When an event sears your soul and strips away a layer of your innocence, you never forget. Early on I remember standing in line for polio vaccinations but somehow we knew the scientists would save us. During those early elementary years, we gathered in hallways or hid under desks in drills for the atomic age, but we had real leaders that cared about the country in those days and they kept the atomic threat under control. Then the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King took away the last vestiges of my childhood. I had already been pulled from my home and shipped off to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which seemed to be on the far side of the world though it was just on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains.
To see our president gunned down fundamentally changed my view of the world. I will never forget taking a taxi to the Chattanooga airport to see LBJ speak from the steps of an airplane. Over the years my innocence got peeled away like onion layers by war and other crises but then I fell in love with Canada's Maritimes.
I fell hard because it was so much like my childhood in rural North Carolina. Life in the fifties was built on trust. We came home from school, played football, baseball or even put shotguns on our shoulders and went hunting. We camped with our scout troop or fished on the weekends. My mother, my only parent during those years, was involved in my life but no one was always watching us. For the most part, we were on our own. We ranged far and wide and no one seemed to care as long as we showed up for dinner and didn't break any bones. Even if we got sick, doctors still made house calls in those days.
Military school was very different. Everything had boundaries imposed by someone else. College was the exact opposite. The only boundaries were the ones that I gave myself. Eight years' absence from a rural life made me grow weary of cities, their strange night light, and the never-ending crowds. So when I met Nova Scotia, it was close to love at first sight just like with my wife.
I still remember my first night in a tent by myself on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. I grilled steak over driftwood and listened to the waves crash on the rocky shore not far from my tent. It was magical and it was as close to paradise as you could get unless you drove through the actual town of Paradise which was halfway between Bridgetown and Lawrencetown where we often shopped at the Beaver Fruit Cooperative. You could get a bag of grain for the cattle along with your groceries.
On those drives, through the Annapolis Valley, we would stop at produce stands operating on the honor system with just boxes for your money. Life on the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley was not perfect but it brought you close to the land and the sea. You had to let other people in your life or you would not survive.
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick where we farmed for ten years, and Halifax where we lived for a few years after farming became anchors of my psyche. While I might have idealized the places in my memories, my stories about the closeness of the Tay Creek community where we had our farm were all true. People were always willing to lend a hand even to the point of digging a neighbor's grave. The keys remained in the switch of our unlocked farm pickup for seven or eight years. Halifax was as friendly a city as I could ever imagine. There was no gun violence.
I never felt unsafe anywhere in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick even walking a half a mile to the barn through the woods in the middle of the night.
Fast forward to the spring of 2020. In the last few months, even grocery stores have become unsafe. We wash our hands all the time. We have stopped having our neighbor over for our weekly dinners with him. We stand farther from friends when we meet them while walking. It is a strange existence staying at home and rarely venturing beyond the neighborhood. It might well be our future for a long time.
While I knew that the Maritimes were also under many of the same restrictions because of the coronavirus, in my mind like a childhood friend who remains frozen at ten years old because you have not seen them for sixty years, the Maritimes was still the same safe place. Now with the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, I am forced to admit that even the tiny villages of Nova Scotia are no longer safe from the peculiar modern disease of mass shootings. I knew that even before this the government was allowing asbestos waste to be stored on the North Mountain behind our old home but there was always the hope that they might come to their senses and stop.
With the Nova Scotia mass shooting and COVID19 crisis, I am forced to admit that as an adult there is really nowhere to run. There are no safe places left for those of us with modest means. We have to stand and join the fight against this disease and the mass shootings with the only tools left, science, political will, patience, and intelligence. There are people out there who care only for their strange ideologies that scorn truth while valuing power and wealth over human life. We cannot let them win or we are all finished. This might be the last great opportunity to take our government and lives back so there can still be safe places in the world for the rest of us that haven't been given over to viruses and the powerful.
I am just sorry that the children of today might never have the chance to build a fort in the woods, go to school without worrying about being shot, or wander after school without a care in the world.
Comments