I’ve been trying to get away from Brownlow for nearly two-decades, half my life. Now I wonder if the thing I’ve been trying to get away from has been with me the entire time.
It’s funny how place shapes us. Even when we’re trying to be different that’s still a reaction rather than true authenticity. Though, authenticity to what? The living organism that formed out of that specific environment? Place is inescapable. It’s who we are. It’s the home port painted on the transom of our lives.
Yet I couldn’t wait to get away. Part of it was simply that the community college is small and didn’t offer the program I wanted. I also think it’s important to live somewhere else for a few years, even if you do settle back in your home town. But I did want to see how the rest of the world lives, not just this isolated corner of it, so I guess the real question is: why I didn’t return?
The traditional reason to leave Brownlow is in search of opportunity. A few do exceptionally well in Brownlow, many do well enough, but it’s a sufficiently small place that it can’t accommodate everyone. I’m in tech and there’s just not a tech industry here. Even though I work remotely the question isn’t so much why Brownlow, it’s why not anywhere else? How can a place like Brownlow compete with places like Victoria, B.C., or what I like to refer to as the nicest place in the world.
Jules Octavian, perhaps not surprisingly, is the one that has me thinking about this. Jules is a person who could have succeeded anywhere. I think he could’ve had a shot at being Prime Minister or CEO of some big company. He didn’t have to stay in Brownlow and it likely would have made more financial sense for him to leave. Yet he chose to remain.
Canada is an urban country. It didn’t start that way but by the time Jules was deciding whether to stay or go the writing was on the wall: we were centralizing. Small towns used to be full of people with national ambitions but by the nineties they’d pretty much all migrated to the city. Smaller communities had to be happy with smaller ambitions. So why did someone with national, or even global, ambitions stay?
The answer is simple: it’s a nice place to live (even if it’s not the nicest) and if you send away all your talent, what’s left for Brownlow? Jules had the privilege to be able to buck the trend and continue living in a little slice of paradise, so he did. And while he’s not one to brag about his accomplishments it’s not like Brownlow is remote: he’s quietly had his hand in some national projects. He just doesn’t like to talk about it.
Yet Brownlow is an intensely insecure place. That’ll happen in a community based on giving economic refugees leftover land to keep out Americans and indigenous people that has slowly bled it’s best and brightest for the better part of a century. When people used to ask me about my home town I’d tell them that the motto was “do you think you’re better than me?!” And you can understand how it got this way. But it does raise certain challenges for the ambitious and Jules has chosen the difficult path, though he would call it the more interesting one.
It’s this, I think, that I’ve been fleeing all along. If I weren’t a digital nomad and wanted to settle somewhere I’d probably look for a place with more going on. Yet as a digital nomad my home port would be more of a place to rest and recharge, something Brownlow excels at. I look for my excitement elsewhere. I used to think a cottage would be ideal but they’re too remote, a destination unto themselves. And living in the city is expensive, especially if you need a place to park a van and you’re spending most of your time on the road. Travelling means being able to set your money aside for just that and Brownlow is actually the perfect place for a person like me to do that. It’s the culture that I’m resisting. Yet Jules Octavian has made me wonder if that’s more of a me problem than a them problem.
Who cares what the neighbours think? Jules’ superpower is his ability to spend time in his own company. He loves people and might be at his best working a room, though working is misleading because for him it’s not work. Yet he doesn’t need the approval of other people or even their input. He trusts his instincts and enjoys his own company. That’s what allows him to quietly go about building his little empire and few, if any, know how far it actually stretches. So why do I care?
That’s the narcotic value of travel: you’ll never see the people around you again. Often I’m travelling in big cities where that’s more or less a given anyway, but a big city in another country is entirely freeing. Brownloafians, on the other hand, live in constant fear of upsetting grandma’s enigmatic friend Myra or embarrassing themselves in front of the person who might be their boss in twenty years. If they don’t they tend to live in this ugly defiance, rolling coal at every hatchback they encounter, itself a reaction to the thing they claim to not care about. Maybe, after spending my formative years in a place where generational family feuds are a legitimate consideration, that’s why I love travel so much.
I only came back to see Greg’s new house, and maybe tell him why he’d made a mistake, but suddenly I’m wondering whether he did. The fact of the matter is that Burlington, Vermont, is indeed nicer than Brownlow but I still wouldn’t live there. They don’t have healthcare, everyone has guns, student loans are oppressive, and it’s a very real possibility that they might elect a political insurrectionist in clear cognitive decline as president [they did, this article was published in print last year — eds.]. Everywhere has problems and Brownlow’s do seem a lot less oppressive put in perspective. If I didn’t care what Myra thought Brownlow would be a great home port. It certainly works for Jules. Yet if I returned home permanently I’d be part of another problem.
Gentrification is the hot topic around Brownlow lately. Over the past couple of decades they watched as a neighbouring community, once a local treasure of beaches and rustic vacation homes, got gobbled up by folks from the city looking for a deal. They don’t want it to happen to them and it is happening. Just a few hours away the real estate market is double or triple what it is here, and for a lot less property. Prior to the pandemic and housing crisis it could be ten times more. People were willing to pay a premium to be close to the opportunities that had left places like Brownlow which created an advantageous market for those who couldn’t afford to leave. Yet the pandemic broke down that barrier which means it’s now two or three times as expensive as it was a few years ago, and people were already struggling to make ends meet back then.
The culture is changing too and it’s tough to say whether that’s a good thing. On the one hand, when you get left behind it can become very tempting to form your personality around defiance. On the other hand there’s a certain relief that comes from stepping back from the rat race and approaching life at a slower pace. There’s not a lot of pressure in a place like Brownlow and, if anything, they’d prefer you to make them feel less insecure. It’s a relief until it begins to calcify.
That calcification might be the line between renewal and gentrification. There’s a point at which you’re no longer maintaining the original vision of something that’s been created and rather creating something new with the pieces of something old. On the one hand I can imagine how upsetting, humiliating even, it might be for people to move into your existing community and treat it as a blank canvas. On the other hand it’s worth thinking in a non-reactive way about why one from outside the community might perceive it as a blank canvas. It might be especially worth thinking about why they might paint over something created in defiance of these ‘outsider’ values.
The thing that resonated with me about Burlington, Vermont, was that it seemed like a laid back place to recharge and pursue eccentric personal projects. It was like each garage had a half-completed hovercraft or half-invented new musical instrument. That felt like a very Brownlow vibe except here it seems the only acceptable project is a lifted truck or 60’s muscle car. When I lived in Toronto I knew lots of crazy people who would die for the space or resources to execute their crazy projects and as a Brownloafian it was a foreign concept. Where I grew up everyone had space for that kind of thing. The barrier was what Myra thought, and Myra doesn’t seem to like much of anything. So these days I’m starting wonder if I should even care.
-Rachael
