How’s she goin’?
Just passing through, eh?
Course you are. They all are.
Don’t get much traffic up around these parts anymore. Odd tourist who maybe got lost. Sometimes ‘Mericans that actually mean to come here for the huntin’ and fishin’, but they usually got local guides hired and they take ‘em where they’re going with no stops along the way.
Not much different than a lot of the local these days.
The damn sou’westers don’t even bother stopping into the Irving anymore. They’re so god damn stuck up they’ll drive the extra twenty minutes into town to buy a case of beer.
Can’t blame ‘em really. The Irving is out of gas most of the time cuz they don’t pay their damn bills. The liquor store outlet is always short on something or shut down cuz it’s under investigation for missing booze. The workers there can’t keep their sticks on the ice to save their lives.
And no one white gets gas at Cloud’s on the reserve. People say they’re afraid of the all the free range rez dogs… but that’s a lie.
Townies on the way to Fredericton used to drive through but since the new highway opened, you can go straight from Newcastle to Renous. Safer drive, really. The War’ick’s a shit show of a road. Potholes everywhere, crazy deer jumpin’ in front of yah. I’m tellin’ yah, terrorist deer. Willing to kamikaze to take out a human.
Sometimes, those greasy fuckers jump right outta the potholes and bang!
You’re all dead.
Beat
We’re dying out here. And it’s not just the deer killin’ us.
All of our young people are packin’ it up and headin’ out west for work. The grad classes are shrinking year by year. The Kindergarten classes getting even smaller. The government keeps thinkin’ about closing down the schools altogether and busin’ whatever kids are left to town. We survived a “sustainability study” a few years ago but the next one is right around the corner. Our schools won’t last forever. The kids just aren’t there and once they close… we’re gonna loose it all, we are.
The older generation are droppin’ like flies. Every second house between here and town is up for sale. An old guy dies, leaves the family land to his kids or grandkids… but they’re not here. And they’re not coming back. Can’t sell them. Can’t rent them. Eventually the property tax, the cost of keepin’ the heat on in the Winter, it just becomes too much of a burden. So they take ‘em off the market and let ‘em rot and die.
Or whichever comes first.
I know we all bitch n’ moan about the War’ick’s cracked ass road but it’s only so long till all our roads are like that. They’re gettin’ worse by the year. The old sayin’ round here was that we only have two seasons: Winter and Construction Season. But now we just have Summer because each year there’s less and less work goin’ on to fix up our roads. In the Winter, plows are takin’ their sweet ass time to get tah us. If they do at all.
Unless it’s an election year. Then we matter for a couple a months.
Rural Lives Matter, man.
And-and don’t you jump down my throat about that slogan. I know what it means. I get the context and yeah, I know what words like context mean too. We’re not all uneducated dumbasses up here. I get it, I get how the blacks would be offended. It’s a real white privilege thing that all we got to whine and cry bout is schools and roads… jobs. It’s not like, ah, like slavery. Or getting shot by a cop because of the colour of your skin. Maybe whoever thought up Rural Lives Matter, didn’t really think it out too well… or didn’t understand the context.
But…
Beat
We do matter. Don’t we?
We know what the snobs in the southern cities say about us and they’re not wrong. Not all wrong anyway. New Brunswick is in trouble. We don’t have the tax base to pay for all these things and yadda-yadda, the city folk are subsidizing us country bumpkins and we’re all stupid hicks who don’t understand how the real world works and we’re all welfare bums who want handouts.
Listen, us out here, we don’t expect to have all the services that the cities got. But… but we still need something to stay a float. We shouldn’t have to uproot our whole lives, right? I mean what if we did all move to the cities? What if New Brunswick was filled with a bunch of ghost towns? Would that be any better? Would things really change or are blaming us inbred hillbillies just another excuse to not blame the Irvings and the other One-Percenters? Why should we be the scapegoats, we’re just trying to lives our lives like anyone else!
But just living is getting harder and harder.
And you know… it’s… y’know even our young people are dying. If you don’t got cancer, you’re a pill head. Drug dealing is our biggest industry and the drug dealers are running this place.
And the deer.
Always be on the watch for those mother fuckers.
This is Sunny Corner. It might not be much but it used to be. It used to be beautiful and everyone took care each other, and no one had an empty table. It’s still home though. I’m a Sunny Corner boy. Always was, always will be. Till the day I die.
Welcome to The Corner. It might not look like much, but boy, lemme tell ya’…
do we got some stories.
