It is like something out of Lewis Carroll or Roald Dahl – a giant turtle, arms stretched into the sky, its soulless eyes looking down on you as you waddle past its giant green legs, each the size of the nearby trees. Leave this place, it seems to boom, in a baritone voice. I am happy to oblige.

Every time I see that giant turtle I get the absolute bejeezus scared out of me. I think it stems from childhood. Looking at it as an imaginative (read: stupid) child, I figured that if it wanted to, it could lower one of those giant arms at any moment and bring it down on me, my family, and my family’s Chevy van and get us all with the same hand. Smush. No more kid. No more family. No more van. More important, no more stupid tourists to anger it with flashes from their cameras. Who in their right mind would want to stop and take a picture of that creepy thing, anyway? There are people, I suppose. I sometimes see them from the road going past. They seem happy enough, posing by those giant green feet, but it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable plays out. I imagine the conversation occurring in the local coffee shop when the locals catch wind that their native beastie has annihilated another intrepid photographer: Tommy got another one, eh?Probably stopped for pictures again. Then the coffee shop would explode with laughter, the locals all smugly aware that when you see a giant, menacing turtle, especially theirs, the last thing you do is stop for a Kodak moment. But the laughter would subside when they realize that another potential customer is gone forever. Tommy always made it so damn difficult for people to stop in town.

Tommy the Turtle is one of the first things you’ll see and probably the only thing you’ll remember about the town of Boissevain, Manitoba, as you pass through it heading north on Provincial Highway #10 from the U. S. border. After you see it, you probably won’t want to stop in town for a beverage at the coffee shop. Tommy is not organic, as I may have implied, but is in fact a 22-foot high, fully-colored statue, a smiling mascot that holds the flags of the province and the country in its triumphantly raised green hands. It looks friendly enough, but it still has the power to frighten small children, not to mention previously frightened small children who have grown up to be writers. When I passed it again over the Thanksgiving weekend, on my way to my grandparents’ home in Deloraine, a town about twenty minutes east, it reminded me of how little I ever wanted to stop in Boissevain. Not that there is anything wrong with Boissevain – it’s a lovely little town. It’s just that giant turtles scare me, whether they’re smiling or not. Isn’t there something more appropriate that could represent the town?

Too many towns rely on statues like Tommy to draw in the tourists. There must be some worth to the idea of the giant, oversized mascot – if there were no benefits to reap from such things, towns wouldn’t keep putting them up. They dot the landscape in southern Manitoba like illustrations in a storybook. Gladstone has the ‘Happy Rock’ (get it?), a big stone wearing a top hat, tails, and one of those big, nightmarishly toothless grins. Glenboro has Sara the Camel, representative of the nearby Spirit Sands sand dunes in Spruce Woods Provincial Park, complete with brown/beige hump and neck craning to the heavens (thank heavens they didn’t build in a fountain to simulate the camel spit…). And who can forget Alpine Archie, decked out in his baby-blue downhill-ski gear in the heart of McCreary – Manitoba ’s ski capital – looking like the coked-up bastard child of Dennis the Menace and Curious George. All of them beckon to you from the highway to come on into town and snap some photos. But do we stay for the advertised attractions? Do we even stay for a coffee? Not when we’re racing to get to our hotel in the city before six.

Why do we stay in the city and not in places like Gladstone, Glenboro or McCreary? Is it because of the mascots? No – only silly people like me are afraid of them. The problem goes deeper. Part of it lies in the hotels that towns offer. No pools. No continental breakfast. Maybe a jacuzzi, but then you’d likely be in a place called The Love Shack that is less economical than the motor lodge down the street, and less clean. Let’s face it, there’s not a whole lot to do in these places, either. The movie theatres show last spring’s features that are already out on DVD, and the little pioneer museums celebrating local heritage are closed in the winter, which is about eight months of the year in Manitoba . If you’re not up for watching a curling game at the Rec Centre, you’re screwed.

I live in Brandon , the second most populous city in Manitoba , and a place that by many people’s standards would not be considered populous. But you immediately notice how big a place like Brandon is when you leave it and go to a place like Deloraine for Thanksgiving weekend. A town of about 1,000, it seems to get smaller every year. Each holiday there are fewer stores on Main Street , fewer people in the coffee shop, more vacant houses on my grandparents’ street. As my grandpa sadly remarked a few years ago, “the neighbors are just dyin’ off.” Only occasionally will someone come to take their place. It is reason for a town-wide festival if that person brings a young family with them.

Deloraine has not withered from lack of trying. No town in the region has spearheaded more attempts at plausible tourist attractions and long-standing festivals than that place has. When I was a child, Deloraine was known as “the Harness Racing Capital of the Southwest”; the billboard on your way into town proclaimed it. That billboard, a few years later, was replaced by another, proclaiming that Deloraine was no longer the harness racing capital of the Southwest, but now “the Cookie Capital of the Southwest”, with the occasional harness race. A giant cookie with a big smile and a ballcap that looked suspiciously like the old Shreddies mascot greeted you from its glossy surface and reminded you that Lukkenfest, the town-wide cookie festival, was held every year on the last weekend of July. Come into town and see the World’s Largest Cookie Jar!

Over the course of many Thanksgivings, I would see the World’s Largest Cookie Jar, though I never saw the benefits that such a thing could bring to the town. For four or five years the thing just seemed to sit there, unoccupied, uninteresting, little more than a painted grain bin with fancy trimmings. It’s gone now, like Lukkenfest, both victims of an increasingly disinterested local population and poor turnout. Like most small town initiatives, it was successful for about two years, until the novelty factor wore off for the locals and people like my grandparents stopped going. It was old hat to them, suddenly. A trip to Brandon to play bingo would have been more appealing. As for the out-of-town crowd, well, they didn’t really see the need to support it either. What hard working parent wants to go to a boring cookie festival on one of their precious few days off when they can go to the city, do their shopping for about fifty bucks less than around home, and eat out at something that isn’t called Joe’s Diner for a change, all in one stop? What child would choose a Cookie Festival over neon-speckled city franchises like Ruckers or Chucky Cheese?

Casualties were left behind in the wake of Lukkenfest’s failure. The town had sectioned off one of the old, multi-store heritage buildings downtown and was planning on renovating it and putting in a Cookie Mall. That building was never renovated. I’m not even sure if it’s occupied today. But for the longest time it sat there radiating hope, a computer print-out on the central window reading “Coming Soon” in plain-jane, Times New Roman print. And the town’s reason d’être – the Cookie Jar – suddenly became irrelevant. It stood in town for a year after the demise of the festival, a reminder of its failure, until it was replaced two or three years ago by the town’s newest attraction – The Flags of the World. A sea of steel posts stands where the Cookie Jar once did. No flags were flying on them when I walked by them at Thanksgiving. In fact, the site looked a little like a graveyard – one post for each failed attempt at boosting the town’s fortunes.

Similar gravestones can be found in other towns throughout the region. In my hometown, Erickson, the central attraction – a large, sculpted Viking Boat symbolic of the region’s Scandinavian heritage – has grown invisible to the local population, probably because most of the population is now either Ukrainian or Aboriginal, and any festivals with even the faintest hint of ethnic relevance have been abandoned. Several years ago, the Viking Boat was desecrated. The two sculpted, wooden Viking men inside of it had had their noses cut off and pasted to a certain area of the body to create something that could also be described with the word wooden. There was relatively little outrage; infact, the locals, including me – a smart-alecky teenager at the time – considered the whole affair to be rather humorous, as if it were a grand joke that they had been waiting for someone to pull for ages. The dumb Vikings deserved it. What did they have to do with the town now, anyway?

In the aftermath, the ‘wooden’ Vikings were removed, and for the longest time, the boat sat empty, the town either disinterested in finding something to put in it or not possessing enough money to do so. In the years when the Viking Ship sat empty, the town began to mirror its empty star attraction. Growing up, I remember a vibrant community where we had August fun days and school spirit and soap box derby races and parades. My parents remember a town with a movie theatre and a swimming pool and a skating rink that didn’t have a leaky roof. It was over the course of my teenage years that things began to change. The town lost its arcade. It very nearly lost its bank (it scraped by on reduced hours). It has recently lost its emergency room and hospital. The skating rink closed up for a year. School spirit declined, in concurrence with the number of students in the schools themselves. There were no more festivals. No more soap box derbies. Even the town wide garage sale had fewer tables in it than a few years before. Aside from the occasional parade – mostly consisting of emergency vehicles – the social life of the town had shriveled and died. Why?

There is no easy answer. Aside from the traffic from nearby Riding Mountain National Park that pulled in to buy groceries, Erickson had few visitors from outside communities frequenting its fledgling businesses. It was not surprising, because there was nothing to draw them in. The pioneer museum nearby my house? Closed, for no real reason other than lack of initiative. The skating rink? No one in the community was willing to volunteer at the time to keep it operational. People would leave on the weekends and go to Brandon , spending an entire day buying things that they thought they couldn’t get at home, but could if they were willing to spend an extra forty bucks to get it. And the young people like me migrated north, south, east, and west to anywhere that wasn’t town, desperate for something to do on a Friday or Saturday night. All this, as well as an aging population that couldn’t go to festivals and community events like they were able to at one time. The population and the support system of the community was, as my grandpa put it, “dyin’ off.”

A few years ago, the statues in Erickson were finally replaced. The Viking men were no longer carvings but some kind of shiny metal. The town’s trademark was finally back in place. But where was the town? The spirit and many of the people and businesses of Erickson had seemed to disappear by the time they got back. Today, the Vikings and their boat sit neglected; no tourists take their picture, few locals take the time to admire them. Still, the boat remains when most of the town has vanished. Numerous businesses on Main Street are vacant. Even more houses throughout the town are empty. There was progress here once, but it seems gone now, marked and remembered only by the lifeless structures left behind.

Perhaps it is the shame of having a landmark remain when the festival or inspiration that created it is gone that has inspired some small towns to erect more generic monuments instead. Take the 5m X 17’ grouse in Ashern, symbolic of how the region is a bird lover’s and hunter’s dream, or the giant elk that sits outside Onanole, symbolic of, well, the elk you’ll probably hit with your car as you drive through the area at dusk. There’s also a giant pipe in St. Claude, symbolic of how the first settlers who came to the area…um…liked to smoke, and of how people continue to like to smoke. Worse yet, it is proudly billed as ‘The World’s Second Largest Smoking Pipe’. Second largest? Are these towns even trying anymore?

I’d much rather see the landmarks representing the failed past than these other useless attractions. The cookie jar was at least a symbol of an idea, a concept, promise. Why not leave it up so that you could show the world that at least you tried? Instead, things like Altona’s “World’s Largest Painting on an Easel” survive. Why? Who cares if you have a big picture on an easel? What does it mean? Does the town love art? No! The only relevance of the monument lies in what is in the picture, a replica of Van Gogh’s “Sunflower” (Altona is the sunflower capital of Canada ). Why not build a giant sunflower instead? Probably because it had already been done somewhere else, and god forbid that a small town would put up a monument that couldn’t be coined the world’s largest something. Consequently, Altona’s pride is represented by a cheap trick, and Deloraine’s Cookie Jar is full of grain somewhere, a gravestone kicked over and spraypainted with profanity.

Someday, monuments like Tommy the Turtle and Alpine Archie will become gravestones as well. In some ways, they already are. Boissevain’s annual Turtle Derby, one of the region’s most well known attractions, recently ended due to poor attendance after some seventy years of entertaining the region. It has since been replaced by a scaled-down Turtle Festival, but Boissevain is now relying less on the Turtle-Turtle Mountains gimmick and more on other community initiatives, like town-wide art. Tommy may soon lose his relevance. As for Alpine Archie, he may yet end up hanging that snowsuit of his in the closet – the Agassi ski-hill near McCreary sits vacant. Yet these symbols could inspire other events, other initiatives, born out of the past, geared towards the future. If we tear them down, if we desecrate them, if we ignore them, then how can we learn from them?

I’m back in Brandon now, home from Thanksgiving and Deloraine, well past the terror that is Tommy the Turtle. There are restaurants and shopping malls, bowling alleys and cineplexes, paintball arenas and hockey games all around me, and yet something’s missing. I realize that a part of me, the part that is proud to have grown up in a small but progressive town, the part that had the pleasure of participating in parades and festivals and town-wide games, is crying out. It’s crying out for the people busy amusing themselves in the city and not in their own backyards to not to bury the community spirit and hope that has defined my character and given me much of what I have. I fear that the small town is gradually being abandoned in favor of the mass attractions and conveniences that serve as the landmarks in cities. There is no turtle here. There is no grouse. There is no cookie jar, or even a giant painting on an easel. There is Wal-Mart. There is Burger King. There are grocery stores that offer cheap food and buy-in-bulk discounts.

But there is no community spirit. There is no small-town friendliness. You can’t talk the afternoon away with a stranger, and you can’t sit outside and see the stars on a clear night. These are the things that make small towns magical. Why do we hide them with turtles and novelty festivals? If we are to lose the things that matter in an increasingly urbanizing world, and the small town and its people are left to seek attention through the death throes that are cookie festivals and large paintings, then let’s hope this failure can be captured forever by the new set of gravestones being erected around us, concrete illusions that will always remind us of how things could have been, and once were, before we turned our backs.