Random Access

I wonder what Victor and Agnes Sandford would make of the pile of rich dirt which has been bulldozed into the corner of their 100-acre farm closest to the southwest corner of Eglinton Ave. and Mavis Rd.
It would probably break their hearts. Every time I drive north on Mavis I still glance to my left, in the stupidly vain hope that the lovely Sandford Pond will somehow reappear. Hoping  that the beautiful, open natural stretch of water and weedy vegetation that served as a staging area each spring and fall for migrating waterfowl will still be there.

That's the spot where I saw my first American Widgeon. There were always scads of diving ducks there, especially in the spring.  Every once in a while you'd see a little head bobbing about that definitely looked like a muskrat.

For a long time, the pond sprawled across both sides of Eglinton but now the sprawl is of another kind. Sales pavilions and row houses sprout like the crops that the Sandfords used to raise on their property.

In an excellent column he wrote in 2002 before the developers moved onto the land, Port Credit historian Alan Skeoch recalled how the old-fashioned Sandfords, Victor and his sister Agnes, slowly receded into their little piece of heaven.

Agnes and Vincent Sandford were determined to resist the urban sprawl of Mississauga that gobbled up farms like an insatiable predatory monster, wrote Skeoch. All around the farm new housing estates were built and along the south side the multi-laned 403 expressway sliced its way across the fields.

To the north, clearly visible was the Mississauga landfill project, the city dump in less polite words. It grew higher and higher each year. All around the Sandfords was change. But in their world there was little change. When the electricity failed due to a broken pole, they went back to the use of kerosene lamps. They were not exactly opposed to modernization, they had tractors and hay bailers and veterinary care for their cattle and supermarket food. They just didn't need total change.

If we learn as we grow older and wiser that change is the only constant, why do we become ever so much more emotionally resistant to the inevitable, undeniable transformation of our landscape?
Resistance is futile but it still feels like the only sane response.

The Sandford pond is no more. The Sandford House, vandalized too many times and the victim of a June 24, 1999 act of arson, is a long shot to be preserved and rebuilt.

In a few years, it's likely that only the grove of 100-or-so black walnut trees sitting on public property on the crest of the hill near the house will still stand as mute testament to the people of the land who once lived there.