While South Fraipont may be a blank slate for planners and developers to create a synthetic community designed to efficiently feed into Qualico’s Sage Creek shopping centre, the Creek Bend Estate community in South Royalwood is over 100 years old. It does not need a created back story. It already has genuine history. Like any real community it has a distinct culture of its own.
In rural Creek Bend kids and pets do what kids and pets do. They wander. If you want to build a fence around an area next to your house for your kids, dogs and above-ground pool, you do. If you don’t want to build a fence, you don’t.
Deer, foxes, coyotes, skunks, groundhogs, rabbits, snapping turtles all manner of creatures, don’t care about property lines. They have been going up and down the Seine River valley for 10,000 years. We have been here for less than two hundred years. (Our First Nations people who fished and hunted along the Seine notwithstanding.)
While most of the 40 new homes in the Creek Bend Estate community will be built in active or fallow farm fields, some of them will be built in the traditional manner. Forest and houses in Creek Bend blur together from 5,000 feet and from street level too. Trees in the valley and coulees merge seamlessly into tree stands on the high ground. Trees surround the houses, and deer pass through the yards on their mysterious journeys from here to there at any time.
In due course a conversation will have to be had. Can the new homeowners in Creek Bend live with that lifestyle? Bollards and signage will keep out most adventurous river trail walkers, but not all. Deer do not respect signage at all. They will perversely want to eat the most expensive shrub you chose in your new landscaping plan. Deer need staging areas, places to stand and watch traffic to choose, hopefully most of the time, the right moment to cross the street. Will we allow for those staging areas with our new homes?
With all due respect, the “Creekbend Hollow” gated community is the antithesis of the traditional Creek Bend lifestyle. Fences and metal gates make for the hardest of edges between nature and residents. Can the Creek Bend Estate area retain its permeable nature, its blurring between community and private, between forest and home? Or am I simply dreaming? As I said, that conversation has yet to come.
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