JOHN HARLEY'S HUDSON
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John Harley was a McGill University English professor who moved to Hudson in the mid-1960s, and raised his family here. He quickly developed a great affection for Hudson, and became very involved in the community. John was a keen observer of the local scene, and he brought his legendary cutting wit to bear on a variety of local issues, politics and people. Once he had you firmly in his sights, you would not emerge unscathed unless you were quicker on the draw with a still cleverer rejoinder!
Some years ago, one of John Harley’s two sons, who was living in New York City at the time, paid me a visit at my bookstore, the Village Bookshop. He told me that he had on disc the text of his father’s book, John Harley’s 'Hudson', which had been unavailable for quite some time. He told me that he wanted to give me the disc in the hopes that I might be able to arrange to have it re-published. If this were to happen, he wanted any proceeds to go to a local cause.
Well, much time – not to mention many personal upheavals - have intervened since my encounter with John’s son. However, lo and behold, I rediscovered the disc several months ago! Many thanks are in order for the generous assistance of Scot Gardiner, who made the archaic Mac word processor scratchings IBM-readable. I am now making John Harley’s 'Hudson' available in its entirety on this website; eventually, if economics allow, I will republish the book. Then, I will be sure to honour the request of John Harley’s son, and direct all proceeds of book sales to local causes – the Hudson Historical Society and War Memorial Library seem appropriate.
Anyway, without further ado, put your feet up and make yourselves at home in the world of John Harley’s 'Hudson.' Enjoy!
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Skip this - it's only a Preface
Is there any defence for a book like this, offering you mainly reruns?
If you haven't read any of it yet and you don't know who I am, this is possibly a pointless question. People who have read all this stuff before, however, (or most of it) might well ask.
Some at least of those people are partly to blame for encouraging me. Well, it did become rather noticeable, I must admit, that I was someone who made a bit of a thing about writing to the Hudson Gazette, so I suppose that talking to me you would be likely to mention it. I shouldn't have taken it as indicating a serious interest.
But people who write things are like actors, preternaturally interested in any reaction whatever, and over-responsive to any mild pat or slap, like puppies. So it came about that over the years I deluded myself with the impression that all of these nice people liked my stuff enough to stand reading it again, even at the cost of cash that might be better spent on some nourishing potato chips and a beer or two.
However, if you are not one of those people whose small talk has thus beguiled me, you of course are still entitled to ask why you are expected to read any of this.
I really don't have much of an answer in that case. A lot of the situations here are old hat, and probably of interest only to those who have lived in Hudson a decade or so and who might entertain nostalgic feelings for the recent past. A lot of the opinions expressed are cantankerous, the implications are of the I-told-you-so variety, much of the humour is weakly facetious, the verses pure doggerel.
I have to confess, the main reason for this book is vanity. I like reading my old stuff. "Boy," I say to myself (incongruously) "I was good then." This would imply that I don't feel as good now - I am getting on - and thus a way of remedying such a state of mind would be to go over the old ground and tidy it up a bit, omitting some stuff (Oh yes, I have done, though you might think I could have worked harder at it), and slapping down some continuity between the bits. Vanity publishing, yes. Gave me something to do. Passes the goddam time.
When I say "tidy it up a bit" I mean I have really altered nothing in the sense of anything I wrote. There's an occasional change in punctuation and of the odd word - only in order to clean up the meaning, but not to alter it. Besides, the Hudson Gazette was by no means infallible when translating original manuscripts into print, especially hand-written ones, I think I am well covered there.
If people in Hudson who are mentioned here get upset in any way, I really am sorry. I am fond of them all, most of the time, but if I am to represent the kind of place Hudson seems to me to be, it's unavoidable that I talk about individuals. There are many, many of them around, often left over like me from dim decades going back to the 19th century. The subject of this little book is my Hudson, not anyone else's, and it isn't even all of that. It's that part of Hudson that has provoked me into writing. There's an awful lot else. It's a good place, or has been up till the time of writing.
Of course, it's all constantly going to hell in a handcart, but miraculously enough when you look again it's still there. Council or no Council.
Some nice people
Nearly all the letters and verses in this booklet appeared first in the Hudson Gazette - or the Lake of Two Mountains Gazette, its earlier manifestation. I therefore owe to its cheerful and usually complaisant editors, Ron Jones and Greg Jones, my sincere thanks for allowing them to appear there, letting me use some of their facilities for getting certain copies made, and generally being welcoming.
The delightful cover is by Jill Evans, based on a photograph from the archives of the Hudson Historical Society furnished for the purpose by Frank Nobbs, their genial archivist. Jill has done splendid posters for the Hudson Players Club, which also display her acute sense of visual wit as well as her first rate eye for design. All done out of friendship and for two free copies: my deepest gratitude.
I have to thank also Jill Baird, Ernie Frohloff, and Howie Putnam, who have allowed me to use in these covers some of their entertaining letters and verses, that were in these cases provoked by some of mine. There were many other letters in those years that I would love to use, but there's a limit to my time and energies, and also perhaps to the tolerance of readers for resuscitated ephemera like these.
At a very late moment I had qualms about my judgment and asked Karen Williamson to substitute hers in reviewing the proposed contents here. An unattractive chore, coinciding at the time with the equally tiresome one of getting all the leaves raked off her property and into those obscene, swollen, flaccid orange bags that have been decreed preferable to the sweet smokes of our autumns. I am grateful as always to this tireless friend.
Finally, may I thank all those friends and neighbours of Hudson, including do-gooders, dogs, Councillors, dépanneurs, developers, Mayors and so forth, who continue to provide so generously to the attentive observer such an endless supply of comic material.
So We Came to Hudson
The Harley family arrived in Hudson more or less by chance, in the summer of 1966, and as has happened with many others we stayed on indefinitely - committed to the place.
It was the 10th house Pat and I had made a home in, and we were certainly a bit tired of moving every second year on average, with our three sons and all our other junk. But although we settled in to the big house on the Côte with some relief, thinking "never again", that relief did not account for our subsequent addiction to Hudson. It was very soon, just a week or two after we had moved in, when Pat reported getting friendly smiles as she walked down the road, from people she had never met.
We had simply had to move once more. The house in Baie d'Urfé, next to my work at Macdonald College, was rapidly becoming too small, not because it was shrinking but because the boys were expanding. A large hole that appeared in the wall of the passage had made this point for us: in a friendly if over enthusiastic gesture Son 1 had pushed Son 2 (or maybe vice versa) right through. This had been the second house we had actually owned.
So with myself unwilling but acquiescent, Pat had set about looking for a large enough garden and house, and with the new bridge completed at Ile aux Tourtres, Hudson did not seem an unfeasible location. Swallowing hard at the apparently enormous cost, we struck a deal with the Evanses. When we were sitting afterwards in the pleasant drawing room, with the windows open on the early spring evening - we had first seen things in the quiet of February under snow - I was disconcerted to notice the 6 o'clock traffic rushing noisily down into Hudson.
"Oh, you soon get used to that," said Mrs. Evans.
Well, we never really did. The noise has increased in volume ever since - along with the volume of my letters to the Editor.
Though the "boys" (who are now aged 30 to 37) have long left the area, as Hudson youth mostly do, we are still both here. Myself in a small house on Brisbane, and Pat in the churchyard of St. James. She died on Christmas Eve in 1987. It was tragic that she could not live out the years she had looked for, in this place to which she had contributed so much in gaiety and music. There were an amazing number and variety of people at her memorial service.
Chronological Index
1972 " 'Yeoman' Rated Wonderful Show” review
1973 People on bikes letter
1974 Road salt and development letter
Hudson's perhaps future letter
The Artistic Director [unpublished] verse
"A Spirited Coward" review
1975 Nights with lights, and a lonely firefly letter
Let there be light [Gwen Rattray] letter
1976 "Just another Execution" notice
The 'rural' Côte letter
1977 "The Countess of Cavagnal" notice
Election slates letter
1978 My own invention letter
1979 The Gentlefolk of Como verse
Song for Hudson Heights [unpublished] verse
1980 The town centre: 3 to 2 against letter
'Local Age' letter
Self-policing for cars letter
1981 Also about salt letter
1982 "The Story of the Como Dragon" notice
1983 "Mini Mikado Claims Son, Brings down
House" review
1984 Ochone for Hudson Hardware! letter
1985 'Rural slum' letter
'Rural slum' explained letter
1986 The big loud dogs of Hudson verse
John! [Jill Baird] verse
To Jill I kneel verse
After Wordsworth verse
That walkway by the Viviry verse
Address to the Deaf verse
"Rana's Glittering Pond" [unpublished] review
Reply from Ernst C. Frohloff letter
Reply from H. L. Putnam letter
Reply to the replies letter
Reply to the reply to the replies
[Putnam & Frohloff] verse
Reply to the reply to the reply
to the replies [unpublished] verse
Rethinking Christmas [part unpublished] [letter]
1987 People on foot letter
Never on Sundays letter
Cahots verse
Grass in your Driveway: a Snob Song verse
Wordsworth in Hudson verse
1988 A nature note from Higher Hudson (or, An
Elephant on Brisbane) verse
Election Address (or Hudson Spa) verse
Signs everywhere letter
Chemically sprayed people letter
'On showing slides of past productions in the
Hudson Players Club's 40th year' verse
What to do about a noisy party letter
Journey's End verse
A Ballad (on Mullan's) verse
1989 O Alstonvale! (Marching Song of the
Alstonvale Projectors) verse
Responding to Gibb Stewart letter
PAH, RAH, & TCHAH! letter
Development as addiction letter
The town meeting letter
Vote! [unpublished] verse
On acrimony letter
Song for the Saints of Alstonvale
[unpublished] verse
no date Chris Miss Karl [unpublished] verse
Song for the Widows of Knowlton
[unpublished] verse
Alphabetical Index
Verses
A Ballad (on Mullan's)
Address to the Deaf
After Wordsworth
A nature note from Higher Hudson
(or, an elephant on Brisbane)
Cahots
Chris Miss Karl
Election Address (or, Hudson Spa)
Grass in Your Driveway: a Snob Song
John! [Jill Baird]
Journey's End
Reply to the reply to the replies
[Putnam & Frohloff]
Reply to the reply to the reply to the replies
Song for Hudson Heights
Song for the Saints of Alstonvale
Song for the Widows of Knowlton
That walkway by the Viviry
The Artistic Director
The big loud dogs of Hudson
The Gentlefolk of Como
To Jill I kneel
Vote!
Wordsworth in Hudson
Letters
Also about salt
Chemically sprayed people
Development as addiction
Election slates
Hudson's perhaps future
Let there be light [Gwen Rattray]
'Local Age'
My own invention
Never on Sundays
Nights with lights, and a lonely firefly
Ochone for Hudson Hardware!
On acrimony
PAH, RAH, & TCHAH!
People on bikes
People on foot
Reply from Ernst C. Frohloff
Reply form H. L. Putnam
Reply to the replies
Responding to Gibb Stewart
Rethinking Christmas
Road salt and development
'Rural slum'
'Rural slum' explained
Signs everywhere
'Suburban slum'
The 'rural' Côte
The town centre: 3 to 2 against
What to do about a noisy party
Reviews & Notices
"A Spirited Coward"
"Just another Execution"
"Mini Mikado Claims Son, Brings Down House"
"Rana's Glittering Pond"
"The Countess of Cavagnal"
"The Story of the Como Dragon"
" 'Yeoman' Rated Wonderful Show "
Even Letters:
Some Letters that got Reactions
In 1984, eighteen years after our arrival, I had retired, we separated, and the house on the Côte was sold, while I tried life in Scotland. And on my perhaps by then predictable return from there in October of 1985, and having waited till after the municipal election, I drew the attention of fellow residents in my by then predictable manner with a letter to the Editor.
During those years I had become a desultory contributor to the Lake of Two Mountains (later Hudson) Gazette. Not altogether surprisingly, my retirement was about to increase both the frequency of those letters, somewhat markedly, and the strain on the patience of those who read that paper. But the very last two words in this letter did seem to take a lot of people by surprise.
[30th October, 1985]
Dear Sir,
Returning to Hudson in October after a year's absence has been a genuine pleasure, except for one regrettably familiar thing. You could think that, in our fall, to stroll through the town in fine weather would be one of the most agreeable things in the world. It is far from it, the conditions underfoot being so disagreeable.
For those who move about Hudson upholstered and on wheels, things are fine and convenient. But each day, for those who go on foot - young mothers with infants and dogs on leash, elderly parties taking the air, and visitors perambulating but stumbling from shop to shop, conditions can only be described as primitive, squalid, and downright dangerous.
It makes you wonder when was the last time any councillors, or mayor, personally walked the length of the village from St Thomas School to St James Church, returning along the other side of the road - and pushing a pram all the way to see for themselves. For that matter I wonder how many of our virtuous candidates have done it. We are all agreed that Hudson is no suburb. But in the transition of its centre from rural peace to commercial prosperity, there has got to be a better solution than this rural slum.
Yours etc. John Harley
There was a sharp reaction among a number of people, and a couple of letters appeared in the paper, one of them suggesting - as some Canadians tend to do - that I go back where I came from if I didn't like Hudson. So I responded a couple of weeks later in conciliatory but explanatory vein:
[13th November, 1985]
Dear Sir,
As Mr. Houghton can hardly be alone in his response to my letter about the state of the walkways in Hudson, I should like to apologise to him and to any others whose feelings I have hurt with my rough words. I am as fond of the place as he is.
Should he look at my letter again - though I can understand that he might not particularly want to - he would see that when I wrote of a "rural slum" I was talking not of Hudson but of its town centre; and that the words "primitive, squalid, and downright dangerous" referred only to the conditions underfoot there. The dirt, unevenness, and exposure of our walkways may seem no big deal to able-bodied natives on their own, but I was protesting on behalf of those who were really troubled by these conditions, the young mothers with children, the elderly, and the visitors who shop here. They too, perhaps, might be invited to move to some more congenial place elsewhere, as Mr. Houghton suggests I do (though I admit it never occurred to me to call Scotland "exotic") but it hardly seems fair.
We are talking about change in the town. Mr. Houghton mentions the many improvements in 40 years in or along Main Road, but I'm sure he will agree that there are some things that have got worse, including the traffic. New England and Ontario (and those are hardly exotic locations) have many towns like Hudson where families may walk with far less anxiety and discomfort than among our potholes and puddles. Indeed, you only have to go to our neighbours in Quebec, to St. Lazare, Vaudreuil, and Rigaud, to find far more comfortable conditions for a walk downtown.
Our downtown is still crummy, despite a few improvements. It looks bad. It conveys an image of poor administration quite out of line with what Hudson has in fact enjoyed in other respects - no question - in recent years. I am confident, if only they would tackle the problem, that the new council and our by now almost hereditary mayor will find a solution that uniquely suits the nature of this town. (And I didn't mean to suggest by this last phrase that we should all go to sleep on it.) Yours etc.
I thought I'd start with these two letters for several reasons. For one thing, they illustrate that however carefully one may write, one will not be as carefully read. People glance through a newspaper in a highly sophisticated but often hasty manner, reacting only to parts of it, to pick up perhaps a line or two, perhaps an entire article, but very rarely to read anything a second time.
To cope with this I have generally tried to promise the odd joke, irony, or provocation, that might be missed if the letters were not followed with some attention. I also took some pains with fluency and with the salience of main points, knowing how very easy it is for readers to get sidetracked by any ambiguity, want of clarity, or strangeness in language whatever.
If there are any consistencies of theme in this collection, moreover, these letters express one of them, the amenity of Hudson. I usually hoped that I might get something done. The "something done" was often very modest, as in this case - having the Mayor and councillors become aware, or if already aware encouraged to proceed - concerning an issue within their sphere of action.
A great deal of what I wrote over the years might easily be dismissed as mere nagging. But on this issue of sidewalks I can at least claim to have been onside, even if the Mayor and new Council had already discussed it, for in 1988 they did carry out a very handsome job of restoring the appearance of our downtown, complete with sidewalks, and it is now quite a pleasure to walk about there. Three years isn't bad for getting something done - if indeed what I wrote contributed at all.
But to continue where I left off on this issue. Some time in the following summer the Mayor bragged a bit about the town's initiative in developing a sort of country walk along the Viviry Creek (which however was going forward very sluggishly and is still very little used). So I thought I'd snipe a little.
[30th July 1986]
Dear Sir,
That walkway by the Viviry
May earn the Mayor glory;
What of the walk along Main Road?
That's quite another story.
Almost exactly a year after that first letter on the subject, I returned to the charge; and the following admittedly provocative letter prompted a stimulating exchange of correspondence over 3 or 4 weeks with Councillor Ernst Frohloff, former Councillor Howard Putnam and others, that many readers of the Gazette enjoyed. It seems to be worth reprinting most of it here.
[15th November 1986]
Dear Sir,
About this time last year I wrote a letter to you in which I referred to parts of downtown Hudson as a rural slum. I wish now to withdraw that accusation, which I believe may have given offence to some fellow citizens; I was quite wrong. What I should have said was suburban slum.
Hudson has become predominantly suburban in the last few years, as anyone can see with half an eye. Drive down the Côte and you see that the lane to Stirling Simon's farm has been gouged into a bald street to nowhere for three-lane traffic; the walkway along the Viviry, which has had no-one along it since its banks were bull-dozed two years ago, is equipped with an elaborately artificial mini-landscape as formal entrance; the once beguiling, park-like driveway leading to Whitlock, is battlemented like the gateway to some fancy cemetery; and now the grassy foreground of the school - as the Players Club audience discovered without warning in the darkness last Friday night - is to become a vast asphalted area no doubt lined with wilting exotic shrubs, in the prescribed pattern of North American suburbia. No need to fell the trees; they’ll just die in due course as usual, from stifled roots.
These are only symptoms of the widespread general change. Hardly a house has been built in this period that isn't in some alien style, clad in inappropriate materials, landscaped with instant grass like an architect assistant's office drawing, and cluttered with carriage lamps and other country cuteries. It says little for the influence of all our enthusiastic real-estate ladies and gentlemen, whose taste in these matters I am sure is at a different level, that these things go on endlessly being built and sold, usually too large for their lot. I don't suppose there's much anyone can do about it.
What worries me a bit though is that there are signs that the town (i.e. not you and me but the Council) is planning to do something about Main Road in the Town Centre. I should be pleased, I suppose; and indeed I am. It may mean that we shall all be able to stroll about in comfort meeting people and dodging into all the little shops that could do with the casual business, and generally enjoying the town's considerable amenities. But I worry that almost certainly any such development will be carried out strictly (and only) according to standards laid down by engineers and all the other people who make their money widening roads and laying asphalt and landscaping the life out of the scenery and building cute little walls of coloured stones.
This is how suburbia is made. You don't come to terms with whatever's there or growing there already; you just delete the lot and impose your simple-minded will on the place, more or less because you happen to have acquired the tools to do it all with.
I'm not sure I'm looking forward to this. Yours etc.
[from Ernst C. Frohloff] [26th November 1986]
Dear Sir,
Having read John Harley's preposterous letter in your column, I can only surmise that my old acquaintance is once again displaying his sardonic wit, or else has reached his dotage. I hope it is the former, since such a diatribe surely cannot be taken seriously by any long-time resident of Hudson. To answer just a few of his observations may I point out that the "bald street to nowhere for three-lane traffic" which was Stirling Simon's driveway in fact leads to a new development which will contain upward of 50 homes, and I very much doubt that any of the prospective home-owners would appreciate using the old goat track as their main exit to a main artery. The developer has, in fact done a good job of providing a proper roadway, of standard width, drainage, etc. As for the walkway along the Viviry river, had Mr. Harley attended the open meetings at which landscape artist Lambert De Wit described this project to provide a nature trail in its pristine essence, he may have realized that the artificial bank of earth at the entrance was placed there to enhance the privacy of the walkway by blocking the noise, pollution, and sight of vehicles from Côte St. Charles, thereby creating a feeling of complete isolation from man-made disturbances.
As for the new gates at Whitlock, I somewhat share Mr. Harley's sentiments, but since beauty is in the eye of the beholder(s), maybe these elaborate portals are a reflection of the taste and status of the members, and so are quite appropriate. Again, referring to the new parking lot at the school, this is to serve also as a staging area for school buses. Surely this is better than having children board buses on Côte St. Charles road in order to preserve a bit of grass.
Nowhere in this diatribe is there a single suggestion as to what this scholarly gentleman would do to rectify the above onslaughts of modern civilization, nor advice as to what are suitable home designs, materials, or ground cover to suit his aesthetic tastes, and his reference to most homes being built on lots too small for their size demonstrated how ludicrous are his arguments, since Hudson has a By-law banning new houses on lots of less than 20,000 square feet, which is considerably more than required in any other community hereabouts.
As Councillor of the Town of Hudson, I shall not dignify his comments about Council's plans to improve the centre of town by refuting them verbatim. Suffice to say that I seem to recall a letter from this same gentleman about a year ago [above] berating the town officials for not providing proper sidewalks, and for having the streets in a condition deemed dangerous for pedestrians. Now he worries that some competent engineers may advise the town how to proceed with a master plan to preserve the rural flavour of the town. No doubt he would hire a Philosophy major to design the infrastructure to preserve our heritage. I can assure Mr. Harley in complete honesty that the preservation of the rustic and rural character of Hudson has been a top priority of our Mayor ever since he became a Town Official, and the present Council is devoted to maintain that mandate. We all would like to see Hudson stay "as it is". But if Mr. Harley has a magic formula short of replicating the Berlin Wall complete with guard posts and gates at the Cameron, Cote and Main Road to keep out the infidels, we on the Council would be delighted to hear it.
C'mon, John, surely with some of the really contentious issues at which to tilt your ink-stained lance such as the language debates splitting our society, or the circus which professes to be a Government in Ottawa [Who remembers which one this was?], which should be a ready target for your acerbic pen, the town to which you chose to return cannot really be all that bad. You being a man of letters, I would welcome any suggestions of a constructive nature you may harbour, so we can discuss some of these issues over a toddy or two.
Ernst C. Frohloff
[from H.L.Putnam] [same date]
The Editor,
It certainly was high time for that old manure disturber John Harley to stir the pot again. Hudson is becoming so suburbanized and growing so fast it's almost mind boggling.
But John forgets that he's part of the problem.
Before he arrived on the scene Cote St. Charles was a quiet, sandy dirt road. There were only three school buses (Como, upper Cote St. Charles and the West End). Drivers from three stores - Mullan's, Cousineau's and Habib's - called every morning to take your food order and deliver it the same afternoon. Local bakers delivered fresh bread and other goodies to the door every day. Baseball was played on a farmer's field beside the Main Road just east of the Viviry Creek and the police station. All the water mains were wooden (they used to leak quite regularly) and septic tanks as we know them were a rarity.
Total winter-time population (pre-war) was probably around a thousand but this mushroomed by several hundred each summer with the influx of noisy Montrealers to their "country" homes.
We think John would have liked Hudson much better in those days. But he and a few thousand others didn't make it until many years later. We're glad they did. Most have contributed toward making Hudson a rather pleasant, friendly vibrant place in which to live.
In fact it has become so popular that real estate prices are at an all time high. So my tip to Mr. Harley is simply this: sell out now John. You can probably triple your investment, and you can buy some unsullied land real cheap halfway between Rigaud and Pointe Fortune.
Sincerely,
H.L.Putnam
Well, I had been challenged. So I came back a week later -
[28th November 1986]
Dear Sir,
It's really something to have provoked such spirited responses as you printed last week from Ernie Frohloff and Howie Putnam, both gentlemen being on top of their form. I feel rather proud. Of course both are or have been Councillors, and who ever heard of perfect Councillors? Try as they will, they're not going to get everything right, any more than I do.
Clearly I have been talking out of turn; my trouble seems to be that I have been an academic by profession, and am a newcomer in Hudson - no parents in the graveyard - and I complain a lot (being in my dotage). The theme of my letter, that Hudson has become largely suburban, is nevertheless accepted by these severe critics. Ernie gives a number of explanations for some cases I mentioned, none of which are unexpected, but of course explanations are not excuses. For example, it is hardly necessary to scar the countryside to allow some 50 householders access to a main road when an adequate lane already exists. (And Stirling Simon has called, and been called, many things, but I doubt he'll appreciate "goat".)
After giving us a really interesting glimpse of the way things used to be, Howie says we are all part of the problem. (Well, he rather assumes we'll excuse those who like himself were here pre-war.) His remedy therefore seems to be that those who don't like anything should leave. Those who don't care too much may stay. It's always been a seductive solution to coping with an opposition.
In a part of my letter that did not get telescoped by the printer [since corrected in the version above] I did say that I didn't suppose there was much anyone could do about all the suburbanization. My main point was my worry about how any change of Main Road was going to turn out under the prevailing habit of letting "competent engineers" decide things for us, with their "proper roadways, standard widths, and drainage etc." Their ideas of scenery are not ours. And if the Council's top priority for years has been the preservation of Hudson's rural flavour, where then has all the suburbia come from?
Admittedly that may be a nasty crack, for it ignores a good deal that the Council has indeed done, often in unobtrusive ways. But in the circumstances I think mine is a legitimate worry, and one shared by a lot of people who by no means all are newcomers.
I'm no great hand at construction (nor for that matter a "Philosopher"), but to Ernie's challenge to be constructive let me offer one or two suggestions:
• ensure that any walls and so on to be built are made of local stone and materials, so far as these are available;
• restore native trees to the sides of Main Road, wherever it has lost them or will lose them - get ahead of the game by planting two for one, to allow for damage. Is it perhaps feasible to work out some kind of tax incentive for businesses with frontage - so much per tree of given dimensions per given unit of length - either bribing or penalising them?
• widen no road, and don't decide about it, until the less comfortable alternatives - one-way system, or difficult traffic - have been understood and thrashed out in public;
• look after the interests of humbler people first: school children, mothers with prams, weaker and elderly persons (lest in their dotage they complain), small shopkeepers. Let the car drivers and truck drivers and the big shots look after themselves (but don't let them park on the sidewalks);
• educate the builders. Legislation can't do it , but people who need planning permission should not get it without a strong and if necessary prolonged demonstration that people hereabouts care for appearances. It's not as if the town didn't have first-rate professionals living in it who could donate their advice if they knew it would be useful. Other places manage.
Ernie and I are at least agreed on one point, where I thought Whitlock's new entrance suggested a fancy cemetery. His wording, that this might be a reflection "of the taste and status of the members", strikes me as delicious. They have lofted their approach, he seems to say, and now are lying dead. Hats off, gentlemen.
After a minute of silence (believe me), I am
Yours etc.
Two weeks later, the fellows caught me by surprise with the following effusion, displaying an unaccountable and disconcerting goodwill brought on no doubt by well-being and Christian feeling, aided perhaps by the odd seasonable noggin:
Our last letter ... for 1986 [12th December 1986]
'Tis the season to be jolly
And above all not be snarly
What would we do without Harley
Hudson would be dull be golly
Though we carp at Harley's folly
He makes people think and parler
So this Christmas we wish Harley
Lots of mistletoe and holly
Howie and Ernie
I did write an answer to that, but it never got sent, mainly because it seemed to me that they had had the very successful last word, and anyway New Year is a new year and who wanted to go on with the old stuff? However, just to show I was not indifferent (and if I can't have the last word now, when can I?) - here it is:
[dated 2nd January 1987: unpublished]
Dear Sir,
And a Happy New Year to you too, Howie and Ernie.
You wished me lots of mistletoe and holly -
It all arrived. My room is covered thickly.
I do my best, but cannot be too jolly
When everywhere I sit is so damn prickly.
John Harley
Even Verses: Relaxing into Verse
Serious results or no, a lot of what I wrote was merely for fun (or nearly merely). The usual signal was that it appeared in verse form, driving people to refer to it as my "poetry", though it certainly was never very poetic.
Example coming up. The summer of 1988 in Hudson was memorable for the extraordinary antics our cars were called on to perform every time we went to shop, or even to get from Hudson Heights to Como or back, and this was all on account of the restoration job aforesaid, with Main Road dug up to some extreme depths, overhead wires often down, and some very bizarre daily placements of the pathetic handful of "Detour" signs in use. Everyone was surprisingly good-humoured about it all.
Journey's End
('"The road should be maintenance proof for 25 years," said Mayor Bradbury')
Lurching across no-man's-land
In my War One tank,
Off to post a letter and
To visit at the bank.
In and out the shell holes then,
Watching out for wire,
Fearful lest I'm left for dead,
Sinking in the mire -
Past stern men in helmets where
They crouch along their trench
(They're not talking English there!
Doesn't sound like French!)
Sudden with a fearful roar
Some pilot drops his load
(Of gravel).
What is it that we're fighting for?
A Road to end all Roads -
As far as Hudson was concerned I had first burst into verse in 1979, when the following appeared without warning preamble in the Letters column of the Hudson Gazette. Up till then I had been exclusively prosy in that context. But this effusion seemed to strike a sympathetic note of its own in a Hudson audience. And I believe that, in spite of all the encroachments that even Como has been subjected to in the decade since these teasing lines appeared, the ambiance that they spoke of is still there.
Nevertheless, there are references here that no longer apply. There are no longer two trains in the morning (let alone any others, need one say?), and since then a few street lights have now been suffered to appear at tricky corners in Como, although they were firmly rejected by the old guard there at the time when they were first installed in the rest of Hudson. And meetings of our very English Players Club, to which I myself have become addicted, can no longer be held in the cosy atmosphere of the old St Mary's Church Hall, destroyed by a disastrous fire in 1988 and since replaced by a modern but unfortunately reverberant building.
The Gentlefolk of Como
How sweet to live in Como
Along the fringe-ed lake,
Where trees grow as tradition does,
And nothing grows that's fake.
There all observe with quiet verve
Unwritten laws by which
One sometimes cuts a friend, but not
The lily in the ditch.
The gentlefolk of Como
Are rather upper class.
They tennis play on Saturday
And lie upon the grass;
They gather by the river
For martinis and for tea,
And raise their voices with their glass
In jocund company.
The Como lady long has set
Within her country seat -
A house that generally has
More history than heat.
She thinks the folk of Hudson
Are almost of the best,
But when she goes to shop there
She feels she's going west.
The gentlefolk of Como
Are fond of watching plays
Where lordly persons quack like ducks
And servants carry trays.
They sit for hours on wooden chairs
On nights of pouring rain;
And when the roads lie deep in snow,
Good Lord, they come again.
The gentleman of Como
Lies longer in his bed;
He catcheth not the seven o'clock
But th' half past seven instead;
And when at length rejoicing
He homeward comes at night,
I think he goes aroving
Those streets that have no light.
The folk that live in Como
Enjoy a state of grace -
They speak in other accents,
They make a different face.
Yet though they view the rest of us
Bifocally, I pray
Their English ways may long amaze
The Seigneurie Vaudreuil.
It was quite easy to set these lines to a tune - almost any Scottish Psalm tune would do, but we usually used "The Church's One Foundation", appropriately Anglican - and we sang it in quartet at the next Players Club AGM.
It seemed only fair to balance that offering with another one, both for the other end of town and for that contrasting element of Hudson's incoming population which was obviously dedicated to the various confusing creeds of conspicuous consumption. This song, which I believe was actually first sung by St James Church Choir of which I was then a member, was set to the tune of that well-known harvest festival hymn, "We plough the fields and scatter", of which it is a parody.
Song for Hudson Heights [unpublished]
We rake the lawn and scatter
Weed killer on the grass.
We hoard organic matter,
We take a fitness class.
We jog throughout the spring-time,
We jog through winter nights;
We're just the kind of people
To live in Hudson Heights.
All good gifts around us
Are sent for our delight
So thank the Lord, O thank the Lord,
For Hu-u-udson Heights.
We gather all our leaves up
In orange plastic sacks.
We treat our trees with fungicide,
We treat our cars with wax.
We never let our dogs squat
Upon our grassy plains,
Where only tanks are septic,
With soft refreshing drains.
All good gifts around us
Are owed us for our pains,
So thank the Lord, O thank the Lord,
For soft refreshing drains.
The children sail a Laser -
One each for boy and girl -
And Mother wears a blazer
When she goes off to curl.
It's simple country living
And so, to quell her fears,
She gets around with 4-wheel drive
And fifteen forward gears.
Such good things around us,
We'd better quell our fears,
And thank the Lord, O thank the Lord,
For fifteen forward gears.
I shall get back to the Players Club and other trifles, but let me take up again the thread of nagging at the Council. It was in the year before the Great Earthworks replaced our town centre for the summer that another manifestation of progress was borne in on all of us, in the shape - though that's hardly the word for any but the strongest of smells - of the odour of rotten eggs (i.e. sulphuretted hydrogen) as it emerged from the tap from the average water heater. Nobody seemed able to do anything fundamental about this, the problem being underground in the water table - perhaps because the expanding population was putting a strain on supplies.
Various ideas about causes and solutions were floated in the Letters column. I thought there might be a positive side to this development, one that the Mayor might even have planned -
[20th January 1988]
Dear Sir,
I haven't yet, but I expect to find the following any day now, posted on the usual pole:
" Election Address "
" Citizens! A mild Hurrah!
Hudson's going to be a Spa -
Now our water really smells
We can call it Hudson Wells,
Turning fairly honest dollars
Treating agues, gout, and cholers.
(No need to lock up your daughters -
Just ensure they drink the waters.)
" Genteel folk will throng to enter
Our new Recreation Centre
Where (instead of Skip and Jump Room)
All will gather in the Pump Room,
Chatting till they make a lull for
Quaffing daily quarts of sulphur.
(Tea-time music too - Gadzooks -
Played by Back Roads, in perukes!)
"Hudson has what spas demand -
Scenery to beat the band;
Gardens, trees on every site;
Culture at its most polite
(Even at our Chateau Hilton
People sit and talk of Milton);
Maids demure and handsome hairy 'uns;
Scores of valetudinarians.
" Whine no more then, you complainers -
Businesses will all be gainers!
It's our Mayor's secret dream,
Super tax-collecting scheme!
Pay no heed to any wailer!
Leave it all to our J. Taylor! "
Hope this finds you, dare I think,
As it leaves me - in the stink.
And this example enables me to lead in, getting a bit more serious again, to the recent and I suppose still unfinished story of the Alstonvale campaign, which as far as my writings were concerned began and ended with the deployment, for a purpose, of some more light-hearted verses. But this affair perhaps deserves its own new section.
About Alstonvale; not so Relaxed
1989, the year in which the Town's proposal for rezoning the area of the Alstonvale development project was fought to referendum, revealed more dramatically then ever before a deep division underlying the apparently serene and friendly surface of the Hudson community. A saving grace of the place, which appears otherwise to be a dormitory for commuters to Montreal, is that a number of people either work there - in both languages - or are long-time residents, and they have strong mutual bonds established over life-times of acquaintanceship. For what is probably now a much larger number, however - and I must count myself among them, although I have described how inadvertent was my arrival - it is basically a playground, with attractions of a largely environmental kind in which to garden, pass our weekends, and retire.
It is a paradox about dwellers in the playgrounds that they don't typically keep their eye on the political ball, and that is why the referendum was eventually lost to the old guard, who did. Large numbers of playground dwellers either did not vote at all or voted for the Alstonvale Project shop window, and thus consigned the major part of the remaining woodland within Hudson boundaries (roughly the size of the town itself) to the process of environmental attrition that has already radically altered the amenity of the regions beyond. The traffic of a yet much larger population with urban habits now dominates these regions, and the possibility of Hudson remaining an enclave, protected both by the river and by its own original standards, has been much diminished.
So the various campaigns mounted by groups or individuals for or against the project, of which mine was only one and very minor, came either to defeat or victory in a wounding climax, capped by a municipal election also characterised by the usual - but, to some, unexpectedly nasty - features. The division in the community, having among others its aspects of class struggle, has always been surreptitiously exploited by local politicians (on both sides) whenever a vote has looked to be critical. As I write, another summer is here, and Meech Lake has torpedoed the real estate market, so the playground dwellers are once more happily engaged with their cruisers, their swimpools and parties, their renovations, garden contractors, landscaping and other expensive toys, while no trees have as yet been felled nor roads driven in Alstonvale. Serenity, you might think, reigns once more.
[That was written before shots were fired at Oka.]
Although the Mayor had then been quietly preparing the ground for two years, and the recently formed Residents Association, with their ears to that ground, had been making warning noises for some time, I personally did not see my call to intervene until Ernie Frohloff offered himself as a convenient target. In a letter to the Hudson Gazette he once more aggressively defended the Council for its support of the Alstonvale Project, concluding rather too optimistically by mentioning his personal expectation, in the face of all the evidence, that such development would lower his municipal taxes.
So I thought I'd give it a bit of rhyme, with a catchy tune. I wrote one verse. Then a month later I attached to another letter (given below) two more verses of the same, calling the whole thing this time "The Marching Song of the Alstonvale Projectors". (I am disappointed that I never heard any of them singing it.)
[15th April 1989]
Dear Sir,
My response to Councillor Frohloff's letter of last week is designed to be sung in chorus to the tune of Tannenbaum (also known to some as the tune of the carol "O Christmas Tree", and to others as that of The Red Flag):
O Alstonvale,
O Alstonvale,
How can you lie there useless?
With pointless fields
Of cheapo grass
And woods both pine- and spruce-less?
So let us bring
Bulldozers in
And clear the woods with axes -
And floor the lot
With astroturf
To keep down Ernie's taxes.
[four weeks later]
O Hudson town,
You're going down,
So why not go down smiling?
Let's do whatev-
er Council says -
Their ways are so beguiling!
How can a place
Have value if
No-one makes money off it?
(Those birds and trees
And all that stuff
Have never shown a profit.)
O Alstonvale,
O Alstonvale!
Your slopes are almost virgin -
Condition which,
With males around,
Stirs procreative urgin'.
So let us strip
Your zone apart
And never mind the hubbub,
Till Hudson has
Joined St. Lazare
In one continuous subbub.
The letter to which these two last verses had been attached was aimed at the target offered by Mr. Gibb Stewart QC, who ran an individual campaign of his own on behalf of the Alstonvale Project, and who launched an attack on the Residents Association of Hudson as a small group of power-seeking conspirators, who were maligning Council and thus offending the electorate. (This was to become a common theme in the hostilities, echoed with unsurprising unanimity by Councillors and their would-be successors, and could be said to have had its debut in this letter.)
As is probably clear by now, I had learned the benefits of counter-attacking from the flank, as it were, having turned down an earlier invitation to join the executive of the RAH, and indeed having delayed joining the Association until it had become established.
So, believing in the integrity of the Association, having attended its meetings (as Gibb had so far not), I charged:
[12th May 1989]
Dear Sir,
I must congratulate Gibb Stewart for demonstrating to perfection the ancient art of wielding a double-barreled rhetorical shotgun, firing generalizations in two directions simultaneously so as to create an instant confrontation - angry sounding and chest-beating, naturally - between two entire classes of person who otherwise might never have been aware that they were supposed to be at war.
This time-honoured technique has usefully been employed throughout history to maintain those intellectually comical postures called by various words ending with the suffix -ism, such as Racism, Sexism, Imperialism, and the like. Perhaps we can call this one Municipal Councilism.
Seizing on a single sentence from a lengthy argument in the letter of one individual, Gibb's trained lawyer's eye enables him first to detect a conspiracy not only among all the letter writers who in recent weeks have fired off their reactions to Ernie Frohloff's opening salvo, but also among the whole membership of the Residents' Association - a considerable group. Then with the practised ease of a Q.C. he turns swiftly to generalise - this time concerning the target of this alleged campaign - from Councillor Frohloff not only to all the Council, but also to the "solid" majority of the municipal electorate of Hudson.
Thus in an instant the membership of the R.A.H. finds itself deemed to have deliberately insulted the electorate of Hudson, to which apparently it is thought not to belong.
I have one or two other difficulties about the Q.C.'s proposition. If this was a premeditated campaign, how did the plotters know that Ernie Frohloff was going to write that letter? (Perhaps Ernie was in on the plot. Of course! that would explain it. What an interesting supposition!) But then, as one of those who myself wrote one of those letters - albeit in rhyme - I wish someone had told me what was going on; I'd really like for once to have been in on a plot. But, naively enough, I thought all those people who disliked the idea of the Alstonvale Project had really meant what they were saying...
Yours etc.
More of our older residents joined the letter-writing fray, going on about how trustworthy Mayor Bradbury was and how untrustworthy newcomers are. And meanwhile the last touches had been put to the Main Road reconstruction, so I thought we owed the Mayor thanks for what had really been a beautifully executed job, disproving all my previously expressed apprehensions.
(I had said thanks to him personally, but he had growled something about it being about time, after having had to read all those [miserable] letters I had written.)
[4th June 1989]
Dear Sir,
This would seem a good moment (springtime) for me to change heart and join the Patriarch's Association of Hudson (PAH!) in singing the praises of Mayor Bradbury. The recent and astonishingly swift completion of the revamping of the Main Road up to Mullan's, together with the bonus of the renewal of the sidewalk up to Birch Hill, has completed a magnificent job that has done wonders for the appearance and self-respect of our town.
It is now an easy pleasure - shared I see by many - to stroll townwards enjoying other people's gardens for free, in the style that gives life here some of its unique charm. This past week the new section was fragrant with lilac (one might call it Lilac Alley) thanks in part to the careful tact with which bushes on the south margin, that were within the Town's powers to rip out, have been left untouched. The hand that has controlled with sensitivity such details, throughout the operation, has thus left a personal sign on the already comely face of Hudson that will last a long time. And that hand, as in almost everything that happens or even that doesn't happen around here, is Mayor Bradbury's.
I am glad to be able to say this now, so that I may not be accused of intervening in any way in the municipal elections that will be held later in the year. It would certainly not be doing the Mayor any good to be praising him openly like this at that time, for that would be in breach of an ancient and well-founded political principle - namely that in any election people vote not for someone but against someone else. The conclusion to be drawn from this premise (well understood by professional politicians but not usually grasped by the amateur enthusiast) is to be careful not to offer a clear target that can be voted against.
Thus the outcome of the elections in Hudson will as usual be determined by whose head is showing above the skyline to be shot at. This rule of thumb applies just as much to groups of people who make their opinions conspicuous, as to individuals. And so organizations like PAH! and RAH! (the Residents' Association of Hudson), and TCHAH! (the Town Councillors Heroworshipping Association of Hudson) had better watch what they say in public when the time comes. It's only what people say in private around here that has ever determined how things get done, and people elected.
So you probably won't find me praising the Mayor like this again. I'm sure he'll be greatly relieved to hear me say so.
Yours etc.
Clearly much of this was tongue in cheek and relied on the Mayor's sense of humour. I was really trying to warn the Residents Association while taking the mickey out of their opponents. These had reason to be alarmed because a lot more people were thinking for themselves about the development situation than was comfortable for the Council. And it wasn't as if the Mayor was impartially above the situation.
But he did fool me by not running again, when Fall came round. He had been Mayor for the best part of two decades, and I have to admit now a very good one, though his public style in dealing with opposition - or even with bystanders - was that of a street brawler, and I was against many of the things he did.
My next letter was different.
[9th June 1989]
Dear Sir,
In the rather fulsome real estate blurb you featured last week on the Alstonvale Project the Mayor is quoted as saying "It's a lovely development." The writer, and presumably the Mayor, did not choose to add to this statement the necessary qualifying clause and phrase, "as developments go", and "on paper".
Last week I praised Mayor Bradbury's judgment in making improvements to Main Road. This is different. When things have to be done to places where humans have already squatted, he seems to know his stuff. But no human "development" - that euphemistic weasel word for massive interference with the natural environment - is as "lovely" as a landscape left alone.
Much of that article, and many wiseacres around here, lazily assume that there is something inevitable about the "development" of this particular element of Hudson's environment. Would someone please convince me of that inevitability? Nobody needs the money, and there has appeared no compelling reason to remove the zoning. That zoning has served to protect Hudson's setting, an immensely valuable asset to this community that is reflected in the extraordinary status it still has throughout the Montreal region as a place to live.
If Hudson of all places cannot resist taking the drug of development, as resolute communities elsewhere have shown can be done, then it is less of a gutsy place than I think it is.
But perhaps we have already begun the addiction. And how after this one, certainly, would there be anything left to resist? The mood-altering effects for some of us clearly began a while ago, when the Mayor represented the unwitting citizens of this town, to the CPTAQ public hearing of 25th October 1988, as already consenting to this development. The plan now appears to be to slip this proposal past us with all the familiar social blandishments, and - as with so many political lemons - during the apathetic summer season.
The irreversible changes that would ensue in the years down the line would destroy the character of Hudson - and the nearest piece of country would become Rigaud Mountain. But who would care, for who would then have the character? This is what drugs do. They make you think that decline is growth; and that any dopey, indolent indecision is a kind of wisdom.
Fortunately, a decision is still potentially in our hands. We can - as we should say to any harmful drug - just say "No".
Yours etc.
The summer wore on with rising tensions as the process towards referendum continued, so that an information meeting at the end of July to present the Bylaw was heavily attended and was characterised by a good deal of raucous heckling when it came to questions. The Residents Association, although over 200 strong, had been branded according to plan as a small clique of power-seekers, and its President Heinz Heinrich, an Austrian from Czechoslovakia who had served the Allies in the Second World War, had once again been smeared even in public by hints that he was a Nazi - a disgraceful ploy that throws a dishonorable light on those who have never publicly condemned the slander, although they stood to - and did - gain from it.
The following admittedly fairly lengthy letter was delayed in the press for three weeks before its actual publication, a fact that did affect adversely the timing of some of its points; there had been a lot of letters, naturally, but at least one equally long on the other side had meanwhile been given priority. Perhaps it was felt that I had had my share. On the other hand, the Editor had meanwhile allowed his name to appear unobtrusively in a full-page advertisement as a supporter of the Alstonvale Project, and so of course of the Bylaw to rezone.
[4th August 1989]
Dear Sir,
For a community that considers itself friendly, there was a lot of anger at the Council's information meeting on Monday 31st July. But the angry feelings being expressed were not those of the people questioning the zoning by-law. Unusually, and contrary to the standard news story appearing in the Montreal Gazette, it was those who were defending the by-law who seemed upset, and defiant, and otherwise emotionally aware that theirs might be a losing cause.
It emerged that two years ago Mayor Bradbury had decided to arrange for the effective doubling of Hudson's rate of growth, from an average of 20 plus houses a year to one of 35 to 40 from the Alstonvale Project alone. Now, the Mayor and his Council had been elected a year or two before that, with a vote of confidence in his management of the day-to-day affairs of the town. But I don't suppose that anyone then thought that the Mayor had been granted a mandate to play God single-handedly with the future of Hudson.
Late in the meeting Councillor Duclos, a decent man, lamented that so little trust had been shown by those present who were understandably concerned, and delivered a short sermon on the topic. But trust is a two-way street. On the one hand the Mayor and his Council have not appeared to have had much trust in the judgment of the people they are meant to represent, for clearly it is only Quebec law and not their own inclination that has forced them to present their decision to the community for approval. Their action in pressing the matter through prematurely in vacation time, the conduct of the meeting itself, and their tendency to smoke-screen or evade answers to questions and to interrupt the questioners (especially if they were women), did not encourage the reciprocation of trust.
Nor are we encouraged by the record of municipal control in past and present developments, their piecemeal approach to planning, and the amateurish manner in which these very by-laws are being handled. They expect to make ad hoc by-laws for development after, and not before, this zoning by-law has been put through - an unsophisticated and pretty unprofessional way of proceeding which leaves Hudson open to appalling risks.
The Mayor and Council are volunteers with considerable hands-on experience, who do a great deal of work with little reward, and there is little point in merely confronting them - to the point where they feel at bay - with the almost inevitable deficiencies as they face a complicated and difficult task. Correspondingly, let us hope that they can, with all the resources and initiatives at their disposal, deal magnanimously with the disagreements arising from their constituents.
I have to say, as one of those constituents, that I have so far felt better represented by the Residents' Association, which I joined belatedly, than by those who have been elected to represent me on Council. The meetings of the Association, contrary to an image publicized by some who have never attended, are conducted in an atmosphere of thoughtfulness, expertise, and impartial attention to a wide diversity of views - an atmosphere not particularly apparent on Monday night.
I have also to say that some things I have heard being hinted about the leadership of the Residents' Association (and have read in your columns, Mr. Editor, by one writer who failed to declare his interest in the Alstonvale project) are plainly despicable. I am ashamed for any of my friends and acquaintances who have failed to quell these manifestations of racism, not to speak of those who have actually repeated them and passed them along. Some otherwise sane and kindly people seem to have had bits of their humanity shot away in the war. If Hudson is indeed the unusually friendly place that some Councillors claimed it to be, let us put an end to this disgusting nonsense and start treating each other with some adult respect, no matter what our views are or where we were born.
For some people still to believe that this zoning by-law is "no big deal", as Rick Frohloff claimed his acquaintances do, is really pretty funny if you think about it. The Alstonvale Project must be quite the biggest "deal" to come Hudson's way in a long time, quite apart from its immense implications for further growth, and I wonder if a number of men and women at present engaged on a personal scale in trades or services in the village quite realise the consequences that the change of scale from village to suburban centre would entail for them. With St. Lazare planning to go from 8,000 to 20,000, and Hudson already sliding steadily in the same direction, they are likely to face outside competition of a sort they may not have bargained for.
However, this particular change is not in the least inevitable, notwithstanding the various sermons on the inevitability of change delivered to us by good Father Norris and the Reverend Putnam. As one speaker has put it, we have to recognise that the future of the majority is being put at risk on behalf of the few. (Note: the one-time business "risk" taken by those few, by acquiring or holding property in the expectation of its being "inevitably" rezoned, is now being called their "legitimate expectations".) Once Hudson decides, in a fully worked-out development plan, that its woodland is to remain woodland, and its rural features rural, there seems to be no reason why such a decision should not stick, no matter who buys land. Yours etc.
The Alstonvale Projectors spent a fair bit of money rather effectively in the weeks before the vote by renting an empty store in the town centre and manning a pretty display there, with the usual optimistic coloured maps that developers go in for. A number of people who had not been following arguments closely up to that point were favourably impressed by the selling job, for which the Residents Association offered no such counter except another pamphlet reiterating at tedious length their rationale, and although 700 people were to vote against the Bylaw, it is likely that the referendum was lost then and there.
A bit of humour and a bit of verse - I thought - might be timely as a cap to my own campaign. Fat chance. The following relatively impartial offering - impartial at least compared to what had been coming in - was handed in well in time, but never saw the light of day. I never got an explanation. But intimidation of the local press is all too easy in Hudson, and it had happened before.
[September 1989: unpublished]
Vote!
Arise ye women! trowel in hand,
Friends of the wildlife and the land,
Who want old Hudson to remain -
Unburied in suburban plain -
And vote against the Bylaw
Arise! ye hardened men of trade -
All good old boys of wisdom made,
Realists, sceptics, those who win -
To do all those do-gooders in,
And vote against all those against
The Bylaw
Arise! ye critics of the Council,
Each armed with briefcase and blue pencil.
Present your actuarial lumber
And stir us up from decent slumber,
With 40 points to make against
All those against all those against
The Bylaw
Rise up! ye wrathy Councillors
And sturdy fellows in the stores,
Who keep no track of "if" and "then",
But know dam well who are the bores
(For money is money, and men are men).
Just vote against all those against
All those against all those against
The Bylaw - (Got that?)
Envoi
But come, all you who know the score
(Who've heard those playground cries before:
"We'll take our properties away -
So vote our way, or we won't play")
Let love nor anger get your goat.
Think probabilities, and vote
And vote and vote and vote and vote -
And let's forget the Bylaw.
So that should have been that. The vote was taken and the Bylaw endorsed by some 900 to 700. However, when it was a good bit too late, there now appeared in traditional Anglo-Saxon fashion various pious statements from pretty divisive people about how unfortunately divisive the whole experience had been for this formerly friendly place. This disruption in the even tenor of our ways was of course really to be attributed - not to those who had attacked the status quo of zoning in a very large area - but to those who had resisted that quite formidable change.
Among the suddenly sad people were Councillor Ernie Frohloff, Sandy Edmison the point man for the Alstonvale syndicate, and the writer of a wonderfully hypocritical letter to the Gazette timed for the eve of the municipal election that followed 3 weeks later (which proved equally divisive); to whom I therefore addressed the following.
[The reference in this letter to the Editor's suppression of my verses, at the end of the fourth paragraph, was not unexpectedly suppressed in the version published.]
[1st November 1989]
Dear Sir,
Let me (along with I believe many others in Hudson) congratulate D. Tobin on his outspoken letter about the acrimony with which our affairs in Hudson have recently been conducted. It was surely wise that in a letter so brimming with goodwill, the writer should have refrained from mentioning any evidence of the complete falsehoods and half truths quite properly denounced therein.
It is outrageous indeed that an active, vociferous few should have transgressed our democratic rights and protections so far as to force on the town a costly referendum, in which their views were finally revealed to be supported by only seven hundred others, all of whom were clearly ignorant or misinformed or politically motivated or something.
Of course D. Tobin is not politically motivated. He (or she) merely wanted to ensure that the readers vote for the right people, not the wrong ones. One has to agree that it is monstrous that anyone at all should have the impudence to run for election, instead of accepting by acclamation some complete slate designed by the retiring council to gain control of our Town Hall, thus avoiding another costly process. (I have been trying, so as to avoid further acrimony, to echo the exact language used by D. Tobin.)
Clearly the recent divisiveness and acrimony are to be deplored. The remarks to this effect of Councillor Frohloff and Mr. Edmison, published since the Alstonvale vote, are positively saintly - they have prompted me to attempt another version of "When the Saints go marching in". And let me congratulate you also, Mr. Editor, for your own modest contributions to a restoration of confidence, with your timely publication on the eve of a vote of such conciliatory letters as D. Tobin's; and with your equally timely suppression, on the eve of a vote, of one of mine - which after all was on the wrong side, and moreover regrettably couched in execrable verse.
Seriously however I suggest this, to anyone who is really concerned about the social climate in Hudson. That you reflect to what extent your language and tone, when reacting to disagreements as they arise, take into account the absolute right of others to express their points of view, no matter how few or lonely they may be. And that you recognize the probability that they are as right as you are, or as wrong. Any real healer is aware of the probability of a mote in his or her own eye.
The right of a dissident to a hearing is certainly as good as anyone else's, on council or off, elected or unelected, and if you do anything to discourage it you are no democrat. By all means stand up to people, but don't put them down. This may be difficult under apparent provocation, of course. Genuine democracy is not easy to take, and it is not for nothing that it is for adults only. Yours etc.
The version of "When the Saints" I referred to - there - never did get published; but (why not?) I might as well put it in here for what it's worth - which isn't really very much.
[November 1989: unpublished]
Song for the Saints of Alstonvale
Oh when the Saints
Oh when the Saints
Oh when the Saints go movin' in!
I wanna have
Some of their numbers
When the Saints go movin' in!
And when the trees
And when the trees
And when the trees begin to fall!
I wanna have
Some of that lumber
When the trees begin to fall!
And when the grabs ... start lifting dirt
I wanna grab
Some of that pay dirt
When the grabs start lifting dirt.
And when those lots ... go up for sale
I would like
Some of those numbers
When those lots go up for sale.
But when their claims
But when their claims
But when their claims come home to roost!
I wouldn't want to be
Of their number
When their claims come home to roost!
Dogs' Do - and I Don't
" ' I don't ' what? " you might ask. I don't not like dogs.
Let me say that more emphatically, as there are some people - merely because I have made rather a thing at times about what some dogs do - who have believed otherwise: I DON'T not like dogs. Or to put it another way - I don't NOT like dogs.
I get along very well with nearly all dogs - we understand each other, especially as each of us, usually, knows our place. But bossy dogs, noisy dogs, and dogs who think their Place is round the hedge and in the middle of my lawn, do not with me - I do admit - strike a sympathetic chord.
I guess Hudson readers became very familiar with my position on this topic, as I tended to go on and on about it rather. In 1986 I fired an opening salvo at those huge animals that many newer residents seem to think necessary for their defence (and are usually kept behind de fence. Get it, eh?) in this wild frontier town:
The big loud dogs of Hudson
Are quite a fearful bore:
They lie about on porches,
Or lurk behind a door -
From where they bawl and shout and yell
At neighbour or at stranger,
And make you wonder where the hell
Is all the frightful danger?
They none of them could feed themselves,
They're not much fun to pat,
They're good at knocking children down
And bullying the cat.
Indulgently their owners say
They don't mean to offend -
(Who'd rather scare a thief away
Than welcome in a friend.)
Envoi
Soon we shall all, O Canada,
Be friendless, if quite free -
And have us German shepherds all
To stand on guard for thee!
Well, that appeared as a letter in the Hudson Gazette of 19th February 1986 (only the paper couldn't believe I meant that such dogs were "good at knocking children down" and ingeniously if rather inconsistently substituted "tracking children down"); and the next week there appeared in the Letters column a reply from Jill Baird, as independently-minded a lady as you can get, who never hesitated to speak out in defence of any natural thing when she felt it threatened by unnatural phenomena. In her book I was now clearly one of those. (I had not long before written that letter about the downtown "rural slum".)
John!
What can we do with you?
Who loves us not!
Our dogs.
Our cats.
Our streets.
Our ways.
In Hudson home the warmth of heart,
The very feel of being here,
From which you are
Apart. Jill Baird
I couldn't leave it, or her, at that. So, on 5th March -
Dear Sir,
To Jill I kneel in full contrition
For she has said, in phrases tart,
Hudson's a holy proposition
From which I am
Apart.
How damaging the preposition
With which such phrases start!
Might it not be a coalition
Of which I am
A part?
(And the Gazette managed to make that mysterious by printing the first line as "To fill I kneel...” Mind you, my handwriting -
(Then they had to bury the second verse several pages away near the Classifieds, so I am sure no one knew what I was talking about, including Jill.)
On 6th August of that year there had appeared a rather large token, by no means for the first time, right in the middle of my lawn. I tried to be careful to disguise some of my language about it; for this, as they always say, was a family newspaper -
Address to the Deaf
(written with great care, to avoid undue offence,
After cleaning my shoes)
Wilful and mindless canine beast
(I dare not mention dog)
Why have you crept upon my lawn
During your morning jog?
How would you like it if I came
And passed upon your kennel?
What if the neighbours' kids should dig
Through all your flowers a tunnel -
And spread your garbage in the street,
And carry on like jerks -
Run shrieking at your owner's feet
With fusillade of berks? -
Oh, would he not near blow his top,
Prating of discipline,
And summon parents and a cop
To come and run them in?
But should I do as you have done
He'd really do his nut -
And all because, on morning run,
I'd hit upon your shut.
A year later (21st October 1987) it was still happening, not altogether surprisingly, but this time I got lyrical and wrote a ballad, as Wordsworth had done under much less provocation -
Wordsworth in Hudson
Once more I alter mowing course,
Once more I use the trowel.
O Creature, shall I call thee Dog,
Or but a wandering Bowel?
In July 1988 I finally tumbled to what had been happening on Brisbane Avenue (where I live, in Hudson Heights) - and a remarkable but eminently satisfactory explanation it turned out to be -
A Nature Note from Higher Hudson
There's an elephant on Brisbane that's hardly ever seen.
You cannot tell where he will be - you only know he's been.
His spoor falls as the gentle rain upon my fresh-cut lawn,
And lies there gently steaming, in the fragrant hour of dawn.
Deep dappled in the bosky shade he whiles the hours away,
Whisking the flies at either end until the close of day -
Then tiptoes through the twilight along the quiet lane
And does his business where he will, on Avenue Brisbane.
So what, if sight of pachyderm has ne'er been proven here?
No mortal dog would ever leave so huge a souvenir.
The Eastern Arctic Elephant stands yet to be revealed -
In habit shy and reticent - prefers to stay concealed.
He never leaves a footprint, in damp earth or in snow.
Yet spoor is unmistakeable, and that is how I know
That Eastern Arctic elephants - though reticent and shy -
Adapting to environments, have now learned how to fly.
Thus through the blizzard, fog, or night, they glide their hidden way -
The coat in winter brilliant white, in spring a pearly grey -
And this is why no one has yet observed them come and go
To drop their gracious, warm giftlets upon the place below.
When something heavy's overhead - "A plane from Mirabel!",
How oft at night 'tis sagely said. Best mutter, "Is it hell!"
And best stand out from under there (where anything might fall)
As the elephant from Brisbane goes by to pay his call.
Odd Letters
To return now to the beginning of all this, it seems that some years passed before I hit my stride as a writer of letters to the Lake of Two Mountains Gazette, as it was then. The two letters below might be considered the first ones really comfortably written, which is not to say that I hadn't been nagging away, about twice or three times a year, before 1974.
Apart from my being a newcomer, there was another explanation for my having been on my best behaviour. As President of the Home and School in 1970-71, I had been in the public eye at a time of considerable parental upset about drugs (their first impact on Hudson), school uniforms, and the first of many proposed governmental and apparently lunatic reorganizations of school boards, that were to keep on creating crises, especially for Hudson, up through the 80's - never mind the continuing discontents of teachers and the consequent strikes.
As a professional, being a member of the Faculty of Education at McGill, I had always regarded these developments as on the whole positive - in Quebec at least, education was on the move - but that only meant I had to be pretty dashed careful in how I said anything on such topics to lay people. (I suppose various acquaintances will have a good laugh about the idea of me being careful.)
In 1971 or so I became a member of a Sub-committee of the Long Range Planning Committee, the large scale exercise led by Heinz Heinrich that had enlisted the energies and abilities of many residents in thinking about Hudson's future. It was intended to supplement the work of the Council, of which he was a member; but instead this enterprise seemed to offend some of his colleagues, who characteristically regarded it as a threat to their own powers. This sort of obtuse obloquy was to dog his footsteps for two decades thereafter.
The sub-committee I was on, however, submitted a report on the salting of roads which Council received quite amiably, adopting many of its recommendations in its subsequent policy. Clearly I had had this report in mind when writing the following letter; but it also represents things I felt then - including the feeling that a number of my wealthier fellow residents were part of the problem - that were still to be in the forefront 16 years later during the Alstonvale campaign.
Road salt and development [7th March 1974]
Dear Sir,
Mrs. Winston's letter was pretty timely - I think all of us are looking over our shoulders this winter at the development that we hear about on all sides. The striking thing for me about her letter was the part where the local councillor of this rural place being destroyed in Ontario made out to her that it was all a very good thing.
That seems so entirely typical of the whole scenario, so typical that we pass its utter perversity by without a murmur. Time and again a group apparently elected by all the people of a locality go right ahead and encourage things to happen that nobody really wants to happen; and in the end the whole point of their being there is destroyed. Gradually, of course. Each step is taken in good faith.
How does this come about? Take for instance the extraordinary salting of our roads this winter, which I have heard no-one say a good word for. If the majority of the residents of Hudson don't want salt on the roads - in fact positively detest it and its effects on pedestrians, dogs, cars, shrubs, hedges and trees - how is it that it is being done at all? It's not even as if this was something well-established and difficult to change because of vested interest; it has only just been brought in. A year or two ago we were getting on very well without it. There was a citizens' protest early last summer, and a joint committee of council and protesters was formed to investigate and recommend. I haven't heard of that committee since. Did they recommend this?
I don't suppose the present council started it just in order to benefit all those lads who belt around on our roads all weekend for something to do, just as they do in summer. There's an "economic" money reason somewhere. And there's a money reason in all the development too, of course. When commercial interests want something done, all resistance becomes half-hearted.
If having more people in the area means more business and money for a few people in the area, then no one seems able to put up a real argument. On the contrary, one does not deny a man his right to make a livelihood; if his livelihood depends on his making money, one cannot therefore get in his way. People seem unable in our age to distinguish between making a livelihood and making money.
And it must be very difficult for a councillor in Hudson to resist granting rights of money-making out here, when a great number of his constituents exercise those rights on a much larger scale each day in Montreal by making money there.
Yours etc.
The basic idea of the spoof that quickly followed the above was prompted by reflection on the huge quantities of salt then being poured on our roads and the insoluble fact that it doesn't simply go away, but stays in ground water wherever that goes to, which of course round here is the Lake. So if that built up over the years, then logically what would you get - but a salt-water lake. The rest ("entirely predictable" as I said with tongue in cheek) followed -
But it's interesting in a way, as with all such predictions, to discover how many changes along the route described here have either not taken place (not surprisingly, but thank God all the same) or have taken place in a manner entirely unforeseen by me. For I was trying.
So had the Town been trying, actually. As the context below suggests, there had been held, not long before, an information meeting for the town concerning a prettily illustrated plan which among other things had shown a "lagoon" in the middle of Stirling Simon 's farm. Stirling had expressed his views on this idea, which were not favourable, in his usual pithy fashion.
I have put in square brackets [] the occasional marker to indicate where things indeed now are.
Hudson's perhaps future [14th March 1974]
Dear Sir,
Organizations sometimes offer prizes for essay competitions about the future - "Canada in 2000" and so on - but the effect usually is to encourage people to indulge in pipe-dreams in which they merely escape from their current irritations.
I would like to see the Hudson Long Range Planning Committee or some such outfit sponsor a competition about Hudson in which the rules invite the imagination to play along somewhat more realistic lines, combining the unexpected with the entirely predictable - given that people are simply unlikely in the future to do anything effectively different from what they are doing now. In this way the writers and others may be less surprised and indignant when things actually turn out that way.
Something like this perhaps:
Twenty years from now [i.e. in 1994!], one of my sons is bringing one of his families back to see the old place. They turn off the old TransCanada with its rusty signs and float down the hill in their used hovercraft. Threading through the traffic swirling round the Snelgrove Plaza [4 Corners] - a popular place as its vast parking area testifies, built over the Metro stop on Route 17 [342] - he spins along the quaint 4-lane Boulevard St Charles between the massed bungalows screening the Whitlock Driving Range and Nature Trail on the one hand, and Simon's Farm [Shocan development] on the other. A glimpse of the latter at the foot of the hill gives him his first stab of memory, for the place seems unchanged (there is certainly no sign of any "dammed municipal lagoon").
Jostled between throngs of motor kites and minicars racing between the traffic lights, he nearly misses the old home [No. 97], now a rooming house for students at the CEGEP, with its plastic trees and hedges and worn astroturf littered with their snowmobiles and discarded computer tape. The playing fields of the school are now wholly occupied by the CEGEP's modern Contemplation Centre, with all-weather track and glassed-in swimming pool at the 15th floor, just below the landing pad and radio station.
With a sinking heart he turns on to Main.
The long lines of imitation elms carrying power lines and street lights are too straight and uniform to be convincing, even if some of the automatic foliage weren't out of phase - displaying reds, oranges, and yellows in the midst of July. A busload of tourists is just entering Mullan's Store, which looks brilliantly neat as a restored historic site. But further on, the town centre is now clearly a slum; the houses gone, the later commercial buildings replacing them no less ugly than the earlier ones, the bowling alley [destroyed by fire, June 1973; replaced years later by Gramegna's Garden Centre] still roofless though there are signs of squatters, the sky dark with the tangle of power lines.
He suddenly speeds up the ramp to the bridge [a bridge was indeed threatened at the time] over to Mirabel, ignoring the noisy grief of his children, who have spotted the Funfair at the Yacht Club, for he only wants to get away. But at this height he has a wonderful view down the river in each direction, even to where the town ends and the trees begin again, and he notes with nostalgic approval the sails dotting its surface - though rather more crowded than before. There are all the lobster boats and the popular cod-fishing excursions plying busily from Mallette's Wharf, that splendid imitation of an old-time Maine anchorage.
The wave-making machine under the Ile aux Tourtes bridge is in action, and as the breakers roll in among the bathers on the Quarry Point beaches, he reflects with pleasure on that stroke of provincial genius that had made the best of a bad business and turned the salt-laden waters of the Lake of Two Mountains into a full-scale inland sea - with tides controlled from Carillon, free of pollution from oil-spills, and enhancing Montreal as the tourist centre par excellence of eastern Canada...
Well, maybe someone else can take it from there.
Yours etc.
If the letter that follows were to be included at all - on the grounds that it makes, quite well, points that still deserve attention in Hudson - then this would seem to be the place even if it is out of the time sequence, having been written in 1981, some seven years later.
I'd have to admit, however, that the doom and disaster scenario for trees that I drew up here has hardly been borne out by the evidence before our eyes ten years later, even though the study we had made drew upon the best scientific evidence available. 'Twas ever thus for the well-intentioned environmentalist; the gods of science are not as much in control as God Himself, or Herself, or Itself, in fact is.
Also about salt [22nd January 1981]
Dear Sir,
Mr. Seybould's letter is timely. On walks around Hudson I have noticed that the salting of roads is now being done not only more intensively but also more extensively than I believe the Town's guidelines should permit.
The Council in 1975 named certain main roads and one or two very steep places to be given "bare pavement" treatment (meaning salt). In addition, junctions of roads were to be so treated. Otherwise, residential roads were to be ploughed and graded and treated if necessary with abrasives only, to meet the criterion of "safety with reasonable care". I do not recall Birchhill, Wilson Avenue, Fairhaven, and Cavagnal Crescent, to name a few, being designated as bare pavement roads permitting "speed with safety".
As Mr. Seybould observes, salt is pretty expensive, both before and after use. It has permanent consequences that are literally incalculable. Carried into clay soil by water, it does not leave it as water does but simply accumulates year by year, decade by decade. It kills many kinds of trees, especially maples, and its long term effects on other vegetation are certainly harmful.
Left in the heavy, unmelted concentrations I have been seeing, it actually encourages the formation of ice, and of greater than normal slippery conditions, by attracting and retaining water and even raising the freezing point. It increases the frequency of thaw and refreeze and so breaks up road surfaces more quickly. There are many other unwelcome effects.
When the study was made in response to which the Council's decisions were taken in 1975, we found that each mile of road in Hudson had received an average of 34 tons of salt over the previous three years. Of course main roads have since continued to be salted. Since 1971 then, one may estimate that each mile of main road has received over 100 tons, most of which must still be in the immediate neighbourhood. That's one ton every 17 yards. Imagine all those sacks standing there!
I live on a main road, but my trees die on it. Anyone who lives along a road where salt is now being strewn, but should not be, has reason to assume that damage is being done to his property - even with ditches around, because you never know the routes taken by ground water. I don't think we should let it go on, just so that we may indulge that imperious lack of patience to which we feel entitled by virtue of getting about by machinery. Yours etc.
When we first came to Hudson the lights on the roads were pleasantly dim and yellow and about 40 watts, indicating at best where the road was and otherwise interfering not at all with whatever Nature wanted to do about our getting around at night. I remember watching fabulous aurora displays from the front steps, and quiet fragrant nights of starlight. This of course wouldn't do.
With little warning that I was aware of, our houses one night in 1975 were discovered to be bathed in brilliant blue light from the front, and the gardens at the back washed in pale grey as in an eclipse of the sun. Mayor Bradbury, who liked to surprise his electorate - or at least preferred not to let them know what he had in mind - had pulled off in secret another municipal coup. Everywhere, except in Como and in a defiant bit of Mount Victoria, the place now lay exposed like a prison camp.
There had followed a week or two of public statements, from the Police Chief, and from Councillor Putnam in his column called Council Corner, in explanation or should I say extenuation of the installation of new lighting, though not of the manner in which it had been done.
Nights with lights, and a lonely firefly [19th June 1975]
Dear Sir,
No one asked for them, but now they're here I suppose we have to make the best of it. It's not that they don't offer some unexpected if bizarre advantages. Anyone can walk comfortably about my house at night now without turning on a light; the other night I gave myself a bowl of cereal - found a spoon, selected my packet, spread enough sugar and poured the right amount of milk, all without hesitation in what we formerly called the dark. I might have read a book at the window without trouble (though not with much pleasure either; I'd rather have been asleep).
But as I stood there in the kitchen, my eye hypnotically transfixed by the distant purplish glare of one of the dozen new lights across the field, I became aware of something else in the stillness. A firefly, winking past a nearby bush. There must have been others, for it was one of those magical, warm, glimmering nights we used to have when nature holds its breath, but in that wan, blue-bleached haze I had not seen them.
Was the sky starlit - who knows? I would have had to drive up to St Lazare to find out.
As I stood there I realized that apart from the fireflies nothing was astir in all the township round. There had been no traffic for hours - perhaps one car had passed along the Côte road - and yet the lights blazed on along every street of Hudson like the perimeter lights along barbed wire in some great concentration camp. Now this was bloody ridiculous.
Not only have these blinding lights been foisted upon us, so that there can be hardly a house or garden in the place that is not invaded by their unwinking stare, but this inexplicable surveillance continues long past the hour when anyone conceivably needs it, to ensure that our country night is utterly stamped out. Here we are out in Hudson living as though in the middle of Decarie Circle. When the leaves are down in wintertime it will all be for many more hours of night, and far less bearable. Say goodbye to the auroras, in their awesome silences; and hayrides no more.
What, O Town Council, is the point? And please don't bring up "vandalism". If Mr. Putnam knew how often I, and many like me, have felt the urge to smash every one of those things in sight, he might change his mind about their probable effect on that kind of crime.
Let me propose, since we have them up now, that a balance be struck between the needs of those who dash up and down our roads in cars and the needs of the rest of us who have quieter expectations of life in Hudson. Let's turn all those lights off between 11 at night and 6 in the morning. Why not? Cars have headlights after all.
And what is the evidence about "vandalism" - is Mat Night any worse than it used to be? Is it a question between saving on police or on amenity? Or is it the case that Hydro Quebec, rumoured to be the donor of this dubious bounty, would put difficulties in the way of our running up smaller electricity bills than they had planned for us?
I am entirely serious in making this proposal. I believe our Council owe it to us, after acting without warning or consultation in installing these lights - an ominous precedent - to make genuine restitution of some of the amenities of which we have been suddenly and arbitrarily deprived.
Yours etc.
Nobody on Council really listened to this laboriously prepared and lengthy document. Instead, they probably gave credit to the much simpler and - I had to admit - rhetorically far more effective letter from our neighbour Gwen Rattray, that appeared the next week. Who couldn't help liking Gwen and Don, the former Principal to whom the High School owed its glory days?
[26th June 1975]
Dear Sir,
Let there be light all over the world, especially in front of our house. Love it. Thank you Hudson. Gwen Rattray
It had been Don Rattray who had headed up the Citizens' Committee (or some such title) that had selected the slate of good men and true - and, in a really progressive move, for Hudson, one woman! - to run for this Council in 1973. At the time it had seemed a good idea, for the committee were an outstanding group of people.
But actually of course, as all such ostensibly friendly variants on genuinely democratic procedure are condemned to be, it wasn't a good idea. This Council proceeded to behave no differently from all the others that were to follow up till the present; and I have been surprised, reading these letters over again, to what extent we were all doomed to repeat ourselves over these two decades, I suppose because no-one in Town Hall had time to listen between elections.
(Warning: if you are only vaguely interested in the story of our municipal politics, reading this letter could be terminal. Most of it has been said elsewhere in these letters. It was the fact of the repetition itself that seemed interesting to me.)
Election slates [15th September 1977]
Dear Sir,
I hear we are shortly to have elections for the Town Council. I hope we do.
I hope we do not have, as we did last time, some arrangement whereby our councillors are virtually chosen for us, no doubt in a well-intentioned way, so that candidates who have not succeeded in some private process of selection by a group of 'in' people start out with a clear disadvantage in any voting that does take place. Such processes, while perhaps saving good candidates the embarrassment of having their merits and failings publicly discussed in the competitive atmosphere of an election, have the effect - disastrous for the community at large - of rendering those who thus almost automatically become councillors virtually indifferent to the wishes of those who should have voted for them - or at least under great temptation to be indifferent.
I think we have been well served in Hudson by councillors ... One can be the more sympathetic with people in these burdensome offices when, as happens too often, an issue arises over which the councillors and the electorate are suddenly in confrontation, and they are subjected to torrents of argument tinged with suspicion, derision, or downright hostility, and sometimes characterized by plain ignorance of the facts.
At such times one may hear a bitter reference or two to the public's ignorance and ingratitude. These however are the common lot of public office, and those who seek it have no reason to expect the rewards of a universal popularity. On the other hand, it is their job to act in the interests of the electorate, and in the long run it is the electorate alone who can judge how well this has been done. This does not always seem to be understood or accepted in Hudson, and the verdict of the electorate is too often evaded or ignored, or sought if at all only under some compulsion and with reluctance.
It is on matters to do with the future of this town that the Council has time and again got completely out of touch with the wishes of the residents. Admittedly, it is a topic that arouses a great deal of anxiety, and anxiety does not make for rationality. Yet the Council has always appeared to be taken by surprise by the storms aroused by its actions in this area and seems in turn to have acquired its own neurotic anxiety, to avoid them by any available means. Correspondingly, the Council's own position on the future has never been remarkable for its rationality.
It has repeatedly claimed that its actions are governed by concern to preserve the 'semi-rural' character of the place. But what does semi-rural mean to a Council that suddenly and covertly instals an urban system of lighting on all roads major and minor (except where the electorate has gone out of its way to resist it), and seem to do nothing to prevent the deterioration of the town centre into the standard North American small town commercial slum?
'Semi-rural' on the face of it means that at least half of the area remains country, with fields and woods. But the Council's latest action is to urge the rezoning of two large portions of land from agricultural to residential, without recommending any compensatory designation of land as agricultural to restore the balance. There seems to be some belief that you can build houses all over a piece of land in such a way that it remains semi-rural. This is not the definition of the term that is shared by the people who have been objecting. No matter how large the lots, how posh the houses, and how winding the roads on it, that land has ceased to be rural in any sense when it is 'developed' for residences. Fairhaven is not rural; it is not semi-rural; it is suburban in character, as we all know.
There is another failure in rationality going about, the idea that we must be fair to those who own this agriculturally zoned land and who counted on developing it. Apart from the question of being fair as well to those of us who had counted on the amenities of Hudson being kept reasonably intact, there seems to be no question of depriving the owners of anything they have at the moment. They lose nothing. A failure to rezone might 'deprive them' of something they had hoped to gain ...
It is not the function of a Council to ensure that those who take such risks be rewarded. If everyone who owns such land is to be ensured of making a gain from it, where is the risk? ...
The restoration of understanding between residents and the people who ought to represent them - indeed the restoration of representation - is what I am anxious to see brought about in November. It is quite wrong that so many able and experienced people in the community feel frustrated about its future. One of the most regrettable features of the last few years was the suppression by Council of the active volunteer citizens' committees on long-range planning, the dismantling of the structure that had so enterprisingly set them up, and their conversion into the present Town Planning Commission. There was little future in that.
Yours etc.
You'd think I was talking about Alstonvale. Twelve years later exactly the same points were still being made, and the Town Council (under the same Mayor) had still done nothing at all about planning the future or meeting these arguments. In a capitalist society the unseen, powerful engine that drives municipal politics is Real Estate Development, as I guess we should have known.
(It is now as I write July 1990, and the dramatic events in Oka seem to draw the moral: the one really successful way to stop the otherwise inexorable march of development, is to create a Warrior Society. The Residents Association of Hudson should have recruited one, though perhaps not from its own ranks -)
The town centre: 3 to 2 against [31st July 1980]
Dear Sir,
The town centre has lost a great deal of character in the last 20 years, but not to the extent that much of it cannot be recovered. An examination of the main visual features of that area as it was recently defined by the Council has convinced me that the resolute application of two lines of policy - one on parking places and the other on trees - can restore our town centre within the decade to a condition that both tradesmen and residents can live with in comfort and pride.
At present, between Elm and McNaughton on Main Road, the number of disfigured and disfiguring buildings exceeds the number of agreeable ones by a count of 31 to 24. If we add to the former number those lots which once did hold a building but have since become parking lots, the ratio is 36 to 24, or 3 to 2. This is clearly a very adverse balance in terms of the amenity which has usually attracted people to Hudson in the first place.
Of those 31 disfigured or disfiguring buildings, 14 are potentially agreeable, being originally residential and not built for the commercial purposes they now serve. The rest were and are out of tune with the original architecture of the place, though one or two are not intrinsically phoney or disagreeable. All of the 31 are devoid of the setting that makes the other 24 (some of them also commercial in function) agreeable and domestic - a setting of grass and shrubbery or trees extending to the road. Each, whether originally residential or not, now stands bleakly in a barren plain of asphalt or gravel.
Now if those 14 buildings that were once part of the residential ambiance were to have restored to them the frontage setting of personally tended greenery they once had, they would count on the other side of the ledger. It would then read 38 to 17 in favour of the original appearance of Hudson, or over 2 to 1. A transformation, really. Those businesses would incidentally become appreciably more attractive to new customers, as those which care for their front yards are already.
But what about their parking, the reason for the destruction of front gardens? The answer to that must lie in adequate but municipally supplied parking within 100 yards or so of every business in the town centre. It is encouraging to see the Council moving in this direction, with a reduced size of centre, and a start made with an attractive parking lot at Selkirk and Main. We need one or two more of these, possibly in existing lots (I nominate Lake Motors) so there may be much less reason for the almost universal desert of asphalt that has taken over the town like the sands of the Sahara after a decade of drought.
This desert, by personal count, now accounts for over half of the street frontage of our town centre, and is the main reason for it looking like the standard North American truck stop. If nothing is effectively done about it - and admittedly there are difficulties - then things will get worse. Cars, trucks and motorcycles now roam at will over the whole area, whereas for those on foot or bicycle it is a tense and miserable place, to be avoided if possible.
Cars are killing Hudson's character while filling its cash registers. They must be accommodated, but they must also be controlled. It may seem absurd to talk about establishing parking lots in a town where no driver has any trouble finding a spot, but it is the only way to justify requiring businesses to restore their frontages to greenery and decent sidewalks, where a mother may push her pram without fear, and a man may in confidence walk his dog.
The second policy I advocate is easier to follow and simpler to describe. In that same stretch of Main Road between Elm and McNaughton, there remain 54 trees of any size near the roadside. Against this set the 30 utility poles and 13 other poles of various function. There are thus great gaps of denuded skyline against which these poles become prominent, with all their tasteless tangle of rigging and line; and there are 27 stumps and dying trees, not counting the relics asphalted over, to show what has never been replaced.
Town Hall's record on this is no credit to it: words, but not action. It has connived at fellings, and at thefts of the trees planted by COPE. The two young trees planted at the entrance to Manoir Cavagnal are both dead. A tree by the Town Hall is dying. All this can be changed easily enough, but it needs resolution, for trees need persistent care in a hostile environment of asphalt and salt. A few shrubs, marigolds and petunias set for one summer on a stone wall are nice but no substitute - consider the fate of the shopping centre's erstwhile "garden".
It will take very little money and effort to make a lot of difference in a few years' time, but there must be some resolve. Let us hope the Council can create it. One tree fills more of the eye than a pot of flowers. We are grateful for the flowers, but let there be trees again.
Yours etc.
Criticism is never welcome especially in a small town, and the standard line of defence to people like me (and there were many) was the not unusual one that the people who had been around longer knew better. (What they really knew better was each other.) But by this time I had turned 60 and had been around the world a bit, and this line of chat, from editorials in the Gazette and from Town Hall, was beginning to pall.
Some finally patronising remark, by whom now forgotten, must have triggered this one. Howie Putnam, perhaps, in his well-written column Council Corner, or Ron Jones, the wholly amiable Editor, whose prose however was in itself a pleasantly Hudsonian curiosity. The education scene of the time was in its usual turmoil, drastically aggravated by a precipitous fall in the school age population, and the Orwellian Ministry of Education of Quebec - gargantuan, francophone, and remote - was an easy target for anglophone caricature.
"Local Age" [14th August 1980]
Dear Sir,
After leaving the Council meeting the other night, I ran into an old acquaintance having a drink, one of the whiz kids at the Ministry of Education. As you may know, I'm in that line of business myself. I told him how the Councillors had been pretty upset because they were in the dark about what was being built up at the Mount Pleasant school. His response surprised me.
"Ah, they have reason. That's going to be a pretty big job."
"How come?" I said. "I thought you guys were closing everything down. Not enough kids."
"Oh, we've solved all that. It's the New Solution - it was staring us in the face and we couldn't see it. Actually, it was your people in Hudson here who had the answer all along."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, see, of course there are fewer and fewer kids of 5 to 16 years old, what we've been calling School Age, right enough. But what we were hung up on was the idea that 'age' had to mean biological age, eh? - the number of years since you were born? But now we've adopted the concept of Local Age. It's simple really."
"Local Age?"
"Yeah. Local Age is the number of years a person has been in the locality he's in now. Like when your Mr. Bradbury or Mr. Jones tells someone she doesn't know what she's talking about because she has only been in Hudson 10 years or something, while they've been here 28 or 50 or whatever, you know? It's brilliant - "
"Well - yes. But - "
"So all we've had to do in the Ministry is make this minor change in the definition, nothing else. All the legal structure's there already. Those people with a local age of less than 16 are gonna have to go back to school. Do you realise what it means? It's fabulous! More buildings, all those teachers back at work, big expansion in the Ministry, promotions. It's really going to set thing up great, for years to come."
"But you can't do that!"
"Sure we can. We've done it - just waiting for the next session to confirm it. You've been doing it in Hudson for years."
"But these people have all been to school already, university even. What are you going to teach them?"
"Yeah, well that's called for some ingenuity, I can tell you. We're going to have to hire more teachers of course, and they all have to have a sufficient local age themselves, so we're a bit limited in these times. We tried to get your Mayor to do the Civics course but he's pretty busy. So we've hired a bunch of fellows to do it as a team - "
And he mentioned a few names.
"But you can't use them! For Civics, yet! Those guys hang out at the Chateau all the time, and go racketing around on motor bikes and cars, waking everybody up."
"I don't know anything about that. They've all got a local age of over 20, so they're qualified to be teachers under the Act."
"But they act like a bunch of kids. And you're going to have them teach all those people twice their age - the biggest age group here, too, according to the Mayor."
He corrected me. " - Twice their age biologically, that's all. Half their local age, remember, and that's what's in the Act."
A thought seemed to strike him. "So they act like kids, eh? That's interesting. Is that why your town centre looks like a school playground, asphalt all round the buildings? Must make a great track."
"Gee," I said, "I've just realised I've been in Hudson only 14 years. By your count, that puts me about Grade 10, right?"
"Yeah, and you'd better watch it when you write those letters to the editor. Mr. Jones is going to be your English teacher."
I paused, taking things in, gulping a bit. He got up to go.
"You know," I said, "this is going to make a difference to those Council meetings on Monday nights. All those people with their petitions won't be there. They'll all have homework to do."
"Except for one thing," he said, picking up his natty brief case. "You forget the pre-schoolers. Under 5, the schools can't take them. Question time with the Mayor is going to sound more like a kindergarten than ever. See ya!" Yours etc.
Odd, but even verse
The following needs not only an explanation but also an abject apology - for drawing it to anyone's attention. It was aimed at the St James Choir, to which I belonged for some years as a strictly journeyman tenor. We had been rehearsing under Mike Ellis for the annual Christmas Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, and not for the last time Mike had been trying to dissuade us from the usual sloppy diction when singing that all too familiar (and rather sloppy) carol "Away in a Manger", with all its sliding notes that can drag ordinary syllables out to excruciating lengths.
But in vain. Tradition and nostalgia held their indomitable ground, and we continued to swoop and swoon all over the shop whatever Mike did, omitting final consonants and breathing all wrong. So I thought it might be fun to let people see what we sounded like, in print -
Chris Miss Karl [no date: unpublished]
(ritnbye junkie hah leh)
Ah weigh-in aha main je,
Noho cri fore ahbeh,
Thuhu lih till or cheese as layheh downiz wee ted.
The stahzin thehe bryce guy
Luhooctown wary lay,
Thuhuh lih till or cheese erz ahaslee pon the hay.
I like to feel that this is the version, promptly adopted with enthusiasm, that has been sung to this day.
The song below is clearly nothing to do with Hudson, for who in Hudson would admit - as my friend in Knowlton Tony Stephenson freely did - that all her acquaintances had but three things in common: widowhood (grass, golf, or otherwise), a desire to end that lonely state as soon as possible, and a habit of playing tennis with a view to that end?
Maybe Knowlton is more sophisticated than Hudson, its rival in English gentility, or more candid in its habits (being nearer the American border), or has a much higher spousal casualty rate (suspicious, that); but I would bet a case of Scotch that you wouldn't find at the Royal Oak Sunday tea even one among those sprightly ladies of mature years, in their immaculate tennis whites, to acknowledge that she fitted the cheerful bill described by Tony - let alone the figure of seventy-one given by Tony. (As figures go, Tony's is impeccable.)
Song for the Widows of Knowlton
(or for those of Royal Oak -) [no date: unpublished]
The 71 Widows of Knowlton
Are far from the meadows of Spring,
But the single man coming to Knowlton
Will be handed his heart in a sling.
For the widows of Knowlton play hardball -
Watch out for their backhanded volleys -
And they'll put all your wits in a garble
Serving tea, with topspin, from their trolleys.
And whatever the ladies have said, man,
Say nothing, and do nothing rash.
Try returning stuff over their heads, man -
They'll put it away with a smash.
Yes, the widows of Knowlton want partners,
With faults, whether double or none:
Love 15 - Love 30 - Love 40 -
(Play continues till Love 71).
The coming of spring has many joys, much celebrated in literature and especially by the poets. But few of those poets have lived in modern Quebec, with its own peculiar, and subtle, linguistic flourishes.
Cahots [2nd April, 1987]
How pleasant in the spring to know
'Y a du danger des cahots,
And watch poor unilingual clots
Collapse their cars on the cahots!
There was this surge in real estate business in the years of 1986 to 1989, and many new houses were built in and around Hudson, besides the steady boom in sales of existing houses. You got the feeling that living here had become a business deal of some kind, and that a lot of your new neighbours were merely playing the market in posh properties, on this earth to make a profit out of wherever they chose to live. For so much of what they did with their houses and lots seemed to be for show rather than for comfort.
This of course translated in no time into apparent social ratings, and conspicuous consumption was what kept you up with the Joneses. Boats in the harbour got huger and huger. If only they'd all known it, our own Hudson Joneses were anything but conspicuous (at least in consumption; you could actually see Ron a mile off) and lived rather modestly. I thought I might try and put people's ideas on social standing in the right Hudsonian perspective, having got fed up trying to hoe the tussocks out of my rotting macadam -
[30th September 1987]
Dear Sir,
I wonder if the Welcome Wagon would care to include the following song in the material to be dished out to newcomers in the neighbourhood? I might even be persuaded, for a small fee, to supply a recording, accompanying myself on the social and cash registers.
Grass in your Driveway: a Snob Song
You've financed this mansion in Hudson
and you really like it here -
You love the boutiques and the gift shops
and the country atmosphere.
You've joined both the Yacht and the Whitlock (your cruiser's sufficiently long),
But - first check the grass in your driveway
to see if you do belong.
You've landscaped the guts from the garden;
laid turf in a flat green floor;
A river of smooth black treacle runs
right up to the smooth front door;
There are flowers in cute little barrels; but -
you may just have got things wrong,
For if grass doesn't grow in your driveway, sir,
you simply don't belong.
Just hang on around for twenty years
till your garage slews askew,
And the paint flakes off the swimming pool fence,
and the dogs keep coming through,
And the wiring rusts in the carriage lamps,
and the weeds in the lawn grow strong,
Till the grass grows at last in your driveway -
Then you really shall belong!
Yours etc.
I don't think the owners of Mullan's have ever forgiven me for the following little squibs, especially the second one. They were proud of the fresh paint job they had just done, after a change of ownership within the family. But I was by no means the only person in Hudson who was a bit shocked by the vivid sky-blue applied overnight to what was already probably the most conspicuous historic building in the town - conspicuous both for its position confronting the foot of the Côte and for its varied associations as a centre for the community. For it has served at different times as church, post office, or school as well as general store.
People accordingly felt a personal affection for it, and still do. But a dépanneur has to live, and they certainly drew attention with that paint job, having already been frustrated by the Town over the electric sign they had tried out two years before - to which the first verse below had reacted. Perhaps I wasn't the only person, however, who for a long time felt really reluctant to enter the place to buy anything.
[2nd July 1986]
After Wordsworth
(rather a long way after, actually)
My heart sinks down when I behold
The sign on Mullan's store:
I don't know quite why I should fret
(I haven't even read it yet)
The thing just leaves my cuspids cold
And my eyes sore.
I wonder if they'll take a bet -
How many cars will fail to stop,
And end still goggling half inside the shop?
.
A Ballad [25th September 1988]
Your roof is red
Your walls are blue -
Dépanneur Mullan
Why should I love you?
Traffic
Since I lived on the Côte I always had a lot to say about traffic, its noise and speed, so this letter touches on what was to become a familiar theme. It also illustrates my habit of trying to be funny in earnest; I shall spare the present reader some of the didactics. Curiously, the passage of the years has made no apparent difference to the awful habits of many bicyclists; they oughtn't to survive, y | |
