Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s Field Notes

Twenty years ago, it was bad out there in Toronto for cyclists. There was blood on the streets. At the time I was a columnist in the local news pages at the National Post. The paper has a conservative bias; even so the Post published a lot of stories from me about cyclist carnage and the need to improve bike infrastructure in Toronto.

In 2006 I reported this in the Post:

“On Thursday, April 20, a little after 8 a.m., Dr. Hubert Van Tol, a father of three, left his modern home in a leafy, sidewalk-free enclave in Lawrence Park, and headed to his job as head of the molecular neurobiology and transgenic section at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Half an hour later, a dump truck filled with gravel heading south on Avenue Road turned right on Cortleigh Boulevard, hit him and crushed his head.

“Dr. Van Tol, 46, was no self-righteous freak. He was merely doing something that is commonplace in his native Holland: riding his bike to work.”

That same day, a tractor-trailer killed a 16-year-old girl riding a bike at the corner of Finch Ave. W. and Keele Street.

I thought about that the other day. A group of guys, now mostly balding or turning grey, have a ritual of gathering on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. at Bickford Brewery, a little watering hole on Harbord Street, just a bit east of Bickford Park, which is popular with Toronto dog owners. It’s summertime; the brewery has a thin patio out front with a few tables and umbrellas, which is quite a pleasant place to gather and shoot the breeze, as it were. But for me the most pleasant part is the bike lane that passes in front.

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Riding highRead More »

Some book news: Maple Syrup, my book about the history of the sweetener in Canada, has made it to the 2026 Taste Canada Awards Shortlist in the category, “Culinary Narrative.”

Taste Canada writes of this category: “The award is given to the best food- or beverage-related narrative written by a Canadian author (or authors) that is not primarily a recipe book. This category may include books exploring culinary history, politics, social awareness, memoir or biography, all relating to food, and may include some representative recipes. In this category, however, recipes (if any) will not be tested. In most cases, the overall style of the book will be narrative, but reference texts will be included in this category as well. The topic or theme need not be Canadian.”

This weekend I washed all my buckets. I have 60 buckets. One of the cool things I am happy about at my sugar shack, which is deep in the forest with no electricity, is running water. I mean, running, as long as it’s above zero. I put a gutter on the front of the shack roof and it runs to a rain barrel that’s on a stand, so that the tap at the bottom of the barrel is just below my waist. We’ve had a rainy spring and there was plenty of water.

As I scrubbed each aluminum bucket and stacked them on the stairs that rise to my other barrel, the one in which I store maple sap in season, I reflected on the sugaring season that was.

It was a good year, even though I thought there was no way that I would make any syrup at all, since it’s the first spring since my book, Maple Syrup, appeared. I had a lot of gigs booked: I spoke at the Grimsby Museum, I read from my book at the Warkworth Maple Syrup Festival, and I signed copies of my book at Shaws Maple, in Oro-Medonte. The Ontario Woodlot Association, Quinte Chapter, of which I am a board member, organized a visit to my sugar shack during sugaring season too; about 25 people showed up. Greg Bridgwater, a fellow board member who has his own sugar bush in Prince Edward County, actually donated 200 litres of sap to the project, because it was a cold spring and we were worried we would not have enough sap for the demonstration. That day was snowy and just above freezing; people roamed around and looked at the trees and the sap boiling in my evaporator; another board member, Rob Wood, confessed that right after he and his wife visited my sugar bush that day he went home and tapped some trees in his own forest.

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Shilling and sugaringRead More »

Nice know that I have struck a bit of a chord, as it were, with some readers of my book, Maple Syrup. Turns out there is a subculture of maple syrup enthusiasts out there, some of whom have composed  songs about their affection for the sweet stuff, and some of whom have read my book and want to share their songs with me.

As another maple syrup season begins, the other day I heard from one lawyer, Ben Riley, who grew up in North Granby, Connecticut, and now lives in San Francisco. He writes, “Our house was 200 years old and surrounded by massive old sugar maples.  Every year one of the local producers would tap our trees and in return we received a gallon or so of the completed syrup.”

He’s a singer-songwriter and he composed a ballad about maple syrup, “Forty to One,” which refers to the ratio of sap to maple syrup. He sent me a recording of the song. He sings:

“Late winter maple trees storing summer sun,

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Sweet songs of springRead More »

Why are audiobooks all of a sudden such a big thing? Zak Annette at Doubleday Canada, the director of my audiobook for Maple Syrup, summed it up simply: it’s about technology, he noted. When Zak, who hails from the United Kingdom, started working in audiobooks, they were on cassette. Then, they migrated to CDs. Now, through apps like Libby, I can download an audiobook using my library card of the Toronto Public Library, and plug my phone into my headset or, more often, my car, for long road trips. Like many people I’ve become a huge fan; most recently I listened to Whoopie Goldberg read John Grisham’s recent novel, Camino Ghosts. That was a lot of fun.

Doubleday Canada will release my book Maple Syrup on Oct. 21, and Penguin Random House Audiobooks wants the audiobook to come out on the same day. They asked me to read my book. My family was surprised. “We were thinking maybe Liam Neeson or Morgan Freeman,” they said. But, turns out, the publisher wanted me. I hear that, in the case of non-fiction, more often than not it’s the author that reads their own book.

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Maple Syrup: the audiobookRead More »

It’s Canada Day; a pretty warm one, and I am in my back yard with my Smith-Corona Classic 12, a gift from Mimi for my birthday a few years ago. This is a manual typewriter which you could call portable, in the sense that it comes in a carrying case, but it must weigh ten kilos, so it’s not a typewriter that you’d want to bring anywhere. I laugh to think about it, but a years ago—the year I turned 30, to be precise—I travelled with my mom to Indonesia. By this point I owned a laptop, my first, which was a Toshiba. But this was before the Internet, and I still tended to write mainly on paper, that is, using a typewriter. My mom flew from Montreal to LA and I flew from New York, where I lived, to LA, where we met and rented a compact car to drive down to La Jolla, to vist her elder sister, my aunt Elsa, en route to crossing the Pacific Ocean.

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Happiness is a new ribbonRead More »

I wanted for a long time to write a book about maple syrup. I even started a couple of times, and I had a folder kicking around in my office, with some scraps of paper I’d typed with a pretty broken manual typewriter that had a faded ribbon. I typed those words up one night in sugaring off season when I came in from the sugar bush. That night, it gave me comfort as I typed to realize that, while I’ll never be a maple syrup professional, I am a story teller.

I thought that the book was a kid’s book. Basically, the story was about wet socks. When we were kids we wore boots from Canadian Tire to gather sap from the sugar maple buckets that hung on taps on the sugar maple trees at our family farm near Papineauville, Quebec. The uninsulated rubber boots really were wrong for the job. We shoved our jeans into our boots and as we clambered through the sugar bush the snow filled our boots. Then we lugged the heavy pails of maple sap through the deep snow and the sap sloshed into the tops of the stupid boots and mixed with the snow. My socks got really wet and my feet were frickin’ cold.

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Maple Syrup: the bookRead More »

The throng, horde, torrent, stream, the pure rush and gush of humanity, coursing like lifeblood through Union Station, cannot help but impress, even surprise, and carries for me a message of hope. I arrived at 8 a.m. in a taxi with my sister and niece, to put them on a train. A bit bleary, I went to search for a coffee. The station wasn’t busy—it was mobbed.
The workers, the students, the bureaucrats, and even the downtrodden of our nation’s metropolis are on their feet—in running shoes, leather dress shoes, clogs, loafers, fuzzy boots, thick-soled sneakers, pull on boots, carrying backpacks and briefcases and grocery bags; many with earbuds, all walking with firm resolve from the train station into the maw of 10 matching doors with signs above that say TTC/Front St.

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Union StationRead More »

I’d turned down some friends to go to E.L. Ruddy last week. One said in response, a bit bitterly, “Just because you’re not drinking, does that mean you have to become a hermit?” Answer is no, so I suggested to my friend that we meet for lunch, which is less booze-forward meal in my circles, at Massey College.

“Am cool going to Massey, never been there—but where does one eat there? The cafeteria?”

“Yes. Cafeteria style. My treat,” I wrote back.

“Okay, reserve my cafeteria tray! See ya then!” he texted back.

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Dry JanuaryRead More »

Several hundred people gathered on the south lawn of Queen’s Park in front of the Ontario legislature on Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, at 2 p.m. I went there with my son Frits, and our friend Francis met us there. We stood by the pedestel of a bronze statue of a guy named Whitney and we listened to about ten speeches. It felt really good.

The government of Doug Ford, the Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario, announced the other day that they want to rip out many kilometres of bike lanes in Toronto, including bike lanes on Yonge Street, University Avenue and Bloor Street. A lot of people are righteously pissed off about it.

I’ve lived in Toronto for 30 years this fall. Before I moved here I lived in New York. Before that I lived in Montreal.

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Bike lanesRead More »

This afternoon before supper I practiced my tennis game, banging a pale green Wilson us open ball into the brick wall that spreads across from our house. As I banged the ball, the evening sun poured onto me from between the bars of the gate, painted Cadbury-purple, that bars entry to the west part of the factory. We bought this house in 2007, so we’ve lived across from the wall for 17 years. I grew up on a farm; we had a lot of cool stuff like hills to sled down and apple trees to climb, a river to swim in and fields in which to cross-country ski, and what seemed like a limitless supply of fresh vegetables, but we did not have any brick walls.

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The wallRead More »

I am just back from a couple of weeks in British Columbia. It occurred to me that for me B.C. is the Old Country; where I am from; the crucible of old traditions that have stayed with me in my wanderings.

My parents met on a ship from the Netherlands and settled in B.C. in 1958. I was born in New Westminster. My parents split in 1964 and we went our separate ways; not sure exactly what led to the breakup, but is was a bit scorched earth I guess in the sense that neither of my parents, nor us three eldest kids, ever lived in Vancouver much after that. That said, both my parents went on to have kids with other partners. Now I have three siblings in B.C.: a brother in Surrey south of Vancouver, a sister on Vancouver Island and a sister further north on the mainland in the South Cariboo region.

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The Old CountryRead More »

On a recent Saturday morning I boarded the 506 Carlton streetcar of the Toronto Transit Commission, heading west. I tapped my Presto card to pay my $3.30 fare. I like to sit at the back, but it was occupied by a sleeping man, who had stretched out over five seats. I walked further ahead, and saw two other sleeping forms, one beside a cart filled with their possessions; the other sleeping on a bench with several bags tucked under the bench. I walked further forward; just behind the driver sat a fourth sleeping figure, next to a shopping cart.

I am quite sure that none of these riders paid a fare.

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Pay a fare to ride transitRead More »

Sabatino and Mario are friends.

I met Mario first. The other day as I walked our younger dog on the sidewalk by our house, a man  emerged from a house across the street. That house changed hands last year, and the new owners, who I think are architects, are doing a lot of work on it.

“Hi,” said the man, who was a bit older, perhaps 70, and did a good job filling out his work clothes.

“Hi,” I replied. “What are you up to?”

“We are rewiring this house,” he said.

“Oh, so you are electricians? Are you available?” I asked.

“I am not the electrician. He is coming out in a bit. You can talk to him when he comes out,” he said. He said his name was Mario. We shook hands.

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ConnectionsRead More »

Happy Earth Day!

On the weekend I read environmental coverage in The Globe and Mail and some of it slightly depressed me. For example, according to the Globe about 70% of clothing is now made out of plastic, up from about half in the year 2000. The story suggested that, with people turning to electric cars, clothing is the new cash cow for the oil and gas industry. We are all buying more clothing than we used to, much of it junky fast fashion make from synthetic fabrics. Also scientists are finding micro-plastics in peoples’ arteries.

But the paper also published an encouraging story about a guy in Vancouver who planted a Douglas fir tree.

On Sunday I took our dogs, Coco and Rook, for a walk in High Park. I used to drive to the park but I realized that it’s just as easy, and more enjoyable, to take the TTC. Also it is better for the planet. The College streetcar was unusually crowded at about 10:30 a.m. Turns out lots of people were headed to High Park to enjoy the cherry blossoms. Rook sat next to a young man at the back of the streetcar. I think the guy was a bit unfamiliar with dogs but he smiled when Rook sat on his foot. Rook likes to sit on peoples’ feet.

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Earth DayRead More »

My sister Sylvia van Oort is travelling in Italy with my brother-in-law, Franc van Oort. They sent this from Palermo. Sylvia wrote the words and Franc made the drawing.

There is a place in downtown Palermo where everybody goes by at one time or another. We walked from our tiny apartment through a narrow alley, turned right and found ourselves on the via Vittorio Emmanuele, the main thoroughfare down to the sea. A few blocks down we came to the beating heart of downtown – I Quattro Canti, or four corners, where the two main streets of this city have intersected for many centuries. As both streets are now largely pedestrianized there was a coming together on this crossroads, as though two rivers were meeting, a large semi circular fountain on each scalloped out corner, with below each one steps, and above each rising three stories high, a  sculpture of dignitaries in 17th century garb, above which statues of angels, then more decorations, and eventually the roofs. Every type of person imaginable entered the space strolling about, or conversely determinedly going about their business. Tiny motorized scooters zipped through, often with two people plus bags balanced on them, parents pushing strollers, tourists with rolling suitcases, and the odd ‘carabinieri’ car who seem to be able to get anywhere at all.

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PalermoRead More »

Some friends met me for a drink on Saturday night at E.L. Ruddy, or neighbourhood boîte on Dundas St. West. I am doing a Dry January, so that was the first controversy, but they all got over it. The three of them ordered beer and I drank ginger ale. My bill was pleasant: $6 for two soft drinks. Plus I felt great the next morning.

Our gang sought to skirt controversial subjects, such as Israel/Gaza and Trump, so we wound up bitching about something that’s a perennial bugaboo for the four of us, city-boosters and downtowners that we are: the Toronto Transit Commission. Mostly we rely on the streetcars, which really don’t work very well; one friend had a doctor’s appointment at Toronto General Hospital, which is literally four kilometres from his house; the app told him the College streetcar would take an hour to get there. It didn’t. Even 4 km/hour was out of the TTC’s reach. He arrived 20 minutes late. I announced that I have confidence that, in my lifetime, I will ride the Eglinton Crosstown, the light rail line that the province of Ontario began to build on Eglinton Ave. in 2010. The line, four years behind schedule and up to $4 billion over budget, still has no opening date.

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506 to High Park LoopRead More »