Want Counterintuitive? Hitchhiking is alive and well in the County in 2007

OK, I admit it. Seeing Theresa Durning last Saturday at the County Cultural Rally in Picton made me feel guilty about being somewhat lackadaisical (or is that just plain lazy) about not updating The County Counterintuitive since March 8. When I started the blog, Theresa told me to keep it fresh by updating it at least once a week. Now, other than meeting her in person just once in passing last June (introduced by my old Loyalist friend and classmate Sue Capon, editor of The County Weekly News) my only dealings with Theresa (who also goes by “Tee the FJB” – ask her if you want to know the story behind that) were the odd e-mail exchange and copy editing and laying out her No Strings On Me column on Page 7 of The Wellington Times for a few months last year. So I thought briefly about doing what all good copy editors do – besides edit copy. Remain anonymous. Theresa’s mug is well-known in the County (No Strings On Me is also the name of her blog as well as her column and can be found at http://inthebag-tee.blogspot.com/), mine isn’t. But seeing her hustle around the Prince Edward County Community Centre in her apron while taking pictures (she’s also proprietor-in-chief of In the Bag Media) made me feel slothfully sheepish enough to go up to her in person and once again re-introduce myself. And offer my latest mea culpa about blog tardiness.

And speaking of the County Cultural Rally, hearing County Boy Bill Ostrander sing a song his daughter wrote about his 4 a.m. snow plowing of County roads in the winter was worth the ten bucks I spent to get in the door (the price never did increase to $15 after March 15.) Good music and ten bucks. That’s the good news. Less reassuring news about Culture in the County and where it fits into the municipality’s budgetary priorities can be found at Theresa’s day-after-the-event blog entry for April 1, Stringing Culture along…. Unfortunately, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.

For something really counterintuitive, remember hitchhiking? A lost travel adventure art that disappeared somewhere circa 1973 (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up in the Conservative County. Right? Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking is alive and well here in the County and if you want to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, just stick your thumb out. I’ve done it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route. Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considers to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owns it, with some help from relatives, he said, returns most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still live there on Highway 33.

Another time a couple of weeks ago, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home has been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she's also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she’s well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps is the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960. As I said, true fact.