Walking in car territory

It was after walking down St. Laurent Blvd. from Montreal Road to Industrial Ave., and then starting to head back, that I realized the reason for the slightly uneasy feeling that was dogging me as I covered the kilometres. I was walking. I was, in a sense, a visible minority, in that there were very few other walkers or cyclists, rather there was an endless, non-silent majority of vehicles. I felt as though I was being studied, if I was noticed at all, by the drivers as a visible curiosity. A biped that had escaped from a more walkable neighbourhood. For the most part, the only other bipeds I saw were getting in and out of their cars in the slots provided in front of strip malls of varying size and complexity.

The walk commenced with a brief stretch of modest single-dwelling houses, all of which I hope were blessed with triple glazing. I imagined the inhabitants all wandering around wearing noise-elimination headphones, communicating using sign language or writing short sentences on tablets. Surely here was a need for as many trees as could be crammed in. With their ability to absorb noise, like windbreaks in large farmed fields, and look good, they would do the street a big favour. In among the more modest homes, in the 700 block, was an older, porched brick house, it too a visible minority in its throwback style. I have noticed these anachronistic domiciles all over Ottawa, homes that have somehow kept their heads while all around are losing theirs. They are becoming like a lost tribe.

I then did spot a clump of people, young men in the school field between Queen Elizabeth and Rideau High. They seemed underdressed for football, and then I realized they were playing rugby. I stood for a moment and received a montage of memory of my time on the school rugby field, which usually ended with me exiting early, blood pouring from my glass nose. (Later, back home, I went on the two schools’ respective websites; I’ve been out of school a long time. They all have slogans like Educating for Success under their names now, and seemed to be competing with other, as though they were businesses. Queen Elizabeth had a whole page about how to deal with young people and cellphones, their primary source of attention, and the amount of advertising they will be subjected to, fledgling consumers that they are.)

As I proceeded, I began to read the street rather than observe it. I felt I was drowning in the sheer quantity of words plastered everywhere on stores, store windows, on billboards standing on poles anywhere there was a tiny patch of open ground or old railway line overgrown by scrub. Almost all of it was written in the language of enticement, and so anything that wasn’t in that vein stood out. My eye caught the words Canada Council for the Arts, and I remembered that the art bank HQ is here. They had just had an open day at the end of the previous month, which I missed. Next time. The art bank was founded in 1972 — the woman who started it, Suzanne Rivard Le Moyne, died a year ago — and is a civilized brokerage of tax dollars, as opposed to say advertising pipelines.

Once I reached Donald Street and carried on south, the gloves came off, and the arterial roadway gave up all pretence of being part of a neighbourhood and was a barely broken row on either side of commercialism. A relentless signage war was underway to get my attention, and they all seemed to be shouting, the loudest noise coming from one of those stores that offers expensive money loans to people who don’t have much of it. The side streets now only served to separate the strip malls, and it was all about cars. Car lots. Tire stores. Auto repair stores. Car stereos. Windscreens. Discounts. Numbers ending in 999. Once past St. Laurent Shopping Centre (in the after-hours car park of which I learnt to do doughnuts and get out of a snow spin when I first came here; a rite of passage for the sons and daughters of nearby neighbourhoods) and under the Queensway, upon which I could see the sides of many immobile trucks, the signage went up in the air. To my right the letters spelling out OC Transpo hung high above me, with the stables holding the buses below, red fronts poking out of each garage like donkeys on wheels. To my left the sloping letters CUPE were aloft. No doubt the building was heating up that day with equal quantities of foreboding and anger; it was the day of the throne speech.

After walking over two bridges, the purpose of which I couldn’t quite fathom, I discerned that the traffic next to me was crawling towards a gleefully sadistic set of lights at Industrial, and I figured I’d sucked up my regulation daily dose of greenhouse gases by now. There has been, as I have written about recently, a groundswell of desire for the rehabilitation of as many of our streets as is financially and wilfully possible under the banner of Complete Streets, and the policy got the verbal (so far) endorsement of the it in the last week’s Transportation master plan. It may be too late for St. Laurent Boulevard to re-boulevard it, but it could proudly serve as an example not be repeated.