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One of my favorite topics to write on is the land north of highway 7 back home. I wrote this ditty in 2008 when having a chuckle about just how immense and unforgiving that swamp country is. If you aren't from Center Hastings you may not know about the wild lands that exist between Cooper, Queensborough, Actonolite, Tweed, Kaladar, Flinton and up to Gilmour and towards the hills that separate us from the Ottawa Valley. It's a lowland that does not count as part of the Land O' Lakes region...a lowland that has no passable roads for normal vehicles.

Mom said it best once in an interview...she said, "this part of the world, is very much a part of him. Country is in his soul."

As a boy I spent my summers fishing the Black and the Skoot. Mom would drop me off on a summer morning and go to work. I spent the day fishing and hanging out often alone though my best buddy Mikey Graham was a regular participant...often 5 days a week or more. This wasn't something that happened just one summer, this is something that I did. The bass had worms at the Bare Bum Beach fishing hole on the Black River, but the plentiful chubb's did not. Nearly every summer night mom picked up corns at the corn stand at Hwy 7 and 62...and I had some chubbs...and we baked a potato. Fishing and berry picking were easy ways I could harvest off the land, and this I did do! When there wasn't berries there was leaks and fiddleheads. I always found things to eat just hanging around Bare Bum Beach.

The Black was so full of bass...the Skoot offered Northern Pike, of which the biggest I landed was a 12lb duck eater when I was but 13. Mom's house is on the edge of this unsettled part of Ontario...across the road there is 25km of swamps and lakes who hardly see a human visitor. I came west and live in the mountains, but even now when I think of the Cooper Flats (the swamps north of our hamlet community) I think of a very wild place. A place that doesn't mind killing you. I've spent weeks and months of my life at the hunt camps on Mount Moriah staring into the wilderness beyond my lookout point...my imagination captured by the prehistoric landscape!

This song is for all my friends back home...who know just how far reaching, deep and unforgiving that swamp country is. I can honestly say I've been nervous more times there than here in the big mountains...there's no good water, everything looks the same, it's flat, it's hard to navigate between the windy waters whose places are determined by the geological features of the syenite granite complex. I love it back home...I miss it all the time.

The Leafs going on a playoff run has me homesick...I think of all the Ontarians who have been to wild places like I speak of. I think the days listening to the games on a fuzzy AM radio feed out of Kingston...listening to Joe Bowen call the game...looking out the window as I did and seeing cold empty swamp lands less than 300km from the action of the big city. So here I am 840km north of Vancouver, thinking of home, thinking of hockey, thinking of the land...feeling homesick.

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