Hypervigilance takes its toll on civic benevolence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/11/2024 (333 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A single goose-neck reading light. A blank page. The dark.

And me.

And I am thinking about what it is I find so unsettling here.

Last weekend, at the beer store on Pembina, the one where the whole inside of the building is its own cooler, chilled to the same point, January to December, with the bouncer outside. Big guy. Affable. Eyes that remind you of a shark somehow — nicitating membrane. (Go ahead, look that up.)

Year round, he dresses the same: black insulated vest, dark-blue watch cap, sometimes gloves. Whether he’s inside or out.

He stretched his arms wide on Saturday, encompassing and dismissing a whole city all at the same time.

“Stealing has become a way of life here. It wasn’t like that.” As if to say, it’s like that all around us. Waiting.

Shaking his head, as if he found the concept hard to believe.

He wasn’t talking to me. He certainly didn’t know I was a journalist.

But the words rang true.

There is something here akin to menace. When you walk to work in the early-morning November dark, past the casino and the empty parking lots where semis sometimes overnight with their running lights on — long-distance drivers probably catching some sleep before morning deliveries — when you have to scout the immediate horizon and the long ribbon of sidewalk for potential threats or hazards, you lose trust. Or faith.

Nothing, mind you, has actually happened to me, except for a few sharp adrenalin rushes of looming threat, ultimately unfulfilled.

A woman on a bike, in front of the McPhillips and Selkirk 7-Eleven (when there was a 7-Eleven there), screaming, “What the f—- are you looking at? What’s your problem?” at me for letting my head look her way when she was turned away, screaming, from the convenience store’s door.

A young man, rangy and sharp-edged, angling toward me across Mountain, the air heavy with whatever funky and wonderful mix it is that wafts out of Young’s Market in the pre-morning, waving his arms and mutter-swearing, before walking straight past me as if unaware I had even existed.

Once, above Aberdeen and below the “Jesus is Lord” perogy store (if you know McPhillips, you know it), there were evenly spaced drops of bright-red frozen blood on the concrete, with no way to tell which direction they were heading. Frozen as bright-red as blood can be. Scarlet. Two different gloves on the concrete, furred white with frost.

And one memorable fall morning, the ground a broad expanse half-lit and darker below hip-high, three different people rose up from where they were lying face-down in the prairie-dog field by the electrical substation, staggering toward the road, herky-jerky, looking more like extras in a George Romero zombie movie than anything else.

It takes a toll, living in this city where random machete attacks are always possible and unfathomable violence is only a bus shelter away. Police cars and ambulances strobe building fronts with their red and white and blue tics of urgency. Distant sirens rise and fall.

It’s not a measurable thing, not some kind of reverse-happiness index where Winnipeg gets minus-nine points and Copenhagen gets plus-two.

But it is a thing. And it means you have to be ready. That you have to be alert.

I’m not alone in this sense of needing preparedness, of living in constant awareness.

I was strolling west on Boyd in the matte dark a handful of weeks ago, walking in the street as I often do, when a voice called out from a front step back and behind me.

“What’s wrong with the sidewalk? Is it broken?”

There’s no simple answer to that.

You can’t stop to explain that walking on the street doesn’t mean you’re out there casing cars for valuables, that you’re doing it because you just feel like you are better able to hold and control all of the space around you when you have the right to set the distance between you and the world. That there is now a different and larger necessary space than you are used to.

You set your shoulders square to the front, don’t turn your head, walk on.

But I have learned one thing.

I have learned it is my time that is being robbed from me.

Time to wonder about the humped and distant black clouds defining the performance of the arriving sun is taken from me, as is the interplay of light on random objects. About why the 71 bus heading south always follows the 34 and the 36, and never takes the lead.

I lose the ability for my mind to drift to plans for things as unreachable as future dreams and as tangible as what to cook for dinner — because it’s important to be alert.

It’s something important — at least, something important to me.

It’s stolen.

Every.

Single.

Day.