We Grew Up by the River

We Grew Up by the River comes directly from my childhood.

I grew up around Campbellton, New Brunswick, with the Restigouche River running through so much of what I remember about home.

Unlike a piece where I start with an interesting story or historical event, I did not have to research the world behind this one.

I lived it.

The river was simply there.

So were the woods.

The hills.

The seasons.

The things families did every year because that was just what people did.

At the time, none of it felt like material for music.

It was simply childhood.

That is what interested me when I started writing this piece.

A lot of the memories that become precious later in life are things we barely noticed while they were happening.

Picking fiddleheads.

Going smelt fishing.

Fishing for trout.

Finding hazelnuts in the fall.

Sliding at Sugarloaf in winter.

The Salmon Festival.

Being outside because being outside was simply what you did.

Those are not grand historical events.

But put enough of them together and they become a childhood.

And eventually they become a place.

That is what the title means to me.

We Grew Up by the River.

The river was geography, but it was also the constant running through everything else.

Summer looked one way beside it.

Autumn looked another.

Winter transformed everything again.

Then spring brought back traditions that had been waiting all year to return.

As a child, you do not normally think:

this is regional culture.

You think:

this is normal.

Only after you leave do you discover how local some of those supposedly ordinary things actually were.

Someone mentions fiddleheads and suddenly you are back there.

A photograph of the Restigouche can collapse decades.

The name Sugarloaf does not mean a tourist destination.

It means memories.

That is one of the differences between this piece and The North Shore Never Leaves.

The North Shore Never Leaves is about what happens after you leave home and realize that it followed you.

We Grew Up by the River goes further back.

It asks:

What was it that made that place home in the first place?

The answer is not one spectacular event.

It is repetition.

The things you did every season.

The foods that appeared at certain times of year.

The places everybody knew.

The river always being somewhere nearby.

People whose names belonged to stories you had heard so many times you could no longer remember when you first heard them.

That is how a place gets inside you.

Slowly.

Without announcing itself.

The piece also became a way of preserving details that might otherwise disappear.

Not because Campbellton or the Restigouche are disappearing.

But because my version of growing up there belongs to a particular time.

Every generation grows up beside a slightly different river.

Different stores.

Different neighbours.

Different routines.

Different freedoms.

Different expectations of childhood.

The physical landscape can remain while the life around it changes.

Music gives me a way to hold onto some of that.

That is why the specific details matter.

If I simply wrote:

I had a wonderful childhood in New Brunswick,

it would not mean very much.

But say:

fiddleheads.

smelt fishing.

Sugarloaf.

the Restigouche.

Now the memory has a location.

And for people who grew up there, those details can unlock memories that are not mine at all.

That has been one of the most interesting things about the response to the North Shore music.

I can write from my own childhood and somebody else from the area will recognize their childhood inside it.

The details overlap.

Not perfectly.

They do not have to.

Someone remembers a different fishing spot.

A different road.

A different family tradition.

But the emotional structure is familiar.

That is probably why We Grew Up by the River has been shared unusually often for a relatively small Rhialto release.

People are not only sharing the music.

They are sharing a piece of home.

The September tracker showed an unusually high share rate for the size of the audience.

That makes sense to me.

A piece about a specific place becomes useful when somebody can send it to a brother, sister, old friend or former neighbour and say:

Remember this?

That is more valuable than simply getting another view.

It means the music has become a container for somebody else's memory.

Mercy Road is the right voice for it because Mercy Road works best when nothing has to be exaggerated.

The memories do not need drama added to them.

The river does not need to become mythical.

The childhood does not need to have been perfect.

It only needs to have been real.

There is an important difference.

Nostalgia can turn childhood into something that never existed.

I did not want that.

There were ordinary days.

Boring days.

Cold days.

Times when I probably could not wait to grow up and leave.

That belongs in the story too.

Because the remarkable part is not that I knew how important those years were.

It is that I didn't.

That realization came later.

And in some ways, that is what all of these Mercy Road pieces keep returning to.

We do not always recognize the important parts of life while we are living them.

Sometimes they look too ordinary.

A family meal.

A dance you did not take.

A road home.

A river you saw every day.

Then enough time passes.

The ordinary things begin to glow.

And you finally understand what they were giving you.

For me, We Grew Up by the River is an attempt to put some of those things somewhere they cannot completely disappear.

The Restigouche is still there.

Campbellton is still there.

Sugarloaf is still there.

But the childhood version exists now mostly in memory.

So I wrote it down.

And then Mercy Road sang it back to me.

Personal origin

We Grew Up by the River is an original Rhialto / Mercy Road piece drawn directly from my own childhood around Campbellton and the Restigouche River in northern New Brunswick.

Specific memories publicly associated with the piece include fiddleheads, trout, smelt fishing, Sugarloaf, the Salmon Festival and other seasonal North Shore traditions.

These are lived memories rather than material adapted from another creative work.

Geographic context

• Tourism New Brunswick — Campbellton / Restigouche. Tourism New Brunswick provides geographic context for Campbellton, the Restigouche region and northern New Brunswick.

This material is included for readers unfamiliar with the area. It is context, not the source of the music.