(photograph courtesy of Google Streetview; I forgot my camera this afternoon)
I’m taking a writing course this week through the Sage Hill Writing Experience. Every day we are given things to read and exercises to do. Today’s exercise was to read Erica Violet Lee’s “In Defence of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide,” and then to go to a wasteland—defined by Tanis MacDonald, our instructor, as any place without a commercial purpose—and observe it for 15 or 20 minutes. For Lee, wastelands are spaces of destruction and resistance; they are “considered not simply unworthy of defence, but deserving of devastation,”
places where no medicines grow, only plants called “weeds.” A wasteland is a place where, we are taught, there is nothing and no one salvageable. . . . Wastelands are spaces deemed unworthy of healing because of the scale and amount of devastation that has occurred there.
Wastelands are named wastelands by the ones responsible for their devastation.
Lee develops a “wastelands theory” that contends “that there is nothing and no one beyond healing. So we return again and again to the discards, gathering scraps for our bundles, and we tend to the devastation with destabilizing gentleness, carefulness, softness.” Caring for the wastelands, she continues, “is about gathering enough love to turn devastation into mourning and then, maybe, turn that mourning into hope.” Hope, she writes, “is knowing there is more to living than surviving; believing that some worlds must exist for us beyond survival.”
It’s a beautiful essay, and it, along with the assignment I’ve been given, are the reasons I’m walking south on Albert Street on this hot afternoon. There’s an east wind, but it isn’t cooling anything. I cross the bridge over Wascana Creek; the water is pea-green and stagnant, with no outflow from the lake splashing over the dam, despite the recent rain. Canadian flags—leftover from July 1—snap in the breeze. The traffic on Albert Street, the city’s main north-south artery, is busy; the city is coming back to life after the long weeks of the lockdown.
South of Wascana Creek I walk in the dappled shade of elm trees whose leaves have been chewed by cankerworms. A brick, still bearing the mortar that held it in place, lies on the sidewalk. A house is being renovated, and two doors down another house is for sale. Mushrooms are growing at the base of an elm tree. I notice a sign, taped to a light pole, that reads: “2020 Isn’t the End of the World, It’s the Start of A New One.” There is a drawing of an open eye underneath “World,” and I wonder what the connection between eyes and worlds might be. A crow glides out of an elm tree, settles on the sidewalk, and then hops into the road, complaining.
Puddles on the sidewalk and in the gutter testify to someone’s overzealous watering of their lawn. Our water is piped 100 miles from Lake Diefenbaker, but so many of us don’t think about that when we turn on the tap. I take a deep breath; the air has no scent, unless heat is a scent. Why not? A red pickup truck almost hits a small sedan, and horns honk. Another house has a “for sale” sign on the lawn. The flowerbed next to the sidewalk is sad, choked with creeping bellflower. If this city had a floral icon, it would have to be creeping bellflower. That stuff is everywhere someone has tried to plant something else. These are among the most expensive houses in the city, and yet many of their gardens and lawns are uncared for and abandoned. Are the houses empty? Do the owners put all their energy into their back gardens, ceding the front yards to the traffic noise and exhaust? I read some graffiti on a concrete wall blocking someone’s front yard from the street: “ZAIRE.” A long string of yellow caution tape runs from a no parking sign to a broken bench underneath a bus stop.
The southbound lanes are blocked by signs reading “CONSTRUCTION,” but I see only two workers. They’re doing something to the sidewalk, but exactly what they’re doing isn’t clear. The sidewalks definitely need repair; they’re heaved and broken with large holes where boulevard trees have died and not been replaced. I get closer and see that the two fellows are replacing some interlocking brick that makes one corner look fancier than the others. Only aesthetics, then; form rather than function. Sow thistle is about to bloom and a discarded blue surgical mask lies beside a juniper bush.
I suddenly smell hot asphalt, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from; I can’t see any paving work going on, any roofing. Two city workers are checking a water line. A cyclist speeds past me on the sidewalk. The wind is suddenly cooler, blowing from the south, but at the same time clouds are approaching from the northwest. It’s supposed to rain tonight, and those clouds look like the beginnings of a storm. At the corner of 25th Street, I smell cut grass and, even more powerful, the sour smell of cut weeds.
At the crosswalk, I push the begging button and wait to cross the street. Heat rises from the pavement. I can see my quarry, my wasteland, sandwiched between a white strip mall—its tenants include a Robin’s Donuts, a pizza place, Filipino and Indian stores, and the Funeral and Cremation Services Council of Saskatchewan—and a new hotel covered in buff-coloured stucco. It’s a vacant lot. I forget exactly what used to be here; I think it was a gas station, and then a Jiffy Lube. I look at the space from the sidewalk. There’s a large shallow hole close to the sidewalk, and I wonder if that’s where the foundations of the Jiffy Lube might have been, or if that’s where the gas tanks were removed. There are two puddles in that hole; a crow drops something into one of them and then fishes it back out again.
Between the sidewalk and the hole, the dirt is covered in foxtail barley and yellow sweet clover. My field guide to grassland plants tells me that foxtail barley is a native perennial that “flourishes in disturbed places” (Vance, Jowsey, McLean, and Switzer 334). A plant of the wasteland then. Yellow sweet clover is an introduced plant, brought to the prairies as cattle feed (Vance, Jowsey, McLean, and Switzer 142). That’s hard to understand; surely there was a lot for cattle to eat on a grassland that supported millions of bison, but Settlers have introduced many plants—sow thistle and creeping bellflower among them—for obscure reasons. Maybe they were homesick for the plants they left behind. Most of the weeds I struggle with in my allotment garden are introductions from Europe and Asia. Make of that what you will.
A dirt path cuts through the north side of the lot. It looks like a short cut between the apartment buildings behind the lot and Albert Street. A sign next to the sidewalk bears an important message: “FOR LEASE.” I’m supposed to be looking for land without a commercial purpose, but this lot is on some company’s list of assets; if I called the number on the sign, I could find out what it’s going for. Not its worth, though—that’s a different calculation.
I walk into the lot. I notice two mallard ducks standing in one of the puddles at the bottom of the hole. The male is sleeping; his spouse is watching me carefully. The ground is dry and cracked. At the back of the lot, I notice a pile of concrete and wonder if it’s the remainders of the Jiffy Lube. There are scrubby weeds and something that looks like hairy golden aster or rabbitbrush, two native species of wildflowers, but probably isn’t. I rarely find interesting native plants in the city; there are too many seeds from introduced plants in the soil. Still, you never now; I could come back when they bloom in a couple of weeks. I walk away from the ducks and I can see the female relax. Soon she’s sleeping, like her mate.
Now the ground is covered in a weed bearing tiny yellow flowers. I wonder what it is. My field guide is silent on this point, and I loaned my guide to western Canadian weeds to a friend and never got it back. I’m closer to the broken concrete now: along with smaller pieces, there are two huge footings, scraps of girders sticking out of them. I don’t think they came from the Jiffy Lube. They’re too big, too permanent. I see some broken asphalt piled there, too. I wonder if someone has been dumping their garbage here, even though Albert Street is busy and the lot fairly visible. I suddenly realize that there isn’t a lot of garbage or litter in the lot; a few fast-food wrappers, a broken curtain rod, a long piece of lumber. Not much at all, really, for a place surrounded by stores and restaurants. Places with a human presence usually have traces of that presence, in the form of the garbage people leave behind. Maybe nobody comes here. Maybe this wasteland has become invisible to the people walking or driving past.
Behind a row of concrete barriers at the very back of the lot, there’s a row of trees—Manitoba maples and pines—and another row runs between the hotel and the lot I’m standing in. One dead tree lies over a concrete barrier. I can hear the voices of kids playing on one of the apartment balconies. I walk closer to the pile of broken concrete and surprise a jackrabbit. It jumps up and runs away, startling me, too. Behind me, a crow caws.
Several thistles are about to bloom. I see two more jackrabbits, larger than the other one, crouching on the dirt, so perfectly camouflaged as to be nearly invisible. They are perfectly still but watching me intently. I turn away from them; I don’t want them to get scared and run into the traffic. A telephone pole with no wires attached stands on the other side of the lot. I can hear a handsaw slowly cutting through a board or a pipe. A crow in a tree above the rabbits cries out. The ducks are wading in the puddle now, drinking the muddy water. A passing car plays what seems to be loud mariachi music and then it’s quiet again.
I step over two huge dandelion plants that have yet to flower. A bald man cuts through the lot on the dirt track from the apartments, wearing a hoodie despite the heat. He turns the corner of the strip mall and disappears from view. I look down and see that there are dried pellets of rabbit poop everywhere. The plant I couldn’t recognize, the plant that covers this side of the lot, must be something they like to eat. I’ll bet they gather here after dark to feed. From this angle, I can see that the shallow hole has a round end and a rectangular end, kind of like a key or an ankh. I check my watch. I’ve been taking notes for 20 minutes. I’m hot and thirsty and I’ve perspired through my shirt. I walk out to the cracked concrete sidewalk and turn north, towards home.
Works Cited
Lee, Erica Violet. “In Defence of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide.” Guts, 30 November 2016. http://gutsmagazine.ca/wastelands/.
Vance, F.R., J.R. Jowsey, J.S. McLean, and F.A. Switzer. Wildflowers Across the Prairies, Greystone, 1999.
