Searching for the N.B. dream
Remember how they found that 5,000-year-old hunter in the Alps a while back? The guy whose stone age corpse emerged from a retreating glacier but still looked better than Keith Richard?
I find myself wondering what they'll find in my backyard now that the snow and ice are making their first tentative steps toward melting. Since spring is likely just teasing me though -- surely there is another outrage of snow headed our way -- I believe the archaeological treasure trove that is my backyard will find itself perfectly preserved beneath endless winter for another few generations yet.
Someday though, when climate change becomes the global warming we were first promised, that bad thing looking suspiciously like a good thing here in the frozen north, then and only then will my yard be recognized for its true anthropological value.
For it will without a doubt be one day discovered as one of the finest known examples of early 21st century New Brunswick family life.
Many artifacts of childhood and a few samples of middle class adulthood in the second Elizabethan age are already emerging.
Near the back of the archaeological site, where strawberries grew back in the days when we had summer, my son's over-sized plastic baseball bat is just peeking out. Nearby, the cab of a Tonka bulldozer recently emerged and was initially thought to be a patch of yellow snow.
Just barely visible, entombed beneath the ice, is a red PVC kid-sized lawn chair, with my daughter's skipping rope tied around one leg. A short distance away, the top third of my barbecue pokes above the snow line standing sentinel over all.
It being not quite April yet, I'm convinced more snow will come along to bury all these objects and more before I get a chance to do an excavation.
Therefore I will leave them to the scientists of the future who will one day stake off my yard in kite string grids and work their way down through the strata deposited by the three-dozen snow and ice storms of '07-'08.
Because the winter of '08 was also the year the sketchy conclusions of an education report were used just two weeks later to rob my children of their admittedly imperfect but best chance at bilingualism, I suspect the kids will be living in the supercity of Calgmonton and enjoying their grandchildren by the time our yard thaws out enough for any substantive research.
Nevertheless, it's comforting to think someone might one day ask, "Who were the Mazerolles, and how did they live before the Great Alberta Migration?" I'm sure they'll find evidence of us and a whole lot more.
First of all, forget what you read in the paper this week, I'm convinced D.B. Cooper is in my backyard somewhere, still tethered to his parachute. And if the permafrost gives him up, then I suspect Jimmy Hoffa can't be far behind. And all those sneaker-clad right human feet they keep finding washed up on the balmy B.C. coast? I'm guessing you'll find the corresponding left feet beneath Mazerolle Glacier, every one of them sunk deep inside a mukluk.
I assure you I'll have alibis for all of these, should I somehow not be pushing up icicles when these discoveries are made. I can also explain the disemboweled snow blower, which came apart in storm number three and never quite fit back together again. Ditto the two broken snow shovels.
As for the sawed up "Vote Liberal" lawn sign, the burnt effigy of Kelly Lamrock and the sales receipt for the "Teach your Child French Because Your Government Won't" home study course, well, those will give the archaeologists of the future smoking gun evidence of why the Mazerolles at last abandoned their New Brunswick home.
There will be nothing rare or unusual about such artifacts of course, as I suspect they could be found in many a Metro Moncton backyard. I doubt they will end up in any museums.
But maybe, just maybe, one of my unilingual English-speaking great grandchildren will be able to buy a scrap or two on Ebay.
I hope it will be just enough to remind her of how her great grandparents, as naive as it seemed, once believed in a McKenna Liberal dream of a bilingual New Brunswick and assumed a Graham Liberal New Brunswick wouldn't pull the carpet/tapis out from underneath it.
That is, if the dream's not buried somewhere even deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.
n Brent Mazerolle is the Times & Transcript City Hall Reporter and a native of Moncton. His column appears in this space every Friday.
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