Am I Rural? I took Kelly Oxford's Quiz
I’m a fan of Kelly Oxford’s Permanent Retrograde and one of her recent Substack newsletters is called “Are You Rural?”
It asked if you could say ‘Yes’ to 15 statements.
Having grown up in Glengarry, Ontario, I wondered if I was rural.
So I took Kelly’s quiz:
As a child, you found pornography in the woods.
Yes, but it was in an abandoned house. I was in Grade 7 and my parents let me ride my bike to school which was 10 kms away. The ride was relatively safe as the back roads had no traffic besides the odd tractor. They were long, straight stretches of road through corn and soybean fields. A friend had broken into an empty house along the way and found an old Playboy magazine. He whispered his secret to the small gang of bike commuters. Some days we’d stop on the way home from school and climb through the window to check out his find.
You can outrun a cow, you know this for sure.
I’ve never tried so I don’t know for sure. But I don’t remember them being very fast. Our pop punk band The Stand GT put a picture of local cows on a T-shirt. That shirt sold like hot cakes at our rural shows. The cartoon artwork of our first LP ‘They’re Magically Delicious’ paid tribute to our rural upbringing and has a farm scene out the window. There’s a cow smoking a cigarette. When Seattle’s Pat Moriarity submitted the artwork, we asked if he could add the smoking cow. We were proud of that touch. I was also in a university band called The Junior Farmers and wrote a song called ‘Cow Tipping’. So while I haven’t tried to race a cow, I seem to have a lot of stories about them.
Your stripping career was fleeting.
The closest I came to a fleeting stripping career was when I once Jello wrestled in my underwear in a bar in Montreal. My friends and I realized we could make money and get free drinks by volunteering to pretend-wrestle in a giant pool of cold Jello in the middle of the club. We were in university and needed the cash. And being jackasses was already in our repertoire.
You played with heavy machinery as a toddler.
My parents were hobby farmers so we didn’t have heavy machinery. But all my friends did. My first girlfriend was driving tractors as a toddler and taught me how to drive one. Her father also put me to work using balers and milkers. He preferred to keep me busy on the farm as opposed to being alone with his daughter. At our place, it was all manual labour, digging the gardens and mucking out the horse barn. A wheelbarrow and shovel were our “heavy machinery” and it wasn’t that fun playing with them as a toddler.
You’ve clocked over two-hundred Greyhound Bus hours in your life.
Our buses were called Voyageurs, not Greyhounds. Maybe that was a western Canada thing back then? My Mom didn’t have a license to drive when we were kids so she’d load us into a Voyageur to visit relatives in the big city. I remember being impressed that it had a bathroom on it when my Grandparent’s place still had an outhouse. When I got older, I’d sometimes grab that same bus to go back to university in Montreal. I also took a Voyageur a couple of times to visit my friend Doug in Ottawa when he was at Carleton University. You could easily sneak booze onto that bus which was an added attraction.
You know one guy who went to jail for murder, but it happened way after you knew him.
Thankfully it happened before I knew him. But the older kids knew him. A local guy killed his parents and a chainsaw was involved. And aliens were blamed. He was arrested and put away quickly, but that story still echoes in the community I’m sure.
You and ten of your closest friends used to ride in the back of a pickup bed to strangers houses. You should be dead, really.
When I was in Cub Scouts, the Scout Master used to drive a bunch of us in his pickup truck to the weekly Cub gathering. It had a cap over the truck bed, so we’d ride back there rain or shine. He’d drive around the area, stop at each house and watch the little Cubs climb back there, one by one. After my 9th birthday party, most of my invited partygoers rode in the back of his pickup truck. That day he saved on gas and picked up a bunch of Cubs in one shot. I know it was my 9th birthday because I got a tape recorder as a gift. I recorded us talking and singing songs in the back of the truck on the way. There’s a part on the tape when the Scout Master takes a sharp corner and we all go flying around in the truck bed, laughing our heads off.
You can gut a fish.
I loved fishing as a kid and would often go with my Dad or Grandfather. When I got a bit older I used to go on my own or with my sister. There was a small creek near our house where we could catch Lancaster Perch swimming up from the St. Lawrence River. One day I came home with a few fish in a bucket. I was about 10 years old and proud of catching them on my own. When I showed the fish to my Dad he barked at me and said he hoped I didn’t expect him to clean them. “If you catch them, you clean them yourself,” he pronounced, I suppose as a teaching moment. He grabbed a filleting knife from the back porch and told me to start by cutting the heads off. When I held the knife and put the first fish on the wood picnic table in the backyard, it flopped around while looking at me. I did what I was told, but something died inside me that day. And I didn’t go fishing much after that.
You can cook.
When we were kids, my Mom taught us how to make french fries using a huge pot of open grease on the stove. There was a metal basket that hung above the pot that held the frozen fries, dangling there, ready to be submerged in the bubbling grease. Once you lowered the basket into the hot grease it made a really cool sound. I remember one time trying to make fries on my own and I let the grease get too hot. When I dipped the chips, scalding grease went flying everywhere but I was lucky that a) it didn’t burn me and b) it didn’t light anything on fire.
A minimum of two people in your family have been to jail for drinking or drug violations.
No one in my family has been to jail that I know of. I have friends who have been to jail for drinking underage though. There was a local bar just over the Quebec border that was notorious for serving teens under the drinking age of 18. Kids as young as 14 could easily get served at ‘Pauls’, so the bar in Dalhousie, QC was a popular destination. The closest police station was over a half hour away in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield so it took a lot of effort for the Sûreté du Québec police to care about what was going on at Pauls. Until one day they did. And they made it worth their effort. They brought a large school bus, raided Pauls, loaded the bus with underage kids and took them to jail in Valleyfield. I can’t imagine how long that bus ride must’ve felt.
You learned to whistle from your Grandfather who told you to stop crying and bring your paper cut to the woodshed so he could cut your finger off.
My Grandfather might’ve said something like this while teasing us. I do remember him ‘stealing my nose’ and showing me his fist with his thumb hiding between his fingers. His thumb was supposed to be my nose. He was a sweet guy who grew up in rural Newfoundland and was a hunter and fisherman who survived the war and loved nature. He taught me how to take a thick blade of grass, put it between my thumbs and blow hard to make a loud kazoo sound.
Your Grandfather’s younger brother was missing one finger.
I didn’t know my Grandfather’s siblings or if they were missing digits, but my Dad used to tell a good story about some of them when he visited Newfoundland for the first time. “We were all sitting at the kitchen table,” my Dad would say. “They asked me if I wanted a drink. When I said yes, they opened a huge bottle of rum and set it in the middle of the table. One of your Grandfather’s brothers then tossed the bottle cap in the garbage, and they all laughed. Those guys could drink. I couldn’t keep up with them.”
Pizza in the “Ethnic Foods” aisle.
I don’t think there was even an Ethnic or International Foods section in the grocery stores where I grew up. I remember going for pizza as a young kid in a small village nearby. It was a pizzeria that proclaimed to serve “Canadian Food”. I remember thinking how weird that was. When I went to university, one of my friends made escargot in garlic butter and I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever tasted. I remember her teasing me for being a country boy.
Your mom has kicked you out of the car to walk home.
My Dad would sometimes kick me out of the car for getting carsick. He wouldn’t drive away, but he’d drive slowly ahead of me as I trudged behind the car on the dirt road feeling nauseous and feeling the shame.
You’ve dated relatives, or one person has dated you and another one of your relatives.
Thankfully no, as none of my relatives lived nearby. I did go on one date with the daughter of a woman my uncle was dating. But I don’t think that counts.
Ready to take the quiz yourself? Here’s Kelly’s post:
The good old days, when you could smoke AND jello wrestle in bars!
I still have a crystal clear memory of sitting on a Voyager bus on the way to Montreal to see a Sons of the Desert show. The windows all misted up. Looking at the snowy fields as ‘Young Man in Transit’ blasted out of my Walkman.
Thanks for me reminding me Chris!
Chris, I'm roaring. You certainly painted great little pictures of growing up in Glengarry. How lucky were we, eh?