Location, Location, Location
Miriam Ho’s essay ‘Fictional Terrain’ and Dana Seguin and Christopher Katsarov Luna’s essay ‘Heritage Vil- lage: an embedded collective memory’ unearthed in me some uneasy memories and musings about the rural ideal and the urban gaze. Though I have lived for nearly a decade in the busy urban centre of Montreal, I grew up on the shores of the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia. Before the construction of the Confederation Bridge joined Prince Edward Island to its Maritime sister provinces, and when school let out for the summer, I was often rolled into our family car for a ferry trip to ‘the Island.’ There we joined the other tourists in the dream of an isolated place where the sun always shone, the land was always green, the water warm and the people quaint. I sincerely remember it being so. At least on one occasion we stopped to take a tour of Green Gables National Park and of Anne’s house. I was an intense fan not only of the Anne of Green Gables character, but also of the characters and village of Avonlea, immortalised by Montgomery’s novel and CBC’s long-running drama, The Road to Avonlea . Miriam Ho comments that “visitors to the Green Gables house negotiate the actual, historical and fictional, projecting their story onto the site, altering how it will be shaped”; however, as I imagine was the case for many child(like) tourists to this mythological place, Anne’s house destabilised me. The limbo between fic- tion and historical fact was uncomfortable. I was horrified when I realised that the green-gabled house in Cavendish was not ‘the real thing’. As Ho mentions, Montgomery’s childhood house now lies in ruins, its protection trumped by the tourist-driven desire to preserve the myth of Anne. It was amusing to experience a hint of this brand of agitation when I read Seguin and Katsarov’s essay about the Town of Markham and the heritage planning policy that has transplanted hundred-year-old houses to the suburbs. Seguin and Katsarov Luna argue that Markham’s transplanted houses exhale “a sigh of relief that that their community still validates a particular moment of rural Canadian history”. As much as I appreciate the impetus to preserve these fine examples of rural architecture, I cannot suppress the feeling (and to quote Anne Shirley) that “this is the most tragical thing that has ever happened”. Would not these houses be ultimately more comfortable decaying in solitude on rural properties than corralled into a suburb? I admit I am probably projecting my own inner conflict about my rural and urban identities on these inanimate centenarian houses. I choose to live in the city because it offers so much in terms of proximity to cultural life, ease of mobility and varied architecture. And it is easy to expect that by making this choice I can ‘have it all’; however, it seems unfair that the prizes of rural life, such as the Markham Heritage Estate farm houses, are appropriated by those who do not weather its inconveniences. Meaghan Thurston Montreal
4
Send comments, critiques, corrections, rejoinders, footnotes and further discussion on anything you find in this issue of On Site review 28: sound , to editor@onsitereview.ca letters
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator