Dumbass

I walk these days to escape and to think and to listen to music and to be alone. To sort myself out, really. I head most often to the eastern end of Charles St and then along Rideau to the K and P Trail, at which point I aim east along the water and onto Belle Island, where the big trees are. If I’m lucky I run into no one at all.

The willows down near the canal have been bent double and busted open by a recent storm. Their insides spill out like braided gold rope and I swear there is enough room at the heart of the biggest tree to climb inside and change clothes.And that really should have been the image uppermost when I was done today -  those terrible, awesome twists of old willow clawing into a pale, worn-out sky. There is something end-of-world in that meadow scene, and it would have been no surprise to discover a team of seismologists down there (or Ghostbusters) with a van load of blinking receivers and long fine needles scratching aftershocks and ramifications onto rolls of green-tinged graph paper.

But instead, what I have brought home with me (and what has provoked me) is the dull-seeming picture here. Dull until you realize what’s happened. I was ten yards past it and had to go back. The city employee tasked with clearing the snow from the trail has chosen to pile it up so that it buries the installed needle drop box. That worker had nearly a kilometre of path to work with and yet decided this was the spot. It seems a choice both deliberate and bloody-minded, not to mention utterly dumbass. 

That box serves primarily, I think it’s safe to assume, the clientele at the Integrated Care Hub on Montreal St, those neighbours of ours who spill out into the thin forest behind the Centre. There are tents there, and rough homes stitched and stapled from old tarpaulins and scrap wood. To say that any sort of life is being eked out at the edge of our downtown core by these neighbours is to ignore the state of things. And yet some damn fool - probably because they were bored and thought it was funny - has decided to create yet another obstacle for this community, to make things just a little bit worse for them. It is reprehensible behaviour and it is cruel, and whoever is responsible should be ashamed.