What This Writer Liked About Bracebridge - And Hated About Politics
When I began editorial responsibilities with the local press back January of 1979, part of my duties included covering local municipal councils. I hated every moment of it.....every meeting, every minute I had to sit their and listen to the pompous old windbags bestow their wisdom on the captive audience. You can probably still see my claw-marks on the window ledge where I’d occasionally attempt an escape. There was nothing I could do about it because the folks I worked for lived and breathed the political side of community existence. I felt from the moment I began coverage of these multi-layered, unbelievably boring meetings that I was badly, badly out of my element. I can’t tell you how many times in ten odd years, I wanted (but convinced myself otherwise) to stand up and scream at the top of my voice, "I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it any more," which by the way is from the movie "Network." My publishers would have filled the whole damn paper with council tidbits if I hadn’t insisted on doing other stories and features on just about anything else with a modicum of human interest.
When I read the newspapers today it’s pretty much the same as I left it......a really good chunk of ink every week is devoted to municipal government coverage. Even the smallest of concerns, the most rudimentary applications for rezoning or minor variances are given prominent space and a meaty headline.....as if this will truly encourage ninety-eight percent of unimpressed readers to give a crap. And so my disinterest in local politics continues well into this new century. While I have to get involved every now and again because the meatheads go and do something quite mad, in their power drunk desire to pave over paradise, I generally live and let live as the record of my involvements will show. I mean there’s so much more to Muskoka and our communities than what the local elected officials ruminate when they think a reporter is within earshot. I’ve spent a lot of years looking past their posturing and glad handing all over the place, and found some inner strength to examine other aspects of hometown life that doesn’t involve them. I’m sure this bothers them because they like to be central to anything and everything they believe is inherently theirs to comment on and well..... "ribbon-cut.". I don’t like them and they sure as hell don’t like me, so we, at the very least, have an enduring tradition of ignoring one another unless unavoidable. The last time I covered a Bracebridge council meeting as a reporter, a colleague got me laughing so hard in the press box I pissed my pants. Christ for the whole meeting this turd kept up the off-hand commentary and I just narrowly missed being the first reporter in history to be ejected from a council meeting for behaving badly and having wet pants.
When we moved to Bracebridge from Burlington, Ontario, I was a little nervous about what all the trees and open spaces might do to an urban kid used to wall to wall buildings, a smelly waterscape and tall, tall buildings everywhere. Up in the wilds I suspected the wolves and bears would probably be interested in a naive kid who didn’t know how to fend against the adverse elements. I had a lot of misconceptions that in total lasted about two weeks. I found out pretty fast this was the kind of hometown I could grow into......I was active in hockey and loved baseball but most of all my real interest was in the great and expansive outdoors, all in abundance in this community straddling the 45th parallel of latitude. I was in a sort of kid paradise.
I suppose what bothers me today most about the way Bracebridge has expanded its urban boundary, particularly in the past fifteen years, is that it has very much removed much of what I found so critically important as a kid. Bracebridge in the mid to late 1960's was a fascinating small town that oozed neighborliness, and always a goodly amount of room to stretch your arms and twist about to nobody else’s discomfort. It wasn’t unhappy with itself generally...... and we all got along with the pace. Nobody was in a hurry really, except maybe the hockey coach getting to the arena ahead of his players....the ambulance attendants on the way to the hospital with a patient about to give birth, the customer trying to get to the bank before closing.....and similar. It was a lot like Mayberry and that was fine. As far as I was concerned, it was the community I would maintain a lifetime link with, a pretty strong determination for a youngster. It was good to me, affording many great outdoor adventures, a resilient, solid, friendly neighborhood, and many kind folk who helped kick my arse to get me moving along for all those years. Even the old illuminated clock tower on the former federal building, at Thomas Street and Manitoba, was a beacon for me every single day. Its welcome bell rang throughout my childhood, and those big friendly clock faces could be seen from all my different haunts, so that it was almost impossible to forget what time it was......and when I was told to be home for dinner. It was pretty hard to make any claim about "Geez mom, I didn’t know what time it was." It’s true it went through a few days and months of disrepair but not many.
When I daydream about those carefree days I can’t really avoid a musical accompaniment, kind of a sentimental piano piece in the background making me feel glad to have had the association but a tad melancholy because I still very much miss my old mates and daily travels.....stops on the way from school, downtown to get my haircut, up to the arena for an evening hockey practice, down to the ball park for a night game with the bantam squad. It’s a music that doesn’t intrude upon a recollection but it does invigorate the senses.....much as if it’s meant to lead me to some sort of discovery about my own loyalties to the past, and if I could ever truly ignore or get mad at a community that always seemed as comfortable as a pleasant dream, and gentle as waking up to recognize you’re still safely at home and in otherwise good stead.
When I would escape chores on a hot summer afternoon, and retreat to a shady portal in Bamford’s Woods, across the road from the Weber Apartments, up on Alice Street, I pondered, wandered a little bit....studied, counter-pointed, ruminated, and dissected intently just what it all meant to be a hometowner......my whole life in perspective and whether this was a pleasing environment, or actually the most uneventful place on earth. I wasn’t sure early on but it didn’t take long before these woods, and this street were part of my life as if ingrained from birth.....which afterall was impossible seeing as I moved to this burg in my late childhood. The sense of belonging was reinforced continually, in those first years, by the kindness of my new friends, and of course the people who lived in the apartment, which was always more of a commune than a complex. Most residents only closed their hallside doors when they went to bed. For most of the day people came and went, and it wasn’t unusual to have three or four card parties going on in the evening, partners changing venues every hour or so. This was the community within the community that was intimate.....and that may have made for some interesting liaisons but who cared.....not me. It was just neat that’s all.
The escape into Bamford’s Woods was a sanctuary I couldn’t have done without. I could sit and think and concoct and plan and well......just kick back and enjoy the nature of this marvelous little oasis of hardwoods and evergreens, towering over Fred Bamford’s small vacation cottages that fronted on Toronto Street. It was the same down at Bass Rock, on the Muskoka River, although a little busier. You could lay on the rocks for hours on end, enjoying the sun and the warmth that generated up from the heated surface half covered in soft lichen. I celebrated such small details I’m sure others neglected. I couldn’t wait to get downtown on Saturday mornings with my allowance jiggling in my pants, and what wasn’t used up buying dinky toys and models was spent on cent candy up at Black’s Variety then Lil and Cec’s. I don’t think there were many Saturday afternoons in those years that I didn’t have a small paper bag full of cent candy in tow. While this is not to suggest there wasn’t lots of other exciting things going on in town, these gentle times with friends and cent candy were pretty much all I needed to adore the place I lived. I could complicate just about any day I wanted, and getting into trouble was pretty easy.....it was just apparent to me early in life that it was far more life-enhancing to stop and smell the open air freedom of being a kid. Sure I played "Nicky-Nicky-Nine-Doors," to my neighbors’ chagrin, and I loved to toss green apples at my enemies, and they sounded pretty dramatic when we tossed them onto some of the tin rooves on the street,...... and trespass, yes we did....just about every day we’d find some other way to intrude on our neighbors’ good natures. Still it was a long way from skullduggery and though I heard one elderly lady refer to me as a "young rapscallion," it took another decade to find out what that meant. By the time I had a rebuttal she was deceased.
When I wander about the streets of the town today I see a lot of familiar things that poignantly remind me a lot of those earlier days and ways. Most of the open space we knew as kids is long gone, as is Bamford’s Woods, which was a huge loss for the whole neighborhood. I can feel that precarious shift of change that will take away many more vestiges of the past, because of this new round of urban dynamic bursting at the seams. At times writing about these places and circumstances is my own way of coping with change....some of it is for the good, other developments seem as if they are truly breaking-down, once and for all, the town I knew. And I feel there hasn’t been enough attention given to the way these changes, this adaptation to the new reality, will affect the character of the town that grew here. If there is truly reverence to the character of the town, its patina garnered since the first log shanties crowded around the Bracebridge Falls, we should think about the way it is being diluted by expansion. I know that some folks, long time citizens who have watched the assault on their community, have become increasingly wary of all this expansion, profoundly concerned about the watering down of a character that was genuinely unique.....that was very much guarded by those unblinking eyes of Eckleburg, as if F. Scott Fitzgerald himself had been inspired by our clock tower before writing the "Great Gatsby". Those eyes....those eyes followed us everywhere. Funny thing. It was the first prominent piece of local architecture I noticed on my first day of school at Bracebridge Public, the companion that I looked for each morning, and bid farewell to on the way home each afternoon; it was the clock face I would remember when lost in love, dumped and set adrift by a former girlfriend; it was the guiding light when I had consumed too much alcohol at the local tavern, the beacon over my shoulder when I asked Suzanne to marry me, the landmark I turned to in order to check the time, upon leaving the hospital after watching both sons born, and the friendly face of time and memorial I glanced at inadvertently while passing below, the day my mother Merle passed away........after so many years herself using that illuminated tower as a marker of time and task, and how long she had to get home before the inmates were demanding their dinner. It may to some be a petty and insignificant reality of local architecture, from a bygone era but it was so much more significant to this writer. I couldn’t write one historical piece about Bracebridge that didn’t include some subtle reference to its unwavering importance to the way we are as hometowners.
When I sit down to pen some thoughts about my memories of Bracebridge, as I first knew it, I can get a little soppy and misty-eyed. My writing career began on Alice Street....my first short stories composed for my grade six teacher at Bracebridge Public School, were concocted in that modest apartment overlooking the snowy Bamfords’ Woods. Over the years whenever I written a hockey themed feature story, I can not bypass the memories of road hockey games held on so many bitter winter nights, under the lamp-light of upper Alice Street.....when we all took turns being Gordie Howe, Terry Sawchuck, Bobby Orr, Dave Keon, and Jean Beliveau, and of course commentator Foster Hewitt providing the play by play. But it’s all just nostalgia. Water under the bridge I suppose. While it’s inevitable man-made landmarks will have to be restored, possibly removed and replaced with modern structures one day, what’s the rule with fading memories? Not all history is cut and dried or factual. Our greatest loss I believe, will be the reminiscences of those neighbors who kept the history of our times better than any historian ever could.....but who have decided their fading stories must be irrelevant today in the wake of so much dedication to progress and being progressive. The character of Bracebridge was very much about neighborhoods....strong bastions of kinship, sanctuaries for the weary, restorative enclaves for new initiatives. The tenant list of the former Weber Apartments......that modest three story near-commune, attested to this.......the names of those who once called it home is a literal who’s who of community leadership. And then there was this humble scribe who got his start in history and authordom, very much appreciating the friendship and compassion of small places in the grand scheme of a much larger life.
Possibly one day a municipal councillor, feeling a wee pang of nostalgia, might think back upon the revolution of change and ponder if, in exchange for the promise of prosperity, it was worth the expense of character and identity.... once held above all else.... even progress, as the comfortable, secure way of meeting the future with an open palm.