By Heather Mallick (July 21, 1996)

There is a town in north Ontario
With dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there

- Helpless, by Neil Young

KAPUSKASING-High school reunions are a bad idea, as are all sentimental occasions. It is inadvisable to go back to anything. Old boyfriends should be erased. Funerals should be minimalist. If people don't send you Christmas cards for two years, strike them off the list. Be businesslike.

Going to your high school reunion is like volunteering for surgery without anesthetic. But I attended this one, my first, because all my relatives and school friends who weren't going (Kapuskasing is an acquired taste and not all of us had acquired it) plus all the people I know who have never been north of Orillia, begged me to go.

In other words, go have what will probably be a bad experience so that you can write about it, and we can live it vicariously without having to put ourselves out. What follows is an entirely truthful assessment of my hometown, and I accept that I won't be invited back.

High school is a purely North American institution and its intensity can be glimpsed only by those who didn't experience it. My husband, for example, who is British and has standards, thinks that high school is where young Canadians are educated. He does not understand, as we do, that high school has nothing whatsoever to do with education. It has to do with the process of "socialization," with sex and drugs and yearning and clothes and girl gangs and what passes for entertainment and a mental stage where everything-and nothing-is interesting. Actual classroom time was incidental to the business of becoming a grownup, of spending time with your friends, of feeling your way underwater.

An hour after the harrowing flight from Timmins and a high-cholesterol breakfast at Belly Buster's, we head for the high school where they are holding a welcoming wine and cheese, sans cheese, in the sweltering gym. I will drink anything, especially now, but the reunion wine-a specially bottled chardonnay we'll name Chateau Kap after a beloved local bar-is corrosive. I wonder why it isn't chilled and realize suddenly what has been bothering me about the whole town.

The wine isn't chilled because this is not a place where you have to chill wine-it  is cold here, always. This pretty town whose verdancy my husband is exclaiming over is behaving out of character. It looks like Niagara-on-the-Lake.

My Kapuskasing is a white, Siberian misery and if they were being strictly accurate, they would have held the reunion in January. I meet a classmate who tells me the reason he left Kap permanently was that in 1980, it snowed in every single month of the year and he could no longer tolerate it. The whole weekend, I am uncomfortably hot, because I never thought for a moment it wouldn't be freezing.

One thing hasn't changed:  the bugs. I get mosquito bites so bad they leave scars. Visitors from Toronto are shocked to be told proudly by a Kap resident that no, the blackflies don't just appear in the evening, they hover all day. We reminisce about the caterpillar invasions-trees were leafless, cars skidded on the gooey road-and remember the year of the locust? Or were they just deerflies? What about those enormous beetles that we would occasionally find ponderously crossing the road in a procession? Where did they come from? Where were they going?

I begin to realize that there are so many things Kap people take for granted that southerners can't get over. We never salted the roads, instead leaving them to pack down to the consistency of hard soap, which provided sufficient resistance for snow tires. We used block heaters. When we got snow up our pants, we didn't mind because it wasn't going to melt till we got inside, maybe. We killed animals and ate them, but in a casual way so that you never saw antlers on anyone's wall because hunting wasn't a novelty. Everyone smoked, and still does, Player's Light, and people wore hockey T-shirts that said Puck It. The women all had small town hair - terrible perms committed by hairdressers with criminal records.

My husband was desperate to go to Kap with me (to find out how you turned out this way, was how he put it, but he has always treated me the way a horticulturist would tend a genetically freakish plant) and, amazed by my consent, was on his best behavior. He did have an unfortunate manner about him though, sort of like Prince Philip making stilted conversation with someone who has turned over a new leaf after getting out of prison. I overheard someone telling him about catching sturgeon and him responding, "Not a very attractive fish, is it?"

A man of insight, you'll agree, but I think as a subconscious punishment for his crime of being British, polite and well-dressed, I insisted he take me to the Model City Mall and hang out by the garbage cans outside the hot dog stand just the way all the guys did in high school. We sat there and watched women come out of the hair salon with the worst hair in existence, hair that literally looked as if it had been set by a Mixmaster, beehives with giant unblended curls, and the victims looking terrified, and I said, there do you understand small towns now or do I have to take you back into Wal-Mart? Do you want me to gain weight and look 52 at 36, like that woman in the bright green sweatshirt that reads, "When Irish eyes are smiling, they're usually up to something"? Would you like to move to a small town and raise a passel of kids? Would you like to get up from supper every night and head off for your shift at the mill, picking those oft-used plugs out of the ashtray and shoving them in your ears? Go out to dinner on Saturday night and eat cream of carrot soup and hot pork with a side order of toast? One word from you and we can do that! Stop saying my town is charming!

It was one moment of hysteria in an otherwise pleasant weekend.

It's actually useful to take an outsider to your hometown because you then see things through foreign, endlessly appreciative eyes. When I saw London, England, for the first time, I didn't see the grime and the stinginess but rather the beauty and the potential of it. Kap, like all northern towns, has a makeshift air about it, a certain raffishness.

One of the sweetest moments was revisiting the town library. Libraries are a safety valve for small towns, just as bars are, and as a teenager I brought home novels in bulk, not liking non-fiction at that age. The library seems to be as good as ever, one of the few places in town that has not deteriorated or been replaced by that attractive, but somehow samey, colored, corrugated siding. (Why is almost everything built of synthetics in the middle of the world's biggest forest? Because it's cheap and practical.)

Change in this town was wrought by two things: The exodus caused by the mill downsizing, and Premier Bill Davis's last-moment decision to fund Catholic schools.

His move changed the French-English balance in the town, and sent many of the bilingual kids to the French high school, which is known as Cité des Jeunes, thus virtually wiping out my high school which was partially torn down and rebuilt as a combined junior and senior English school. This pointless exercise means that my high school is now known as an "education centre," and Kap, if it was worth five million precious dollars to you to reshuffle an age group that I recall proudly as being a bunch of happy, badly behaved illiterates, have it your way.

T.K. Jewell must have had a fit. He was the vice-principal of my high school (and subsequently the town's mayor), a courteous and correct man whose icy English-accented precision had all the students terrified. We came in every day, listened to the anthem, recited the Lord's Prayer and waited for a speech from T.K. over the public address system (Mister Jewell to you, Miss Mallick) in which he enumerated our failings. He was a splendid principal, achieving discipline by strength of character, remoteness of manner and a sort of polite sarcasm.

He was the first person I encountered at the reunion and I realized as we conversed (alert questions on his part, frenzied babbling on mine) that he is black. That's the kind of town it is, where the mayor is the only black person in town and nobody notices or notices that they don't notice.

In a TV documentary about Kap, T.K. Jewell described his small town southern Ontario background. He said he was raised to believe that a black person had to maintain strict standards for himself in a town, that one had to behave better than others in order to thrive.Is this true? It is certainly true that he always kept himself slightly apart from other people. I'm now wondering if there were Jews in Kap or Ukrainians, or indeed anyone whom we didn't take strictly at face value, just as they expected themselves to be taken. Everyone had a complete lack of "side" or snobbery. It was a profound shock to me in 1992 to hear for the first time-in Toronto-vicious anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-gay remarks. I did not respond to them. My hometown had never prepared me for such a thing.

A small town reunion gives you a feeling of familiarity and connection that is a shock to the system. Everyone knows you here, even if you think they don't, and it is an uncomfortable sensation. Big cities have a bad reputation, but as the travel writer Jonathan Raban once wrote, "Not knowing one's neighbours may be a privilege, not a dreadful fate. To be without a family is, for some, a luxurious and honorable escape from a state of repressive social bondage." Solitude is the prize, as well as the penalty, of city life. To live in a small town means to abandon privacy.

Or does it? Anonymity is a jewel. I greatly enjoy going to parties in Toronto where I know no one, as my chances of being surprised and entertained are so much greater. But then city people do pin you down. What do you do? they ask. What's your net worth? is what they might as well be asking. How many divorces have you had? Are those scars from plastic surgery?

The nicest thing about the whole reunion was that no one asked once in that grasping big city way about how I made my living. What are you doing now? they might say, referring to anything from marriage to children to where our last vacation was. Overwhelmingly, everyone in my class had children-never one, always two and sometimes four or five-but still seemed relaxed. I spent a week recently with a 15-month-old baby. I watched that child peel open a jelly doughnut, dump it in the pool, take it out and play badminton with it and then eat it. I am not even relaxed thinking of it. How do these women achieve such serenity?

Overwhelmingly, the women were open and generous and still attractive. Generally speaking, the men had aged badly and were just as boring as they had been in high school. In many cases, they were more so and communicated by grunting. Many were engaged in classic wife-avoidance tactics that afternoon, like golf, and fascinatingly, the wives expressed no regret at their absence. How did I ever yearn for the younger versions of these useless men?

I do not miss high school; no sane person does. After a few thimble-sized glasses of the Chateau Kap, I started to remember what I didn't like about it. They made us wear these tasteless navy blue nylon uniforms for gym class, with our names embroidered on the back. Everyone detested them. (Or maybe they didn't; this is only my version of events.) I hated gym. It always made me feel the way I assume homosexuals feel plunged into boot camp in Fort Dix.

Once when I was 13, the gym teacher asked me to demonstrate a somersault on the balance beam, which seemed to me to be several storeys off the ground. I looked at her in disbelief, but I did what I considered to be this silly, uncomfortable, graceless thing.

I silently swore that someday somehow I would not have to wear unattractive clothes and possibly injure myself following the absurd instructions of sweaty masculine women. I would not have to break wrist veins serving in volleyball. I would find someplace where I was valued for being a girl and would spend my adult life lounging around reading Henry James, eating delicious food and having affairs with clever older men who said clever things. I had this deep suspicion, from casual things that teachers had said to me, that there might be a percentage in being smart, in being the kind of person on whom nothing is lost.

All girls go through a phase where they realize that sex might be their ticket out. In small towns, sex is your ticket in. If you wear tight jeans and stilettos and hang out at the mall, you will have your future decided for you.

I considered this, but I think I was faking it even then. As Joni Mitchell said about trying to be Bohemian, "Even on the scuffle, the cleaner's press was in my jeans." About a third of us stayed; the rest left never to return.

There were so many thousands of people crowded into the hockey arena for the Saturday night reunion party that we were forced outside. Like teenagers, we stood around drinking beer and talking about nothing much.

I said how sorry I would have been if the mill had died, taking the town with it. One of the nicest people I went to school with-there's one in every class, a Wayne Gretzky type, the kind of gentle, self-confident young man who always makes sure the retarded students aren't left out of things-reproved me for what he believed to be false sentimentality.

It would not have mattered if the town had been destroyed, he said firmly. Memories cannot be taken away. People go where the jobs are (a notion often expressed that weekend). They simply pick up and build new memories somewhere else.

He was saying that the quality of a place lives in the head, and I suspect he is right about this. Any genuine feeling I have for those days is generalized, and doesn't come directly from the town or the school or even individuals.

Places like Kap don't lend themselves to nostalgia. This may just be a conceit, but if there is anything in me that is sensible, hard-headed and ultra-Canadian, it comes from living in a northern town. It's an attitude thing. You southern people have your own softer memories; you wouldn't understand the harshness of mine.

Things for a 16-year-old to do on a slow night in Kap

• Drink a mickey out behind the old hockey arena, be shocked by your own daring and stagger home without passing out in a snowbank. Do it again the next night.
• Sneak into the Jack Pine bar with false I.D. and do mescaline with the band.
• Have grave debates with your girlfriends about the merits of tucking the legs of your pantsuit (this is 1976) into your cowboy boots or leaving them out. Group application of chocolate-flavored lip gloss. Listen to Peter Frampton's Baby I Love Your Way 58 times.
• Stick your head out your bedroom window and smoke Cameos. Drop the cigarette by accident, rush outside in the dark to stomp out the butt in case your mother sees it glowing, step on and squish a frog, be grossed out. Stay up all night. Talk about the family you babysit for, how someone told you the husband is having an affair and how the wife confronted him in a bar and how this cannot be possible because they are grownups and have kids and live in a house and they cannot behave this way because grownups are nothing more than backdrops for exciting teen lives.
• Head out to the Griffin Lake with your friends to stay in the cabin of a guy someone's cousin knows. Get hopelessly lost in the bush and spend 24 hours outside in the rain, propped up against a tree and trying to sleep. See bears. Bicker. Manage to light a fire, smoke a joint, eat a box of toffee someone had in their knapsack. Accidentally spray yourself in the eyeball with mosquito repellent. Mop bright green pus out of your eye for the next 24 hours. Claw your way out of the bush in daylight and think that this is the most fun weekend you have had in a long time.
• When your very drunk buddy suggests you leave the party and go night-driving really fast down Barriault's Road so the car sails in the air, say yes. After all, you are a teenager and nothing can ever hurt your indestructible body or interfere with your wildly expanding taste for dangerous pleasures.
• Have an evening champagne picnic with your friends beneath the dam at the mill where the riverbed has dried up. Sit by the boulders which have a curious thick yellowy-white chemical foam crust all over them. Think that you are having a sophisticated time. Watch the shooting stars, but don't get maudlin because you are too young to have anything to be maudlin about.
• Drink beer, which you secretly hate. Go Ski-Dooing on the river. Watch the aurora borealis, think it is boring and wonder when you will ever get out of this stupid town. Go to a sleepover and watch Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte and be really scared. Watch a Cheech and Chong movie and think it is the funniest thing you have ever seen.
• Roll hash oil spliffs with a safety pin in the dark at the Strand Theatre, at which you are extraordinarily adept. Nobody ever cared what movie was on, we just went. What else were we going to do?
• Sit in Man in Society class while your teacher, Mr. Butcher, whom you are dimly aware is highly intelligent, tries to drag the class through sociologist Max Weber and some preliminary notions of economics. He raises the question of social class and, with a gleam in his eye, asks us to identify our own. But we are Kap kids and have never before encountered the concept. Finally, someone has a bright idea. "We're all middle class." And everyone agrees, restfully.

Mr. Butcher laughs at us. The truth about our town-that we are the children of a working class that has never realized its own vulnerability, that the mill is a cash cow, that most jobs come from service industries and an over-generous government, that the French and English co-exist here rather delicately, that to southern Ontario we might as well not exist, that we may never top the attainments of our parents, that we are innocents-is not something he is going to impart to us.

A brief history

Kapuskasing is as remote to you coddled, moisturized, green-lawned people in Toronto as the Australian outback is to the rich suburbs of Sydney.

In fact, Kapuskasing, with its clapboard houses and beer joints, resembles a rough-and-ready town like Kalgoorlie, Australia, with one exception of course. It's so cold here that only a million or so of Canada's 30 million citizens (the rest cling to the warm American border like sediment) would be stalwart enough to venture outside.

The rest of you would look about you with the dread surmise of Capt. Scott on his 1912 expedition to the South Pole and say, "Great God! this is an awful place," wrap the blankets tighter, throw another log on the fire and scurry back south as soon as the car thaws out, which will probably be next April.

Northern people are different from you and me. Or rather, I should say, from you, because a northern upbringing is something that has stayed with me. I lived in Kap for five years, and in much smaller towns before that. It gives a person a certain ... resilience.

Kap (this is Cree for "bend in the river" and shows that native people are no better than anyone else at coming up with zippy town slogans) is a town of 9,700 people on the shores of the Kap River, west of Timmins and south of almost nothing except Moose Factory. It was built out of a pine wilderness in 1910 as a base camp for the Canadian National Railway, distinguished itself in 1917 as a prisoner-of-war camp (town slogan: "We've got Germans"), was renamed Kapuskasing in 1921 and then became the absolute crystallization of everything Canadians know they shouldn't be but can't resist because it's easy money - a hewer of wood for the Americans.

Kimberly-Clark set up the mill in 1921 and, in partnership with the New York Times, went on to level large parts of northern Ontario to provide cheap newsprint for American papers for decades.

Here's where we get ambivalent: We cut down trees and damaged the ozone layer to enable foreigners to print cheap and mostly bad newspapers. In return, we were employed by reasonably benevolent employers who handed us prosperity, which ended in 1991 when Darwin Smith, the sinister man who ran Kimberly-Clark, pulled the plug. There was, in the Monty Python derivative phrase, "trouble at' mill."

Smith was a cipher, an American loner whose hobby, the Globe and Mail reported, was driving heavy earth-moving equipment around his Indiana farm. Surgery for cancer decades before had left his voice so cracked and raspy that people who spoke to him on the phone took him for a very old man. He was a paternalistic capitalist, yes, but in the way of a father who appeared to dislike his offspring.

His reasons for destroying the town were that the aging mill required more capital than he was willing to lay out. I have never been able to escape the suspicion that the forests were mostly gone and KC wanted to skip town for fear of bad publicity. It has been suggested by some that the clear-cut area-devoid of trees-north and south of Kap is half the size of Prince Edward Island.

Kap people felt they had been milked dry, and they were right. In the boom years of the 1970s, a lengthy strike closed down the town's stores one by one. Our fragility was exposed. The trade unions understood what right-wingers never do understand, that life in a mill is a loud, dangerous, exhausting wet hell, so workers should be well compensated for that and for the day hell disappears.

Smith, a cussed man, did well for KC as always in a deal involving a hydro plant, the Ontario NDP government and a worker buyout that left the town shrunken but surviving. (The town's slogan is now "Strong and alive," which seems to me to have an admirable lack of boastfulness, a bit better than "We're still here" but not by much.) The town that I visited last month is a shadow of its former self, but it is still Kapuskasing, and therefore a marvel.

In the boom years, prosperous mill-employed Kap people had Stuff. They owned houses and boats and snowmobiles (in the north, people die in Ski-Doo accidents at astounding rates; they will insist on venturing onto the ice or into trees), and they drove "boats," too, big Buick Rivieras and Oldsmobiles, along with their trucks. In Toronto, people have also reverted to the boat habit by driving vans, but not in Kap. Transport is a matter of survival, not convenience, to northern towns. The Toronto-Kap trains were always a nightmare of discomfort, what with the bus to Porquis Junction, everyone drinking Red Cap ale till the bar car closed, the train breaking down in the middle of nowhere so that passengers could be eaten alive by mosquitoes, and the conductor waking everyone up at 2 a.m. in North Bay to yell at the drunk who had just vomited on the toilet seats.

There is no train now, and people drive as they have always done, 10 hours from Toronto, with brief stops for gas and fries. If they are particularly effeminate, like me, they fly.

To get to Kapuskasing, you fly to Timmins on a small Air Canada plane and then on to Kap in a smaller Air Creebec plane.

Prissy travel writers like Paul Theroux deplore air travel, saying the real flavor of the country can't be absorbed from the air, but that's absurd. In Timmins, you wander around on the tarmac looking for your next plane, and you smell something you haven't smelled in the 19 years since you last visited-milllions of acres of trees all the way up to where the tundra starts.

The flight is stomach-flinging and very close to the ground, and you wish you had left someone behind to raise the children, but some primitive instinct tells you that an air crash would be too easy. Of all the good people you knew to die in Kap-in overturned canoes, burned alive in forest fires, accidentally shot in moose hunting season-death was always protracted or exotic.

Driving into Kapuskasing is not stirring or even terribly interesting. The visitor is, however, aware of its genius loci, or spirit of place, in this case, a rather tough place. The novelist Jane Urquhart has referred to this quality in writing for the AGO about a 1932 Canadian painting called Silver Mine, Evening by Yvonne McKague, a contemporary of the Group of Seven. It's a northern scene amazingly like the view of the Spruce Falls mill.

We can carry in our minds, she wrote, "a particular slant of light, the pauses in a working day, or the suggestion that a change of season is in the air." Kap is like that.

You think that the town itself isn't up to much. Then you think how welcoming these buildings would be if it were -40 C and blowing outside. Urquhart calls this "the intimacy the inclusion of built structures brings to a landscape." The photograph speaks of "men and women sleeping, rising, working, raising families, and in some cases, dying."