You Can Never Go Home But I Just Did -- Geography

Where Airport Road meets Highway 9 has changed a whole lot from the few simple houses (still there but now mostly abandoned) that marked the turn toward the city (although we never got deeper in than the airport or the home of friends of my parents who lived around Islington and Dixie in the '60s) on trips from my hometown to Toronto in my father's teal green Biscayne. These were not frequent trips and that rarity is likely why I have such distinct memories of that drive; of my father cursing the maze of roadways once one was on airport property. Runs to the airport were to see my mother fly home to Scotland, or once to pick up my Grandmother and Uncle who came to visit. My father forgot to turn the car lights off on one occasion and we arrived at the car to find the battery dead in the airport parking lot. As fate would have it a car pulled in next to us and my father asked the driver if he could get a boost. My father didn't even hear the no as he popped the other car's hood (no interior hood latches in those days) and had the cables linking the two cars so fast the other guy had no choice but to re-start his car and provide the boost. Small town hick friendly meets big city.

Leaving Toronto now nothing gets very familiar from the past until that turn, then each marker indicates a deeper fall into the past for me: Orangeville (utterly transformed in 40 odd years); then the traffic light at Arthur -- you don't go into town, still associated in my mind with the rough greasers with reputations for dirty hockey and dirtier mouths that were represented by the few Arthur kids who made the 30k bus trip to my high school (not Drayton or Orangeville highschools) and the many more who played against my town's hockey teams.

Then it's Teviotdale (pronounced TIV-eh-dale). By here, in summer, I've stopped noticing the distinct heated, wet smell of cut, baled and drying hay cooking in the sun that has littered the fields, especially since after Orangeville. Thirty years ago Teviotdale was a truck stop in a shack, a heavy equipment repair place, a couple of houses and a baseball diamond (with lights!). It was also where everyone who had remained conscious to last call in the hotels in my hometown, as well as the town I went to high school in made some sort of Mecca. Open 24 hours, the truckstop fed our teen age drunken need for BLTs with a side of fries. Fights were fought over what was right -- gravy on the fries or not. The alcohol in blood levels per kilometer driven might surely be record setting for the short stretch of 10km or so of road between my hometown and Teviotdale, excepting the scene was being played out all over rural Ontario in those days when drinking and driving was part of the day-after myth making. "You mean it was ME who drove home? HA!"

The truckstop is still there, but the shack has been replaced with something bigger, sturdier. I guess the waitresses are still people's mothers, but I doubt they serve their drunken underage sons a 2 a.m. BLT with only a shake of the head and not a word about designated drivers. The ball diamond has an adjoining soccer pitch (with lights!) now. And where the heavy equipment shop sat is now a sprawling place selling wooden outdoor furniture the sort of stuff that makes so many cottages ultra tacky. There are also traffic ramps at the corner now. It also occurs to me with a start that Teviotdale used to have a stockcar race track for several years -- the gas station and garage across the street from our house used to enter a car and keep us up nights revving engines as they worked on the stocks, until my father would yell from his bedroom window (using the garage owner's name) that he had to work in the morning.

Half way from the truckstop to my hometown, on the right side of the road as you head into town, is an old, stone farmhouse (of the type where big multi-coloured quartz rocks are stacked willy nilly and joined with wide seams of caulking) with a big red barn and a couple of red driving sheds. The old steel windmill with its steel frame tower is gone now. Even when I was a kid the windmill's piston had been disconnected from the well pump, an electric pump taking its place. But no one had bothered (or avoided) climbing to the top to wire the blades of the thing so it couldn't turn in the wind. That left the disconnected shaft to pump uselessly and vigorously (and dangerously) in a breeze. More troubling was that in gentle breezes the windmill spun lazily on un-oiled gears and the squeal with each revolution was a hazard to a good night's sleep. Eventually that wiring job got done.

There are a hundred blogs about that farmhouse and the 110 acres it anchored, for there lived my father's best friend and, for much of my pre-high school days, lived by best pal (and his little brother who hung out with us), as well. There too lived that pal of mine's grandmother who treated me as if I was her grandson. I have a handmade quilt with a sewn signature in one corner -- hers. It was also her who demonstrated to me and her real grandson just how painful the bottom end of a corn broom can be when jammed into young boy flesh as it hides under a bed from a not quite out of reach and very angry grandmother wielding the handle end of the broom.

As I pass that farmhouse each visit home I begin to blow my car horn about 500 meters up the road and for another 500 until I've passed by. She won't be young anymore, but there wasn't I time I was in that house that when should a car horn sound in greeting as it passed the farm my friend's mother wouldn't scramble to the big kitchen window in hopes of seeing the car and by virtue of that knowing who had beeped hello. A similar, but much greater event atmosphere arose when an unknown car drove into the farm yard. Disappointment ensured when "Now who's this?" turned to "Ah, they're just using the yard to turn around."

Less than a kilometer later is a crossroads that if taken left will take you to the town I went to high school in or if taken right would have taken you to the old Drive In, visible from the road. Sadly the screen was knocked down years and years ago.

But keeping on straight ahead, quickly comes the "Welcome to..." and population sign announcing I've arrived home.