On Walden Pond. Or Not. A Few Thoughts On Street Names

I was driving home. I’d been out in Napanee dropping off a lockbox for a walkthrough. One the way back to Kingston, I left the highway at Odessa. I wanted to drop a poinsettia at my parents’ place in Amherstview. It’s nearly Christmas in this weirdest of years, after all. A sit-down dinner seems an increasingly remote possibility and so we make these gestures, in this case a plant nudged across their front walk with the toe of a boot. It was pushing five o’clock and the sun dropping through grey sky struck me as particularly livid; it raged against the dying of its own light. A righteous Bruce Willis fighting through aircraft fuselage.

I stopped at a cool old house we sold a couple of weeks back, hoping to get a postcard sort of photo to send to the Whitby buyers, a My God, look what you just bought sort of snapshot, but the angles were all wrong.  A big man stood on the shoulder of a side street next to a low-slung black Corvette, trying to figure out how he fit in there in the first place.

There are new houses going up every day at the northern edge of Amherstview. When I moved to Kingston back in 1980 it was flat fields here, and I rode the school bus on this same road. Summer weekends we’d hike in to a secret bush-wrapped quarry and flip carefree into green water,  a sunken car still visible like a blue galleon, a blue whale, just off-shore. 

New homes means new streets. Streets that need names. And someone has - I kid you not - decided that Walden Pond Drive is a good handle. I saw that today and wanted, for a good minute, to give it all up and go back to bartending, to writing short stories in the black back corner of a coffeeshop. Real estate seemed about the hollowest profession in the world. Because, really? Who in their right mind thought Walden Pond Drive was a good idea?

I don’t know who gets to name our new streets. The developer is my best guess. I don’t know if there is any oversight at all. I imagine that at best it’s like license plates, and someone sits in an orthopaedic desk chair in a Mini Mall somewhere, hunting obscure obscenities in that dozen or so numbers and letters.

Vanity definitely creeps in. Trump Plaza ambitions, sorta, but writ even smaller. A long curve of road next to a weedy lake just outside the city bears the name of its developer. A dozen lots for sale and attached to every one of them a blunt bid for the shallowest sort of immortality And why not? It’s his money. And it beats all the hard work of actually changing the world, or long years of public service. We make our own memorials, it’ll say on his headstone.

But Walden Pond Drive? Is there really a pond at the end? A shaggy deep-thinker back there, collecting firewood in moonlit woods around a mossy cabin situated just beyond the neon splash pad? Of course not. There really ought to be a law against this sort of thing. Or at least some minor moral outrage when the sign goes up. I realise we have bigger fish these days, but this really does grate.

My other favourites? 

Executive Avenue. Where everyone who moves in must have a tan briefcase and a 9 am conference call Monday to Friday and every other Saturday morning. Presumably there’s a means test delivered at the gate before you get to move in. (If you have trouble finding it, it’s just west of Pat’s Towing and Auto Recyclers).

And also Brookedayle Avenue. Where no one knows how to spell. Or ever took a geography class. Or looked around them to see if it actually fits. The sort of name created in a middle-grade story contest.

These are truly terrible addresses. That’s my one and only point here. The sole reason for me getting all wound-up on a Saturday night when I should have been reading a good book or watching a bad movie. They are lazy, and offensive, and just plain embarrassing. And someone - I just don’t know who yet - should have realized that before we got stuck with them.