Nostalgia is a funny thing. Not everyone feels it, but for those who do, it can be a powerful, sometimes all-encompassing feeling.
That longing for the past drives nostalgic, sentimental people to return to the same places and keep the same traditions, especially as we age. It’s comfortable, yes, but there’s more to it than that – it’s grounding, as John DeMont writes in A Good Day’s Work: In pursuit of a disappearing Canada, “to tread the landscape I walked when I was young.”
DeMont is unabashedly nostalgic. It’s one of the things that gets him through the day, as he says “when his forebrain bulges”… and “university kids hold open the doors and call you ‘sir.’ And your hamstrings become so tight that only by laying turtled on your back can you pull your socks on… at this point, I think it’s perfectly natural to want to breathe the air you breathed when life was all out there, waiting for you.”
And that’s the thing; change incites nostalgia, making the longing for the past more intense. Which is why DeMont still walks the paths of his youth and why he set out to document Canada of today through 10 of its dying trades, before they’re considered part of the Canada of yesterday.
He chose a locomotive engineer, a blacksmith, milkman, rural veterinarian, record store owner, newspaper publisher, rancher, travelling salesman, drive-in movie projectionist and lighthouse operator.
Just as the time of buffalo hunters, whalers and clockmakers have passed, so too will the trades DeMont profiled (along with many others) as technology and the economy changes.
DeMont found, according to 2006 federal census, that Canada has 3,000 boat builders, 2,000 shoe repairers, 6,000 jewellers left and only 870 blacksmiths. Image consultants, he found going through the stats, outnumbered funeral directors
“What I’m trying to do is tell that story of Canada, not in a great big way, but in a slow way. We talk about this stuff disappearing because it speaks to this notion of there being an iconic Canada,” he said. “When you’re 11 and people say ‘what do you want to be when you grow up,’ you don’t say I want to be an insurance actuary, you say ‘I want to be a fireman or drive a train, run the drive-in movie or be a cowboy.’”
Just as kids love the romance of certain jobs or ways of life, so too do nostalgics.
“My feeling is that basically everybody’s childhood, unless you had a really bad one, unless you were abused or in dire poverty or something terrible happened, it’s golden,” DeMont said. “I’m a middle class white straight protestant kid growing up in a Halifax that was big enough, but small enough by the same token, and it is old enough, it’s got some history. For me, it was blessed really.
“On the East Coast, it seems a lot of people just pine to get back there. A lot of it is being in a particular place in a particular time. Maybe it is something about my looking-backwards Celtic sensibility. My people are a bunch of Scottish, English, not the most joyful looking forward types.
“I think I’m a guy who looks forward and is moving forward with the world and is generally an optimistic person, but I’ve always had this pang of nostalgia even as a kid. It’s peculiar. I moved in my city, not far away, seven or eight blocks; even switched schools, but in Grade 3 I’m wandering around the old hood,” he said.
But, as DeMont points out, sharing the work of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, the homogenization of Canada, and the world for that matter, is bringing an end to distinctiveness and nostalgia.
“We’re reaching the end of nostalgia as the distinctive landscape of our past is replaced by a reality that is pretty much identical, whether you’re in Pouch Cove or Portage la Prairie,” DeMont wrote.
The rural landscape and small resource towns are shrinking as more people move to the city and it’s gotten to the point where one city is very much like another – someone in Halifax can have the same experience as someone in Calgary.
“Everybody lives in the city and everybody has the same life,” he said. “Something big is happening, but it is happening under the surface. In Nova Scotia, the population is declining but it is growing in Halifax. Everybody moves into a condo and gets the same frigging haircut.”
He’s lamenting the loss of individuality and uniqueness. After all, when we’re feeling nostalgic, it’s usually over something that was different in our lives, not something the same as for everyone else.
A Good Day’s Work: In pursuit of a disappearing Canada is published by Doubleday Canada. It sells for $32.95.
