Ted Barris Jan 08, 2009
A longtime resident of Uxbridge, Ted Barris has written professionally for 40 years - for radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The "Barris Beat" column began in the 1950s when his father Alex wrote for the Globe and Mail. Ted continues the tradition of offering a positive view of his community. He has written 16 non-fiction books of Canadian history and teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.
Previous
In my lifetime, I've heralded the new year on the Pacific coast, the Atlantic coast and even the Gulf coast. I've watched Dick Clark count it down at Times Square. I've counted the seconds down myself, hosting my own radio show. On Y2K, we stayed up most of the night watching TV coverage of the new millennium arriving in Sydney, London and New York. I've brought in the new year alone, at parties with total strangers, but most often with members of my immediate family. I observed the passing of 2008 a bit differently. Actually, it was the day before New Year's Eve. I stood on the Wynford Drive bridge late last Tuesday afternoon in a biting north wind, waiting for the hearses carrying the bodies of the three latest Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan to pass.
“I suddenly felt the urge,” I told a fellow who arrived shortly after I did with a Canadian flag tucked under his arm. “I live nearby,” the flag-bearer told me. “I try to be here each time they go by.” At first, we two were the only ones on the bridge. Soon after, a brigade or four or five firefighters and two
ambulance crews stopped on the bridge and turned on all their flashers. Within the hour, many more adults had emerged from their cars, walking their dogs and, like my friend with the flag, from nearby residential buildings. One man arrived holding his two young children. For a while, the little ones seemed more interested in the firefighters and flashing lights than anything else. Then, their father calmed them and focused them on the Don Valley Parkway beneath the bridge. “I don't even know the men's names,” said a teacher standing next to me. “Michael Freeman, last Friday,” I mentioned to her. “Then, Gregory Kruse and Gaetan Roberge on Saturday, I think.”
I mused about the significance of these quiet vigils that have gone on spontaneously in recent months. The practice dates back to at least July 2007, when the body of 27-year-old Captain Matthew Dawe was returned by air force transport to Trenton. Then, when his body and family were transported via Hwy. 401 between Trenton and Toronto (later named “the Highway of Heroes”) to the coroner's office in the city, people gathered along the route to pay their respects. What occurred to me about these impromptu tributes is that they bring the deaths of Canadian servicemen and women closer to us than at any time in our history. In both the World Wars and the Korean War, fallen Canadian troops were eulogized and buried where they fell - at Benysur- Mer in France, Groesbeek in Holland or Pusan in South Korea. To my knowledge, only from the Afghanistan mission have war dead been retrieved and physically returned to their families. In front of our eyes too.
It was almost 5 o'clock. An air force vet suddenly appeared among those gathering around me on the bridge over the DVP. He wore his blazer, beret and medals. He didn't know Freeman, Kruse or Roberge either, but he understood their families' pain. Like the men he'd known and lost a generation ago, he felt the three men deserved his presence, “because Canada needs to respect what they've done,” he said. Within minutes of his arrival, the traffic on the southbound DVP quickly thinned. The late afternoon sky and empty roadway seemed to blend together in darkness. Then, from the distance came the flashing police cruiser lights and close behind three stretch limos and three darkened hearses. The assembly on the bridge and even the flags strung along its railing fell silent as the cavalcade approached. Someone in the passenger seat of one limo waved back in gratitude. The entourage disappeared beneath us. And almost as quickly, the southbound traffic resumed its rush-hour density.
Most of us stood quietly for a few more seconds, a minute maybe. A young radio news reporter who'd been standing with us on the bridge recorded comments. She spoke to my friend with the flag. She talked to the dad and kids. Then she asked me why I'd come. “It's something I've never done before,” I admitted. “I've written books based on soldiers' stories. I've delivered eulogies for elderly veterans who've passed on in old age. But I've never personally paid my respects to young Canadian servicemen so soon after their deaths.” Somehow it seemed fitting that I do it on the eve of 2009 - a year those three Canadians won't experience. The cold, the strangers who'd also taken time to pay homage, and the sacrifice those three men had made - humbled me. It seemed an appropriate way to clear my head and bring things into perspective at New Year's.
