Road side story
From the Wawa goose to a giant Easter egg, how one man’s passion put Canada’s outsize curiosities on the map
Unlike the roadside attractions he catalogued, Ed Solonyka was not attention-seeking. He worked for the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines, was slightly taller than the national average, and had a moustache from the time he could grow one.
During a family vacation in the early 1990s, the Sudbury geologist became fascinated with the monuments that interrupted the Canadian landscape. The internet was young and Ed, then in his 40s, made a website chronicling roadside attractions, like the big nickel in his hometown. People sent along their photos, and it became a never-ending census that captured monuments like the Wawa goose, and more obscure finds like the “World’s Largest Endangered Ferruginous Hawk,” in Leader, Sask.
In January 2015, I emailed Solonyka, believing his site could be a way into a series about small towns: “That sounds like a dream project,” he replied promptly. “Unfortunately I have a cold presently, however perhaps sometime later this week or next week I’ll be in touch to arrange a time.”
The series didn’t happen, and this summer, I noticed Solonyka’s website had changed. It looked modern, and there was a note:
“For more than 17 years, Ed regularly maintained and updated the site, which is now the authoritative list of large roadside attractions in Canada . . . For some of us, the challenge was to find a roadside attraction not yet listed on the site — take the photo and send it to Ed to be added to the list. And it was fascinating to keep track of the expanding list of roadside attractions — even, and perhaps especially, those that we weren’t likely to see in real life. “On December 19, 2015, Ed passed away. “This website will go on, in memory of Ed.”
When people travelled by rail and stage coach in the 1890s, “roadside attractions” were lakes, villages, even a patch of finely cut grass. One of the earliest references in the automobile age was a pile of stones in an Illinois field noted in Bloomington’s
Pantagraph newspaper in 1924.
“He was following his dream, and allowing many of us to live it with him.” LORRAINE HIRNING AN EARLY FAN OF THE WEBSITE
By the time Ed Solonyka was born in Winnipeg in 1946, the car was king, and communities throughout North America were building more showy displays of local pride, using concrete, wood and steel.
David Stymeist, a retired anthropology professor from the University of Manitoba, spent many summers in the ’90s living in his van as he drove across Canada to research the folk art phenomenon, speaking to people about their town’s giant coffee cup or Plexiglas mosquito. He often turned to Solonyka’s site. “I found things I didn’t know about or wouldn’t have ever found,” he says.
He found monuments weren’t as abundant in southern Ontario, but they appeared more frequently on the edge of the Canadian Shield, and into northern Ontario. The “true heartland” was the prairies. Some were made by professional artists, others by locals, and they were a part of the Canadian consciousness in a way that hadn’t happened in the U.S. They were affirmations — a sign of settlement, history, economy and achievement, but sometimes they were contested symbols, and occasionally people got mad about all the money being spent.
Take the pysanka in Vegreville, Alta., for instance. Its construction in the 1970s was delayed and people began to criticize the cost. “There were rumours that some local youth were planning to blow up the partially constructed statue with dynamite, and the project’s designer began to spend nights at the site to ward off an attack,” Stymeist wrote in the
Journal of Canadian Studies in 2012. Ed Solonyka, who grew up in a Ukrainian family, had a soft spot for that big Ukrainian Easter egg, decorated with equilateral triangles and stars. (“The first computer modelling of an egg,” the town website notes, calling it one of the “premier tourist attractions on the Yellowhead Highway.”)
Solonyka studied at the University of Manitoba before moving to Toronto to work in geology and mining. That’s where he met Phil Hum, who would steer him toward the world of web design when the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines relocated to Sudbury, Ont., in the 1990s.
Because he owned a computer and knew how to use it, Hum became the ministry’s webmaster in those innocent days of chat rooms and page counters. With a limited budget, Hum asked each department for a “champion” who wouldn’t mind learning HTML. Solonyka was a joiner, and of course, he was in.
Together, the friends experimented on the ministry’s internal development site, copying and pasting bits of code they admired. They found a graphic of Indiana Jones in a mine car that was tantalizingly on brand, but “we can’t put cartoons on a government of Ontario site,” Hum recalls from his Sudbury home, laughing.
They enjoyed a good laugh, but they were analytical types who thought things through. “When we were in the office, even on casual days, we still wore office casual attire,” he says.
Hum passed the exciting graphics to Solonyka, who had created two websites at home. The first honoured his uncle, Ukrainian-Canadian poet Volodimir Barabash, and the second was dedicated to roadside attractions. It had two spinning maple leaves and a Canadian flag blowing in the breeze of the information superhighway. In the beginning, there were two dozen photos from his family vacations.
In the pictures, Tanya Solonyka, now 35, can watch herself grow up beside objects she will never reach in height. The earliest photo is pixilated, but she must be 11, standing under a moose, wearing a striped T-shirt and pink shorts. She re- members how her dad stopped the minivan where the Trans-Canada jogs north outside of Dryden, Ont., on a family trip to Winnipeg.
Stymeist visited the same moose during one of his research trips. They are a popular animal in the roadside attraction game, with about 30 statues across Canada.
“Some kid chiselled off his genitals, which was remarked to me as being a terrible thing to have happened,” Stymeist says. “They were kind of outraged by this.”
(A town official told the anthropologist that while Moose Jaw, Sask., may have a bigger moose, Dryden’s was more realistic. “It’s true,” says Stymeist, which is big of him, as a Moose Jaw resident.)
Tanya Solonyka remembers how her dad would sit at the oak desk in their living room for hours. When the computer whirred to life, he marvelled at the questions and photos in his inbox. He categorized the attractions by location, alphabet and type, and had a special group for “planes on pedestals.”
“Anytime he’d be driving somewhere for work, he’d always have to detour to go find those planes,” his daughter says.
He kept the site immaculate, like the backyard garden he nurtured with his wife. The couple were private people, and the website became this “weird social activity for him,” Tanya says. He liked the connections.
Dale Redekopp, a retired Air Force pilot from Alberta, was a frequent correspondent. He liked documenting ghost towns and grain elevators, and during his drives on the prairie back roads he often came across oddities like the giant fibreglass man, “out standing in his field” near Moose Jaw.
“We call him Bob,” says Gord Gadd, who owns Mid Prairie Body Centre. “In the ’90s, there was a Doritos commercial, and it was, ‘Where’s Bob?’ So we named him Bob.”
Gadd found the giant in an auto wreck- ing yard, smashed and broken, a relic of a fibreglass moulding process that created muscular men as advertising gimmicks. Gadd sculpted him back into shape and set him up in the field in the 1990s. In Saskatchewan, where people often navigate by landmark, Bob is helpful to locals.
When Redekopp saw Bob, he pulled over, walked into the field, and stood beside the man’s legs for scale. Then he sent the photo to Ed.
Lorraine Hirning, who lives in British Columbia, bought her first digital camera in the early days of the site so she could do the same thing.
“It’s awesome to just go wander,” she says. “A lot of people wander to museums, to art galleries. I tend to wander to the smaller towns.”
Like early cartographers, Solonyka’s internet friends fanned out across the country to create their new map. Hirning planned her vacations around the task and emailed the last of her photos each fall with a cheery “see you next year.”
It was like a family without the baggage, “because nobody threw much baggage out there,” Hirning says.
Like Redekopp, Hirning only communicated with Ed by email. She invited him and his wife to Melita, Man., for the unveiling of the town’s big banana in 2010, but Ed wrote back to say they wouldn’t make it. (It was another divisive landmark: “I guess some people think maybe money could be spent on health care or roads and streets instead of building bananas,” Mayor Bob Walker told the Winnipeg Free Press, “I think anything that attracts people to the town of Melita is good for the town of Melita.”)
When Solonyka was diagnosed with leukemia the following year, he didn’t tell many people. He didn’t want people to treat him differently. The doctors said it wasn’t an aggressive form and he didn’t need treatment until 2015. Chemotherapy went well and Hum would often pick him
up for the weekly lunch with his coworkers.
Solonyka enjoyed work, but looked forward to more free time in retirement. He wanted to modernize the site, and drive an RV across Canada to every attraction. His wife laughed; not for her. Tanya said sure. She’d go and see “all those crazy things.”
Her favourite was the “Happy Rock” in Gladstone, Man. Back when she was a kid, they would pass it on the way to visit her cousins: a smiling fibreglass rock wearing a top hat, giving the thumbs-up on a neatly manicured lawn.
In November 2015, her father rang the remission bell. He was back at work, and happy to have a powerful new computer at home. He emailed Redekopp to ask about the exact location of a dragon and a Minion statue, and added a few new photos.
In mid-December, he didn’t feel well. His children rushed home as his cancer became very aggressive very quickly. Everybody was shocked by the change, including Ed. He died less than a week before Christmas.
Amid the grief, Canada’s supply of roadside attractions was unceasing. Nobody knew Solonyka was unwell. Some learned he had died when his wife emailed them for the first time.
Redekopp, who learned about Ed’s death from Hirning, had never heard Ed’s voice. The webmaster was a mystery. “I had no idea what he had done before,” he says. “I assumed he was retired. I’m not even sure where he lived.”
He had a sense from years of respectful, prompt emails: Ed was a real nice guy.
“He was following his dream, and allowing many of us to live it with him,” Hirning says.
Redekopp sends photos of grain elevators to a man in Nova Scotia for a different website, and they banter back and forth about grandchildren. But Ed didn’t veer off track from his solution-oriented correspondence. Redekopp once spotted a homemade plane in his travels in Alberta. A man had built it, he died, and his widow didn’t know what to do, so a friend raised it high on a pedestal. He emailed the details to Ed.
Ed had a separate category for “planes on pedestals,” but they had to be planes with real flight hours.
“I said, well, let’s put it on large roadside attractions — and he did,” Redekopp says.
Lorraine Hirning didn’t have the time or skills to take over the site. Worried it would disappear, she printed a full copy.
Mira and Mike van Bodegom noticed the site was stale in the winter of 2016, and they too found out what had happened. They had been followers since 2002, when they were a couple of newlyweds looking for adventure. Back then, they hit the road in their Ford Tempo to see an old plane and police car on the roof of the Cainsville, Ont., flea market. The site had been the source of countless road trips.
They didn’t want it to disappear. With the Solonykas’ support, the van Bodegoms agreed to take over. Their 12year-old son, Smith (Smitty), is a computer programming whiz, and it has become a family project. This summer, they added the site’s 1,500th attraction: a silver maple key in Cambridge.
Ed Solonyka would have been humbled and honoured. He had been so proud of his website that, in a rare instance of self-promotion, he ordered a red baseball cap with “Large Roadside Canadian Attractions,” embroidered in white thread. It was his favourite hat.
His daughter would tease him. “This is going to be your claim to fame,” she’d say, and he’d stick his tongue out. But she was right. It was noted in his obituary, alongside his love of gardening and his volunteer work with the Out of the Cold program. For a small but passionate segment of the Canadian population, it is impossible to see a roadside attraction without thinking of Ed Solonyka.
He didn’t get the chance to take his final road trip, but he laid the groundwork in more than 1,000 co-ordinates that dot the country like a bad case of chicken pox on the site’s new map. Maybe you’ll remember him if you find yourself in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. It’s between the flagpole and the gazebo in Montmartre, Sask.