I take no solace in the wilderness. Small towns strike me as neither quaint nor cozy. If they were so great, why aren’t more people living in them? There’s life enough for me in the city where I live and those that I like to visit.

So it was as much a surprise to me as it would be to anyone that I found myself on the shores of Lake Erie this Thankgiving weekend with a friend I had not seen in sometime. How had such a turn of events come about you ask? Well, with barely a warning, ___________ showed up atop his brand new Honda Gold Wing cruising bike on Friday a.m., wanting to take me for a ride. Initially I demurred, having not been on a motorcycle since an ill-fated trip through Morocco sometime during my undergraduate years. But the bike was big and shiny, and I had no particular plans this long weekend. The weather was supposed to be glorious. If not now, when?

___________ and I had become acquainted when he appeared at my high school for a couple years there in the middle. He had a brilliant mind, effortlessly understanding the more complicated regions of math, physics and chemistry. Probably not coincidentally, he also had an affinity for mind altering substances, the more exotic the better. It was clear even back then that there was going to be a battle waged between academia and narcotics for ___________’s heart and mind.

Over the course of the next ___ years, he would flit in and out of my life. At times I was never sure how exactly he discovered my whereabouts, only adding to his mystique. That, and the fact he was always very circumspect about what he was doing for a living. Weapons development (including biological). Alternative energy research. The last time we chatted, he’d talked fondly of MBSs and CDOs which, when I questioned him about over pie on a break from the ride, he smiled either grimly or smugly, I couldn’t judge, and said, “High finance is not for the meek. And I’ve dealt with anthrax, buddy.”

How this all relates to you and this site comes from the Friday night of my trip. We wound up in the little lakeside hamlet of Port Stanley at a friend of __________’s. Let’s call him __________²; an organic farmer who, when I asked what he farmed, smiled a similar smile I’d seen on the face of __________ when I asked about his role in the financial crisis. Part of me wondered if this whole trip had been planned to make me the fall guy for whatever it was these two were involved with. But that was probably just the paranoid stage I was experiencing at the time.

We’d finished a delicious dinner cooked by __________²’s live-in cook, an elderly gentleman hailing from Japan, and were sitting around, watching the news. __________²’s satellite system piped in a news feed from Toronto with an item featuring Rob Ford’s press conference earlier in the day where he further attempted to outline his economic plan if elected mayor. I had been enjoying an election-free few hours and was hoping that the story would pass unremarked upon as I just didn’t feel up to getting into all the gory details. Alas, it was not to be.

“Toronto’s going to elect that dude to be its mayor?” _________ asked. First, I was caught off guard realizing that there were people out there who weren’t aware of our situation, who hadn’t been following along to every twist and turn in our municipal campaign. Rob Ford had even made it onto the front cover of last week’s Macleans magazine. This must be national news.

Recovering from my deflated sense of place, I then had to admit that, yes, there was a good possibility Rob Ford might be elected mayor. It wasn’t a done deal but there would be no surprise if it came to pass. Silence ensued and it looked as if that was going to be the extent of the conversation. It was a couple stories afterwards before __________² piped in on the topic.

“That Ford guy doesn’t look like a big city mayor. He looks like a county reeve.”

It turns out that __________² hails originally from Dutton, Ontario, a farming community some 35 kilometres inland from Port Stanley. He explains that a reeve is similar to the mayor’s position but for sparsely populated counties. “Interesting fact,” he sidetracks. The word ‘sheriff’ is derived from the term ‘shire reeve’.”

“From my understanding,” he went on to explain, “reeve positions were mostly taken by the dumbest sons from the more prominent local families. The ones most likely to hurt themselves or somebody else on the farm. They’d send them off basically just to occupy their time and be front men for the family’s interests.”

Both _________ and _________²’s cook laughed. I wasn’t sure if I was being fucked with. Some down home, rural humour I had no way of plugging into.

“Yeah, these Elgin county folks,” _________² continued, “they used to spit out farmboys in droves, each looking just like the previous one but a little bit dumber.”

“Like Multiplicity,” ________²’s cook piped in. A reference neither ________ nor ________² seemed to get as they turned back to watching the news without comment. ________² started up his story again after a bit.

“By the fourth or fifth son, man, they were flat out stupid and if they stayed around the farm, inevitably something or someone got chewed up and spit out by the combine harvester that shouldn’tve. Or they cut off somebody’s ankles with a scythe. Usually their own. Fell through the barn roof and onto a prized dairy cow, breaking its back and having to put it down.”

At which point the three of us turned to stare at him, convinced we were all now being screwed with. Evidently not.

“Oh yeah. Elgin County. The Twin Peaks of southern Ontario. The tales of misadventure I could tell you…”

We then turned back to watch the news on TV and the start of a very odd Thanksgiving weekend.

And there you have it. Rob Ford, For Reeve of Toronto.

— rurally submitted by Urban Sophisticat