I don't exactly have a good relationship with my hometown. I was bullied there, never fit in, that town had nothing in it I could appreciate and I had nothing me that town understood or needed so I moved to Moncton.
This story marks the time I stopped wishing that town to die a slow and painful death...because that town has been dying a slow and very painful death since before I was even born! The fishing and lumber industries, when they still have trees to cut and fish to take, has been overwhelmingly mechanized. Those two things are no longer options but neither is going back to school when you're 50 and been told all your life that school is for sissies. The young and employable are leaving that entire part of the province and the perfume of elderly despair that emanates from it so fast that some temporary foreign workers are hired or, as the locals put it, “to steal our jobs”.
Among all the half-assed ideas the desperate people of that town tried (and you and I would have half-assed ideas, if we were desperate!) there's having a summer tourism industry but without having the party-goers offend the local catholic sensibilities with their booze, music, sex and recreational drugs. There was also, for a few short years, the idea of working 3 weeks in the oil sands of Alberta, buying a huge home dangerously close to the sea front and pretend that climate change isn't real.
When I come to think about it, I'm glad I never loved that town. It made it easier for me to move on to something better instead of watching my home die like those who stay there.
Instead, I have the luxury to just laugh and snark while it is painfully and slowly flattened by the merciless steamroller of time.