Читать книгу Bent Hope - Tim J Huff - Страница 9

5. Like Bigfoot, Like Elvis: July 2002

The Lake Huron region is like no other in Canada. While the world-renowned Muskokas, directly north of Toronto, have begun to unfold with small towns turning into franchised small tourist cities, the northwest regions reaching to and along beautiful Lake Huron have remained mostly unchanged.

The drive from Toronto to my father’s birthplace is peppered with slow stops in sleepy towns. Single-streetlight towns that boast corner stores with worn wooden floors and metal-dome Coke signs over the doorways, quaint knick-knack and craft shops with ornate verandas, and gas stations (still called service centres) where, more often than not, a friendly ol’ someone in a mesh John Deere hat will saunter out to wash your windows. Between these towns, single lane highways with dusty shoulders weave around endless acres of farmers’ fields, slow-moving cattle and rusty, tin-topped barns.

As an adult, born and raised in the frantic city, even after a childhood of making this drive on every holiday weekend and school break, it still feels like plopping onto the wide rolling set of an old black-and-white television show. A world far from my own that includes time to think and breathe, much politically incorrect humour, and a Sunday afternoon routine structured around meandering to the fishing hole and back for pie on the front porch.