The Bonnechere Caves were a big part of my childhood. My dad and mom were good friends of the original owners, Tom and Ruth Woodward. Both gone now many years. Tom was a larger than life character. He was a showman, probably a genius, definitely a rebel and he had a cave. Tom, was Tom, but Ruth, was Mrs. Woodward . She was tough and razor smart. I think she grew up on the prairies during the Depression, though I stand to be corrected on that. Something made her tough. She told me once, one of the ways she had made herself smarter was to read and study a page of the dictionary everyday. Which she did, for many years, like clockwork, while waiting for the school bus to pick up her kids. One of the daughters was a high school pal of my dads.

Tom discovered the caves and opened them to the paying public. He used to say that when he was a boy, growing up poor in England, he always wanted a backyard with a waterfall and some caves. And thats what he got. When I was a kid this was part of my extended backyard. It fell within my five mile bicycle radius.

Eganville, was geographically manageable for a kid. Five minutes on your bike, in any direction, and you were in the bush. Waterfalls, caves, creeks, limestone quarries and riverbanks were daily destinations during the summer months. Truly a wonderland to grow up around.

The village, rising up on both banks of the Bonnechere River, maintained the classic small town on the riverbank design. Starting from the waters edge with a small clutch of older commercial buildings. The hotels are gone now. Up a little further the houses, nested and perched among the trees in an order only understood by the types of birds that frequent telephone lines and leafless branches at sunset. And Churches, plenty for everybody, it was a town full of steeples. Some gone now.

As picturesque as it was, the Bonnechere Valley could be slightly less kind in the winter months. It was different back then, winter had teeth. Snowstorms would last for a week. Coldsnaps… coldsnaps seems woefully inadequate… more like hell frozen over. If you did’nt have the requisite number of layers you ran the risk of having your blood freeze in your veins. Adults drank a lot more then, to prevent blood freeze-up, I suppose. Times were different. Snowmobile racing was a big distraction from the potentially deadly meteorological event known as February. Think winter directed by Michael Bay.

Even though the village was tiny, and had a population of only 1500 or so, there was something very traditional about the place. Handed down through the generations was a centuries old prejudice. On a day to day basis it was virtually invisible but somehow it cultivated. The prejudice was this, we didn’t know any of the Catholic kids, and they didn’t know us; until we got to high school. We were public school kids. A ragtag group of mostly, but not all, Protestants, many,like myself, Lutheran. My immediate clan was not particularly religious, but the family tree had its roots in the noble German traditions of Church and public service. I went to Sunday School. I sat in the little tiny wooden chairs, sang the bad songs, made the bad over-glued construction paper crafts. We put on a couple extravaganzas, one around Easter and another around Christmas. This went on for years. Anyway, I’m pretty sure, but I can’t confirm it, we didn’t know the Catholic kids because we were pretty sure our extravaganzas were better than their extravaganzas. So who needed them. Oh, we’d see em around, on the bridge, at the rink, swimming at the river but they were just ghosts to us.
This is where I grew up.