Exits: Destiny ends somewhere

The Lakers and LeBron James, or, when two brands of exceptionalism collide.

I’ve been north of Toronto, up in the woods. I cleared out a week in my schedule to come here and shore up the first draft of my book. I was last up in January, also to write, the whole place then was heaped in deep snow. Being farther north, spring is a few weeks behind compared to the city (in the fall, that goes in reverse), and when I arrived the trees still looked bare. Some of the heartier groundcover nudged from the layers of leaf litter — clumps of stubby ramps, hairy wood fern curled into tight canes — otherwise everything looked like it was in stasis.

What made the absence all the more striking were huge swaths of churned earth littered with shredded wood, all along the cottage road where saplings used to be. This wedge of buffer land between the road and people’s property, or the road and Crown land, isn’t that wide, the largest frontage maybe 10 metres. With the absence of trees though, shot through as they were with tangles of blackberry thickets and in one of my favourite…