We drove up the hill leading to the town and I was starting to freak. It looked pretty much like I remembered, at least at first. There was our neighbourhood, Grant's Pond, on the left. The big pond that would freeze over in the winter, allowing for lots of hockey and ice skating. The bank on the corner. The high school/library/pool building right over there, a bright orange. The Lutheran church at the stoplight. Then I noticed other buildings gone or changed - the Vocational School building, the municipal building now looking like it should be in the Caribbean somewhere with it's pastel front, the Tim Horton's donuts that must have finally opened.
As I said, I was freaking. I wasn't totally sure why, but something was going on.
We drove down into my old neighbourhood, as I pointed out this place and that; my friends lived here and there, we used to knock on that guy's door and run away, there's the next door neighbour who never let us use their pool.
Wow. This was all a huge emotional rush.
We stopped in front of my old house, now blue rather than white. It took me a good few minutes before I could be convinced to get out of the car for a quick picture. There was no way I was going to go up to the door and knock. It was just too weird.
We drove around the town, just looking at different stuff. It really seemed to be such a depressing place. The main strip was just a bunch of parking lots and stores - it was particularly ugly.
Both of the elementary schools (k-4 and 5-6)were torn down to make way for other buildings. The mall was basically a huge Wal-Mart now, and what had to be hundreds of acres of forest had been cut down to build houses for god-knows-who. Especially with the trend of out-migration that the whole province has been experiencing for years. There just aren't jobs.
We had plans to stay at a B&B in town that night. However, after driving around and seeing what I saw, there was just no way that I could stay there. I had a set of memories that were good and I felt that I had no need or desire to make more. I had left when I was 13 and, as my brother remembers, I was thriving. I had lots of friends, forests to run around in, and no knowledge or concern about how damn strange my family was and how we didn't fit in at all.
Now, as an adult, the town was depressing, ugly and frankly, scary. I was scared to think about who I would have been had we stayed. My older brother had a terrible time in high school there - fights everyday after school and constantly being picked on for all kinds of things from reading too much, to being Jewish or vegetarian or whatever. He even took up (and became very good at) Judo in order to be able to protect himself. That's fucked up.
It seems I left at the perfect time, looking back. It was before cool mattered. Before testosterone and girls and clothes and all the things that change when you go from being a kid to being not a kid anymore. Ever since I left, I had always felt somewhere deep down that I would have been happier there, maybe. Now, I see that had I stayed just a bit longer, there still would have been drastic changes in my life, but not likely the kind that I've had that have made my life and experiences pretty awesome. I doubt I would have ended up in the Alberta oil-fields like many of my friends. It's unlikely I would have ended up working at the paper mill where many others are now working. I'm sure I would have gotten out at some point, but in the end, I'm glad to have gotten out when I did.
As J says, it's my old stomping ground, and I could see my footprints everywhere I looked. My feet are bigger these days, though, and trying to stomp around now would have only trampled all over what I had.
wow.
2 comments:
J's probably right. but port hawkesbury has always been a transient town. people in, people out. just depends on when you passed through it. i grew up here, and stayed and its way different than when i was a kid but it was still a good place to raise my kids.
when was that you grew up there?
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