Meet the People in our Neighbourhood
|
Raymond Parker, August 12th, 2020 |
Olwynn Hughes: What is your name?
Raymond Parker: My name is Raymond Parker.
OH: And what year were you born?
RP: 1955.
OH: Have you lived your whole life in Avondale?
RP: Pretty much except for 20 years when I went down the road to Hogtown, aka Toronto.
OH: Do you have family history in Avondale?
RP: Yep, back several generations on my father's side, the Parkers, and then not in Avondale but in Hants County up in... well, my mother, my mother was a Smiley from Smile-A-While Farm, part of which eventually became Smiley's Provincial Park.
OH: Do you have any favorite childhood memories from here?
RP: Favorite childhood memories. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what pops into my mind, which wasn't exactly childhood, more adolescence. And I see you've interviewed Carolyn Connors. So anyway, what popped into my mind was, as you know, her husband Albert passed away a while ago and somehow I thought of this, this is a bit of a story. But anyway, so Albert used to help out both my uncle Harold and my dad, they were both dairy farmers with various chores and especially in the haying season, and well actually, silaging season around here's in June. Albert used to drive my uncle's old W4 International tractor hauling the wagons full of silage back and forth from the fields to the elevator, which carried the silage up into our 40-foot high silo. That old tractor had terrible brakes and Albert really had to come onto them to have any effect. The elevator was a big, noisey, screechy thing. You had three or four guys on the ground dragging the silage out of the wagons onto the elevator with special silage forks, and one or two more up in the silo. Ha ha, as a kid it seemed Iike a big operation.
Meanwhile out in the field, my dad would be on the 1955 Ford tractor hauling the forage harvester, and I would be in the wagon behind pulling on a rope attached to the spout of the harvester to evenly distribute the silage as it blew out. This was a great job for a kid but I was absolutely terrified every time dad had to get off the tractor and lean over the rotating pickups to clear the harvester when it bunged up, which was often. It was a terrible racket, with everything on that machine shaking and vibrating at 1800 rpm, and designed to draw anything in front of it into its steel maw. From my vantage point in the wagon all I could see was his head and shoulders as he leaned over the machine. Crazy. That's one part of "the good old days" I'm super happy to see the end of.
Anyway one day, Paul Webb, who you've heard of, I'm sure, whose father ran the orchard for the Mounces at the time and they all lived in the bungalow on the Cemetery Road. Anyway, Paul and I were friends and still are, we were you know, we were I don't know how old we were 13 or 14, maybe younger. Anyway, one day, the silage wagon was empty and had the tractor attached to it and Paul says “let's jump in the wagon! We’ll get a ride to the top of the hill with Albert". So we jumped into the wagon, and the wagons have these tall sides on them because it's silage not baled hay, and so we jump in and Albert gets on the W4 and hauls the wagon up the steep hill behind the house at Roseway where my sister Eva Evans and her husband Alby live today. And so we get up to the top and Paul and I get out of the wagon and then Albert sees us and apparently he hadn't noticed that we'd gotten in the wagon down below. So anybody from olden times, will know that Albert had a real talent for colorful language. Oh man, we got it full-on, just full-on because you know, he's basically, what he was saying, underneath all the colors were, you know, if that hitch pin had come out, if something had happened and the wagon had gotten away going down that hill, you know, we could have been killed. So that actually never, never, it's never happened on our farm, but still, stuff does happen. So anyway, I always remember that as a story of my life, early adolescence, or something like that. There's your story.
OH: Did you attend school here?
RP: Yes, I went to the little white schoolhouse in Avondale for primary and grade 1. I don't know if grade primary was half a year, or it was the year before that was half a year. But anyway, so I went to grade 1 and that time it was, as I’m sure you know, it was a multi-class one room, well actually, two room schoolhouse. But anytime I was there they were only using one room. Yeah, but then by grade two they built Brooklyn District Elementary, so I got bussed there.
OH: Do you remember any Community Traditions from the area?
RP: What springs to mind is the community picnic. Which was, I don't know if it was the first of July, sometime in summer and I think it may have been just one day on Saturday or Sunday, which you may have heard about it from other people, but that was cool. You know, it was just, you know, three-legged races, one thing and another, and the whole Community got together.
What was probably way more significant in my life were various 4-H activities including the local 4-H field day. We had a really vibrant 4-H club, and they were all across the country, and Hants County had several 4-H clubs. Ours was called the Three-Cornered calf club. My dad was one of the leaders, and so was Marg Mosher. Of course, there were a lot more dairy farms around then, and my dad was a dairy farmer. So we had lots of calves and older cattle. Then, once a year, there would be a local 4-H field day, which would be held at, you know, hosted by a different farm each year, and that was cool.
The 4-H members, you know, they show off, we would show off our herds and be judged for who had the best animals. So you might, you might have a calf or you might have a whole "herd", which would be a calf and a one, two, and three year old. You lead them around the ring and you get them prettied up and mix up a kind of blue dye in water to dunk their tails in and make them extra white somehow. And the idea was you're supposed to be training your calf all through the season, so that when you go to do the show ring they will stand still, walk ahead, back up, step sideways etc., to show off their best characteristics, like fashion models on a runway. We were supposed to keep feeding and production records, and we had to practice judging cattle too. I wasn’t so diligent with all that, but through no effort of my own, because my dad was a, his thing was breeding the ideal purebreed Guernsey herd, I tended to clean up at the field day and then later at the Hants County Exhibition in September too. That was my dad's big, big part of the year, was to take his cattle and show them over the week of the exhibition. He took a lot of pride in his prize dairy herd.
The coolest thing about that 4-H field day, which I remember, was they always got the milk truck driver, who was Ivan Fletcher in those days, to bring a big milk can of cold chocolate milk, and then we would scoop out the milk into cups and they sold for five cents a cup and that was pretty special, as otherwise we never had chocolate milk, at least in our house. The chocolate milk was packed in "dry ice", which was another novelty.
Another thing we did at 4-H was public speaking, and the winners from our local club would go on to the annual county competition which was held in the gym at Hants West Rural High School. My brother Dennis and I would kind of cheat by plagiarizing stories from old Reader's Digest magazines, stories like "I am Joe's Liver". Ha ha. We also learned square dancing at 4-H, which might have helped spark the passion for social dancing that I developed later in life.
OH: What was your cow's name?
RP: Well, I couldn't tell you what their names were, there weren't, you know, they were always changing. But I can tell you that it definitely started with ‘R’ and probably had a Rose in it somewhere because my dad's farm was Roseway Farm, part of which I still live on today. And all of his, you know, he could trace the genealogy of his cattle back generations and generations and they were named accordingly, according to the parents, their grandparents on both sides, and so forth. So it might be Roseway's Rosalee Rebecca Regina, or some such. I didn't much keep track of the names myself--those cows all looked pretty much the same to me, ha ha.
That reminds me that another big farm related event was the annual grain harvest in the fall. Up until I was 10 or so, before the advent of the self propelled gain combines, it was a community affair where the local farmers would join together and go to a farm to run the thrashing machine and bring in the harvest, and then after a few days of that move on to do the next farm. The mostly women folk would have to prepare huge meals to feed all those workers at once.
OH: Did you hear stories growing up about relatives that you never met?
RP: Okay, so here's my chance to go. Dr. Raymond C. Parker, who was well known in medical research at the time, was my father's cousin, and may have been the inspiration for me being named Raymond. Dr. Parker was born here in Newport somewhere, went to Acadia, and afterwards he did a PhD at Yale. Eventually he went to work at Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto. He was instrumental in the development of the Salk Polio vaccine, in that with his team at Connaught, they developed a method of tissue culture to grow "Medium 199". This is a kind of synthetic medium that you could grow viruses in, including the polio virus. So that was critical because otherwise, you know apparently for the polio virus the only hosts were humans and monkeys. So being able to have a culture to experiment with to make vaccines was critical. I think Dr. Parker died in ‘74. He was three years older than my dad.
A funny story about that is, when I was a struggling graduate student in Toronto, one time I had this part time job, going around to people's homes and interviewing them. I think the client in this survey was TV Ontario. At that time TV Ontario had some kind of a little electronic box that people could put on top of their TV set and somehow interact through this box with the TV or with the station, and they wanted to know how people felt about the experience. Anyway, the interviews were already set up for me, so I would just call and go, basically sitting in people's living rooms having tea and chatting. Anyway, I’m at this one older couple's house somewhere in midtown and you know chit chatting, and “Oh Raymond Parker, any relation to Dr. Raymond C. Parker?” Well, so this couple had worked their entire career at Connaught Laboratories and they said Dr. Parker was a much loved fixture there. They were over the moon about my connection to him, and they said you must go down to Connaught and tell them who you are and they'll be tickled to, you know, introduce you and show you around, you know. Unfortunately I was preoccupied with other things at the time, and never followed up, obviously to my great chagrin now. Actually it's only in the last few weeks that my sister mentioned that, well she held back on the story about Dr. Parker so I could tell it, that I kind of started looking into it again and of course now, with Google, it's easy to look up, and I have to say I didn't appreciate what a terrible, terrible scourge polio was for decades and decades up until this vaccine became available, and the crucial role that Dr. Parker and the people at Connaught played in its development. The vaccine was released I think in April, 1955, just two months before I was born. So most anyone my age or younger can be thankful for the development of the vaccine. It took some years after that for the vaccine to get fully out into the community and then planet-wide. I was just reading that the World Health Organization instituted a global eradication program for polio in 1988, with some success.
I think not 100% success, but it's you know, we're dealing with this Covid-19 virus now and so it seems timely to give a nod to our public health organizations at all levels of government and non-governmental institutions too. Although public institutions have been getting a bad rap now for several decades, I hope that we can see today a bit more with Covid-19 how important they are, including those having to do with health, and that's my story about my relative, Dr. Raymond C. Parker. I can also say that having had treatment big time for acute lymphocytic leukemia, I'm a big fan of Canada's public health system anyway. It's saved my life at least twice, so far!
OH: Were you involved in starting the museum and, like, the Avon Spirit?
RP: No, not really. Not at all. I was still living in Toronto at the time, working, so I wasn't really involved.
OH: Did you ever sit on the board though?
RP: Nope. Part of the reason for that is, a few years after I came back from Toronto and I was, you know, making a go at developing an organic market vegetable business, so I was super busy.
OH: Was that your line of work?
RP: It was when I came back from Toronto and so yeah, I was preoccupied with my vegetable business and then, around 2005 I think, we heard that the gypsum company, United States Gypsum, or USG, was planning this massive expansion coming across on the Avondale side of the Ferry Road. I and another community member got an invitation to meet with the main environmental consultant for the mine at their offices in Dartmouth. I think they had the idea we could serve as community ambassadors for their plan, but when we walked out of the office, we looked and each other, and said, "Man, this can't happen," because we'd seen maps of their plan for a new open pit mine that would eventually be three kilometers long, a kilometer wide, and seventy meters deep, blasted out of the middle of our our peninsula, which itself is not so much bigger than that on this side of the Ferry Road. We said, we've got to get organized and for, you know, saving our watershed, so I got involved in that and that pretty much became my life for the next several years.
And of course the great thing about this community and on the peninsula as a whole, actually, groups of people right across the province really stepped up. We formed the Avon Peninsula Watershed Preservation Society, or APWPS, to preserve the watershed and tried to make sure that our interests and the voices of the creatures of the watershed were heard as well. This culminated in our submission to the province in November, 2009, with our comments on USG's environmental assessment report. I think the museum has a copy of our report, along with some maps and aerial photographs that we developed. So that's why I didn't get too involved in the museum, although many community members did serve on both the museum board and with APWPS at the same time.
By the way we'd certainly welcome new blood, so to speak, new energy into the watershed society. Our situation with the watershed is still a bit dicey as I understand that USG has been bought by a German company and we don't know what their plans are. On the other hand, this may provide an opportunity to expand our trail system, and even to repatriate or otherwise protect the watershed somehow, if the new owners are cooperative. There's lots of possibilities for what we can do, including lending support to the Friends of the Avon River and their efforts on behalf of the river regarding the twinning at the Windsor causeway. Check out "Save The Avon River" on FB, if you're not already subscribed. Many, many people in the community came on board the watershed society just at the right time in our dealings with the mine and the various levels of government, both locals and people that moved here from away. We're lucky that we have some pretty civic minded people here on the peninsula.
OH: So, what do you love about Avondale?
RP: Well, the people of course, and the spirit to work together to make good things happen, and the land. Here's a passage from the last page of our APWPS submission:
"Imagine a sacred place where three rivers meet to form a beautiful peninsula of rolling hills, mixed farming, forests, streams, and a heritage that is alive. In the wooded upland interior are rare and endangered orchids, and other rare flowers, trees and lichens. Caves and sinkholes, formed by the erosion of the underlying gypsum, provide shelter for many small animals, including hibernating bats who may come from as far as PEI and NB to overwinter. This "karst" landscape is spectacular and offers great opportunities for hiking, bike riding, cross-country skiing, and horseback riding, or just wandering around in the magical gypsum woods. Farms and communities in the surrounding lowlands thrive on the water that is stored, filtered and buffered by the upland watershed."
"Of course this place is real… the Avon Peninsula watershed has many features that are unrepresented in our protected area system, and it's our candidate for protection for present and future generations. It would be terrible to see it sacrificed for another open pit gypsum mine. Besides, we need our watershed, and we love this place."
And it's not just the rare and endangered plants and animals that we share the watershed with, but try to think of all the plants and animals that live together here, it's a long list, albeit not as long as it would have been only a few hundred years ago. So, the rolling countryside, the watershed, with its underlying karst geology and its creatures, the farmland near the roads, the river with its coming and going twice a day just continues to me to be just, just mind-boggling. And, so, the land, the people, certainly the heritage here. We know there must have been people here for thousands and thousands of years and why wouldn't they come here, at the place where the three rivers meet? And before that, dinosaurs, volcanoes…
OH: Final question. What do you hope to see in the future of Avondale?
RP: Well, I would like to see the continuation and evolution of our community spirit and our civic institutions like the museum and boat shed, the wharf committee and the community hall, the churches, the trail association, etc. And darn it I'd like to see fish passage and a free flow of water upriver at the causeway. I'd like to see us wake up to climate change and be an inspiration to other communities. I'd especially love to see a revitalized watershed society. Most of all I'd like to see a time when there is broad recognition that really, we're all swirling patterns of energy, momentarily sharing this radiant space all together. Beautiful.
Thanks for the interview Ollie, and I wish you all the best!
Raymond Parker: My name is Raymond Parker.
OH: And what year were you born?
RP: 1955.
OH: Have you lived your whole life in Avondale?
RP: Pretty much except for 20 years when I went down the road to Hogtown, aka Toronto.
OH: Do you have family history in Avondale?
RP: Yep, back several generations on my father's side, the Parkers, and then not in Avondale but in Hants County up in... well, my mother, my mother was a Smiley from Smile-A-While Farm, part of which eventually became Smiley's Provincial Park.
OH: Do you have any favorite childhood memories from here?
RP: Favorite childhood memories. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what pops into my mind, which wasn't exactly childhood, more adolescence. And I see you've interviewed Carolyn Connors. So anyway, what popped into my mind was, as you know, her husband Albert passed away a while ago and somehow I thought of this, this is a bit of a story. But anyway, so Albert used to help out both my uncle Harold and my dad, they were both dairy farmers with various chores and especially in the haying season, and well actually, silaging season around here's in June. Albert used to drive my uncle's old W4 International tractor hauling the wagons full of silage back and forth from the fields to the elevator, which carried the silage up into our 40-foot high silo. That old tractor had terrible brakes and Albert really had to come onto them to have any effect. The elevator was a big, noisey, screechy thing. You had three or four guys on the ground dragging the silage out of the wagons onto the elevator with special silage forks, and one or two more up in the silo. Ha ha, as a kid it seemed Iike a big operation.
Meanwhile out in the field, my dad would be on the 1955 Ford tractor hauling the forage harvester, and I would be in the wagon behind pulling on a rope attached to the spout of the harvester to evenly distribute the silage as it blew out. This was a great job for a kid but I was absolutely terrified every time dad had to get off the tractor and lean over the rotating pickups to clear the harvester when it bunged up, which was often. It was a terrible racket, with everything on that machine shaking and vibrating at 1800 rpm, and designed to draw anything in front of it into its steel maw. From my vantage point in the wagon all I could see was his head and shoulders as he leaned over the machine. Crazy. That's one part of "the good old days" I'm super happy to see the end of.
Anyway one day, Paul Webb, who you've heard of, I'm sure, whose father ran the orchard for the Mounces at the time and they all lived in the bungalow on the Cemetery Road. Anyway, Paul and I were friends and still are, we were you know, we were I don't know how old we were 13 or 14, maybe younger. Anyway, one day, the silage wagon was empty and had the tractor attached to it and Paul says “let's jump in the wagon! We’ll get a ride to the top of the hill with Albert". So we jumped into the wagon, and the wagons have these tall sides on them because it's silage not baled hay, and so we jump in and Albert gets on the W4 and hauls the wagon up the steep hill behind the house at Roseway where my sister Eva Evans and her husband Alby live today. And so we get up to the top and Paul and I get out of the wagon and then Albert sees us and apparently he hadn't noticed that we'd gotten in the wagon down below. So anybody from olden times, will know that Albert had a real talent for colorful language. Oh man, we got it full-on, just full-on because you know, he's basically, what he was saying, underneath all the colors were, you know, if that hitch pin had come out, if something had happened and the wagon had gotten away going down that hill, you know, we could have been killed. So that actually never, never, it's never happened on our farm, but still, stuff does happen. So anyway, I always remember that as a story of my life, early adolescence, or something like that. There's your story.
OH: Did you attend school here?
RP: Yes, I went to the little white schoolhouse in Avondale for primary and grade 1. I don't know if grade primary was half a year, or it was the year before that was half a year. But anyway, so I went to grade 1 and that time it was, as I’m sure you know, it was a multi-class one room, well actually, two room schoolhouse. But anytime I was there they were only using one room. Yeah, but then by grade two they built Brooklyn District Elementary, so I got bussed there.
OH: Do you remember any Community Traditions from the area?
RP: What springs to mind is the community picnic. Which was, I don't know if it was the first of July, sometime in summer and I think it may have been just one day on Saturday or Sunday, which you may have heard about it from other people, but that was cool. You know, it was just, you know, three-legged races, one thing and another, and the whole Community got together.
What was probably way more significant in my life were various 4-H activities including the local 4-H field day. We had a really vibrant 4-H club, and they were all across the country, and Hants County had several 4-H clubs. Ours was called the Three-Cornered calf club. My dad was one of the leaders, and so was Marg Mosher. Of course, there were a lot more dairy farms around then, and my dad was a dairy farmer. So we had lots of calves and older cattle. Then, once a year, there would be a local 4-H field day, which would be held at, you know, hosted by a different farm each year, and that was cool.
The 4-H members, you know, they show off, we would show off our herds and be judged for who had the best animals. So you might, you might have a calf or you might have a whole "herd", which would be a calf and a one, two, and three year old. You lead them around the ring and you get them prettied up and mix up a kind of blue dye in water to dunk their tails in and make them extra white somehow. And the idea was you're supposed to be training your calf all through the season, so that when you go to do the show ring they will stand still, walk ahead, back up, step sideways etc., to show off their best characteristics, like fashion models on a runway. We were supposed to keep feeding and production records, and we had to practice judging cattle too. I wasn’t so diligent with all that, but through no effort of my own, because my dad was a, his thing was breeding the ideal purebreed Guernsey herd, I tended to clean up at the field day and then later at the Hants County Exhibition in September too. That was my dad's big, big part of the year, was to take his cattle and show them over the week of the exhibition. He took a lot of pride in his prize dairy herd.
The coolest thing about that 4-H field day, which I remember, was they always got the milk truck driver, who was Ivan Fletcher in those days, to bring a big milk can of cold chocolate milk, and then we would scoop out the milk into cups and they sold for five cents a cup and that was pretty special, as otherwise we never had chocolate milk, at least in our house. The chocolate milk was packed in "dry ice", which was another novelty.
Another thing we did at 4-H was public speaking, and the winners from our local club would go on to the annual county competition which was held in the gym at Hants West Rural High School. My brother Dennis and I would kind of cheat by plagiarizing stories from old Reader's Digest magazines, stories like "I am Joe's Liver". Ha ha. We also learned square dancing at 4-H, which might have helped spark the passion for social dancing that I developed later in life.
OH: What was your cow's name?
RP: Well, I couldn't tell you what their names were, there weren't, you know, they were always changing. But I can tell you that it definitely started with ‘R’ and probably had a Rose in it somewhere because my dad's farm was Roseway Farm, part of which I still live on today. And all of his, you know, he could trace the genealogy of his cattle back generations and generations and they were named accordingly, according to the parents, their grandparents on both sides, and so forth. So it might be Roseway's Rosalee Rebecca Regina, or some such. I didn't much keep track of the names myself--those cows all looked pretty much the same to me, ha ha.
That reminds me that another big farm related event was the annual grain harvest in the fall. Up until I was 10 or so, before the advent of the self propelled gain combines, it was a community affair where the local farmers would join together and go to a farm to run the thrashing machine and bring in the harvest, and then after a few days of that move on to do the next farm. The mostly women folk would have to prepare huge meals to feed all those workers at once.
OH: Did you hear stories growing up about relatives that you never met?
RP: Okay, so here's my chance to go. Dr. Raymond C. Parker, who was well known in medical research at the time, was my father's cousin, and may have been the inspiration for me being named Raymond. Dr. Parker was born here in Newport somewhere, went to Acadia, and afterwards he did a PhD at Yale. Eventually he went to work at Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto. He was instrumental in the development of the Salk Polio vaccine, in that with his team at Connaught, they developed a method of tissue culture to grow "Medium 199". This is a kind of synthetic medium that you could grow viruses in, including the polio virus. So that was critical because otherwise, you know apparently for the polio virus the only hosts were humans and monkeys. So being able to have a culture to experiment with to make vaccines was critical. I think Dr. Parker died in ‘74. He was three years older than my dad.
A funny story about that is, when I was a struggling graduate student in Toronto, one time I had this part time job, going around to people's homes and interviewing them. I think the client in this survey was TV Ontario. At that time TV Ontario had some kind of a little electronic box that people could put on top of their TV set and somehow interact through this box with the TV or with the station, and they wanted to know how people felt about the experience. Anyway, the interviews were already set up for me, so I would just call and go, basically sitting in people's living rooms having tea and chatting. Anyway, I’m at this one older couple's house somewhere in midtown and you know chit chatting, and “Oh Raymond Parker, any relation to Dr. Raymond C. Parker?” Well, so this couple had worked their entire career at Connaught Laboratories and they said Dr. Parker was a much loved fixture there. They were over the moon about my connection to him, and they said you must go down to Connaught and tell them who you are and they'll be tickled to, you know, introduce you and show you around, you know. Unfortunately I was preoccupied with other things at the time, and never followed up, obviously to my great chagrin now. Actually it's only in the last few weeks that my sister mentioned that, well she held back on the story about Dr. Parker so I could tell it, that I kind of started looking into it again and of course now, with Google, it's easy to look up, and I have to say I didn't appreciate what a terrible, terrible scourge polio was for decades and decades up until this vaccine became available, and the crucial role that Dr. Parker and the people at Connaught played in its development. The vaccine was released I think in April, 1955, just two months before I was born. So most anyone my age or younger can be thankful for the development of the vaccine. It took some years after that for the vaccine to get fully out into the community and then planet-wide. I was just reading that the World Health Organization instituted a global eradication program for polio in 1988, with some success.
I think not 100% success, but it's you know, we're dealing with this Covid-19 virus now and so it seems timely to give a nod to our public health organizations at all levels of government and non-governmental institutions too. Although public institutions have been getting a bad rap now for several decades, I hope that we can see today a bit more with Covid-19 how important they are, including those having to do with health, and that's my story about my relative, Dr. Raymond C. Parker. I can also say that having had treatment big time for acute lymphocytic leukemia, I'm a big fan of Canada's public health system anyway. It's saved my life at least twice, so far!
OH: Were you involved in starting the museum and, like, the Avon Spirit?
RP: No, not really. Not at all. I was still living in Toronto at the time, working, so I wasn't really involved.
OH: Did you ever sit on the board though?
RP: Nope. Part of the reason for that is, a few years after I came back from Toronto and I was, you know, making a go at developing an organic market vegetable business, so I was super busy.
OH: Was that your line of work?
RP: It was when I came back from Toronto and so yeah, I was preoccupied with my vegetable business and then, around 2005 I think, we heard that the gypsum company, United States Gypsum, or USG, was planning this massive expansion coming across on the Avondale side of the Ferry Road. I and another community member got an invitation to meet with the main environmental consultant for the mine at their offices in Dartmouth. I think they had the idea we could serve as community ambassadors for their plan, but when we walked out of the office, we looked and each other, and said, "Man, this can't happen," because we'd seen maps of their plan for a new open pit mine that would eventually be three kilometers long, a kilometer wide, and seventy meters deep, blasted out of the middle of our our peninsula, which itself is not so much bigger than that on this side of the Ferry Road. We said, we've got to get organized and for, you know, saving our watershed, so I got involved in that and that pretty much became my life for the next several years.
And of course the great thing about this community and on the peninsula as a whole, actually, groups of people right across the province really stepped up. We formed the Avon Peninsula Watershed Preservation Society, or APWPS, to preserve the watershed and tried to make sure that our interests and the voices of the creatures of the watershed were heard as well. This culminated in our submission to the province in November, 2009, with our comments on USG's environmental assessment report. I think the museum has a copy of our report, along with some maps and aerial photographs that we developed. So that's why I didn't get too involved in the museum, although many community members did serve on both the museum board and with APWPS at the same time.
By the way we'd certainly welcome new blood, so to speak, new energy into the watershed society. Our situation with the watershed is still a bit dicey as I understand that USG has been bought by a German company and we don't know what their plans are. On the other hand, this may provide an opportunity to expand our trail system, and even to repatriate or otherwise protect the watershed somehow, if the new owners are cooperative. There's lots of possibilities for what we can do, including lending support to the Friends of the Avon River and their efforts on behalf of the river regarding the twinning at the Windsor causeway. Check out "Save The Avon River" on FB, if you're not already subscribed. Many, many people in the community came on board the watershed society just at the right time in our dealings with the mine and the various levels of government, both locals and people that moved here from away. We're lucky that we have some pretty civic minded people here on the peninsula.
OH: So, what do you love about Avondale?
RP: Well, the people of course, and the spirit to work together to make good things happen, and the land. Here's a passage from the last page of our APWPS submission:
"Imagine a sacred place where three rivers meet to form a beautiful peninsula of rolling hills, mixed farming, forests, streams, and a heritage that is alive. In the wooded upland interior are rare and endangered orchids, and other rare flowers, trees and lichens. Caves and sinkholes, formed by the erosion of the underlying gypsum, provide shelter for many small animals, including hibernating bats who may come from as far as PEI and NB to overwinter. This "karst" landscape is spectacular and offers great opportunities for hiking, bike riding, cross-country skiing, and horseback riding, or just wandering around in the magical gypsum woods. Farms and communities in the surrounding lowlands thrive on the water that is stored, filtered and buffered by the upland watershed."
"Of course this place is real… the Avon Peninsula watershed has many features that are unrepresented in our protected area system, and it's our candidate for protection for present and future generations. It would be terrible to see it sacrificed for another open pit gypsum mine. Besides, we need our watershed, and we love this place."
And it's not just the rare and endangered plants and animals that we share the watershed with, but try to think of all the plants and animals that live together here, it's a long list, albeit not as long as it would have been only a few hundred years ago. So, the rolling countryside, the watershed, with its underlying karst geology and its creatures, the farmland near the roads, the river with its coming and going twice a day just continues to me to be just, just mind-boggling. And, so, the land, the people, certainly the heritage here. We know there must have been people here for thousands and thousands of years and why wouldn't they come here, at the place where the three rivers meet? And before that, dinosaurs, volcanoes…
OH: Final question. What do you hope to see in the future of Avondale?
RP: Well, I would like to see the continuation and evolution of our community spirit and our civic institutions like the museum and boat shed, the wharf committee and the community hall, the churches, the trail association, etc. And darn it I'd like to see fish passage and a free flow of water upriver at the causeway. I'd like to see us wake up to climate change and be an inspiration to other communities. I'd especially love to see a revitalized watershed society. Most of all I'd like to see a time when there is broad recognition that really, we're all swirling patterns of energy, momentarily sharing this radiant space all together. Beautiful.
Thanks for the interview Ollie, and I wish you all the best!