Captain Fraser, long accustomed to ferrying locals along the river, uttered a single sentence as he succumbed to consumption in the winter of 1892 -“If I am ever again obliged to please the good people of Fredericton; I will surely have returned to a hell of my own making.”. A great man, Fraser would regale his passengers with tales of river travel and warned sternly… -“Fredericton has only three major exports: passive aggressiveness, an over-inflated sense of self-importance and impeccably qualified writers who will bore the living piss out of you… I mean really boring… dry humping allegorical syrup from every red maple tree kind of boring… perfectly punctuating nautical novels that crash into waves of frothed yawn boring… shamelessly curating the platitudinous minutiae of pioneer privilege and machine-gunning waterfowl similes into turducken haiku collections that will make you tremble with despair. It’s really quite remarkable, like there’s something in the water… I mean, really.” Rest in peace ol’ drunk Captain Fraser. Even in your loneliest dying days, when you were coughing up blood and inappropriately groping your passengers, you tried to warn us.
Culturally 2020 Fredericton is like a once peaceful riverside paradise lined with softly swaying willows, now occupied by squatters who park their trucks on the lawn and collect taxes. This truck culture built its important buildings atop of the previous culture’s graves on purpose, a serious dick move. Today, they ask descendants of those dead to “come together” to preserve these same buildings and ceremoniously mourn by a hotel pool. On occasion a megaphone blasts -“Yes, this granite cornerstone is crushing your eighth great-grandmother’s skull and we paved over most of her family but, think of the great tailgate parties we could have here with more ample parking! Now, let’s grab an ax and chop down these majestic cedars!”. Imagine asking the descendants of Africville to merrily celebrate and raise money so the city could memorialize each bulldozer driver who flattened their community. It’s like that. Indeed, Fredericton is a beautiful place and most of its modern day citizens are lovely people. On the other hand it’s also a class-divided and casually racist lumbersexual place a decade or so behind in its trends and nearly a century behind in its politics.
