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- 2002-10-07
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Driving southeast down Highway 16 is unpleasant. Bottled up on Bank, eyes right past Lansdowne, endless retail overkill both sides, treadmill through the car lots, quick flit of green in a graveyard, new and soon to be new dormitory suburbs with ironic names lifted from nature, trailer lots, a dead restaurant or two, into Greeley, low swampy bush waiting to turn into suburbs, a sign for Marvelville Road, where the superheroes live, finally, 30 kilometres from the Peace Tower, past the Metcalfe sign and the lights at Snake Island Road, the first sightings of working barns and silos and fields, and the existential, grinding hum starts to turn into a pastoral melody.
Ten kilometres more, stop at the roadside farm store for local honey — save the bees! — and the sign says Welcome to Vernon.
A minute later I’m out the other side and across the Ottawa border. Pull a U, and I park for absolutely free, for as long as I want, outside the library, which looks like an old one-room schoolhouse, because it was. A large tile set in the wall above the porch dates it at 1882 which is like, totally pre-smart phone. Standing at the road side, with a nearby fenced-in barking dog posing as a burglar alarm, there are three churches at one end of the village, a convenience store in the middle, and a museum at the other.
The village of Vernon was in Osgoode Township prior to the Great Amalgamation of 2001, and it was then, and still is, a quiet place, with its rural quota of communal tragedies and dramas, crimes and blessings. The church with the highest spire, visible from a tractor seat anywhere in the surrounding fields, and the tallest building in town which dates from 1887, is Presbyterian. The female vicar’s name is Chan, and there is a discarded beer can in the parking lot. How Canadian is that. The Anglican and Baptist churches are opposite each other a minute’s walk from the Presbyterians. The Baptists are advertising their Harvest Festival, which makes sense out here, where there actually is a harvest.
Judging by the dates on the primary buildings in Vernon, it was on the up and up in the 1880s, and levelled out somewhere along the line, with the older farm houses and retired farming homes on the west side, and some newer semi-suburban homes on the east. The functional community centre, with a billboard outside it welcoming army cadets, is relatively new. While I’m outside a young woman in a teddy bear outfit runs out to her car and back. Halloween teddy bears picnic?
For me the heart of the village is the Osgoode Township Museum (www.osgoodemuseum.ca) which got going in the early 1970s and is run by good, active folks and includes an agricultural museum. A plaque outside informs me that Alexander Rutherford, who was born in Osgoode in 1857, went west as a young man and ended up as the first premier of Alberta. Well, well. I’ve given several talks at the museum, and enjoyed my visits with people who take their neighbours in time seriously, and who have good, how-it-used-to-be stories of their own to pass on.
The only curiosity in town is a Chinese Buddhist temple in a one-storey building, an ex-general store I suspect, with five enlarged historical photographs of Vernon pinned to the façade. There is not a word of English anywhere on it. According to Farid, the pleasant man who has run the convenience store for the last 12 years, the temple landed here several months ago, and keeps itself to itself as does the village. The Ottawa suburbs, and the world in general, get closer to Vernon every year. Hopefully, they will be slow in coming.
Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer. Email phil@philjenkins.ca.
查看原文...
Ten kilometres more, stop at the roadside farm store for local honey — save the bees! — and the sign says Welcome to Vernon.
A minute later I’m out the other side and across the Ottawa border. Pull a U, and I park for absolutely free, for as long as I want, outside the library, which looks like an old one-room schoolhouse, because it was. A large tile set in the wall above the porch dates it at 1882 which is like, totally pre-smart phone. Standing at the road side, with a nearby fenced-in barking dog posing as a burglar alarm, there are three churches at one end of the village, a convenience store in the middle, and a museum at the other.
The village of Vernon was in Osgoode Township prior to the Great Amalgamation of 2001, and it was then, and still is, a quiet place, with its rural quota of communal tragedies and dramas, crimes and blessings. The church with the highest spire, visible from a tractor seat anywhere in the surrounding fields, and the tallest building in town which dates from 1887, is Presbyterian. The female vicar’s name is Chan, and there is a discarded beer can in the parking lot. How Canadian is that. The Anglican and Baptist churches are opposite each other a minute’s walk from the Presbyterians. The Baptists are advertising their Harvest Festival, which makes sense out here, where there actually is a harvest.
Judging by the dates on the primary buildings in Vernon, it was on the up and up in the 1880s, and levelled out somewhere along the line, with the older farm houses and retired farming homes on the west side, and some newer semi-suburban homes on the east. The functional community centre, with a billboard outside it welcoming army cadets, is relatively new. While I’m outside a young woman in a teddy bear outfit runs out to her car and back. Halloween teddy bears picnic?
For me the heart of the village is the Osgoode Township Museum (www.osgoodemuseum.ca) which got going in the early 1970s and is run by good, active folks and includes an agricultural museum. A plaque outside informs me that Alexander Rutherford, who was born in Osgoode in 1857, went west as a young man and ended up as the first premier of Alberta. Well, well. I’ve given several talks at the museum, and enjoyed my visits with people who take their neighbours in time seriously, and who have good, how-it-used-to-be stories of their own to pass on.
The only curiosity in town is a Chinese Buddhist temple in a one-storey building, an ex-general store I suspect, with five enlarged historical photographs of Vernon pinned to the façade. There is not a word of English anywhere on it. According to Farid, the pleasant man who has run the convenience store for the last 12 years, the temple landed here several months ago, and keeps itself to itself as does the village. The Ottawa suburbs, and the world in general, get closer to Vernon every year. Hopefully, they will be slow in coming.
Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer. Email phil@philjenkins.ca.
查看原文...
