I found myself forced to leave the comfortable environs of London yesterday, venturing forth into the unlawful edge country that is commonly called Strathroy. After my business there was over, I decided to actually try and enjoy the drive back. To take in the fields and small towns of Southwestern Ontario, and maybe get a sense of that vague label being attached to certain stories being written by local writers--that elusive quality known as Southwestern Ontario Gothic.
I've been thinking about this of late. The current story I'm working on--tentatively called
Don't Hurt Maggie--definitely would fall under that banner. Or at least I think it would, because I clearly have no idea what it means. It just
sounds right.
As a kid, I spent a fair amount of time sitting in the back of my family's station wagon, looking out at fields and farmhouses,usually on Sunday afternoons when my parents would get in the mood for house-hunting. In high school, taking the late bus home during the winter, one of my favourite memories is sitting on the darkened bus, looking out at the snow covered fields as the stars began to shine in the sky. The sheen of moonlight on the fields, the quiet drone of the bus mixed with Eighties rock on the driver's stereo, felt removed from the reality of the day, and while not exactly a religious experience, was surely safe to be called magical.
But you get older, and you actually start driving, and you lose that ability to be a passive spectator because you don't want to wrap the car around a tree while pondering the beauty of snow crystals. Add on top of that the fact that most pick up drivers on country roads appear to believe that they not only
own the dirt road you are both driving on, but you are all that stands between them and the achievement of lightspeed. Which is why their roadkill bespecked bumper is riding only a shotgun shell away from yours, and why they are frowning at you beneath their baseball cap and ever present Nickelback tunes.
So, despite that, I decided to un-white knuckle my grip on the steering wheel, and take in my homeland as I sped through it. I switched on NPR, and before I knew it, I was actually beginning to enjoy myself. And to wonder just what constitutes gothic in this part of the world.
The easy answer is 'abandoned farmhouses', but I think the answer also lies with distance and horizon. While Southwestern Ontario can't compete with the Prairies for vistas, we don't do that badly here. When famed British author David Southwell came to visit me years ago, he was shaken by the distance all around him. "This isn't something we see in England," he said. It took him time to acclimatize, but the effect of simple geography on someone who hadn't grown up with it took me aback.
Even from London, you are no more than half an hour away from a field that stretches to the sky, or a forest that looks like no one has been in it for years. You can find solitary farmhouses, each filled with their own history, ongoing or not, standing alone, looking as untouched by a world of cell phones and Twitter, as if they haven't the time for such business. There are years to consider, lying deep upon their stones, ghost touch fading upon the woodwork.
As I drove, I remembered being the boy who felt overwhelmed by the countryside outside, who wouldn't look out the window at night for fear of what he might see staring back from the broken window of an empty house. A brief, fleeting moment of connection between who I was and the adult I had become.
I pulled into Komoka, and entered another memory palace: The Little Beaver. This was a place of Sunday morning treats, when my father had fleeced the overconfident lawyers and doctors at Sunningdale in golf on the previous Saturday, and could afford to take us all out for breakfast. Here, the bacon and eggs never tasted so good, chewing toast and looking out at the gravel pits across the road, considering depth and what might be at the bottom. Wonderful Sunday mornings, treasured even as they happened.
Now, a vegetarian, bacon is no longer an option. But cherry pie was, and so was coffee, served in that artifact of awesome, the white ceramic mug, the totem of refuge in truck stops across North America. And so I sat, thinking of people now gone, of the unavoidable sadness the years bring, and of how the waitress had destroyed the cherry pie when she cut it and did her best to hide the damage beneath whipped cream. It made me smile, because I can't slice pie to save my life, either.
I paid, leaving her a tip beneath the plate, the scene of her enjoyable culinary crime.
On a final swing through, I headed through Delaware, my home village. Saw the bell my father and I had installed outside of the Community Centre, still there. Drove past Delaware Central, which still looks amputated to me. The original building, a wonderful creation of--dare I say it?--gothic stone and wood, long gone now, but its ghost still stands there, defiant emptiness, not letting anyone forget. Even the newer building was modified and recombobulated, like a Lego building constructed by someone afraid of criticism. The vast playing field of Seventies British Bull-Dog seemed shrunken. As I drove past, three teenage boys, dressed in hip hop style, wandered past, looking pissed off as only teenage boys stuck in a hick town can.
Then I was back at the highway, heading back into London, into the present.
So what is Southwestern Ontario Gothic? Well, for me, it's horizon and distance, combined with memory and regret. And it's about looking out the window when you pass an abandoned farmhouse, knowing that the only thing you'll see staring back is your own reflection distorted in the broken glass.
