The wonders of wandering a new city

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/07/2023 (1156 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I start sorting a small but growing collection of Winnipeg index cards in my head now, each one a marker for its own short film of memory.

At the moment, everything is wonderfully half a story: unjaded by regular experience of this place, I see fragments of things in progress and my imagination makes its own beginnings and endings for them, because I’m able to simply let my mind wander.

Later, I know, routine will begin to trump wonder.

Routine is a gradual force, but an effective one, its steady grind also its own form of entropy.

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The man across the street from us is his own perfect one-act play — he enters from stage right, lit suddenly bright-white by his own motion detector security lights. He tries the driver’s-side front door of his car, then the passenger-side front door, then circles around the back of the car, brushes his hands together and goes back into the house.

A minute’s wait.

Then the lights cut sharply to darkness.

Fin.

The same play is performed almost every night, always just after dark.

Admission is free.

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Bicyclists sweep by on our street in the mobile bubbles of their own sound systems, sharing a verse or two with everyone as they pass. One particularly enterprising pair of cyclists early one Saturday evening had a trailer hooked up behind one bike, just to haul the speakers for their sound system. Big speakers, the rich bass chasing them down the road like a large, friendly, loping dog.

The couple can’t be older than their late 20s, but the singer they are hauling around behind themselves is Marty Robbins, singing El Paso, a song Robbins released in 1959.

Somehow, for a brief moment, it isn’t just someone else’s noise intruding into your evening: somehow, for the length of a verse or maybe two, it is like the neighbourhood has gained a soundtrack. Maybe, I think, a movie is about to begin. Maybe it has already started.

Later, a brief glimpse, the light almost faded to dark, something almost impossible to believe: a pod of cyclists pass, at least two of them dressed as giant squid.

Did I really just see that?

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On Arlington north of St. Matthews, the early morning 71 bus slows for its next stop, and almost every day I notice the house that burned.

The fire vented straight out through the peak of the roof, giving the building a surprised look, as if it was unable to accept that strong winds had blown the permanent fixture of its hat away.

The house is for sale — or, at least, the land is for sale. The house has to be demolished; its race has been run. A sales feature on the realty sign? “Zoned for a fourplex.”

Three bedrooms and one bathroom for each unit.

The lot hardly looks large enough for a house of that size, let alone that many families and their intertwined histories.

The family that was there left few signs, even through the regular time lapse of captured Google Street View images. You can see a small carpet hung over the front railing of the house last year, a riot of what look like pink peonies blooming in the garden 12 years before that. Curtains move back and forth in the individual photographs; little else changes before the fire.

Most of the windows and front door are now boarded up with white-painted plywood.

● ● ●

There are padlocks threaded through the wire mesh on the outside of the pedestrian part of the rail bridge over the Assiniboine again, just past Halter Park. Love locks are now a global phenomenon — as a concept, their attempt at signalling permanence has never made much sense to me. A lock is for something you need to hold by sheer mechanical force when it’s out of your sight. Still, it’s hard not to read the names — or even just the initials — on the locks and not get a smile from the sheer hopefulness on display. I discover later that Winnipeg has the dubious honour of being one of the few places where such a lock actually caused an injury — 21 stitches to a passerby in 2015. Love hurts.

Up against the bank on the right-hand side of the river, looking downstream, a milky brown eddy cycles backwards against the main current, chewing into the soft ground, leaving a balcony of root-tied sod and shrub plants hanging out over open air.

Routine is a gradual force, indeed, inevitably at work dismantling the new.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca