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| The smell of money... |
Chapter Eight
Lennox was a small, grimy, northern industrial town…
With a population of sixty-eight thousand, Lennox was a small, grimy, northern industrial town.
Geographically sprawling and covering a diversity of terrain, one minute you were downtown, and then you were out in the country in about five minutes. At times, it felt like there were three times as many cars on the road, but not three times as many roads.
As the city matured and prospered, development had moved out of the core and up the lakeshore to the northeast. The southwest tended to be big, Victorian homes converted to low-rent apartments. While there were a few enclaves of nicely-restored period homes, for the most part the southwest corner of the city was working class bordering on slum. This is where the social assistance recipients lived, the disabled, and the mentally ill, as well as those who preyed upon them.
Everyone else was working-poor, or the elderly, or on unemployment, or just plain criminals.
Due to the large percentage of single-family units and the age of the community, it was well-treed, with large maples, oaks, sycamore, and ash. Many were beautiful old trees, some of impressive size and girth. The newer neighborhoods to the northeast, the so-called estate lots, were treeless. They were built on prime farmland. This black-soil former wetland was capable of growing truck vegetables such as potatoes, cabbages and onions. That part of the city was mostly floodplain and former marsh habitat. It had been drained by ditching and the re-routing of creeks in a previous century.
Lennox was a study in contrasts. In the southwest, it was a sprawling mixture of heavy petro-chemical industry and post-industrial decay. This included abandoned properties of all sizes. The impoverished neighborhoods were here, not least of which was the Nassagewaya Reserve, composed of several thousand hectares of woodland within the city limits. It was also completely surrounded by chemical plants.
In the far, far northeast, the homes were tucked under oaks. Gently-rolling terrain indicated former dunes, and there were savannah-like grasslands around ponds and creeks. Here the homes ranged from a few hundred grand up into the millions.
The southeastern part of the city was still farmland.
While not exactly pristine wilderness, it was pastoral and placid, complacent even as smokestacks loomed tall on the western horizon. These people held stewardship. They were stewards of the land. In some cases, maybe the same land and the same family for a hundred and fifty years. To them, city people, even those who might hold the same job for thirty or forty years, or who might own family businesses that had been going for three or four generations, well, they seemed flighty, or transient, to the farmer’s way of thinking.
Tucked away like a zoo in the northwest corner, lay the village of Port Harold.
The village had successfully resisted the city’s amalgamation bid, whereas the former Lennox Township hadn’t. The result of amalgamation was a geographically-sprawling municipality, considering its small population. Brubaker wondered at times if the city fathers hadn’t bitten off rather more than they could chew in their efforts to grow their tax-base.
According to some guy named Boucette on the Ben Cockburn P-CAC interview show, “Streetcar neighborhoods generate income for the city, and sprawling suburban housing units are a black pit, a sinkhole for tax dollars.”
Bru had figured it out.
If a suburban home has a hundred feet of frontage, then it takes a hundred feet of sewer pipe to connect two units, right? A hundred feet of road, a hundred feet of curbing, a hundred feet of this, and a hundred feet of that.
In the old-fashioned neighborhoods, the businesses on the ground floor paid taxes. Units above those businesses paid taxes. Everyone in the neighborhood, rich or poor, agreed on the need for day care, Boucette had said. In the suburbs, family values are now inward-looking.
Brubaker immediately thought of the city bus service. The people in China Grove at the far northeast boundary had been screaming for bus service for years. The one time the city attempted it on an experimental basis, ridership was so low, it was a fiasco. It was discontinued. Yet a few people in China Grove were still agitating for the bus service, even with $769,000 homes, their SUV’s and BMW’s. They all had sixty-foot boats sitting in the driveway on trailers. Many had mobile homes that cost more than a small working-class house in the south end.
What was the real problem? They didn’t like paying taxes that went to support bus service in the rest of the city, not if they weren’t getting it too. That was the new family values.
The same thing with day care. Why pay taxes to make spaces for poor people’s kids in daycare? The middle class hated, feared and loathed the poor, even as they condemned single moms on welfare for not trying to make some kind of better life for their children. They were expected to work for minimum wage, pay a babysitter, and take the bus to work.
So far, every attempt to build new geared-to-income housing in Lennox had failed.
The neighbors always said, to quote, We’re afraid it will affect our property values.
Property values were the only values they had.
Chemical Alley.
“Fucking jerks.”
Bru had a lot of time on his hands, and spent much of it thinking.
Situated at the southern end of Lake Kandechio, the St. Irene River drained south to Lake Goddawannapiss, and hence to the St. Lawrence. Located on the west bank of the St. Irene River was the U.S. town of Port Nugent, Michigan. The two cities were joined by the double span of the Clearwater Bridge. In the days of his youth, Brubaker and friends often walked over the bridge to Port Nugent, but those innocent days were long gone.
With Free Trade, long line-ups, and the sheer volume of traffic, foot and bicycle traffic were no longer permitted on the bridge. A yearly marathon run occurred, which took in both towns. To the average Canadian, the American obsession with terror threats made cross-border shopping harder. You might have four hours of waiting to cross the bridge both ways. No one took terrorism seriously in Lennox.
Frank Brubaker used to cross the river to buy a gallon of milk. What some people will do to save fifty cents. Those days were gone.
Like many such events, the marathon took place on a Sunday morning. Diane ran in it last year, and hoped to do it again. Another tradition was dead, the cross-river swim, which Brubaker had watched as a boy. With the number of ships and pleasure craft on the river, it was just too dangerous. The memory of two hundred swimmers diving into the river, about a kilometre wide in Bru’s estimation at that point, was definitely worthwhile.
His old man had swam (or swum) the river, but only once, and with a couple of King Scouts rowing a rented dory alongside as he stroked across. That must have been about 1947.
“We used to swim bare-ass right in Lennox Bay, there at the Foot of King George V Street.” So said Frank Brubaker.
Lennox was supported by the petrochemical industry, much of it built in 1942 at the height of World War II. Polycor, a Crown Corporation, had produced synthetic rubber for the war effort, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour cut off supplies of natural rubber from the plantations of southeast Asia. The company had been located in Lennox due to the presence of Colonial Oil, original developers of the Oil Wells discovery, (after buying out and amalgamating with others.) Eventually Chemical Alley was comprised of twenty major companies and dozens of smaller, ancillary operations. The Polycor Corporation had been bought and sold a dozen times since then.
With pipeline links to Alberta, and major refiners to the east, tank farms, lots of big power plants and transmission lines, railway tracks and superhighways, Lennox had a declining population, and a low birthrate. The residents of Lennox were getting older.
A few cute little imports and not much else.
During the Cold War, it was common talk that the Soviets were targeting Lennox as a major strategic site.
Perhaps that was mostly ego talking.
In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, there was plenty of work, and the standard of living was high. The first oil crunch in 1973 had brought a few small import cars. Otherwise there was hardly a ripple in the collective consciousness. The recessions of the eighties and the nineties, and the noughts, had their effect. Yet life soldiered on pretty much as before. The bars did their business, the hockey club persisted, and the youthful cruised around in hot cars.
Lovers leapt, while old folks and kitty-cats slept.
The residents of Lennox seemed blithely unaware that change could happen. Perhaps they believed that if it did happen, it could only be for the better. Like maybe some big foreign automaker would come in and set up a manufacturing plant that would create thousands of high-paying jobs, and attract new investment, save the city from bankruptcy, and stop everyone’s kids from moving away for no good reason at all.
END
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