Derelict

Sometimes it’s better to take the long way home.  I often find myself driving less-traveled road when I have the time, sometimes to clear my mind, sometimes to let the song on the radio finish, and occasionally to just watch the countryside.  It’s interesting seeing the view for no other purpose but to ‘see’ it.  I mentioned that I only get to do this when I have time.  Who has time?  When do I have time?  There is less and less of it these days.  I never seem to have time to do the things I want.  I have had a hard time making time to write this blog entry.  Maybe the problem is making the effort to afford the time to do things.  Sometimes it’s just not possible.

When I finally get the time conundrum sorted out and I drive through the countryside, I look for certain things.  I have a fascination with old buildings.  They can be anything; maybe an old barn, an abandoned house, a shed hanging in tatters behind an otherwise well-maintained property, maybe a tree house no longer played in by children.  Buildings are like senior citizens.  They have withstood all the storms of life, and yearn to be needed still while they wait. 

As a child, my Aunt Madelyn (actually my great-aunt, but she was close to me like an aunt) had a cottage near our house.  The cottage was sky-blue coloured, and was bungalow shaped with two great, big old-fashioned windows with the small square panes.  She had storm windows that I used to help her install and remove when I was a little older.  The walls were brown paper and cardboard, and there was running water only in the small sink in the kitchen, primed by a pump every spring and shut off so as not to freeze the pipes in the fall.  There was a matching blue outhouse out back, and it was the worst abomination you’ve never seen.  Outhouses are nasty, but this one seemed claustrophobic, musty, and occasionally was home to grass snakes and all assortments of insects.  I used it only when it was strictly necessary.  She used to poke fun at me for being afraid of it!

Auntie Madelyn passed away in the spring of 1992.  She was found in her home on her way back from the bathroom (a real bathroom); presumably she had suffered a fatal heart attack and never made it back to bed.  She died on Mom’s birthday, and to this day Mom swears she died specifically on a day that everyone would remember.  Which of course isn’t true, but if you knew her spirit, you might just be inclined to agree.  She had diabetes, and a long history of heart trouble, so it wasn’t a total surprised that she would pass away in her sixties, but the loss was of course nonetheless considerable.  She had no children of her own, and her husband, Uncle Rae had died years before.  She left behind an extended family of nieces and nephews, and a lifetime of wonderful memories.  Her house was eventually sold, but the cottage remained in our family.

In the twenty years since her passing, the cottage was used briefly by my sister Marcie and I for parties with our friends in our high school years.  We had one of those chemical toilets to use instead of that godforsaken outhouse, but otherwise we had a great time.  You could draw on the paper walls.  We were just far enough away from home that we could drink without attracting too much attention.  We had power and water, but otherwise it was kind of rustic.  Eventually my uncle, who was bequeathed the cottage, began to use it as a storage shed, because really, no one had any real use for it anymore.  As the years passed, the natural age of the structure began to show, and while he made the effort to keep it in good repair, the reality was that the building was nearing the end.  With that end came the dissipating of the memories of many a summer weekend spent there, learning to play Auction 45s, listening to the radio, drawing and writing our names on the walls, and everything else.

My family has a knack for holding on to decrepit old buildings, among other things.  Dad transported, from his homestead as a child, a dog kennel, a garage and an old storage shed.  All three of those buildings have been moved more than once since they were relocated the first time.  The dog kennel, which saw new life as a pen for a half-dozen ducks, is long gone.  The garage has been refurbished as Dad’s new lawn tractor garage.  The shed contains numerous old car parts and the like, and has been dubbed ‘Jackson Auto’, after a nickname my grandfather once held.  Jackson Auto is in pretty rough shape, and is in need of more than a tune-up.  We have a hard time letting go of these things because we are a sentimental family.  My grandmother, whose property once housed these buildings, is now in a nursing home.  Dad was actually thinking of having her house, which isn’t much bigger than a standard cottage, moved to his lot to use as a guest home, which makes sense given our family has grown exponentially in recent years.  I wouldn’t be shocked in the least if he did it.  I would.

Behind Jackson Auto there once lay a graveyard.  It was a boneyard, really; a junkyard of old cars.  My grandfather (whose sister was Auntie Madelyn) was of the generation that dragged things out into the woods to get rid of it.  He was not exactly an environmental child of the 90s.  Things were used as long as possible, and received all of his TLC, until that fateful day when it was proclaimed useless, and unceremoniously dumped in the woods.  If it was anything but a car, it could be found virtually anywhere.  There’s nothing that spells nature like seeing an old washing machine rusting along the trail.  But if it was a car, it was laid to rest in the Spruce Grove, the stand of trees that blocked out most of the sun and harboured a car enthusiast’s dream of old relics.  My cousin and I built a cabin there of the remnants of my mom and her siblings’ old one, only to have my grandfather make a smoke shed out of it.  It’s hard to entertain your friends in a cabin that smelled like smoked fish.

Back in the woods, there is a camp that my family used faithfully every winter for many years.  My grandfather used to walk back and nap there because it was very peaceful.  Like the cottage, we used to write our names on the wall, and we even kept a log book you could sign.  There was an old wood stove that used to start to glow orange when it was super-hot.  We had board games, teddy bears, dishware, and bedding kept there permanently.  In the later years, the mice began to take interest in the bedding, and when us kids were grown, mom and dad never went back to the camp anymore.  After Grampie died in ’98, it was seldom used again.  Recently, I took a trip back to salvage what, if anything, was still of use.  There was a kerosene lamp, a few stuffed animals I remembered from my childhood that the mice didn’t exploit, and the log book we kept.  And the girlie poster my grandfather had put up.  Apart from that, there was nothing worth rescuing.  As I turned to leave, my foot breached the floor boards.  The building had succumbed to the forest that surrounded it, and it was beyond its twilight hours.  It sits there as it was when I walked out that last time, whispering behind me that it was time to leave, time to let go.  However, in the true spirit of my family, I have other plans.  I’ll be back this summer to see if any of the timber is salvageable, because if it is, I’ll take it apart myself to bring back to Fredericton.  I plan to build a small playhouse for my kids.  There is something cathartic about the thought of using the old wood from the camp to build something new.

When I’m driving through the countryside, and I see an old barn, defeated with its big doors hanging off its rusty hinges, I can’t help but wonder.  Who owns or owned this building?  How long was it used?  Did kids jump off the hay loft into big piles of straw?  Did precocious teenagers steal a first kiss out back?  How many makes and models of tractors took shelter within?  When did someone finally look at it and say “it’s over”?  Everything becomes derelict eventually, but the real moment of truth comes when you finally accept that it has.

Auntie Madelyn’s cottage has found new life.  True to form, Dad relocated the old cottage with my uncle, and after some cosmetic surgery, they have transformed it into a working garage for their respective recreational vehicles.  They even have room for the wood splitter.  I must say, it looks pretty spiffy.  They have vinyl siding on it, kept the original door for rear egress, and have removed the front windows, supplanting them for bay doors and ramps.  The old sink is still there though.  It’s pretty safe to say the old outhouse will be staying put.

Rules For Q*bert

Now here's a story with a proper dose of irony for you.  I am going to talk about how video games may not have been so bad for your brain as your parents told you, sort of.  Imagine that.  All those hours you spent thumbing your control pads or joysticks, shaking your Wii sticks and hoping they won’t come flailing off, hitting an unsuspecting partner or spectator while you dance up a storm, apparently isn’t that detrimental after all.  We have evolved our human thumbs in the last two generations so aptly as to invent a communication tool which relies heavily on our thumbs.  It’s called the cell phone, in case you were wondering where to get such a thing.  We have 3D movies pouring out of Hollywood faster than tanning spray off Christina Aguilera.  Owning a 50-inch TV is now not only the norm, but will likely soon be too small for the norm.  We can store our multimedia digital files on ‘clouds’, which we can access from anywhere.  I’m telling you, the ‘country music chip’ for your brain isn’t far away (some of you know what I mean by this, but for everyone else, you’ll hear about it in a future blog, no doubt).

It doesn’t seem like that long ago to me that video games were The Great Satan.  My ever-loving parents, who really did try to raise me in a home with good, wholesome influences surrounding me, never liked video games, and vowed that their children would never succumb to that great space invader of the child’s developing and fragile mind.  Young Brandon was never to have an Atari, Vic 20, Commodore 64, or Nintendo.  The first video gaming device we owned was a Tandy computer, and it wasn’t good for much except for typing and printing.  We owned a typewriter, but the Tandy was an actual ‘computer’, which immediately meant it was better.  Along with the Tandy, which of course had no internet access in 1986, came the inevitability of games to play on it.  Now, you could play games like the old consoles had, to some degree, but what the Tandy could do that consoles of that time could not was run games that involved strategic input from the player.  Role-playing games, such as the King’s Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry, and a host of other scenario games were readily available, and reasonably affordable.  You had to insert floppy discs—and I mean the old 5 1/4 inch ones, not the more recent-yet-still-obsolete 3 1/2 hard-cartridge discs.  My current PC is now 9 years old, and still has a floppy disc drive, so they had a good run it seems. 

Mom and Dad justified letting us play these games on the Tandy because the games themselves had evolved beyond simple call/response or reaction games like Donkey Kong or Asteroids.  Indeed, the new breed of games required the player to think about what would happen next, type commands into the computer and respond to what the computer had to say in response.  If you walked into a room in the castle dungeon, you might wander over to the wardrobe and ask the computer to open the door.  Maybe inside there was a secret weapon you could use.  Maybe a giant monster would jump out and crush you.  Either way, it was fun, and if the latter was true, you hopefully saved your game earlier and you could do something different next time.  Maybe you could hide under the bed while the evil wizard opened the wardrobe. You get the idea.

To some degree, my parents were right.  I didn’t waste my money on video games, and as a result, I focused my interest and energy on other things.  I read a lot, particulary the Hardy Boys books, a series which I still collect to this day (I mentioned this briefly in the last blog).  I developed a fondness for boardgames, and as an adult I am an avid gamer and owner of dozens of different styles of games, from simple party games to hours-long strategy games.  My money began to go to music purchasing, and as those of you who know me at all can attest, it’s still where most of my available funds go.  My first investment in a video game system was the Wii, which we bought as a family three years ago.  Still, I may have invested up to 2-3 hours total on it.  My sons adore the Wii, and Kieran recently declared that while music was my ‘thing’, video games were his.  Part of me was a little saddened, but an equal part of me understood. 

At school a few weeks ago, a few boys from my class were over near the swings playing in the fine gravel on which the swing sets are situated.  When I approached them, I noticed they were playing something I thought was long extinct.  They had a handful of little, green army men.  I was blown away.  I used to play with my Dad’s little army men when I used to stay with my Grandmother at her house while she watched me when my parents worked late.  They were pre-posed, and I had no real knowledge of the army, nor did I have the wherewithal to care about it, but they were fun to pose in mock battles, to make pretend gun noises while I maneuvered them around awkwardly.  When I made to congratulate them on finding some classic toys to play with at recess, they looked up with fear in their eyes.  It then occurred to me—they’re war toys.  In 2012, we’re afraid of war toys.  The world we live in doesn’t feel so easy about kids pretending to wield guns; the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ days are long gone. I remember playing ‘War’ in the thicket beside my house as a kid when my friends used to visit.  We had plastic rifles and assault weapons and we used to make forts, run recon missions and engage each other in open combat.  I even had a plastic bazooka.  We had paths through the woods worn down to the dirt.  We built platforms in high trees as look-out posts.  At the end of the day, we never realized how much we were developing our imaginations. And there I was, faced with the choice of whether to prevent them from playing ‘war’, or remember young Brandon who grew up to be Mr. LeBlanc, evidently none the worse for having played with toys like that himself.  I don’t think anyone that played ‘War’ in the thicket at my parents’ house ever grew up to shoot up a school, hold up a bank, or even obtain a hunting licence for that matter.  But man, did we ever have fun.  When I was visiting with my parents this past week, I stopped and looked into the thicket.  The paths are long grown in.  The forts are long gone.  My own children will never play the way we did.

When we were kids at Port Elgin Elementary School back in the 80’s, my friends and I ‘invented’ a game of our own.  Down a steep embankment, yet still on the grounds of the school, was an area where there were no trees, but the grass grew fairly tall.  Forming small islands in the hayseed were giant slabs of rock, probably about a dozen or so of them in an odd formation.  There were three or four large, flat ones, on which I’d say maybe five or six kids could stand at once.  The others were all a fraction of that size, and no more than one could stand on them without knocking another off.  We used to bounce from rock to rock, originally just goofing around, but gradually developing a sort of tag game.  Rules began to form, and word spread; before long, a dozen or more friends were making straight for the rocks as soon as the bell rang and we could get outside.  One day, someone finally suggested that our game was a lot like the then-popular arcade game Q*bert.  For those of you who weren’t children in the 80’s, Q*bert was a little creature who hopped on two legs on a wall of ascending cubes, whose goal was to touch every square before his enemies touched him.  Think Pac-man, but 2D and quicker.  Our game, of course, was much different.  Rather than have one Q*bert, our game had most people acting as Q*berts, while the ‘it’ person was his nemesis Coily (a snake who bounced like a spring on his coiled body).  The Q*berts all started on one of the giant rocks, while Coily started on a designated starting point in the middle.  The Q*berts had to hop from rock to rock until they safely made it to one of the other agreed-upon rocks at the far side without being tagged by Coily.  All this time, no one was allowed to leave the rocks at all.  If you did fall from one, you had to either go to a ‘prison’ rock, or start over, depending on who was playing and which rules were in play.  You see, in our version of Q*bert, we worked out a verbal agreement how to solve problems that arose during gameplay, and we moved on.  No one fought during Q*bert.  It was like an unwritten rule that if you spoiled the fun, you had no business being there.  And no one wanted to be banished from the rocks!

As a teacher today, I could find a host of things you couldn’t allow in a game like Q*bert.  First of all, rock formations like that would be removed from any playground.  If they weren’t, they’d be fenced off for sure, and duty teachers would be vigilantly policing them from children with over-active imaginations from playing near them.  Maybe the kids would pick up sticks and pretend to play war, mock-shooting each other like they might see on the news.  That wouldn’t be allowed either.  Too bad really, because all the skills they have been honing playing Call Of Duty would surely come in handy.  If it was winter, forget playing near the rocks.  A skinned knee might be as good as a lawsuit in 2012.  Never mind that you could smash heads playing soccer, or fall from monkey bars, or slip on an unseen patch of black ice.  Soon, we’ll need to bubblewrap the students to keep them safe. 

We have come full-circle with our video games; we worry so much about the dangers outdoors that we often let our children seek refuge in the one thing a generation ago we never thought possible.  We protect our children from two things:  the outside world and their own imaginations. Video games have lots to offer, and they’ve come a long way, even since the old Tandy Quest games from my childhood, and even then they helped foster critical thinking and creativity.  Ironically, my friends and I used a video game as a scenario for an original idea, for hours of harmless fun.   I would go so far as to say we were building character.  Perhaps we don’t give our kids enough credit.  Perhaps we think on their behalf more than we should.  We should rather remember when we were the Q*berts trying to get to the other side, back when Coily was just one of us, randomly picked for the fun of it.  I promise you, if the duty teacher ever came to play Coily, we’d have all left the rocks for good.