Sudbury

 Two or three summers when I was little, Mom would take Polly and I to Sudbury with her for the summer. I positively HATED it. There's no other way to put it. I wanted to spend my summer vacation with Dad on the farm. I didn't want to be in a city. I wanted the smell of curing hay, the taste of fresh wild strawberries from the lane, and the feel of powdered Queens Line clay under my bare feet. I wanted DAD. 

Even though my favorite aunt, Aunt Pansy, lived in Sudbury, and we mostly stayed with her, I wanted to be home. Her husband, my Uncle Gordon Scott, was away for long periods of time in the mines up there. He was a good uncle with a great sense of humour and a heart for kids. He had four of his own; John (Sonny), Chris, Meryl, and Sharon, all old enough to be my uncle and aunts themselves. His grandchildren, scattered throughout the somewhat nearby Copper Cliff and Lively, were roughly Polly's and my age. One of the worst bawling's out Mom ever got came from Uncle Gordon. He came home one evening from his long stint at the mine to find us there, and me, a fish out of water there at the best of times and he knew it, with no toys to play with to pass the long summer. He ordered Mom to sit down on the couch and he let her have it: "You dragged that little boy all the way up here with you for the entire summer and you didn't bring him any toys to play with?! First thing in the morning we're getting in the car and we're going to the mall and you're damn well going to buy that boy some toys!" He was really angry and he was yelling. It was his house and his rules and Mom had to sit there and listen. She was crying when he was done. I wasn't. I didn't want to be there in the first place. At 8 or 9 o'clock the next morning, sure enough, we were in his big Ford LTD heading to the mall. When we came back, I had 3 or 4 toy trucks to play with. They were only cheap plastic ones, but they were far better than anything I had up there yesterday. I played with them in the sand next the pond behind Uncle Gordon and Aunt Pansy's neighbour's house. It was at the convergence of the railroad tracks going behind their house and almost in the shadow of the railway trestle going across them all high above. There were almost no trees in the adjoining yards back then, just sand. There were three ground level railroad tracks; two double and one single converging behind their house, and the huge, gently curving trestle crossing them all at approximately 90 degrees in an inverted Eiffel Tower shape. Sudbury is a mining town, and any mining town is a railroad town. At least I saw lots of trains. I means LOTS of them. Locomotives that would be considered Classics today and would likely make a railfan drool. But the noise at night was just unbelievable, especially from trains crossing the trestle. It was no less rusty looking back than it appears in the present day pictures below.

Whether I liked it or not, I was in Sudbury when the tornado went through on August 20, 1970. I was 4 years old at the time. They didn't call it a tornado then and there. 'Tornado' was Southern talk. They called it a cyclone. It missed Aunt Pansy and Uncle Gordon's house by 2 or 3 miles as it went northeast through Lively to Copper Cliff, and then turned south to Lockerby, skirting the edge of Sudbury. There were many stories associated with it at the time, but the one I remember was that the tornado exchanged coffee tables from two houses on opposite sides of a street through their living room windows. From this very distant time of over half a century (yikes!) later, I tend to think it was only folklore... but I do have a very foggy recollection of a newspaper article that might have been about it. 

I can't even remember one time coming home to Dad from Sudbury. The only plausible explanation I have for that is getting back to Dad must have been such an overjoying experience that it overwhelmed my little mind to the point that it had the same effect as being frightened so bad by something that you can't remember the experience. I wish I could but I can't. All I can remember is the one time we went up on the old Beachburg Road to Pembroke, and when we came back it was all redone. I believe another time we went up through Pembroke on Old Highway 17 and on the way back the Highway 17 Bypass was put in and we came back on it. I could be wrong about that. As Tim Tabbert used to say, "I was wrong once before". 

Once I was a little older, wild horses couldn't drag me away from Dad and the farm any time of year, much less during my school summer vacation. Time away from Dad when I was little was an eternity. That's why I remember it so well.