By Brian Lee
One of the smothering realities of punching this thing out every month is that there’s very little time to peer farther ahead than the next deadline. I hold that up as my excuse for not doing more for the Harbour Spiel’s 25th birthday. The 300th issue is a significant milestone that, had I more time, deserves nothing short of flying in Lil’ Wayne and Beyonce for an A-list wingding at the community hall. Maybe I’ll save that for the 30th.
In December 1990, Myrtle Winchester mailed out a Christmas greeting on two letter-sized pieces of photocopied paper. She called it the Upcoast Journal but for reasons explained in her next issue (see p. 20), she changed it to its present name. The first issue of the Harbour Spiel was mailed in February of 1991. Math whizzes will note the 300th issue should land in January but one month was missed in 2003 when Winchester was undergoing medical treatment.
For a publication so reliant on a single person to push it out the door each month, that too is significant. Because of back spasms and crashed hard drives, I too have come close to missing an issue, but have managed to squeak through so far. I’m proud of my record but am humbled by the fact that I’m still six years away from Winchester’s 15 and haven’t even had my first heart attack.
When I took over the Spiel in 2006, that 15 years seemed like an incredibly long time. Since then I’ve come to appreciate how change creeps up almost imperceptibly, sometimes taking decades to reveal patterns of progress. So it is with this place.
Muriel Cameron still organizes bingo at the hall on Thursday nights, Sunny Charbonneau still cuts hair, Bill Hunsche still peddles real estate and Egmonsters still go without cable. And despite large numbers of new residents arriving since 2000, our year-round population still charts flat. We’re a community that once feared that too many newcomers could destroy what is unique about Pender Harbour and Egmont. I like to think that wariness of newcomers explains why so few stick around long enough to shed the tag.
But the sky didn’t fall. The people that landed here during the last real estate boom have not only fit in but revitalized many volunteer organizations that form the core of our community. Richness of experience has finally trumped the number of years planted here and the latter doesn’t seem as relevant anymore.
Yes, our community has changed since the first issue of the Harbour Spiel but read through it (see p. 19) and you’ll probably recognize something familiar too. The activism, responsibility and community concern voiced by residents reads like recent times. There’s some history, neighbourly thank yous, a call for what would later become GRIPS and an announcement that Centre Hardware is changing to Taffy’s clothing store. If you jump back 25 years and consider the accomplishments yet to come, a pattern does emerge. And it seems we’ll be just fine.
Comments