Thunder Bay: Going Back to the Future in the Streets of My Childhood
It was still a glorious summer day when I pulled into Cumberland Drive Esso in Thunder Bay. The skies were blue, there was a light, pleasant breeze, and Phil Collins sang about the hands we’re given as I stared out the window at my childhood home, next door.
The store used to be a Husky, and it ate my first allowances in exchange for Panini stickers, penny candies, and Superman comic books. Now, I entered for lost memories and a box of Old Dutch Onion & Garlic chips, like we had enjoyed so many times with our elbows on the floor during Friday-night television.
The interior hadn’t changed much because corner stores never really do, except the cash register was on a different wall, and they didn’t have the chips I was looking for. They did have Sour Cream & Onion, so I paid, returned to my car and devoured them to the last crumb.
In a few minutes, I emerged smelling of lemony wet-naps and walked over to my old house. It was beige, with strong, brown trim and the same cement front steps crumbling onto the front walk and lawn, where I dreamed so many of my dreams. The house next door, which was built in mirror image and shared a garage with our own, looked the same too.
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Reclaiming Old Memories in Port Arthur
Cumberland Street runs parallel to the wild shores of Lake Superior in the scruffy bellows of Port Arthur district, complete with unsightly shipping yard ruins, a bar with a neon Playboy logo in the window, and an unpredictable railway line.
With years of retrospect, I found the area quite proud. Although it seems run down at a glance, its preservation after all these years conveys a working class honour I couldn’t have picked up on as a child. Even now, the motels lining the street — the Superior, Modern, Lakehead and Sea-Vue — all have the same signs they did in 1988, and they were memories I was happy to have back.
A middle-aged man was cutting the grass in front of the Sea-Vue Motel, and I immediately remembered sitting on my front step, watching the motel’s owner mow his lawn in the distance at the end of every workday. Awed, I hurried down the street, finding new old things to look at, and formulating counterpoint narratives to the “you can never go home” adage in my mind that went something like:
If you follow the right steps, at the right time, there are portals where time is fluid, the world rhymes, the stanzas have symmetry, and hands work the same fields until the sun takes it all back, forever.
Which is ridiculous.
When I reached the Modern, its parking lot was lined with the same crumbling walls and tacky pig stonework that I used to pick at while waiting for the bus at the stop outside.
The Sea-Vue proprietor had finished cutting the lawn, and stood at the head of the property, hands on his hips and looking out at the world with days-end satisfaction. And I remembered watching the old owner do the same thing, every day. It could have been him, but I didn’t ask.
If I could capture my impression of Thunder Bay during this trip in one place, and hold on to that feeling forever, this would be it: Haunted, beautiful, and precisely as I left it all those years ago.
Someone Stole the Shopping Carts (I Think It Was Him)
I became aware of a man watching me from down the street, wearing blue jeans and a white t-shirt with red rings around the sleeves and collar, with scruffy unkempt hair sticking out from the sides of a red baseball cap. When he noticed me looking at him, he laughed, as if we shared a private joke. He leaned forward with his hands cupped above his eyes like telescopes and looked at the Sea-Vue with mock intensity.
I realized he was teasing me, though it felt good natured and of course, I was gawking.
As I walked back to my car, he followed me down the street with a shopping cart that squeaked and squealed every step of the way. When I looked over my shoulder, he let go and stepped back with his palms held face out, and stifling laughter, continued staring at the Sea-Vue.
When I got back to my car, he sat down on the busy curb on the other side of the street, a few metres away from the cart.
If I may fast forward here a bit, over the course of my visit, I found shopping carts everywhere. I didn’t think much of it at first (it’s a poor city and people take shopping carts), but I kept seeing them. There must have been hundreds scattered about, mostly in my neighborhood.
I was working on a punk record in my spare time, so I chanted lyrics to myself every time I spotted one.
I think it was him.
I think it was him.
Someone stole the shopping carts,
I think it was him.
I snapped photos of them like they were collectibles in a treasure hunt, with bonus points if I could get locations from my past into the frame. For example, here are the Boulevard Lake public beach facilities.
The beaches were dry,
And nowhere to swim.
Someone stole the shopping carts,
I think it was him.
I even got my old elementary school into the fun.
The school was empty,
The windows were dim.
But someone stole the shopping carts,
I think it was him.
I found them while I was hiking the Boulevard Lake Loop. I found them on the George Burke Trail Loop. When I stopped at Safeway (another big nostalgic moment for me), the employees had chained the few remaining shopping carts up at the store entrance, and there were few left indoors. Port Arthur’s shopping carts were under siege — and I think it was him.
The Nostalgia Magic Runs Out
Because we seemed the same age, my imagination was running wild about the possibility that I could know him. So when I got back to my car, I searched for the name that was easiest for me to remember: We’ll call him Lenny (I’ll keep his name private for the purpose of this story). He could have fit the visual description, and he was a bit weird when I knew him.
He was one of my better friends, and in the days before I left Thunder Bay, he took us out for Burger King, where we got playable vinyl records with our meals. We listened to them later at his place with his grandmother’s parrot who despite my urging, had nothing to say for himself.
After a quick internet search, I found out Lenny had passed away in 2019. His obituary was the first search result on my phone. When I looked back, the man with the shopping cart was gone.
I felt bad about my friend, so after I was done checking in at the Airbnb, I went for a drive to Chippewa Park. I would soon find out that not everything was as it should there either…
This story is part of an ongoing series describing the events that led me to become a lifelong hiker during the Summer of 2020.