STANDARD TRANSMISSIONS
Homeward bound
By Rik Davie/The Scugog Standard

Canada Day was a blast and a special thanks has to go out to all the guys and gals who showed up with their Corvettes for the first annual ‘Vettes for Vets’ Canada Day Cruise. More than 30 cars participated and the event was made a success by these folks who gave our local vets a lift down Queen St., two abreast in their street cruisers.

Me? I didn’t have a Vette so I had to put up with slinking down the boulevard behind the wheel of a 1950 Caddy convertible with our own Bev Oda in the back and Linda by my side waving at the huge crowd. The parade gets better every year. A special thanks to Devon Powell and the crew at his race shop. Devon and his customers put several hi-po Vettes into the parade and promise to return next year.

For 37 years I didn’t have a home town.

While I was born in Toronto and lived in the easy end and the north end for much of my childhood, I never really felt an affinity to the city.

I lived in a small town north of Toronto for a time and did stints in Windsor and London.

As a kid, I loved the old Andy Griffith Show and its snapshot of rural small town life. When I met my bride and moved to this area, I immediately felt at home and spent 20-odd years getting to know the history and foibles of my adopted community. But I still wanted a place to be from, to go back to.

So when I found that my family actually came from a place called St. George, New Brunswick, I was anxious beyond words to travel to this tiny little town on the shores of the Bay of Fundy just a stone’s throw from the State of Maine and across the bay from Nova Scotia.

It was settled by an ancestor of mine named Capt. Peter Clinch who, according to the history books, was forced to find new accommodations after choosing sides badly in the American Revolution.

It is so small, as the saying goes, that it says welcome to St. George on both sides of the sign, and it is everything one wants in a small town to be from.

I am a member of a family so rooted in the area that it is hard to swing a cat without striking a relative or the spouse of one.

My mother lives on the shores of a river that passes through a set of Salmon steps before it empties into Fundy just a few miles from her back porch - where, by the way, one can sit and watch eagles fish in the river by dropping from the sky like some missile of fishly doom.

My aunt lives just down the road in the 100-year-old-plus house where my mother and her siblings were raised.

It was kind of like waking up one morning and finding out you were the missing Walton. I had a home town. One where I could see my ancestors buried in the local cemetery going back through parts of four centuries.

Now I don’t get there much but, as you read this, Linda and I are travelling down the highway that runs north and south the breadth of New Brunswick headed, as John Denver said, home to a place I’ve never been before.

Besides the chance to see my mother whom I simply don’t see often enough, it is a chance to travel around a tiny area that I have a strange affinity and closeness for, even though I have not spent a cumulative month there in all of my years.

I’m looking forward to it. Everybody should have the chance to be from some place.

See ya next week ... maybe!