The Shaky Mover
Part Six: Greener Pastures
There comes a time in every young artist’s life when they feel the melodramatic urge to move to a city that really gets them. It could be a big city, full of lush metropolitan sounds, scenes and delicacies, or simply another small - albeit more artist-friendly - town.
I didn’t feel a conscious desire to move cities in my youth. I was simply too depressed to think that was even a possibility. I’d been raised to believe that whatever you saw in your immediate surroundings was all that lay in store. Growing up in urban low-income housing and townhomes, that wasn’t an inspiring certainty. I never saw myself “getting out of there.” For better or worse, I begrudgingly accepted my fate: that I was doomed to be an unhappy nobody with no direction or ambition other than to be nothing like my parents.
The cool bands and beautiful artists I saw and heard on TV and the radio, and the thousands of books I devoured from the library fell into my grasp for entertainment purposes only. They didn’t exist to inspire me; I felt like my indulgences in art were a clandestine endeavour that primarily served to torture me with untouchable people and unreachable possibilities. Even as I learned to dress like them and to play guitar so that I could cover their songs, I never thought I was one of them.
Even while I toyed with the idea of heading to Toronto to attend university at a competitive school for journalism, I knew deep down that I’d never make it into the program. I’d been far too apathetic - and preoccupied with my part-time job and apartment - to excel in my later years of high school. I didn’t even bother to apply to school in other provinces because I felt stifled both by a lack of parental support and by my own deeply embedded sense of inferiority.
It never occurred to me that I could just move to Toronto (or any big city) just because I wanted to.
It also never occurred to me that I was an artist.
Even at the start of my twenties, having tasted a newfound adult joy in the form of moving out on my own, attending punk rock shows, befriending musicians, trying psychedelics and other nightlife delights, it still never occurred to me to leave my hometown. I just accepted that this was all there was: this group of friends, and bands, and bars and barista jobs. No matter how maddening that acceptance became, I dug my heels in and looked for meaning in the blades of grass and bats in the treetops of my city park at night. High on mushrooms, but deeply sad inside.
It wasn’t until I met my lifelong partner, Ryan, and began exploring my creative urges - a terrifying process in itself, and one I’m grateful to have shared with my love - that I considered that moving cities might be a good idea.
Guelph was a rural university town with a decent indie music scene and an agricultural bent. Two beautiful rivers carved their way through the city, which was designed by a haughty Scottish colonist to mimic the European towns he admired so dearly. What I loved about the place was the overwhelming sense of history - of the thousands of years Indigenous people spent tending to nature, not its 200 year colonial existence - I felt when I sat upon its riverbanks.
My hometown was also an agricultural university town intersected by a substantial river, but it was just a little bit bigger and snobbier. The confluence of higher learning and high tech culture with Mennonite settlers had long shaped the area’s awkwardly conflicted post-industrial cultural profile.
Horse-drawn carriages were as common a sight in the city as were visiting scientists and tech moguls. Stephen Hawking make repeated visits to the Perimeter Institute for Quantum Physics, located along the trail where I took nightly walks. The infamous Blackberry (one of the earliest smart phone-type devices) was created a few kilometres up the main road. The exact polarity of visible Luddite vs. tech bro culture was never lost on me.
Both cities - it goes without saying but I’m going to say it anyway - existed just a few dozen kilometres from one another, on equally stolen land.
In Ryan, I’d unwittingly found a partner who was not only a brilliant creative, but also a guy who’d never thought twice about leaving his hometown until he met me. He jumped into our relationship wholeheartedly, joining me in my bizarre, brutalist ugly/beautiful city when we were both 21 years old. We eventually played shows in some wonderful all-ages DIY venues ranging from a 200-year old Mennonite grist mill to a punk basement called The Screaming Fish, to an iconic house venue run by a kindly magician…but that would all come several years later.
Alas, that inevitable artist craving to seek community and stimulation in a different city crept up on both of us. We’d visited Guelph and sat dreamily under willow trees along its riverbanks, and fairly abruptly, decided to move there. Not so much for the music scene, I realize now, but very much because I’d never made the leap that my partner had in physically picking up and moving away from the place that had both raised and neglected me.
I needed to throw a wrench into my gears in order to kickstart my newfound life as both a newly married adult woman and a freshly minted musician. I needed a long-term breath of fresh air to activate the latent hopefulness and adventurous spirit that lay dormant deep within my young mind. A move 30 km across some pretty vast cornfields would provide just such an opportunity.
To the city where I’d write, perform and release my first album.
To the city that would change almost everything.
In a dream we would be here
Every day under the willows
Walk across a river
In bare feet
Tread lightly
Stay tuned for the next instalment of my autobiographical series, The Shaky Mover. You can also revisit previous instalments by working your way backwards from here.