I had very ambitious plans about writing a travel piece about returning to Erindale after 35 years, but I couldn't really get a handle on what it all meant. The piece with the photos has some "Hey, ho, way to go, Ohio" notes to it, but I don't think that really gets to the heart of it. I think I would have to write a history of Mississauga that was also a manifesto on sustainabilty. And I have to work out my attitude toward change. So instead, here's the adventure of how I got there and what I did.
Heather doesn't like the way I travel. It makes her mental in fact. She has to have everything mapped out and timetabled. I'm more "I think it's in that direction." So it's just as well that she was at a conference the day I went to Mississauga.
I did look at a map long enough to notice the GO Train line from Union Station to Erindale, but it turns out the trains only run from Mississauga to Toronto in the morning, and back again in the evening. There's a bright shiny bus terminal next to Union Station, but the ticket booth doesn't open till around noon. This is typical. One of the biggest problems for a tourist is to find something to do between eight and whenever the thing you want to do opens. So I hiked up to the University and hung around some bookstores. I bought a copy of The Indelible Alison Bechdel, and you should picture me carrying it, an umbrella and a camera around for the rest of this story.
I got back to the bus station and received some helpful advice and a day pass for ten bucks. The GO busses are actually coaches, which is nice, and a step up from what you'd get from OC Transpo in Ottawa. (OC Transpo: Buy some coaches for the Kanata run.) We pulled out and headed west on the Gardiner.
Torontonians will tell you their city has seen some hard times in recent years. There was that garbage on the streets, for instance, in the last years of Mel Lastman. But the place has never stopped growing, thanks in part to all the billions of dollars in banking service fees that course into town. It really does help to have the headquarters to everything in your city. It shows in the dozens of condo towers leaping up along the lakeshore, and the houses the size of Victorian institutions filling up the last of the farms.
Mississauga is, in Ottawa terms, an uberNepean. It elects enough Members of Parliament to be a Maritime province. Once a vast forest, then a bundle of farming townships, it's now a jigsaw puzzle of suburban neighbourhoods. Good thing the driver knew where he was going. I didn't recognize very much apart from that escarpment that rises behind Cooksville.
Just when I was feeling completely lost we stopped at the Erindale GO station, a parking lot with a small office attached (which is closed till the trains run.) I knew from the map that I was practically on top of Erindale Woodlands, but there wasn't a feature I recognized from childhood. The whole area north of Burnhamthorpe Road had been farmland in my day, with split-rail fences and the occasional nineteenth-century brick farmhouse or elm tree. The road, which had been a rural two-laner with a level crossing, was now a four-lane artery with a railway bridge over it. I crossed a pedestrian bridge and found myself in the parking lot of a ten-storey office tower. I crossed that and came to a road running beside what might be the last strip of farmland around there. It came as a surprise, as the MapArt map had it coloured industrial grey. (Though, in fact, the soil, which had recently been turned, was the same grey as the map.) Beyond the field were the tracks, and beyond them, a mound.
The mound was the first feature I recognized. As a child I had explored my neighbourhood as far as this mound. I had wondered if it had been made by the Iroquois or Huron, or by the railway men, or by a bulldozer. I guess I should find out. This was my first sight of it from the other side. My inner ten-year-old kicked in and I jumped the ditch, squelched across the field, jaywalked three railway lines, and climbed the fence to the field with the mound, skinning the back of my knee.
I now knew where I was going and it didn't take long to find the top of Queenston Drive. I was now in the second-to-middle ring of my childhood universe. These two-storey houses had been the exotic homeland of the kids who lived on the other side of the school.
For some reason I had expected the school to be run down, but it looked very well kept. The big change was the removal of the front lawn for a bus lane, and a kiss-and-ride. In the '60s nearly all the kids walked to school, except for those bussed in from the surrounding farms. Now their parents drop them off. I wonder if the number of kids hit by other kids' parents at the drop-off is less than the number formerly run over while walking to school. (It was about one a year.)
I wanted to take pictures, so I went in to the school office to let them know what I was up to, aware that I am now a Strange Man to them. I told the woman in the office I was in the school's first kindergarten class. "You were a teacher?" "I was a student!" Huh. "Yeah, alright, go ahead."
South of the school is the core territory. About eight semi-detached brick houses make up the area I was allowed to roam as a preschooler. They have all changed hands probably two or three times since my day, and during some coming real estate boom they'll likely all get torn down and replaced by houses with garages where the living room should be, but for now they look pretty much as they did.
Except for my house. Yikes. I took a couple of pictures and got the hell out before anyone came out with a shotgun.
I went along to the little strip mall. I used to haul jugs of milk from there when I was small enough for it to be a two-handed job. Then back up the Credit Woodlands to Burnhamthorpe (the way I should have come in), onto the same GO coach making its return journey, and back to the city.
As I said, I don't know what it means. Things shouldn't change. That whole place should still be forest. They shouldn't have paved over the farms. There should still be grass in front of the school.
Things should change. The neighbourhood should be more like a town, with things to do that don't require driving. They should tear down my old house.
Douglas
