writings,
and I hoped to find that.

There were several rapids in the river through town. Chris and I commented that we would love to
have a photo of us with the rapids visible behind us, but the protective stone wall was so high that
the river was out of view. "No problem," Wendy said. "I'll just hop up on Mike's shoulders and
take the picture from there." Before Mike could protest she climbed up and reached for my

camera. She's not much bigger than me, so it likely wasn't too much of a burden on Mike, though he grumbled a bit. In any case, she got the photo.

We asked around and were told of a trail that would take us through the woods to a spot where we could climb into the Gorge. I was hoping to see some limestone caves that
my great-grandmother, Madonna Ahrens, wrote about in her biography of Carl, and that he himself mentioned in a short story he wrote dating from 1894. We easily found the path and walked back quite some way before we found a

makeshift staircase leading down to the river. We took some photos down there, finally discovering one small cave, and decided to follow the stream (a tributary of the Grand) to the junction with the river. We could see this from where we were; it wasn't far. Getting there, however, involved a great deal of rock hopping, which I was decent at after having spent my childhood in Maine. Mike insisted on going first so he could help Wendy and I along as needed. Chris did his best not to laugh, as he knew I didn't need help. I will never discourage

a man from being a gentleman, and apparently neither would Wendy. Turned out that she didn't need help either - on the
way back we skipped over the rocks at twice the speed of the guys. She said she suspected that when Mike called up to us with offers of help that his motivation involved getting a breather himself.

When we got to the Grand, I picked up a few rocks and a piece of driftwood, as I always do when I want a tangible reminder of a place.

There was a group of rocks in the middle of the river, and we made our way to that. Someone
had tried to canoe through there and fallen out of his boat. While he was in no real danger, the
current was surprisingly fast, and rescuing him was a fascinating operation.

I turned around and saw a huge outcrop of rock that appeared almost like someone's head
perched atop a very long neck. I took several photos of this, thinking it must be some kind of
landmark. We soon learned that we had happened upon Lover's Leap. There wasn't a lot of
water under it at our visit. I imagine there was more when Carl had his accident or he would have
done far more than break a couple of ribs.