There's a bit of land. Not much… maybe two acres. That isn't the really important thing. Years ago, the Merrymont family settled it. They had some good years. Then the river flooded. Their land swamped. They didn't have any real desire to stay there so they moved. The place there slowly fell in. As time progressed, the shitwood and blackberries took over.
Within a few years the land was a tangle of scrub maple and blackberry. It's interesting, all around the old Merrymont property things have grown. The other landholders subdivided after the war and the houses just spouted. There's a store at Staynor Street and Pipeline Road. But that place is hanging on by its bootstraps. Most people do their shopping at the shopping mall on 154th Street near the freeway. On the other side of the river things went the same way. Lots subdivided. Roads were built.
Eventually a city grew around the mountains. Along constant 20-foot wide streets that flowed into boulevards that channeled onto the arterials traffic flowed. The arterials connected to the freeways. The traffic flowed through this wonderous system. Freedom reigned.
But then freedom became constrained. Bridges reached capacity. The six-lane freeway reached its 2 000 vehicles per hour per lane capacity. Then the traffic jams started. Now it was getting hard to get to the 154th Street shopping mall. The municipal engineers saw the solution: a bridge at the Merrymont lot.
The Merrymont lot was perfect. Right on the river. An unused street right-of-way on the other side. Hell, all the municipal planning maps since 1966 showed a nice, double dashed line across the Merrymont lot. This was the Staynor Street expressway. A new arterial. This was the solution, all they needed was Council's agreement!
I'd grown up in the bottoms around the river. Old undeveloped lots, abandoned tracts left to the merciless blackberries, salmonberries, maples, and ferns. This was where I grew up. Yeah, over the years tourists and bikers had discovered the river trails. But the Merrymont lot was ours. In spring the wet vegetation smacked us as we propelled our bicycles into the mud. The slimy, green moss stained our clothes as we slid down the old wood stave drainpipes that passed between the Merrymont lot and the parkland to the north. In the late summer we gorged on the sweetest blackberries that could possibly grow (at least in our opinion). Some kids played doctor up there. Others played war. Someone cut their knee open and needed five stitches and a huge bandage. Someone else broke their arm and was in a sling for two and half months. But we played there. It was ours. At night the neighbourhood teenagers built bonfires on the riverbank and pitched beer bottles at the trees and boulders. Where was there a more ideal bush party spot?
Last week I read the "City & Region" section in the daily. Work started on the new Staynor Street expressway. An integral part of this road is the "Merrymont Spur" which connects the new expressway to 162nd Street. The spur cut across the Merrymont lot and onto a new bridge across the river: four lanes of asphaltic concrete, one hundred metres of concrete "New Jersey" barriers, several hundred thousand dollars worth of drainage improvements (including the replacement of all wood stave pipes), and a new, fifty-metre concrete bridge across the river. The neighbourhood youths would be interested to learn that the municipal government was footing the bill for a new community centre at Pipeline Road and 157th Street. The children of the suburbs would finally have something to do!
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Story by M A Kitchen, Copyright © 1999.