Smooth trail in Lakewood Heights East Saint John New Brunswick

 

Riding out east on a warm October afternoon to see what has and hasn't changed in my old neighborhood.

There's Simonds, my old high school, still standing after over 40 years.

The house I grew up in.  We were on the left half.

I was surprised to see the old store still there. This is where I used to buy my comics once a week.

Our local beach lake, the Res, has had some major upgrades.

I love the Little library, a nice little box where anyone can take or leave a book for free. I wished I'd brought a book with me.  A couple of kids checked it out for anything good and were clearly disappointed to find nothing but romance novels.  

On the next trip, I had a stack of old comics from Mom and Dad's basement to contribute.   I met Kenny Hall then, an 80 something Korean vet in charge of maintaining the Little Library. He took the bag of comics and put them in his car to distribute them one at a time and make sure more kids had a crack at them. There are two more Little Libraries in Saint John and I visited the other two with a small stack of comics each.  The other two had no caretakers on hand to intervene so some young kid will get a windfall. Maybe they will share.

Kenny shared some stories.  He was only 15 when he volunteered for the army.  In Korea he'd been responsible for providing cover fire for refugees fleeing villages.  He'd almost died from a work accident at the Dry Dock.  I found out later that he and my father knew each other.   Kenny had been a young elementary student at Bayview School where Dad had one of his first jobs with the School Board.  Saint John can be such a small town city.  

The biggest change to the Res is the trail around the lake.  I remember this trail as an industrial dirt road with occasional dump truck and heavy equipment traffic. Abandoned cars were often dumped in the hidden coves of the lakes. Garbage was everywhere. This is so much nicer now.

Mark Melanson and I first discovered this waterfall when we turned off the main trail one day. Not a lot of people knew about this place and we kept our mouths shut.

This was the most popular spot for fishing.

This hill looks so much smaller now. My first bike fell into two pieces, right in the center of the frame, and I slid at least 3 feet to a gravelly stop on my knees. Ah, the pain. Little pieces of rock and sand were driven under the skin.

Worse was to come.  My parents still believed in the medieval medicine of iodine for wounds. There was no way to sneak into the house with the bike in two pieces. Fortunately for Dad, he'd been talking to a couple of men outside the house when I returned.  They helped him hold me down for the first aid.