Autobiography, Installment #2: Strata

Nearly every aspect about our lives is a function of geography: where we are, where we want to be and how we can get from one to the other. To grow up in northern Ontario is to know exactly where you are: god-forsaken, isolated nowhere. It also informs where you want to go --anywhere but here-- and how to get there --by any means available.

I mentioned previously the region is essentially an ancient lake bed from the last ice age. Glaciers smoothed the ancient basalt rock formations to low bumps and the ancient lake silt filled in the depressions to leave the modern land surface effectively flat. There are four exceptions in our immediately area, however.

The alluvial clay soil erodes easily so even small and comparatively young creeks and rivers have cut deep, narrow river valleys. The general flatness and the impermiability of the basalt bedrock also means there are rivers, creeks, lakes and ponds everywhere. My five mile long school bus ride to our local elementary school crossed no fewer than three creeks, several more if we took the scenic route.

The major lake of the area is named Long Lake: 22 miles long, 200 feet across, 60 feet deep. I know nothing about the geological origins of this particular lake. It figures highly in my memories however because the south-east end divides the village of Charlton (pop. 160) in two. The halves are linked by a single road over three steel-reinforced concrete single lane bridges constructed in 1954 over three parallel sets of waterfalls which then immediately merge to form the headwaters of the Englehart River. When you say you're heading to the lake or to the beach, this is where you're going.

About ten miles to the southwest of our farm is a formation known as Sand Ridge, named such by our creative forefathers because it is a colossal ridge formed entirely of coarse orange sand. Having access to 100 billion tons of sand is a very good thing indeed when one has icy roads in winter. The sandy soil also produces the best blueberries in the area, huge and juicy if there is sufficient rainfall. The berries in turn attract the largest well-fed brown bears I have ever seen. One learns to pick berries in teams with at least one person with reasonably good eyesight constantly acting as a look-out.

The only other interesting geological feature is a shallow rift valley, an elongated basin created when the land on each side rebounded along fault lines after the weight of mile-deep ice was lifted 12,000 years ago. The town of Englehart (pop. 1200) sits in the middle of the basin; Highway 11, our major north-south escape route to civilization runs the length of it. If frostbite and hypothermia aren't sufficiently attractive winter activities to entice you to visit, go just to see the spectacular icicles and ice falls along the basalt cliffs of Highway 560 just as it runs along the fault line at the edge of the basin. Ground water seeps all year round from top onto the rock face where it freezes and melts in the sunlight, creating towering ice formations 100 feet high, tinted by the minerals in the groundwater and dazzling in the morning sun. If you're very lucky in the spring, you might see massive ice formations peel away from the rock face and crash to the ground, shaking everything around as tons of ice shatter on the boulders. Just don't stand too close.

Our farm was located near the geographic center of Dack Township, a nearly 100% rural expanse with a population of less than 500 people but perhaps 2,500 cows --god help us all when the cows start voting as a single political bloc. Charlton and the lake were in the north-west corner, five miles away; Englehart was in the north-east corner, eight miles.

Townships are interesting entities. There are no counties in northern Ontario --those are a southern Ontario feature; I have no idea why this is but there are probably historical and political reasons. For this discussion, just think county and you'll get the picture.

Townships come in two flavours: organized and unorganized. The organized townships are formally incorporated, have their own elected officials (a reeve [mayor] and councillors) and run their own affairs. Unorganized townships have no such privileges: they are effectively just place names on a map created for the purposes of sorting & identification by the provincial government. The services there are provided by the provincial system --but typically only when the province gets around to them after they've addressed higher priority areas. An organized township would have its snowplows out clearing the roads immediately after a heavy snowfall; an unorganized township may have to wait a few days, a week or more.

Why do I mention this? There's a social status involved here.
Dack Township (mine): Organized.
Evantural Township: Organized.
Hilliard Township: Organized.
Chamberlain Township: Organized.
Savard Township: Unorganized.

To say that Savard Township was looked down upon by its neighbours understates the situation in the same way that World War II could be described as a minor skirmish. As the child of newly arrived would-be farmers, my social standing was only slightly higher than algae in the food chain of rural society but I could still claim a status over my counterparts in Savard.

When you're a nearly microscopic fish in an equally microscopic pond, one latches desperately onto anything for the illusion of status. Excusable in children, pathetic in adults.

Of course, status also comes from lineage. My family were new arrivals so we had claim to any sort of children-of-the-original-settlers ancestry. My parents were already married and my brother and I were years below respectable marrying age --even in this area-- so there was no possibility of marrying into the right family tree.

Even these progenitor families were more fiction than reality. Nearly the entire region was destroyed in an immense forest fire in the fall of 1922; everything there now basically started from this new 1922 baseline. The settlement years prior to the fire became fanciful myths of a great golden age of prosperity. Pure fiction, but it's a fiction many an old family has woven into their identity and god help the scoundrel who tries involving facts, records or reality.

And finally, status comes from one's financial means and career choices. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers and such were probably at the top but since I hadn't met any until I was in high school, who can say? Government bureaucrats were envied for their job stability and regular hours but that was all.

Among the people I met daily, the miners and railway workers were at the top of the food chain. They were well-paid by our standards, had steady work and generally had free time and disposable income for things like vacations, a second vehicle, recreational vehicles and satellite television. At the bottom were farmers, barely making a small living working seven days per week, whose pitiful fortunes were entirely tied to the whims of the weather, market prices and how long one got on with the local banker who would decide whether or not to finance the purchase of seed, fertilizer, equipment, livestock or such, or whether to order repossession of such items when a payment was missed.

My grade 1 class photo nicely illustrated the differences in means. In a class of 25 or so, a handful were properly scrubbed & neatly presented with clean clothes and new shoes. The rest of us were a scraggly lot in ill-fitting, patched hand-me-down clothes, shoes with holes and a general appearance of sad desperation.

When one lives at the bottom long enough, one either becomes fatalistically accustomed to the view or one becomes more determined day by day to escape.

One also begins to question the intelligence and sanity of one's parents who brought them to this hopelessness. I can forgive general naivete about the harshness of the region and the myopia brought on by the excitement of following their dream, but it takes a bewildering display of foolishness and denial to avoid creating a vaguely realistic business plan.

At the age of four, I learned the following lessons alongside my alphabet and numbers:

1. Who you are matters.
   
2. Who other people say you are matters, even if they're wrong.
   
3. People lie, especially about themselves. Especially if they have something to lose.
   
4. Always have a Plan B.
   
5. My parents were idiots, albeit well-meaning and loving idiots. My older brother too.
   
6. I was going to be different. Somehow, I was going to be smarter, successful and resourceful. Above all else, I would leave this god-awful mess behind as soon as possible. Sadly, I also knew enough math at age four to realize that it would take at least 14 years until my 18th birthday, an utter eternity to a child. *sigh*

Autobiography, Installment #2: Strata

Nearly every aspect about our lives is a function of geography: where we are, where we want to be and how we can get from one to the other. To grow up in northern Ontario is to know exactly where you are: god-forsaken, isolated nowhere. It also informs where you want to go --anywhere but here-- and how to get there --by any means available.

I mentioned previously the region is essentially an ancient lake bed from the last ice age. Glaciers smoothed the ancient basalt rock formations to low bumps and the ancient lake silt filled in the depressions to leave the modern land surface effectively flat. There are four exceptions in our immediately area, however.

The alluvial clay soil erodes easily so even small and comparatively young creeks and rivers have cut deep, narrow river valleys. The general flatness and the impermiability of the basalt bedrock also means there are rivers, creeks, lakes and ponds everywhere. My five mile long school bus ride to our local elementary school crossed no fewer than three creeks, several more if we took the scenic route.

The major lake of the area is named Long Lake: 22 miles long, 200 feet across, 60 feet deep. I know nothing about the geological origins of this particular lake. It figures highly in my memories however because the south-east end divides the village of Charlton (pop. 160) in two. The halves are linked by a single road over three steel-reinforced concrete single lane bridges constructed in 1954 over three parallel sets of waterfalls which then immediately merge to form the headwaters of the Englehart River. When you say you're heading to the lake or to the beach, this is where you're going.

About ten miles to the southwest of our farm is a formation known as Sand Ridge, named such by our creative forefathers because it is a colossal ridge formed entirely of coarse orange sand. Having access to 100 billion tons of sand is a very good thing indeed when one has icy roads in winter. The sandy soil also produces the best blueberries in the area, huge and juicy if there is sufficient rainfall. The berries in turn attract the largest well-fed brown bears I have ever seen. One learns to pick berries in teams with at least one person with reasonably good eyesight constantly acting as a look-out.

The only other interesting geological feature is a shallow rift valley, an elongated basin created when the land on each side rebounded along fault lines after the weight of mile-deep ice was lifted 12,000 years ago. The town of Englehart (pop. 1200) sits in the middle of the basin; Highway 11, our major north-south escape route to civilization runs the length of it. If frostbite and hypothermia aren't sufficiently attractive winter activities to entice you to visit, go just to see the spectacular icicles and ice falls along the basalt cliffs of Highway 560 just as it runs along the fault line at the edge of the basin. Ground water seeps all year round from top onto the rock face where it freezes and melts in the sunlight, creating towering ice formations 100 feet high, tinted by the minerals in the groundwater and dazzling in the morning sun. If you're very lucky in the spring, you might see massive ice formations peel away from the rock face and crash to the ground, shaking everything around as tons of ice shatter on the boulders. Just don't stand too close.

Our farm was located near the geographic center of Dack Township, a nearly 100% rural expanse with a population of less than 500 people but perhaps 2,500 cows --god help us all when the cows start voting as a single political bloc. Charlton and the lake were in the north-west corner, five miles away; Englehart was in the north-east corner, eight miles.

Townships are interesting entities. There are no counties in northern Ontario --those are a southern Ontario feature; I have no idea why this is but there are probably historical and political reasons. For this discussion, just think county and you'll get the picture.

Townships come in two flavours: organized and unorganized. The organized townships are formally incorporated, have their own elected officials (a reeve [mayor] and councillors) and run their own affairs. Unorganized townships have no such privileges: they are effectively just place names on a map created for the purposes of sorting & identification by the provincial government. The services there are provided by the provincial system --but typically only when the province gets around to them after they've addressed higher priority areas. An organized township would have its snowplows out clearing the roads immediately after a heavy snowfall; an unorganized township may have to wait a few days, a week or more.

Why do I mention this? There's a social status involved here.
Dack Township (mine): Organized.
Evantural Township: Organized.
Hilliard Township: Organized.
Chamberlain Township: Organized.
Savard Township: Unorganized.

To say that Savard Township was looked down upon by its neighbours understates the situation in the same way that World War II could be described as a minor skirmish. As the child of newly arrived would-be farmers, my social standing was only slightly higher than algae in the food chain of rural society but I could still claim a status over my counterparts in Savard.

When you're a nearly microscopic fish in an equally microscopic pond, one latches desperately onto anything for the illusion of status. Excusable in children, pathetic in adults.

Of course, status also comes from lineage. My family were new arrivals so we had claim to any sort of children-of-the-original-settlers ancestry. My parents were already married and my brother and I were years below respectable marrying age --even in this area-- so there was no possibility of marrying into the right family tree.

Even these progenitor families were more fiction than reality. Nearly the entire region was destroyed in an immense forest fire in the fall of 1922; everything there now basically started from this new 1922 baseline. The settlement years prior to the fire became fanciful myths of a great golden age of prosperity. Pure fiction, but it's a fiction many an old family has woven into their identity and god help the scoundrel who tries involving facts, records or reality.

And finally, status comes from one's financial means and career choices. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers and such were probably at the top but since I hadn't met any until I was in high school, who can say? Government bureaucrats were envied for their job stability and regular hours but that was all.

Among the people I met daily, the miners and railway workers were at the top of the food chain. They were well-paid by our standards, had steady work and generally had free time and disposable income for things like vacations, a second vehicle, recreational vehicles and satellite television. At the bottom were farmers, barely making a small living working seven days per week, whose pitiful fortunes were entirely tied to the whims of the weather, market prices and how long one got on with the local banker who would decide whether or not to finance the purchase of seed, fertilizer, equipment, livestock or such, or whether to order repossession of such items when a payment was missed.

My grade 1 class photo nicely illustrated the differences in means. In a class of 25 or so, a handful were properly scrubbed & neatly presented with clean clothes and new shoes. The rest of us were a scraggly lot in ill-fitting, patched hand-me-down clothes, shoes with holes and a general appearance of sad desperation.

When one lives at the bottom long enough, one either becomes fatalistically accustomed to the view or one becomes more determined day by day to escape.

One also begins to question the intelligence and sanity of one's parents who brought them to this hopelessness. I can forgive general naivete about the harshness of the region and the myopia brought on by the excitement of following their dream, but it takes a bewildering display of foolishness and denial to avoid creating a vaguely realistic business plan.

At the age of four, I learned the following lessons alongside my alphabet and numbers:

1. Who you are matters.
   
2. Who other people say you are matters, even if they're wrong.
   
3. People lie, especially about themselves. Especially if they have something to lose.
   
4. Always have a Plan B.
   
5. My parents were idiots, albeit well-meaning and loving idiots. My older brother too.
   
6. I was going to be different. Somehow, I was going to be smarter, successful and resourceful. Above all else, I would leave this god-awful mess behind as soon as possible. Sadly, I also knew enough math at age four to realize that it would take at least 14 years until my 18th birthday, an utter eternity to a child. *sigh*

Autobiography, Installment #3: The Ties That Bind Eventually, Sorta

A community's culture is a mélange of a number of different factors: language, customs, religion, education, personal interconnections, social hierarchy and such. I have frequently said I don't understand much about the local culture around me here in the suburbs of Washington DC. The more I think about the past however, the less I think I ever had a clue what the hell was going on in the very community in which I was raised.

My religious upbringing was relatively confused. Dad almost never stepped foot in a church in his life but Mom was persuaded that she needed her children to get some form of religion. I still haven't figured out if it was because she thought we needed it, because she thought she was obliged as a parent and community member to do this or because she just wanted to dress up and get out of the house from time to time.

Charlton (pop 160) had no fewer than five churches: Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada. Dad's family was nominally Anglican while Mom's was nominally UCC but we began our religious life in the local Pentecostal church. Go figure.

I suspect it was largely because Mom's closest friend was Roberta Booker, wife of the Pentecostal minister, Bob Booker. I also have a strong suspicion that the Pentecostals were simply more welcoming to relatively new arrivals: St. Paul's, the United Church which one might think the more obvious choice, was dominated by large and long established families. It's not that they were disparaging of new members, but new arrivals tend to be chased back south again after the first bad winter. One can save a lot of time & energy by waiting 5-10 years to welcome folks to the neighbourhood. Some religions deny darwinism, some accept it, but St. Paul's embraced it an unofficial membership policy.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were other explanations for Mom's choices but Mom's decisions frequently defy logic. The moment I recognized and simply accepted her peculiar brand of irrationality was the moment my migraines stopped.

We attended that small Pentecostal church for at least three years, until I was about 7. Eventually, the congregation merged with the vastly larger one in neighbouring Englehart with their relatively huge new mega-church building. It wasn't much of a mega-church by today's standards of 50,000+ congregants, but the new building with seating for several hundred was larger than any other in town except for the schools, hockey arena and curling rink. It was prominently located along the nearby highway, angled for maximum visibility to the passers-by. I don't recall them having any social or charity programs but no expense was spared on the exterior building lighting, billboards and landscaping. Bob & Roberta briefly attended the new facility as congregants but moved away shortly thereafter. We never went.

If there was a golden age in my religious life, this was it: I think there were nearly seven solid years in which I had my Sundays to myself. After all, what was the point of a day of rest when one had to work harder than the other six days getting dressed and made presentable just to make an appearance for a 60-90 minute community service?

It didn't help that I harbored a dark secret: I didn't believe any of it.

Creating a universe in seven days? Creating a woman out of a rib? Spontaneously creating enough water to destroy a planet with floods but then conveniently zapping the same water out of existence again? A deity who loves us unconditionally but routinely commits genocide? A deity and his virgin-born son who are actually three entities? And it's all going to end in a planetary deity-endorsed catastrophe?

It might have been easier to accept in small sips but I gulped it down in my usual all-in fashion: unfortunately, the entire package, inconsistencies and all, struck me as too much to swallow. It didn't help that so much was accompanied by "don't ask such questions," "because I said so" and "because it is." A child's embryonic cynicism is watered and fertilized on such statements. In my mind, both the message and the messengers were tainted and I soon developed my own personal, most horrific insult: the sources were unreliable.

Reliable sources are able to say "I don't know," "let's think this through," and "let's look it up together." Reliable sources know there is a difference between questioning the material & conclusions and questioning the character of the person offering it. Unreliable sources conflate the message and their personal role, dismiss the question or the questioner, use intellectual hand-waving to distract attention from the issue and use their authority to avoid dealing directly with the problem. In the fairy tale, it was a child who declared the emperor had no clothes. I wasn't brave enough to say it --all actions have consequences-- but it was clear to my young eyes the emperor was buck naked.

And ultimately, my next lesson in religion was that it didn't really matter what I believed so long as I went through the motions of the public ceremony and didn't rock the metaphoric boat. The effect this revelation had my escalating cynicism is left as an exercise to the reader.

Religion also didn't matter in other ways in our tiny little rural world. Sure, some families said grace before meals. A few went to evening services beyond their usual Sunday morning service. Religion and prayer, however, were not going to put food on the table or keep a roof over one's head: practical matters had to be dealt with by real-world effort, not hymns and sermons.

Each local denomination worked well with the others. On occasion, services for one denomination would be held at the church of another while their own was undergoing renovation or repair. I often wondered why they bothered having separate churches and services at all since they all appeared to believe the same thing. Children miss the subtle nuances of different slivers of the same general faith although I still am amazed how such minute details have been allowed to create such intense and long-standing fissures.

The most devout lot in our general community were the Jehovah Witnesses. I knew they were radically different in their religious views: the two or three JW kids would leave the classroom during the morning prayer and national anthem. Where did they go? Did they just hang out in the hallway for a few minutes or did they have some special but brief class elsewhere in the building? What earned them the special status? A child's mind incessantly toils on such grave matters.

If there was any sort of societal split, it was linguistic but even that wasn't much of a barrier.

About one third of the District of Temiskaming, our regional association of 17 townships, spoke french as their primary language, the rest english. This isn't an even distribution, however: languages tended to clump by towns. Englehart and Charlton were nearly exclusively english; Earlton and Belle Vallee were nearly exclusively french. Hailebury and Cobalt were english but New Liskeard and Thornloe were mixed.

Still, the language variations didn't really matter. English was effectively the primary language of business because of the larger numbers although smart businesses ensured they could do commerce in each. Government publications and services were available in both, although some offices employed a three-way telephone call to bring a government interpreter into the conversation.

My parents spoke only english but I learned french in elementary school from grade one onwards. Being ever the nerd, I also took french immersion in grade six --all courses except english & music taught in french-- and had intensive french courses from grades seven through 13 rather than the usual french-lite classes most others took. My brother and I were occasionally used as interpreters by our parents but it was a mercifully rare event: while I can speak the language, I'm still all too aware of my imperfect understanding and stumbling speaking ability. My english skills are above average and is unfortunately a constant reminder that my abilities in french aren't of the same proficiency, nor are ever likely to be. I don't deal well with intellectual failure.

Social outlets were few. By the time we were in elementary school, my brother and I could have joined the township's 4H club but after a couple of meetings, we let it go. Again, it was populated and maintained by the established families who hadn't yet warmed up to the new arrivals. I overheard at least one mother tell her children not to bother with us because we'd be move away soon... After all, we had only just moved in five years previous.

The ultimate reason for not continuing with 4H was simply that I hated farming with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns: farming brought us to this isolated place, farming brought us to poverty, farming make us the daily playthings of banks and markets. The idea of discussing the joy of farming during our spare time away from actually doing it made me nauseous.

The Englehart kids had a boy scout troop but we laughed that off immediately: they went into the wilderness for weekend adventures but we lived in that same wilderness every day. I already knew a thousand ways to die out there; intentionally wandering into the hunting ranges of wolf packs and bears just didn't strike me as a fun time. Here's a tip, however: if you don't know who the group has singled out to be left behind as a distraction while the others escape, it's probably you.

Mom had her monthly Women's Institute meetings. Honestly, I have no idea what the WI was about or what they did. As near as I could tell, it was a regular get-together at a member's house of the area women, away from their husbands, children and responsibilities, to simply chat and bond over tea and sandwiches. And that alone seems sensible and practical enough to justify the practice in my ever-so-humble opinion.

There were two WI groups in our township. The Dack Women's Institute group met in the northern part of the township; Mom's group, the Sunday Creek Women's Institute, was in our immediate neighbourhood. As near as I know, each had 25-30 members. I wish I could say more as they dominated my mother's social life and fostered her social connections but that's all I have. Some day, I'll ask Mom for more details but if she starts talking about conspiracies, secret ceremonies and special handshakes, I'll probably just have her committed.

Dad's social life? Good question. Dad has always been a relatively quiet, private individual; I still know very little about him. He had a couple of friends in the general area whom he would visit for a few beers. He also went to the Commercial Tavern in Englehart to meet with the guys. I wasn't privy to any of this. Even after reaching the legal drinking age (19 in Ontario), I never stepped foot in the local tavern or accompanied Dad on any his bonding visits. It just wasn't his way, or mine. I didn't pry and we both intuitively knew that his idea of a night on the town and mine --as well as that of his friends-- were almost entirely mutually exclusive.

Let's summarize: realistic social bonds take nearly a decade to form, my parents had their periodic distractions and I didn't really fit in anywhere. Sounds like a great time, doesn't it?

Autobiography, Installment #3: The Ties That Bind Eventually, Sorta

A community's culture is a mélange of a number of different factors: language, customs, religion, education, personal interconnections, social hierarchy and such. I have frequently said I don't understand much about the local culture around me here in the suburbs of Washington DC. The more I think about the past however, the less I think I ever had a clue what the hell was going on in the very community in which I was raised.

My religious upbringing was relatively confused. Dad almost never stepped foot in a church in his life but Mom was persuaded that she needed her children to get some form of religion. I still haven't figured out if it was because she thought we needed it, because she thought she was obliged as a parent and community member to do this or because she just wanted to dress up and get out of the house from time to time.

Charlton (pop 160) had no fewer than five churches: Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada. Dad's family was nominally Anglican while Mom's was nominally UCC but we began our religious life in the local Pentecostal church. Go figure.

I suspect it was largely because Mom's closest friend was Roberta Booker, wife of the Pentecostal minister, Bob Booker. I also have a strong suspicion that the Pentecostals were simply more welcoming to relatively new arrivals: St. Paul's, the United Church which one might think the more obvious choice, was dominated by large and long established families. It's not that they were disparaging of new members, but new arrivals tend to be chased back south again after the first bad winter. One can save a lot of time & energy by waiting 5-10 years to welcome folks to the neighbourhood. Some religions deny darwinism, some accept it, but St. Paul's embraced it an unofficial membership policy.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were other explanations for Mom's choices but Mom's decisions frequently defy logic. The moment I recognized and simply accepted her peculiar brand of irrationality was the moment my migraines stopped.

We attended that small Pentecostal church for at least three years, until I was about 7. Eventually, the congregation merged with the vastly larger one in neighbouring Englehart with their relatively huge new mega-church building. It wasn't much of a mega-church by today's standards of 50,000+ congregants, but the new building with seating for several hundred was larger than any other in town except for the schools, hockey arena and curling rink. It was prominently located along the nearby highway, angled for maximum visibility to the passers-by. I don't recall them having any social or charity programs but no expense was spared on the exterior building lighting, billboards and landscaping. Bob & Roberta briefly attended the new facility as congregants but moved away shortly thereafter. We never went.

If there was a golden age in my religious life, this was it: I think there were nearly seven solid years in which I had my Sundays to myself. After all, what was the point of a day of rest when one had to work harder than the other six days getting dressed and made presentable just to make an appearance for a 60-90 minute community service?

It didn't help that I harbored a dark secret: I didn't believe any of it.

Creating a universe in seven days? Creating a woman out of a rib? Spontaneously creating enough water to destroy a planet with floods but then conveniently zapping the same water out of existence again? A deity who loves us unconditionally but routinely commits genocide? A deity and his virgin-born son who are actually three entities? And it's all going to end in a planetary deity-endorsed catastrophe?

It might have been easier to accept in small sips but I gulped it down in my usual all-in fashion: unfortunately, the entire package, inconsistencies and all, struck me as too much to swallow. It didn't help that so much was accompanied by "don't ask such questions," "because I said so" and "because it is." A child's embryonic cynicism is watered and fertilized on such statements. In my mind, both the message and the messengers were tainted and I soon developed my own personal, most horrific insult: the sources were unreliable.

Reliable sources are able to say "I don't know," "let's think this through," and "let's look it up together." Reliable sources know there is a difference between questioning the material & conclusions and questioning the character of the person offering it. Unreliable sources conflate the message and their personal role, dismiss the question or the questioner, use intellectual hand-waving to distract attention from the issue and use their authority to avoid dealing directly with the problem. In the fairy tale, it was a child who declared the emperor had no clothes. I wasn't brave enough to say it --all actions have consequences-- but it was clear to my young eyes the emperor was buck naked.

And ultimately, my next lesson in religion was that it didn't really matter what I believed so long as I went through the motions of the public ceremony and didn't rock the metaphoric boat. The effect this revelation had my escalating cynicism is left as an exercise to the reader.

Religion also didn't matter in other ways in our tiny little rural world. Sure, some families said grace before meals. A few went to evening services beyond their usual Sunday morning service. Religion and prayer, however, were not going to put food on the table or keep a roof over one's head: practical matters had to be dealt with by real-world effort, not hymns and sermons.

Each local denomination worked well with the others. On occasion, services for one denomination would be held at the church of another while their own was undergoing renovation or repair. I often wondered why they bothered having separate churches and services at all since they all appeared to believe the same thing. Children miss the subtle nuances of different slivers of the same general faith although I still am amazed how such minute details have been allowed to create such intense and long-standing fissures.

The most devout lot in our general community were the Jehovah Witnesses. I knew they were radically different in their religious views: the two or three JW kids would leave the classroom during the morning prayer and national anthem. Where did they go? Did they just hang out in the hallway for a few minutes or did they have some special but brief class elsewhere in the building? What earned them the special status? A child's mind incessantly toils on such grave matters.

If there was any sort of societal split, it was linguistic but even that wasn't much of a barrier.

About one third of the District of Temiskaming, our regional association of 17 townships, spoke french as their primary language, the rest english. This isn't an even distribution, however: languages tended to clump by towns. Englehart and Charlton were nearly exclusively english; Earlton and Belle Vallee were nearly exclusively french. Hailebury and Cobalt were english but New Liskeard and Thornloe were mixed.

Still, the language variations didn't really matter. English was effectively the primary language of business because of the larger numbers although smart businesses ensured they could do commerce in each. Government publications and services were available in both, although some offices employed a three-way telephone call to bring a government interpreter into the conversation.

My parents spoke only english but I learned french in elementary school from grade one onwards. Being ever the nerd, I also took french immersion in grade six --all courses except english & music taught in french-- and had intensive french courses from grades seven through 13 rather than the usual french-lite classes most others took. My brother and I were occasionally used as interpreters by our parents but it was a mercifully rare event: while I can speak the language, I'm still all too aware of my imperfect understanding and stumbling speaking ability. My english skills are above average and is unfortunately a constant reminder that my abilities in french aren't of the same proficiency, nor are ever likely to be. I don't deal well with intellectual failure.

Social outlets were few. By the time we were in elementary school, my brother and I could have joined the township's 4H club but after a couple of meetings, we let it go. Again, it was populated and maintained by the established families who hadn't yet warmed up to the new arrivals. I overheard at least one mother tell her children not to bother with us because we'd be move away soon... After all, we had only just moved in five years previous.

The ultimate reason for not continuing with 4H was simply that I hated farming with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns: farming brought us to this isolated place, farming brought us to poverty, farming make us the daily playthings of banks and markets. The idea of discussing the joy of farming during our spare time away from actually doing it made me nauseous.

The Englehart kids had a boy scout troop but we laughed that off immediately: they went into the wilderness for weekend adventures but we lived in that same wilderness every day. I already knew a thousand ways to die out there; intentionally wandering into the hunting ranges of wolf packs and bears just didn't strike me as a fun time. Here's a tip, however: if you don't know who the group has singled out to be left behind as a distraction while the others escape, it's probably you.

Mom had her monthly Women's Institute meetings. Honestly, I have no idea what the WI was about or what they did. As near as I could tell, it was a regular get-together at a member's house of the area women, away from their husbands, children and responsibilities, to simply chat and bond over tea and sandwiches. And that alone seems sensible and practical enough to justify the practice in my ever-so-humble opinion.

There were two WI groups in our township. The Dack Women's Institute group met in the northern part of the township; Mom's group, the Sunday Creek Women's Institute, was in our immediate neighbourhood. As near as I know, each had 25-30 members. I wish I could say more as they dominated my mother's social life and fostered her social connections but that's all I have. Some day, I'll ask Mom for more details but if she starts talking about conspiracies, secret ceremonies and special handshakes, I'll probably just have her committed.

Dad's social life? Good question. Dad has always been a relatively quiet, private individual; I still know very little about him. He had a couple of friends in the general area whom he would visit for a few beers. He also went to the Commercial Tavern in Englehart to meet with the guys. I wasn't privy to any of this. Even after reaching the legal drinking age (19 in Ontario), I never stepped foot in the local tavern or accompanied Dad on any his bonding visits. It just wasn't his way, or mine. I didn't pry and we both intuitively knew that his idea of a night on the town and mine --as well as that of his friends-- were almost entirely mutually exclusive.

Let's summarize: realistic social bonds take nearly a decade to form, my parents had their periodic distractions and I didn't really fit in anywhere. Sounds like a great time, doesn't it?