:: Barrie Ontario: My Home Town ::

Written for CBC Radio`s Vinyl Cafe program & featured in Reader's Digest Our Canada magazine march 2009

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Barrie is my home town. It’s the town I nervously wandered away from early in the eighties right after high school in pursuit of knowledge and abundant riches laying in wait elsewhere in the world and it is the town I returned to once again some eighteen years later.

I never knew at the time exactly what it was that drew me back to Barrie but in the eight years since returning I have been slowly figuring it out. I quickly learned as most do who come back to their home town years later, that the place I left existed for the most part now, only in my memories and if I had matured during my absence, so then had Barrie.

The woods and fields that border Barrie’s outer most edges were at one time the equivalent of the Serengeti, at least through the curious eyes of a 12 year old boy. Wooded ravines and overgrown fields where we spent most of our endless summer days as children catching frogs and snakes, flicking grasshoppers into spider webs, upsetting ant hills, building precariously placed tree swings and forts from materials absconded from building sites and on at least one occasion in the woods I recall making ourselves physically sick smoking stale cigars my still best friend Stan swiped from his dad’s top dresser drawer. We tried washing away the acrid taste with a concoction of gin, rye whiskey, and various liqueurs poured in presumably undetected amounts into a mason jar from bottles in my mothers liquor stash.

That stage where I played out my childhood has been replaced over time with manicured lawns, paved driveways and in ground pools amongst seemingly endless rows of subdivision homes. The pond that was sacred to us where we once caught turtles and tadpoles in is now a large rectangular cement lined water reservoir surrounded by seven foot high chain length fence and tucked into the back corner of a subdivision of over three hundred homes.

The dance the mind does between past and present is never more energized as it becomes when driving through the stomping grounds of your long ago youth. I can’t possibly be the only one who while waiting for the traffic light to change at Big Bay Point Road and Yonge Street, has squinted for a brief moment in the direction of the Zehrs mega grocery store while mentally envisioning the old farm house and barn that once stood abandoned and alone at this corner against a backdrop of fields line with 100 year old maple and oak trees evenly separated by field stones piled three or four feet high over decades.

The wooded areas along the old creek bed itself still exist and on a revisit a quarter century after my last walk through those woods I was taken aback to see that the well worn paths that are still clearly etched into my memory were now undistinguishable and over grown in contradiction with the reality that the youth population of the area had more than tripled along with the number of schools in the area since I left.

The intrigue of nature to young boys exists no more apparently and if you spot a kid with a stick in his hands today it is more likely to be attached to a video game console in a family room than a tree in the woods. I can not imagine technology has or ever will be able to create a virtual electronic conquest that could replicate the instantaneous adrenaline rush a boy feels on hearing an encroaching freight train whistle while standing at the halfway point across a two hundred foot long, forty foot high trestle such as the one that was part of our extended route home when pop and chips were not staple items in the family kitchen but were the reward at the end of a mile long walk to the store that often filled entire Saturday afternoons for me and my friends.

What has remained unchanged in Barrie is the sense of community that is unfelt in bigger cities I have lived in. I can’t exactly put a finger on it except to call it a spirit that underlies the conversations overheard in our stores, coffee shops and bank lines. It is an intangible energy that gives ease to connecting and conversing with the people around you who you may not exactly know by face or by name. It is much like the connection one experiences while away on vacation on learning the person next to you is from your home town or province. It’s the sense that things we share are more profound than things separating us at any moment. It is also the feeling that events and changes covered in the pages of the local news paper have in part happened to you. A sense of belonging and significance again not available somehow to the masses living in large metropolises that extend beyond their own horizons but unique to cities and towns who’s edges fall within walking distances.

Politically Barrie can best be compared to a teenage boy clumsily adjusting to its ever growing feet and constant need for bigger shoes and longer pants. Growth spurts that have taken Barrie from the town of 36000 I left in 1982 to what I hesitate to call a metropolitan city of just over 130000 today. Those who step up to the municipal task of representing Barrie tend not to be motivated out of personal gain, and typically meet with the challenges of a rapidly rising population and expanding borders with diligence and consideration for Barrie’s roots and the image it presents to all who live within and visit her.

Barrie is a town where you are as apt to run into a past or present NHL hockey player as you are your own neighbours while out buying your groceries and when you do the back and forth conversation flows freely as once again, the Barrie spirit cares not which end of the gene pool you may flow from.

In Barrie we curse the first snowfall then quickly forgive it the very next day for we are at the heart of some of the best skiing, both downhill and cross country and our outlying regions are weaved together by countless numbers of snowmobile trails that can take you hundreds of miles in almost any direction. When Kempenfelt Bay finally freezes up to an adult body weight supporting thickness some time after Christmas, Barrie gains a new back yard and playground for a couple months. A vast plain of white, peppered with hikers, skiers, snowmobilers and hundreds, perhaps thousands of ice fishing huts hunkered together in mini villages, no two alike in design or colour. Like little forts for grown men hiding themselves away for endless hours and giving rise to the expression “Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll sit in a plywood box in the middle of a lake and drink beer all day”.

This same bay plays host spring, summer and early fall to drifting sail boats and the pleasure crafts of the cottagers who line Lake Simcoe or who travel to the lake from the Trent Severn waterway. They move about in every direction leaving crisscrossing wakes and a horizon splashed with coloured sails carving their way through the warm summer wind. Around the bay’s edges, our clean swimmable beaches are busy with sun seekers and splashing children, the waterside paths and parks, active with bikers and bladders runners and walkers, stoopers and scoopers. From May through October hardly a weekend passes without a festival alongside of Barrie’s shoreline offering up the wafting smells and smoky tastes of great outdoor cooked summer foods, live jazz, rock, blues and country music , open air theatre, fireworks, crafts and antique markets. The geography surrounding Barrie provides for some of the finest golfing this country has to offer on dozens of challenging courses. On hot summer nights the downtown stretch of Dunlop Street in Barrie takes on a Mardi Gras like feel as nocturnal pleasure seekers attired to attract move between the clubs and bars filling the summer air with cologne, perfume and pheromones until the early morning hours.

This is Barrie in a nutshell. For me there was never a greater time or place to grow up than Barrie in the seventies and eighties as a tail end baby-boomer kid. Yes much of what I have stated here about Barrie past and present may well describe other similarly sized cities and experiences across Canada but only one holds the distinction of being at the centre of my own universe.