[URBAN NOTE] "Searching for the Tragically Hip’s mythical Bobcaygeon"

[rfmcdonald]

MacLean's Adrian Lee writes about mythic Bobcaygeon.

It’s a bright, sunny June day in Bobcaygeon, Ont.—one of the first beautiful weekends in what this area calls “the season,” as if there is only one, the one that brings the tourists and the cottagers. But the day’s charms are dimmed somewhat for Kathleen Seymour-Fagan, whose attention is focused on a different light, one that has lingered at red for too long, allowing cars to inch over a bridge in fits and starts.

“They really need to fix the traffic lights,” she says, squinting as a line of cars waits to cross the bridge, one of two entryways into town. The Bobcaygeon councillor for the City of Kawartha Lakes—the town was amalgamated in 2001, hoovering up six villages and the town of Lindsay—has other things on her mind, too: there are provincially mandated growth rates to meet, costs to maintain. Even the limestone upon which the town is built is causing trouble, creating potholes and sinkholes.

If this all seems like any other small town—well, it is. But it also isn’t, because this is Bobcaygeon: a town woven into the fabric of the Canadian imagination by the Tragically Hip. It was in “Bobcaygeon” that a little town a two-hour drive from Toronto at the mouth of a mighty lock system that spiders between two Great Lakes became the idealization of a small-town getaway, and a kind of CanRock Valhalla. It was in “Bobcaygeon” where the Hip arguably reached the peak of their powers—and, as the band embarks on one final tour later this month, in the wake of frontman Gord Downie’s diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, it is a town pausing to consider what it all means.

“I’ll be driving in, and it’ll be a beautiful night, and that song comes on,” says Seymour-Fagan. “And it’s like . . . yeah.” She lets out a wistful sigh.