“Suffrage! Right to hold office! Show us first the woman who has independence and sense and taste enough to dress attractively…in shoes that do not destroy both her comfort and her gait.”

So wrote the New York Times in 1871, on the topic of women’s suffrage.  I had not realized that a woman’s wardrobe choices, including a fondness for high heels, had been at issue during the long fight for the right to vote in the United States. But shoes have been quite political over the course of human history. The quote above was on the wall in a special exhibit about shoes in the 1920s — the last stop on my tour of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

This was not the first time that politics had come up at the museum, nor was it the first time that Elizabeth Semmelhack, the museum curator, and I discussed the total impracticality of high heels. (For the record, we were both wearing flats.) “High heels are entirely irrational footwear,” she said. “The higher a heel becomes,  the less it conforms with mobility.” On the other hand (other foot?), high heels and a woman’s sexuality have been intimately intertwined for centuries — they are routinely described, for instance, as “hot”.

So a conundrum for a woman in the late 19th century: should she sacrifice an important signifier of her one reliable source of power over men, that of sexual attraction, in favor of sensible shoes? Or should she keep her heels, retain that power, and provide evidence of  a “woman’s foolishness”?

Telling are the two stereotypes that women were sorted into, on the basis of the height of their heels, writes Semmelhack in Heights of Fashion, in her fascinating history of the elevated shoe: “The humourless, low-heeled frump and the empty headed, high-heeled flirt.”

My private tour with curator Elizabeth Semmelhack was another stop on my Toronto itinerary, and therefore part of the all-expenses paid trip which you can enter to win. See previous stories on this trip, including this one on a frequently overlooked museum in Toronto, and this one on my a romance with a hat. More details here.

To me, the mark of a great city isn’t the presence of major museums — although you do need those — but the ability to support smaller institutions.

I always felt, for instance, that the presence of Rubin Museum of Art, which focuses on the art of Himalayas, was a great mark of pride for New York City, and, when I visited Warsaw, I imagined that if I lived there I’d feel the same about the Muzeum Karykatury, a tiny museum devoted to  caricature and cartoons.

It’s easy for visitors to miss these quiet places, and so when I travel, I’ve made it sort of a side project not to.

And so, in Toronto, I visited  The Museum of Inuit Art, which describes itself as “the only public museum south of the Arctic solely devoted to the display of art made by Inuit living in Canada.”  I thought I’d given the cab driver the wrong address when I arrived, since it’s located in a downtown shopping mall on Queens Quay — a fact not made entirely clear by the lovely photographs on the museum’s website.

The museum itself is as far removed from a shopping mall as you could possibly get though — beautifully designed, it provides an education through time and by artistic theme on a subject that most of us know very little about: the art created by native communities living in Canada’s arctic region. This display, for example, shows how a master carver is teaching his son his art through apprenticeship and example:

This was another stop on my Toronto itinerary, and therefore part of the all-expenses paid trip which you can enter to win. See previous stories on this trip, including this one on a romance with a hat.  More details here.

“Do you wear hats?”

This was the opening question from Karyn Gingras, and a good one, as we stood in the center of her small millinery boutique, Liliput, in Toronto’s Little Italy.

“Well,” I said, my eyes darting around the store, landing on one that seemed made entirely from peacock feathers, another banded with a leopard-print ribbon, and the ones embellished with flowers, with crushed velvet, with tulle…

“I do in the winter, ” I answered tentatively.

As if the knit hat crumpled in my backpack at that very moment had anything to do with all this.

Imposter syndrome, to which I am especially prone, begins to set in.

“But not really, because I have this giant head.”  I added.

Karyn, who is about six inches shorter than me , flicks a quick practiced look at my head and skepticism flits across her face.

“Probably everyone says that, I don’t know, but I always think hats don’t fit me…”
“Well”, she says.  “Okay. That’s the beauty of custom made, our hats will definitely fit you.”

And then she takes me to the back of the store and shows me a shelf filled with felt capeline, rough hat shapes that look vaguely like floppy witches hats — the basic shape that is formed into winter hats. (In the summer, she explains capeline are made from straw.)

She shows me her collection of vintage hat blocks, or molds, which are used, with the help of steam and sometimes heat, to form the capeline into a certain shape. And then how that is finished, with hat band and wire and eventually embellishment, to become the hats that are sold around the store. We talk about how long it takes to make a hat (as fast as one day in a pinch), how the royal wedding this year created more interest in hats, which led to talk about fascinators, and then about hats as a form of individuality.

“Clothing has become very mass produced, hats are a way of expressing yourself,” Karyn said. “You don’t replace a winter coat every year, but you do get new accessories.”

She stepped away to help a customer, and I wandered over to a display of fascinators, and tried on a modest one with a spray of black feathers and sequins. I turned my head this way and that. This would be very handy for me when traveling, I thought, building a mental case for dropping $70 Canadian on it, since I don’t  pack dressy clothes and often need to dress up a basic outfit with a scarf or whatnot…

But on the other hand, am I really a sequin and feathers type of girl?

Plus, now I really want a serious winter hat. One that will keep me warm and will still allow me to express myself.

Karyn returns and begins to select hats for me to try on. And then, as they’re sitting a little awkwardly on my head, she stops and says, let’s just settle this and get your head measured. She wraps my head tape measure. “Okay,” she says, “the average head is 22 1/2 inches and yours is 22 3/4s. That’s not much!”

I knew it.

She had the hat band stretched on a couple of hats that seemed promising and eventually I walked out with a hat box, and my very own 1920s cloche: gray, and embellished with felt in other shades of gray. Which fit my giant head, and I daresay my personality, just right.

If you’re visiting Toronto, you can call ahead to reserve an hour with Karyn, who will go over the basics of millinery and hat style with you and help you pick out a hat. And tell you how your head size relates to average. This was also a stop on my Toronto itinerary, and therefore part of the all-expenses paid trip which you can enter to win. Details here.

I’ve just returned from an action-packed trip to Toronto, where I learned to make hats, decorate cupcakes, and mix cocktails; where I tasted locally-brewed sake and oysters from all over the world, where I took a curator’s tour of one of my favorite museums anywhere — The Bata Shoe Museum — and even got to poke around in their artifact room! I attended something called a Literary Death Match, and then lost a great deal of unneeded dry skin during a sublime scrubbed with local herbs at the Ritz-Carlton spa, which is also where I stayed.

And I did it all for you.

This was part of a project with Canadian Tourism, American Express and Travel+Leisure , in which three bloggers helped to design dream itineraries to serve as a prize in a sweepstakes. The sweepstakes winner gets the itinerary, all expenses paid.

So there’s me, in Toronto, getting my cultcha (and cupcakes) on, there’s Mike Richard of Vagabondish in the national parks of Québec, and there’s Matt Armendariz of Matt Bites eating his way through Vancouver.

I’ll have more to say about my trip in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, enjoy a few images from the trip you too might take, and enter to win.

Story and photos by David Lee Drotar

When humans go bear watching where the salmon are swimming in British Colombia, Canada, what do the animals think?

PAPA BEAR

It was early September and the sun was shining brightly on the calm, deep blue water when I saw the humans drop from the sky. You’d think an old grizzly bear like me could take a little nap under a Western red cedar tree in the remote British Columbian rainforest before starting my winter hibernation. But no…

A noisy machine that sounded like a swarm of honey bees in the distance woke me up. Even though my eyesight isn’t perfect, I could see that it had giant, puffy balloons on the bottom. It circled around the mountain, came soaring deftly through the notch like an eagle, splashed onto the fjord and finally taxied up to the shore.

Ten people spilled out of the machine onto these wobbly, wooden platforms that were floating on the water, and there were little buildings floating there, too, that they called the Great Bear Lodge. Imagine that. I knew right away this meant trouble.

The people were talking and laughing like no one was around, but I could hear every word they said. They came from Australia, England, India and the United States and wanted to see and learn about bears in nature. But get this: There was some dude who carried a notebook around and said he was going to write a travel story but never even asked us bears. Well, I just want to set the record straight.

I’m a divorced dad. I’d like to play a more active role with the child-rearing, but Mama Bear thinks I’m too rough and might eat the kids. OK, well, I did once, but only because there weren’t enough berries that year and I was really, really hungry. Now the ladies stay in groups and keep me away. Sometimes we hook up in the spring, but we just can’t live together anymore. You know how it is. I’ve heard the humans have similar habits.

Anyway, those humans think they’re so smart. A long time ago, a bunch of stinky males used to come into the forest and cut down trees and then trade them for little pieces of colored paper that were made from other trees. If they traded the trees to people in the United States, the paper was always green. Then the humans traded this paper for other things like food. It all seemed kind of dumb to me. Later on, my ex will tell you how us bears get our food and, even though it’s tough sometimes, it’s a hell of a lot simpler than cutting down trees. We require about 40,000 calories a day to maintain our body weight so we need lots of food. And not many people know this, but we keep growing until the day we die.

But getting back to the humans. In order to get the trees out of the forest, they needed trails, so they cut down even more trees to make clear areas. They called these paths “logging roads” because they moved the logs over them.

There’s an old logging road that runs along the Neekite River. It starts at the Great Bear Lodge and goes about ten kilometers (six miles) into the woods. Tom and Marg, the owners of the lodge, keep it clear. I like walking on it, too, when no one else is around, especially in the spring when I can rub my scent all over the trees and keep the other male bears away. Sometimes I even like to roll around in the mud.

Tom is actually a pretty clever guy for a human and has figured out how to live way out here and how to take care of the visitors that come to see me. He’s got a fancy piece of paper that says he earned a degree in electrical engineering. I don’t know exactly what that is, but there are wires and panels and tubes all over the place. These funny looking contraptions somehow get energy from the sun, wind and moving water and allow people inside the lodge to cook food and have light after the sun sets.

The humans are really fussy about what they eat. Tom and Marg had to hire a crew of young people to live there and cook special food three times a day for the visitors. Every day at the crack of dawn, Cindy gets up and makes whole wheat pancakes with flax seeds, broccoli and mushroom frittatas and other ridiculously nutritious stuff. Really now, couldn’t these spoiled guests just get up and eat some grubs like I do and be on their way? As if that weren’t enough, the lunches and dinners are even more lavish. Heather makes gourmet dinners like king crab legs and she even bakes cookies every day. There is one food, however, that humans and bears can agree on. We both like salmon.

MAMA BEAR

That no-good louse of a bear. Here I am with two rambunctious toddlers who can’t be left alone for one second or else they will wander off and be attacked by a wolf. And where is their father? Typical male, he struts all over the forest and never once lifts a claw to help with the kids or bring home any food. After I got pregnant with the twins he didn’t even stick around for their birth.

Truth be told, it was a pretty easy childbirth and I’m better off without him. I gained a lot of weight, but slept it off during my hibernation last winter. I was roused out of my deep slumber in February when I felt a little tickle down there. The little buggers practically slid out on their own. Still a bit groggy, I just curled up and let my babies nurse while I went back to sleep for two more months. No crying, no whimpering, just cuddling—what more could a Mama grizzly ask for? I’ll admit I can get a little ornery when things don’t go right, especially if a human gets in my way. But Kuruk and Miakoda have been a real joy. I wish they could have stayed that small forever.

When we woke up and left the den in April, however, my baby bears sprouted up like sedge grass in the estuary and it’s been go, go, go ever since. There’s so much to teach Kuruk and Mia and so little time. Here it is September already and the three of us have got to fatten up to make it through another winter. I worry that Kuruk is still a little immature and won’t be ready.

Mostly we hang out along the Neekite and Piper rivers so we can catch the juicy salmon when they’re swimming upstream. It’s really pretty down there by the water with the spruce trees on each side towering up to the sky. There are lots of smooth, rounded rocks in all different shapes and sizes, from about the size of my big toe up to sea gull size. The fish swim between the rocks and sometimes they even jump over them, splashing back down into the river.

That’s where we see the humans most often. They’re very lazy creatures. It’s only a few kilometers from the lodge, but they don’t walk down to the river when we’re fishing. Once in the morning and once in the early evening, they get into a big, metal box with windows on the sides and wheels on the bottom. The box bounces along the logging road and when it stops, the humans get out and move slowly into another box perched above the rushing water. This second box is made from wood and they call it a “blind” because they think we can’t see them. They’ll sit quietly in there for hours.

Continue to Page 2 – British Columbia Bear-watching