Places of our Soul

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us…hath had elsewhere its setting”

Intimations of Immortality,
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Have you ever had a feeling about a place, that you had been there before? That you had such a sense of familiarity about it that you may have lived there before? Yet you had never been there? This happened to me some 30 years ago.

Barrie is my hometown, at least as close to a hometown as I will ever have. I was thinking the other day, as spring was beginning to highlight the colors of the maple leaves and the bay, of how many summers I had spent in Barrie and the County of Simcoe. Most have been quiet since my first move here with my family in 1941. I was only one year old then.

Since then, there have been moments of extreme excitement, like dancing at the Lucky Star when the whole place shook with the beat and the dancing feet of kids to something like Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue”. The Lucky Star has long since faded into the County’s history.

It has been quiet here, mostly. But I remember there were moments of extreme excitement, usually associated with the events on the bay or the main railway station close to it in Allandale. One event outshone even the party for my third or fourth birthday. It happened when Mother and Dad succumbed to my entreaties and took me down to the station where one of the trains was taking on water and was huffing off steam. I was allowed to climb up into the cab with the engineer. Yes, I’ll never forget that.

A number of other uncharacteristic, exciting moments occurred in the mid-to-late 1940s. These were days when Kempenfelt Bay was silent and still as glass in the early morning. I wandered down one Saturday and found a crowd beginning to form. Then suddenly a long whine in the distance began to become a noise, and then a loud noise and finally a deafening roar. The powerboats were here. They resembled hydroplanes with wing-like protuberances to keep them balanced on each side. They kicked up huge plumes of water at the rear like roostertails.

The most famous was Guy Lombardo’s Miss Supertest which won a number of speed trials along the waterfronts of Barrie and that winged-wheel city to the southwest beside the Detroit River.

What brought these memories to the fore recently, was, of all things, an art book:  paintings from the Hermitage gallery in St. Petersburg, Russia. I noticed several that I recalled from a visit to a small French town near the Spanish border. There, about 30 years ago, I had found a small town in France not unlike my Barrie of the 1940s, before Barrie had become consumed by the business of growth.

Like Barrie, it was situated right on the shore of a bay that formed a half circle in front of the main buildings. Unlike Barrie, it was protected by a large rock face which jutted out from the hillside adjacent to a stone tower, in effect guarding the northern entrance, almost hiding the beach in front of the shore-front businesses and houses making up the town.

Most streets were perpendicular to the beach; the homes closest to the shoreline were each painted in one brightly solid shade like red or yellow or purple. As the hills rose behind Collioure, they passed a white hotel that looked too expensive and beyond my means. But as for the town itself, I knew I had been here before, yet my history and conscious memory is clear that this was the first and only time I had been to Collioure.

What had brought this gorgeous small summer-bright series of homes to my mind was a painting that formed part of the collection at the Hermitage. It was a picture full of large expanses of reds, pinks, and terracotta red off the tile stones of the roofs. Oh, and yellows and light lilac of the flowers in window boxes. It was a painting by a still young Henri Matisse.

Matisse had come to Collioure in 1905 and for several summers after that. He and his friend Andre Derain experimented with light and colour, trying to express the singular quality of the light there. It was the source of a new art fashion and design developed by a number of painters and designers referred to as Fauves or Fauvists, led by Matisse out of his work in Collioure. Matisse in particular became known for his brilliant use of colour to express the light in this area of the Mediterranean.

Others who followed the same style included Maurice de Vlaminck, Jean Puy, Kees van Dongen, and Raoul Dufy, a fashion designer who favoured less restraints and few underclothes for women in order to express their freedom. They even included, for a few months, Pablo Picasso. Fauvism was a style that went against representational art to favor the emotion of colour, bold, simple shapes, strong pure colours and brilliant design (See Art A New History, Paul Johnson, p.657-8, 2003). Picasso would have liked the opposition to art as representational art, but he was looking for more of a revolution in art, like what he found in cubism.

I had found this place in the small pocket of France near the Pyrenees Mountains and Spain almost by mistake. It happened to be on the highway just before it reached the border with Spain en route to Barcelona and I was heading there. It changed my route and brought me to a stop.

It was not Barrie, but it had the same small-town sense of stability and pleasure in its simplicity. It allowed me time to consider what I was doing with my life. I had been through two failed marriages, one long, and the other a serious mistake about myself that hurt another. I needed to slow down and stop, instead of plunging on.

I spent a week in the town, spending time in the hills overlooking Collioure trying to understand the unspoiled charm and mysterious light of the area. I even braved the class and charges of that major white hotel up in the hills south of Collioure for a long, satisfying lunch. I found out its name, Le Relais des Trois Mas. Lunch tends to be a levelling influence on the excessive charges and mystique of wealth that hung over places like this, with its coolly modern design. The server and I even became friends.

I went on my way after that week in Collioure, but I never forgot it, entirely. As I closed the Hermitage book, I knew I had to return there some day. As for Barrie, even with its place as a centre for growth, it is still on the banks of Kempenfelt Bay and my wife, family and friends are here or not far from here, except for my son whose love affair detains him in America. And Barrie is home—it always will be.