Pembroke and Petawawa are both situated on the banks of the Ottawa River, which is the border between Ontario and Quebec.
The drinking age in Quebec is 18, so it was a rite of passage for teenage Ottawa Valley kids to go drinking in La Belle Province.
Petawawa only had a one high school and it was a public high school on the military base. For a long time only students of soldiers could go to General Panet High School, all the civilian kids, both public school and catholic, had to be bussed to Pembroke.
In 1992 I graduated from Our Lady of Sorrows, and started grade eight at Bishop Smith Catholic High School. When I first started at Bishop Smith, we were in a school that was originally designed to be an elementary school housing 300 students, which was being used as a high school with 800 students. The school had no cafeteria, most students had to share a locker and it had about 15 portables, which were classrooms in little trailers. In my grade eight year, every class I had was in a portable except for gym, home economics, shop and music. The portables were pretty awful, they were small, and were cold in the winter and boiling in the summer.
Most kids in the in the Ottawa Valley spend the leisure time on sports, mostly Hockey and Baseball. I however was a horrible athlete and was always pretty awful at whatever I attempted. I played one year of Bumble Bee hockey when I was six years old, but I hated it. I also played one year of T-Ball, but I couldn’t really throw or catch, which are key elements of the game. I did take a few years of swimming lessons, but I was generally too weak for swimming.
During most of my early period in Petawawa, I was able to lead what I would call a sedentary life. Except for a brief flirtation with hockey and a bit of five pin bowling, I wasn’t really active in any sport. I also didn’t really have any artistic pursuits. When I wasn’t hanging out with friends, I did a very healthy amount of loafing around. Television was a constant and steady companion. But as I got a bit older my parents began pressuring me to start earning money.
My brother, who is two years older than me, had a few different paper routes throughout his young life, and my first entry into the working world was filling in for him when he had various sports practices after school. His absences tended to be during the school year, so I would always have to fill in during the coldest months. Petawawa doesn’t get Toronto cold, it gets a whole special version of -30 degree cold, which was awful. I also never really have been a fan of walking around, and the paper route that snaked through our quasi-country neighbourhood was a long walk, and would take me over an hour. Since I only filled in maybe four or five times a month, I wasn’t really making very much money doing it either. I dreaded the nights, that I would have to come home and do the paper route. I mean, it was my brothers choice to take on the paper route, why was I being forced to suffer?
When I was around nine years old my parents decided we had outgrown the house on Isabel Street, and they decided to build their own house in a neighbouring subdivision. That house was located on Country Lane, seen below (you will have to rotate the view to the left a bit, according to Google we lived in the middle of the road).