Craig Janzen

Walking 124th And Area | The Edmonton Municipal Cemetery on 107th Avenue and 117th Street.

This week’s River City ramble dovetails nicely with the topic of Slow Living that’s dwelt upon elsewhere in the pages of this issue, not just because it’s somewhat attuned to slow philosophies but because it gives me a chance to hold forth on a key slow activity: walking. If you desire for the mindspace to meditate, or a way to connect with community and downshift from the hyper-accelerated pace of modern life, look no farther than the ends of your legs.

Despite repeated mockery for my distinctive gait and the speed of my stride, I’ve strived to be a transit pedestrian for much of my life and, more recently, a pedestrian tourist. Simply put, there is no better way to get to know a place than to find it by foot and I’ve pursued this belief down the streets of almost every major city in Canada, a handful in the U.S. and slivers of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. And yet there is still so much walking left to do.

The subject of walking is of particular relevance to Edmonton because, the river valley trail system aside, our city isn’t really set up for the shoe-commuter. Sure the weather can be dissuasive, but the real problems are that it’s way too spread out and key parts of it are absolutely butt-ugly and totally uninviting, which gives far too many people an excuse to stay in their cars as much as possible. Seriously, when I see you lined up in one of our city’s many drive-thrus, your idling car belching exhaust into the air for unnecessary minutes on end, I wonder how big of a piano you have tied to your ass that you can’t switch off your engine and walk up to the counter.

Westmount To Downtown
Last week was characterized by shin splint-inducing walk from Westmount to downtown multiple times. The weather was brisk but conducive, the sky slowly taking on colour above me as I strode down still-slumbering 124th Street, an area I snidely dismissed as overhyped in last week’s restaurant section. I found, though, that I love 124th Street in its pre-gentrification phase as a ’hood that still has room for niche retail (corsets, crystals), upscale hair salons and audiophile boutiques cheek-by-jowl with the Edmonton Chess Club, a prosthetics clinic and unvarnished ethnic outposts like the proudly Ethiopian Arada Grocery and Hellas Foods, the Mediterranean mini-market of long standing that correctly uses the word “Oriental” (in the Edward Said sense) on its sign.

The historical quality of the area abides not just in the beautiful heritage homes on the sidestreets that flank 124th (some of the loveliest in the city), but also in the tumble-down fences that divide aging apartment blocks and look like they might have had horses tied to them once, and in the institutional character of some of the businesses, like the stolid brick face of the building that houses Moore Planning Group, which has recently been defaced by someone calling themselves the “Inner City Goblin.” Not only are you in the wrong neighbourhood, shithead, but your amateurish graffito is just more visual blight in a city with plenty to go around.

If I hadn’t been on foot, would I have noticed that some prudish vandal had scrawled the word SICK in the vast, shiny lacuna between the model’s breasts in an advertisement on the side of a bodybuilder’s supply kitty-corner to the Roxy Theatre? I’m not so reactionary myself, but point taken — I’ve noted her nigh-orgasmic expression and pendulous frontage numerous times, but I still don’t know what product she and her mams are shilling for.

Striding Past The Graveyard
From there, I followed the self-described Avenue of Nations east, past the Edmonton Municipal Cemetery where, in sight of a massive old headstone inscribed with the word BIBLE, I saw someone had strewn the pages of dismembered Playboy magazine along the cemetery fence. When I passed the same spot on the way back, all the pages had been harvested, which gave me to think that Tim Hortons and other purveyors of value-priced, nutrition-free provender ought to imprint their wrappers and cups with photos of air-brushed tits and ass so that horny schoolboys and budget-conscious lechers alike will feel rewarded for keeping the sidewalks and boulevards clean of what any pedestrian will tell you is the most pervasive refuse on the River City roadways. You litterbugs probably bought it at a drive-thru before throwing it out the car window, didn’t you?

Even from the sidewalk, the cemetery is fascinating, a monument not just to the dead but to the hybrid vigour that kept Edmonton from withering and blowing away in those harsh pre-provincial capital days. Amidst the granite menagerie — stone sheep, lions, horses, cherubs, and birds abound — you’ll note names devoid of vowels or Romanized characters, names connecting their bearers to the far corners of the northern hemisphere, names you can trace to people who still live here, still make our town diverse, vibrant, habitable.

It’s certainly a sharp contrast to the generic big-box strip malls a few blocks away on 104th Avenue. What will they represent to our descendents, except our blinkered insistence on convenience that paved over the past in favour of cavernous concrete monuments to instant gratification?

Perhaps such notions are so much bullshit — my mind wanders as much as I do on these peregrinations — but I can’t help but think our town would look a little different if more of us decided to slow down a bit.