Jane's Walk

Letter from Coboconk, Ontario

LETTER FROM COBOCONK

photo by Vic Gedris

"Just a quick note to say our first Jane’s Walk was a huge success. We had about 80 people show up and everyone participated and left with a smile on their face.

We started off at the old Lime Kilns, and two people who were in their 80’s talked about the strike that took place there in the 1930’s. My uncle also confessed that the lime kilns were where everyone went to smoke when they were teenagers. From there we went down to the docks where the local councillor, Emmet Yeo, talked about a festival that the municipality is organizing for Summer Solstice include a fair and boat rides.

At the docks, my grandma talked about when she was 2 years old and the first steel bridge was going in, and about how all the kids were crowded at the shore and suddenly a very strange man appeared from the water, with a big round metal head and a strange rubber body. Of course, she was talking about the diver, but because no one had ever seen one before, it was like something from outer space. At this point, a local historian, Paul, who I had never met before, cracked open a binder of old photos he had brought along, that included a picture of the diver!

My grandma started to laugh as he was exactly like the one in her memory. We passed the photo around so everyone could see. It really brought it all to life, hearing her first-hand story of a scary yet exciting event in a child’s life, and then seeing the black and white photo which captured the moment in time.

Then a woman (who incidentally was my librarian when I was in grade school) talked to us about the church across the road, and a lot of people who attended the other churches (Coboconk has seven) talked about our shared heritage and using the churches as community spaces. That United Church is having their 100th Anniversary this year and some people from the other churches offered to help make a quilt to celebrate.

Then, to much laughter, we headed from the church to the Coby Jail, the smallest in Canada. Well according to Wikipedia it’s not, but hey, who am I to disagree with the locals? No one even knows where Rodney Ontario is anyways. The volunteers from the jail were kind enough to open the jail up three weeks earlier than normal to talk to people and let us file through one by one to check it out.

As we were walking and talking from there it turned out that the people who currently live in the second-oldest home in town were out gardening. They talked to us about the history of the house and the Phillips family that built it, and kindly brought out some old photos for us to see what people wore and how the tables were set in the 1920’s. My grandma and another woman were able to place the decade from the boots the women were wearing in the picture.

And then we carried on to the old Lodge, (formerly Caiten’s Lodge) and the current owners happened to be on the walk as well. They turned it into a B and B and call it the Saucy Willow. They had come along to meet the locals and find out more about Coboconk and so they opened up the reception area of the Lodge and invited everyone in. Everyone seemed to have a memory to share about sledding there, or working there, staying there, or the once-a-week movies that screened on Monday nights in the dining room.

As we were walking by the old school (closed in 1992), a teenage boy asked me what the government was going to do with the building. I stopped the group, and posed the question to everyone. No one seemed to know. After silence and murmurs, the boy said out loud “we, WE should do something then”. And it was really a moment when I saw the magic that Jane Jacobs have have seen. All the members in the crowd seemed to agree that we had to do something before the school was just allowed to be torn down or get dilapidated.

This was where a lot of people chose to stop to talk or go for a coffee nearby. I gave out my business card to a few people with the promise that we would somehow, as a group, find out what our options are for the school.

I didn’t mean for this letter to be so long, I just wanted to say Thank You to you guys as a group for bringing Jane’s great ideas to people far and wide, and helping empower us to work together to keep our communities strong.

Thanks again and best regards,

Tara Webster