My Father Took a Chance on Muskoka
It was the winter of 1966. Our snug little family of three was on the move from Burlington, Ontario, to the 45th parallel of latitude. On our merry way to the small town known as the summer home of Santa Claus, at the internationally famous Santa's Village, on the Muskoka River; situated in a pinery just beyond the urban boundary of Bracebridge, in the beautiful district of Muskoka. My father, Ted Currie Sr. had secured a job with the historic Shier's Lumber Company, in Bracebridge, and it was a good enough opportunity to warrant leaving the city and its opportunities behind. What an amazing adventure.
The summer before,our family had stayed at the company owner's small cottage property, on Bruce Lake and we all admittedly were smitten with the lakeland. I was eleven years old at the time and the thought of swimming in a lake and running through the forest, seemed far more attractive than my present life, pounding the tarmac of the urban jungle and swimming at a public pool. I was ready to go with the flow, you might say. The rest is family history.
When my father and mother Merle arrived in Bracebridge, our first neighborhood was up on Toronto Street, in one of the new spec. houses built by Shier's Lumber, and its proprietor at the time, Bob Jones, who had known my dad for decades in the Southern Ontario lumber trade. It was to become a tumultuous relationship, with many resignations, and in those first ten years my dad held down a number of jobs in and outside the lumber industry to keep us in Muskoka. He knew it was the best place to raise a kid and it was......just as it was a great place for both Merle and Ed who made many friends in their apartment situation up on Alice Street, which was properly known as the Weber Apartments, a sort of 1960's commune of really nice folk who enjoyed each other's company....and games of cribbage and euchre long into the winter nights. The longer we stayed in Muskoka, the harder it was to leave.....not because of circumstances but because we all really enjoyed living in a country town with the privilege of being called a "local." Mind you, that took more than a few years but was worth the wait. It's not to suggest small town living was easy because with opportunities being less, particularly in the case of employment, one had to hunker down sometimes in adverse conditions, at a task not fully enjoyed. I personally held many jobs I didn't like in Muskoka, just to be able to afford my ongoing stay in the region.
My mother died in May of 2007. On the 15th of December 2009 my father had a small stroke at his apartment in Bracebridge, and has been in hospital ever since, with a number of serious medical issues that will most certainly adversely affect his quality of life in the future. We have spent many hours with Ed in the hospital, talking about fond memories and our happy days in Muskoka. I'm not sure if he believes my bestowed gratitude for his determination to make our Muskoka experiment work. I've spent more than 30 years writing in and about Muskoka for the local and provincial press, and I've never been without a source of inspiration. Today I'm writing from a book cluttered office in a modest homestead we call Birch Hollow, surrounded by snow-laden evergreens and leaning old birches, across from a wonderful little wetland we call The Bog. I can look out this small window and find inspiration each season of the year, whether it’s from the shadowy, silver appearance of iced-over rasperry canes in the front garden, or the beautiful sprays of lilac blooms that push toward the sky in late May. In the autumn evenings, the moonlit forest might appear as Thoreau saw his Walden Pond on star-filled nights, and as I drive along the Muskoka River, on a visit to Bracebridge, I can imagine it as author Washington Irving interpreted the historic Hudson River, passing in deep, misty silence past the village of his own Sleepy Hollow. Irving did have a hand in the naming of Bracebridge proper, as it was borrowed by a postal authority, in 1864, from the title of a famous book of sketches, known as "Bracebridge Hall." Long before I researched this, and subsequently wrote a book about the relationship with Irving, my mother had always referred to her new home in the hinterland as "Sleepy Hollow."
No, I could not possibly be without sources of inspiration here in the beautiful lakeland, and I have my father to thank for enduring many hardships to keep our family in paradise.
We are still on that prescipice of the unknown with my father, a worthy adversary of life challenges.......admittedly he is aware of the serious nature of this latest illness but never letting it get in the way of present determination to see his grandsons or hear news about his many friends and former co-workers.
My dad and I were born argumentative and there was enough Irish in him to frequently and with near-glee, initiate a no-holds barred debate.....and enough English stubborness in his son, to always make the log-jams interesting whether about hockey or politics, current events or future predictions. As he never walked away from a fight in his life, I refused to let him plant the last word, and if we had recorded these little spats for posterity, they'd show a father and son who loved a good scrap more as practice-rounds than for settling anything specific. Merle used to say "You two are crazy!"
He was the sailor-dad who didn't run to the school every time his son came home with a black-eye or bloodied nose. "Soldier on, son," he'd say. "Put up your dukes and defend yourself." Good advice in his day and with his demeanor but the more I tried to defend myself, the harder and longer the beating got. But I knew where he was coming from.....this afterall was a guy who grew up in Toronto's legendary Cabbagetown, was abandoned by his Irish father with his three brothers at a young age, joined the Navy under-age, and manned an anti-aircraft gun on his ship, a River Class frigate, the Coaticook. A kid with a big gun trying to down German aircraft. He wasn't raised to be tough but to survive he had no choice but to be tough.
What I didn't know until recently, was that my father had taken a lot of flack about his son the writer, reporter, editor, historian that I didn't know about. When I began writing for the local press, back in the late 1970's, his desire to have three generations of "Edward Curries" kind of backfired. As his father had been named, "Edward," and he was granted the name as well, he saw little disadvantage naming me Edward as a kind of a family hat-trick. I began my writing career as a poet/bard and that caused him chagrin, when his lumber customers began teasing him about moonlighting as a country philosopher. "That's my son....certainly not me!" When I became a reporter for the local press he got many more adverse comments, particularly if I had been working on a crime story that issue, that involved friends, neighbors and kin of his customers. While they knew it wasn't Ted Sr. writing the news copy, they couldn't resist unloading on him about his stupid kid who had tarnished their good family name. He internalized a lot of it of course. I knew it bothered him generally but we really never talked about it. We both needed to make a buck and afterall it was his choice to name me Edward........both of us being called "Ted". To ease his suffering in silence, I changed my byline to Edward Currie from "Ted" for several years but it didn't really work. On the other hand, I had hundreds of phone calls home asking questions about lumber and accessories.......the callers believing I was their main man at Building Trades Centre, where he became the eventual manager in the 1990's.
Since my mother Merle passed away, Ted Sr. has been pretty lonely. He and Merle used to take scenic drives every day, winding up having coffee at a variety of local restaurants, where they celebrated the good qualities of rural, small town life and times. When I think back to the many times, since 1966 that we faced the question of whether to stay or go, leaving Muskoka for job opportunities in Southern Ontario, we always managed to find a way to bridge the problem, and preserve our adored way of life.
When Merle and Ted Currie decided to move to Bracebridge back in '66, they were in fact extending me a creative future beyond their wildest expectation. Because of their belief, living rurally was better for raising a family, my own parallel future in Muskoka led me to marry a local girl, Suzanne Stripp, of Windermere, and raise our own family, Robert and Andrew, now businessmen in the Town of Gravenhurst, in South Muskoka. And when I try to express this to my father now, his eyes still have that old sparkle......meaning to me, at least, he's contented with his choices in life; some that didn't work as planned, others that worked magnificently well. When I think back to the books I've written, sitting at this same desk, with this same wonderful view, and recall all the late night vigils I've happily occupied this office to pen feature stories and columns for so many publications, the feeling is unmistakable contentment, on my part, that I did "soldier on," and fight all adversity that might have forced me to move away.
This morning is calm and slightly overcast. The intense wind of the past few days has ceased and the snowflurries have finally stopped. I think the sun might soon break through the cloud cover, and dazzle down on this snowy mantle across Birch Hollow. I will always think about my dad's own passion for the countryside I watch over now.....and wonder how a Cabbagetown boy got so interested in the hinterland......but I will always acknowledge that it was Ted Sr., who forced this place on an eleven year old child. How thankful I am that he was a visionary but one who never ever, not once, wrote a poem. He did however, on more than one occasion, sing his Navy song about the legend of "The North Atlantic Squadron." I only remember several of the verses but the melody will be hummed forever.

GRAVENHURST AND ELECTION YEAR
Judged with other municipalities in North America, well, Gravenhurst’s governance is adequate in my opinion, and not one molecule beyond. What makes them "just adequate," is the disconnect they show as a group to the real community that they are supposed to represent. What they see and interpret of their home region welfare, isn’t an accurate assessment. Askew by the fact they sit in the golden imagination of self imposed pomposity, on stacked ceiling-high bylaws as if their collective throne, and rely on what is written far more than what is actual, and occurring every day just beyond their short sightedness. The fact many in our community must make use of the Salvation Army Food Bank to survive is, to me, one of the most obvious trigger points for reaction from the municipal leadership. If councillors were really on the ball, they’d be pouncing on this increasing need for assistance, to create a new and enlightened focus on the truthful conditions in our town.....not the convenient truths they like to knit about them for comfort. As they use the word "progress" like it means "for one and all," they see economic development as the holy grail. The more development means prosperity all round. Alas, they delude themselves by choice, and mutual admiration from the rest of their ilk.
With this election year for municipalities, in Ontario, we will once again see, hear and read some pretty impressive projections for our community, and grandiose promises to secure votes from a fed-up electorate.......a majority of citizenry who believe it doesn’t matter anyway because they all act the same once in office. They’re not wrong to think this, and if you measure our own town council with the most recent liberties being taken by the provincial and federal governments, bending the rules to accommodate their agendas, what on earth would make us then believe a newly elected municipal council is going to worry about protocol and fairness.....and govern as they themselves would like to be governed responsibly. Once sworn in, the distance increases and the pomposity of elected office swells to fill every open space in the town hall.
This doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to challenge their authority and I certainly plan to watch carefully as new candidates begin the dream-building exercise, of trying to convince us that they’re more deserving of our vote. There are more than a few present councillors I would not like to see re-elected or achieve mayoral status. While the present council might believe they have done a superior job running this municipality over the past three years, they have at best participated in the process......but I don’t see a better or more progressive town. It will take more than a new town hall and new strip mall developments to impress this civic watcher. My idea of prosperity is to no longer need a food bank. My idea of a worthy member of council, is an elected member who openly and actively speaks out in support of helping the less fortunate in our community, and assisting those tireless groups of volunteers who work non-stop to fundraise in order to help all those in need. It’s one thing to show up to all-candidate meetings with the usual tomes about how you’ve helped the community in the past,...... and how well you handled yourself as an elected official this term...... but quite another to recognize that polished sentences and vein-bulging hubris won’t provide the groceries to the food bank, or hot meals to those who can’t adequately provide for themselves. So what candidates see as an opportunity to win a popularity contest, shortchanges us all.....because this is not what we need. There are a million glad-handers out there smiling for the camera but no so many bringing groceries into the food bank.
There are people I know who will be running for local council, who possess good intention to represent their constituents. And even those who try hard can fail because their initiatives are voted down by the majority. Yet my criticism is this. As I have never once spared a criticism or an ovation when earned, throughout my lengthy writing career, the most unholy of situations I can find myself, is being afraid of speaking or writing my opinion because of anticipated fall-out. I’ve long been the bane of publishers because of my insatiable appetite for muck-raking. Instead of capitulating because they threaten my job, I take the time to sell them on the virtues of honesty despite the cost. For my outspoken assaults, it’s true I’ve been blacklisted about a thousand times....to the point where I’ve come to expect being shunned as a matter of daily functioning. It’s hard to find a publication willing to ruffle feathers especially if they belong to advertisers. I don’t go to bed at night however, feeling bad about this consequence of honesty but I surely wouldn’t sleep a wink if I bottled up my opposition. Thus, if I was elected a councillor, I’d surely be as forthright and unwilling to be muzzled. And seeing as I’m not running for council, I would love to find a council hopeful who shares the same disdain for "going with the flow," and who would far sooner leave work a little bloodied from the full rounds of an electric democracy, than retire frustrated and unresolved. Call me if you can handle blunt truth and want a better future in Gravenhurst.
My advice to constituents leading up to this November’s election, is to truly investigate the shortcomings of the present council, and what you wish could be corrected by a new council. Stay the course and attend all-candidates meetings. Not to kick ass.....well maybe just a bit....but rather to point out that the prosperity of a town isn’t always about money, expansive developments on every square inch of earth, or a show-piece town hall....... but rather on the show of good-will throughout. The kindness of a home town. The coming-together of citizens to help one another in feast or famine, natural disaster or catastrophe of fire. A town councillor must be a citizen first, and appreciate fully what ground zero feels like. Give me an enlightened elected official......even one, who senses and appreciates what the majority of us do everyday of our lives in order to survive........and I’ll show you potential and genuine progress. What a thrill it would be to find someone interested in elected office who shares the opinion that there is indeed a precarious balance between a hometown and just "a place to live and work." A balance that needs to be nurtured and maintained. The self-supporting diatribes of councillors, to reflect on themselves as caring and involved in their community, doesn’t hold up to a general audience that knows all about avoidance and the art of deferring responsibility by council.....because they’ve been paying attention to four years of hide and seek.
Take it from an historian. This is a critical election to the future well-being of your home region. Don’t sit on the sidelines because you believe your comments and your vote won’t count. Another four years of weak leadership will ruin the hometown we have come to know and love.
My idea of a perfect council representative is one who speaks up for the less fortunate, and one who doesn’t hide behind "council’s wishes," as reason to fob-off about "democracy has spoken." That’s an okay headline as long as the secondary heading reads, "Councillor vehemently argues for constituent rights."
I’ve been a news hound in Muskoka, as well as an active historian since the late 1970's. I read every council story and as a former long-serving editor, who prided himself on exposing under-handedness within the municipalities of our district, I can tell you honestly this is not the time to get involved in local politics as a hobby. Coming next year is one of the toughest council terms in modern history because of excesses of the past. So many pressing issues that should have been addressed, have been side-stepped by council, preferring instead to concentrate on their misguided concept of what true progress and a good and prosperous hometown is all about. It is exactly why our downtown in Gravenhurst straddles the precarious canyon between success and failure, as a direct result of urban sprawl, at a time when councillors are preoccupied with anything and everything else.
I would love the opportunity to sit down with council hopefuls and help them find their way to the truly important issues of hometown life and times, so that this blindness to reality might be reduced. You’ve got my email. Love to hear from you.