Three Prison Stories

My great great great great grandfather walked away from the US in 1807, under circumstances that are not clear. Some reports say he was a Loyalist, and the lot of Loyalists in the US had not been happy since 1775 — anyone in the service of the British at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and anyone who failed to sign an oath of allegiance to the Republic and a repudiation of British citizenship was automatically guilty of treason, with loss of citizenship, seizure of all property, and prohibition from holding office (and, in some states, execution, lengthy imprisonment, or public tarring). Embittered British militias continued to fight savage battles with the new American forces until the armistice of 1814, and atrocities were committed by both sides. Some Americans made no pretense of Loyalism at all, and came up to Canada in the early 1800s simply because they were attracted by the free land grants. My guess is that Joshua Pollard was neither a Loyalist nor a Freeloader, but more likely one of the first of the great tradition of American conscientious objectors unwilling to fight in the about-to-be declared US-Canada war of 1812. He was, I would guess, a draft dodger. To get his 200 acres of land he had to come to Canada, file the petition, and wait for acreage to be surveyed and allotted. He did so, and with his wife and the first eleven of their eventual seventeen children (a normal family size in those days) squatted with many others at what is now Front and Yonge Street in Toronto, where they lived as rudimentary a life as one can imagine through three winters. Then, with two neighbouring families, they helped clear the new Middle Road to what is now the Toronto suburb of Mississauga and on each of the three families’ lots they cleared and fenced the minimum 5 acres and built the 38 x 26 foot wood frame minimum house needed to ‘own up’ to the land grant by June 1810. Life in the wilderness, a dense forest of 30-foot high trees, all done with hand tools in daylight hours. Joshua founded the first school in Peel Region — ‘cost of tuition’ was one cord of cut, stacked wood per family per semester. Nineteen people living in a 1000 square foot house, of which the 200 square foot front room served as the area’s first tavern and, one day a week, for the traveling preacher’s service and for services for the dead (Joshua also ran Peel’s first cemetery). The archival records say that, unlike the more devout neighbours, the Pollards loved to dance.

My neighbours have always had two dogs, mostly golden retrievers, about six years apart in age, so that on the death of each dog, the younger sibling soon becomes the big brother or sister for a new arrival. When they first moved to our neighbourhood they installed an ‘invisible fence’ and both dogs were taught, using the ‘gentle’ setting, to stay within their three-acre lot without supervision. With the exception of one ‘slow-learning’ Bernaise puppy, the dogs have never needed a second lesson, and have never gone outside the fence — even though it is only turned ‘on’ for the first month or so after each new pup’s arrival. The rest of the time they could now wander off with impunity. In fact, the older sibling ‘shepherds’ the new puppy away from the boundary, so it is quite possible they could disconnect it permanently and the dogs would teach each other where the boundaries are. Our neighbours are wonderful, affectionate, dog-loving people, and the dogs adore them, but the power of the ‘invisible fence’ that isn’t really there at all still astonishes me.

What does it take to make someone so dissatisfied, so unable to bear the life they lead, that they can walk away and start a new, better life, a different way, elsewhere? And what does it take before we realize that the prisons in which each of us live, societally and metaphorically, are prisons without locks, just waiting for us to let ourselves out?