What makes news?

I'm not sure which was more surprising. When I drove into the yard of my new home in West Quaco on October 6, 2009, the first thing I looked for (apart from the house, the yard and the view of the Bay of Fundy) was the pile of firewood I'd ordered in May... which wasn't there. On the advice of local neighbours, I ordered the wood in spring because apparently that's how things are done down here. The wood -- maple and birch mostly -- is cut green, so needs to season over the summer, otherwise it will burn green. I expected a substantial pile, because I'd ordered four cords. Not a stick in sight.

There are theories about what happened to the wood. It was delivered; neighbours saw it in the driveway. But within days it was gone. After some amateurish sleuthing on my part, I concluded that I'd asked all the questions I reasonably could of my new neighbours and called the RCMP. The constable I talked to advised that it would take a while before he would be able to get to the investigation. No surprise there. How urgent is a theft of firewood that happened 3-4 months previous?

So my jaw dropped when I opened the Saint John Telegraph Journal a day or so later, to find the article posted above. Wow. Interesting.

Every day the Telegraph Journal has a column of minor crime stories like this one. Somebody was caught hunting without a license. Somebody was driving over the limit. Somebody else was caught shoplifting. It used to be, in Whitehorse, that the local papers would give a weekly report on similar matters before the courts, but that practice ended years ago. After some observation of the Telegraph Journal, I concluded (rightly or wrongly) that it is so awash in advertising business that it desperately needs editorial copy to fill the pages, hence these reports on the minutiae of criminal activity in the area.

Maybe; maybe not. Perhaps there's a different sensibility here in New Brunswick. The Whitehorse newspapers' practice protects members of the small Yukon populace from embarrassment, gossip and speculation, and in that way, lets the community get on with the greater business of being a functioning society. But perhaps the downside is less public accountability and personal interest. I've lost count of the number of times that people I'm meeting for the first time have asked if I'm the person whose wood was stolen and have expressed their dismay and concern. They're shocked that such a thing could happen here and mortified that this was how I was "welcomed".

The wood is gone; the RCMP investigation has come up empty; my insurance deductible was $40 higher than the value of the wood; a replacement four cords of wood is neatly stacked at the end of my driveway. But look at all the food for thought there is in this incident. What's normal practice in one locale is unheard of in another... and vice versa. We live in a huge, diverse and very interesting country, we Canadians. When I saw this article in the newspaper, I laughed for the sheer delight of knowing how parochial it would seem to my Yukon acquaintances... but quietly I wonder of some of my new Maritime acquaintances would find Whitehorse unaccustomedly impersonal...