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.