Sunday, January 14, 2007

viewing


in the summer, I'm told that tourists sometimes walk right in the door of where I’m living, to visit the “historic house of Pierre Berton”. No doubt they usually back away in horror, finding some unkempt writer sitting at a laptop in his underwear. Their mistake is understandable: the Robert Service cabin across the street is a tourist attraction you can walk into, and just down the block, there’s novelist Jack London’s cabin, with a re-built food cache on stilts and a proper visitor centre.
To help the tourists, there is a little viewing platform out in the Berton house garden, nearly snowed-over at this time of year (see above!) The platform has a nice wooden banister, benches, and small information panels explaining the history of the house with a brief biography of Pierre Berton. It’s a good idea, though I do wonder if writers living here in summer ever wake up like rare birds, tourists staring in from the viewing platform with binoculars.

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