Riding a City

Lately, I’ve written a lot about the big picture, about philosophies of the city as a whole, and urban theories. This week, I’d like to go back to experience, the thing that all my abstract musings are founded upon. I need to be grounded once in a while, and this is one of those times.

On Tuesday night, I had a unique and decidedly Edmonton experience – I rode the train. You must understand, I ride the train nearly every day, many times per day, but when I say that I rode the train on Tuesday, I mean something different. Instead of lugging my school bag with laptop and textbooks sufficient to fill a seat unto themselves, I boarded the LRT with only my notebook, and a pen. And then, I rode. And wrote. And rode and wrote for two and a half hours, until I lost count of how many times I’d passed Central Station, lost track of the direction I was travelling in.

We stop by the LRT garage, between Clareview and Belvedere. It’s a blue and grey corrugated tin warehouse, with small windows – the windows are the only reason I know what it is. I had ever considered where the trains might go when they weren’t on the tracks – even though I know they traded the cars, reduced the number of trains for the night, I always thought of our transit in perpetual motion – back and forth and back and forth, bouncing between north and south into eternity.

In Alice Major’s poem “Contemplating the City, she divides the city by two axes – the east-west river, and the north-south flight of migratory birds. (My Edmonton axes are less romantic – see this old post.) In my Tuesday night riding, even though I was fixed to a track that is clipped at both ends, I felt as though my motion, like that north-south migration, had wings with which to fly.