The Northern Town and its Water

In the small town there was an old library, a few churches, and even a place where they sold worms for fishing and nearby, in the summers anyhow, a corn stand. I only realized far after that I never brought my bike there, such as in stories and films. If I could go back, I would have, for a bicycle fits a town and one could go on adventures and take more pictures of the local flora and fauna.

Yet I still have much memory in the mind’s eye and a few photos from walking. I used to fish off the shore walls and near little bridges and no matter what theory says, worms always got the fish to bite or at least become curious and nibble more than any metal or plastic lure. There were wooden bridges and stone ones, and moss and rocks and the sun-bleached parts caught my eye whist people generally were friendly and many of them waved. 

There was a series of canals and though they go in Northern Ontario it was based off a model of waterways from somewhere in Europe. These waterways, often called ‘intercostal,’ can be found in southern Florida also. They are often secondary homes or cottages, and I suppose that means upper middle class or affluent populaces inhabit them. Or old timers that simply always lived there through the generations. Maybe each situation is unique, and they can’t exactly be categorized. 

I remember the winters frozen and sometimes an ice fishing hut or series of them could be viewed as one looked from the purlieu of the lagoon intercostal waterways out to the white and grey lake frozen and crystalline-like under a December or January sky sun laden. That would make a good landscape painting for someone, some soul involved in such, and often as I walk summer fields and meadows or winter hills with vistas, I have the passing thought whimsical of wishing I knew a painter to talk about all with. In fact, I should have lived in older times where letter writing, where true soulful epistolary was the norm. But, in lieu of not having a confident or artist contact I’ll tell here…

The area was big, several square kilometres and none of the houses could have basements for the water could go in and that would be problematic. The dwellings were built on piles, telephone poles wooden and probably chemically stained to preserve them. Some houses were bungalows and nondescript with simple screen doors and others towered over the earth maybe up to four of five stories tall, and those usually had expensive power boats over forty feet long outside of them bobbing up and down a little bit in that lake water. 

And it was quiet while someone watched the nice world there and the change of seasons. Boat. Book. Walk. Reflect. Even pray or meditate. Repair a bird house wooden or sit on the porch and watch the world go by. When we went to church, so long ago, the old man that gave the exegesis about the gospels used to say that his goal should be the same for his community. And what was his goal? It was for his maker, his God, to simply say in heaven when the day arrived, to say about the life one had lived on earth, ‘Well done good and faithful servant.’ 

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Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet, writer, and photographer. The Book of Love and Mourning, a third collection of prose poems and landscape photographs, is set to be released in winter 2025.