Many years ago, when I was a young child who thought it great adventure just to walk to the end of our street and keep going, something terrible happened in my neighbourhood; and it has left a lasting impression that is so clear in my mind, I can still remember it to this very day. Perhaps I can tell you about it now, if you'll spare me a few minutes.
There was a small stream, a branch of the Black Creek, that ran behind the public school at the foot of our street. It wasn't much of a stream, you could jump right across it in the summertime, and it froze up early every winter. But I remember cold winter afternoons when I learned to skate on the tight curves of that little stream, and lazy summer days when a gang of us would build rafts of junk lumber and poke around in small ponds, proud as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on the Mighty Mississippi.
The grown-ups always warned us to be careful when we went down there, and after a while I learned not to tell them where I was going. It was the kind of place rough kids hung out in -- I'm sure every neighbourhood has one -- but it was also a place of nature in the city, where trees and grass and weeds grew in wild profusion, and kids could do the same.
I suppose the scale of all this has been magnified some by memory. It was over thirty years ago, and I was a lot smaller then too. If you showed me the same place today, I doubt I'd be very much impressed.
But, you can't show me that place any more. You see, some grownups decided our wild stream wasn't important any more. They decided it would be better to tame the wildness of our stream, and safer to build it a nice smooth concrete riverbed; and while they were at it, they decided to throw up a highway where our stream had once flowed, as if it were some crackerjack consolation prize for what we had lost.
I was very young. The excitement of the construction of a brand new road, the noise and the dust of the giant earthmovers soon distracted me. My Dad was happy his morning commute to work was shorter, and the new highway was a fast route to our family cottage up in the north country. I suppose most grownups were pleased about the jobs the new highway created, and the shiny new industries that sprang up along the way.
It was only years later, coming back from the cottage, sleepy-eyed and backseat-tired, that I realized just what we had lost and what we had traded away. Like something out of a dream, I looked up, and saw a huge sign passing over my head -- a sign I'd never seen before, a sign I'd never expected to see. A sign that at the time, I never thought I'd see again. And instantly, I realized what a terrible bargain we had made, in trading away our flowing stream, for this.
With that thought in mind, and with the thought of what we might be trading away now, I was inspired to make my own picture of that sign. I know to some, especially those caught up in the noise and the dust of the current construction, this will seem foolish, even backward. My drawing skills are poor, and I realize this is perhaps my own most personal of childhood memories, which may not touch the hearts or minds of many others. But, I have to try.
Here's my roadsign.