A reporter’s journey in Canada Town
The local story tells all
And later that night, hitting the last stroke on my keyboard, handing off the story to my editor Cheryl and trying to hold back tears.
BIRTHDAYS
CAN INSPIRE celebration and melancholy, marking the beginning but also the journey, and reflection on an unknowable future.
At least that’s how it feels when your 50th looms, if you have a tendency to study upon such things.
I always had a love-hate relationship with my birthday, or more specifically my birth date, at the end of August.
As a kid I thought I was cheated out of the joy of anticipating it, because doing so meant wishing away summer in favour of school starting. (Which is surely way too much contemplation for a 10 year old.)
It’s a challenge wrapping your head around the meaning of a milestone birthday; of fate, blessings, and roads taken and not taken. And that’s just for one person. But for a nation, the second largest on the planet?
I could pretend I’m well-positioned to expound upon Canada’s 150th birthday, as a centennial baby born during Expo 67 in Montreal, and in that very city.
But capturing all that is Canada is daunting. Roll the visuals: forests and mountains and frozen tundra and sparkling lakes; maple leaf facepainted kids, the Peace Tower (forever cool) and CN Tower (not anymore).
Maybe it’s better to localize, reel in those panoramic visions, because in the end no one can feel a whole country.
SO SHRINK IT DOWN to — what? Your neighbourhood? Your family? Yourself ?
Widen the circle a bit more to your city: Hamilton. Which, as it happens, is perfect for the occasion of Canada’s 150th, because Hamilton is arguably the country’s most distinctly Canadian city.
That is, if an alien landed and said, “show me Canada,” you could do worse than bring the creature here.
Or, to borrow from Esquire magazine, whose masthead boasts “Man At His Best,” Hamilton is Canada at its Best.
It’s a thesis I unwittingly began working on when I landed at The Hamilton Spectator 20 years ago this spring, my haircut high and tight, clean-shaven and wearing a tie each day.
There was not one single all-Canadian moment that brought that realization into focus. A couple jump to mind though; one heavy, one light.
HEAVY: A gentle breeze touching faces gathered along Main Street one October evening, as Nathan Cirillo returns home, the sidewalks packed with people wrapped in red and white, yearning to get closer to the slain soldier; scribbling in my notebook, feeling the city’s collective heart swelling, and later that night, hitting the last stroke on my keyboard, handing off the story to my editor Cheryl and trying to hold back tears. Hamilton.
LIGHT: Showing up on short notice at FirstOntario Centre with Spec photographer Barry Gray — what other major arena in the country could you do this at? — where a trainer hands me a Bulldogs jersey to wear, and a stick, and I skate alone on freshly polished ice so I can narrate a video recalling the Gretzky-to-Lemieux Canada Cup ’87 game-winning goal, arguably Canada’s greatest hockey moment, an event that essentially christened state-of-the-art Copps Coliseum, in a city denied an NHL team in seeming perpetuity.
I met Lydia five years ago. She lived with her cat Buster in an old house downtown crowded with art and plants.
Hamilton as a microcosm of Canada crystallized in many smaller glimpses, the education of a reporter who thought he knew something about the city, but did not.
Soon after I was hired at The Spectator I was assigned to write a ward profile for a city election. I drove to the northern edge of the ward’s boundary, which I discovered to my delight was a beach, one that had, pre-Waterfront Trail, a raw and undiscovered vibe to it. I walked in the sand to the edge of Lake Ontario, because I could.
I grew up in flat and landlocked London, Ont. And so my lead in that ward profile story read: “A valley, mountain, beach and lake define Ward 5,” as though this was news. Clearly I was awestruck by the geography: my first love for Hamilton was purely physical.
Geologic forces over thousands of years created the setting; glaciers advancing and retreating, forging the lake and the harbour protected by a sandbar six kilometres long that turned Hamilton into an industrial powerhouse.
I became a southern Ontario boy because of my dad’s fears of Quebec’s separatists. When I was six he uprooted us from Montreal. When my parents heard rumours of London’s bland landscape — they had never visited Ontario prior to moving day — they sold our little 16-foot sailboat and also the downhill ski equipment in favour of cross-country gear.
MY FIRST NEWSPAPER job was at the Mitchell Advocate 45 minutes north of London, then 15 minutes west of there at the Huron Expositor in Seaforth, then north to Port Elgin at Shoreline News, back south to the Guelph Tribune, and finally The Spec.
I was 29 when I started here, recently married, no kids, and now I’ve got two decades under my belt exploring Hamilton, digging into its past, paddling and hiking the terrain, writing about this most Canadian of cities.
Why most Canadian? Certainly Toronto can’t make that claim, because what Torontonians yearn to be is New York. And in any case Hogtown is too big and self-important to be considered distinctly Canadian.
HAMILTON: A large Canadian city with a small feel that sits near the U.S. border like 75 per cent of the country’s population and is representative of Canada’s physical geography, with its escarpment, valleys and Great Lake.
Like Canada, Hamilton’s economic DNA evolves; “Steeltown” endures — long may the title live — but more as a metaphor for the city’s grit. Today it is world-class medicine, the arts.
And agriculture: we remain the country’s broccoli and cauliflower capital. Hard to believe, but nearly 80 per cent of greater Hamilton is rural, with about 8,000 hectares of potential prime farmland.
Its people come from across the globe, a place of ivory tower academics and bohemian artists and blue collar workers. It is a carnival of characters; heroes of uncommon valour and the worst of villains. It is the wealthy and desperately poor; the quirky and brilliant, generous and strong.
I write these words from home. On the wall behind me hangs a wartime poster of Winston Churchill, and also a painting of Churchill’s home, called Chartwell. The artist is a woman named Lydia Knox-Hill.
I met Lydia five years ago. She lived with her cat Buster in an old house downtown crowded with art and plants. As a teenager her family fled Lithuania near the end of the Second World War and she witnessed terrible things that haunted her dreams. Maybe that was why she often painted beauty; flowers and lighthouses, horses and fields and windblown trees.
After a profile I wrote about her appeared in the Spec, I visited again. She made tea. I noticed she only briefly dipped the bag.
“I like my tea so mild you wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “I just colour it. It was the war.”
(Every time I wait a few beats for tea to steep in my mug, I think of Lydia.)
I am six-foot-two, and at the front door when I said goodbye she wrapped her arms around me, barely coming up to my chest, and hugged hard. Hamilton.
FINALLY, LIKE CANADA, this city is all about place, all about being here.
Take in select parts and you miss it entirely. That includes those who merely catch a glimpse while hurtling across the Skyway, unable to transcend that fire-breathing industrial postcard, to linger in the light and music of a café or gallery, float down a placid creek, walk corridors of the past along the Bruce Trail or feel mist from a teeming waterfall.
Those just passing through will never appreciate the layers to this textured, resilient and bighearted city, the most Canadian there is, as a Spectator reporter observed in an article more than a decade ago. (You could look it up. I’m the one who wrote it.) Canada Town? Has a nice ring to it. Probably won’t catch on, but that’s fine. Hamilton doesn’t seek the title.
Happy Birthday, Canada. And on behalf of Canada Town: You’re welcome.
The city’s people come from across the globe, a place of ivory tower academics and bohemian artists and blue collar workers. It is a carnival of characters.