“In west [Edmonton], born and raised—at the [Grovenor] playground I spent most of my days.”
The ‘city’ has been my home for the duration of my brief existence, coincidentally providing many ‘senses’ of the city, and memories from many different corners of the capital region; although, I also spent almost every summer just outside the city at my parent’s cabin at Alberta Beach. This 45 minute gap between Edmonton’s urban expanse and a small summer town evokes some of my greatest realizations about the city.
After weeks of lake adventures with the local folk, the return back to the city would always give me mild culture—or rather ‘urban’ shock. Urban shock being a result of the sudden sensory overload from the wake of large groups of people. As city dwellers, we never turn the lights out, we walk past street lights, traffic lights, and storefront signs unconsciously; our cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses all radiate sticky exhaust while whittling deep ruts into the city’s concrete arteries; we wake up in the morning, turn off our annoying alarm clocks, and set our autopilot functions on.
As children, my sister and I classified people in two different groups: lake-kids, and city-kids (adults were simply excluded). This distinction comes from when either of us would bring a friend (read: city-kid) out to the cabin, and they would seem to stop functioning normally. This glitch in city-kids was over time decided to be a result of perpetual autopilot, and from a lack of spontaneity.
Lake-kids know everyone from their block, to the next block, to the store clerk, to the librarian, and beyond. City-kids rarely know their neighbors on both sides. Lake-kids never bruise their knees on the same street, usually not even on a street—but off in some remote treed place.
Unfortunately, lake-kids grow up to be adults just like city-kids. I have my own ruts I follow, the usual haunts, and have slowly shifted into autopilot—it’s hard not to, with Edmonton's urban sprawl, hectic schedules, and terrible winter transportation. I see the city through the window of the bus on my way to and from work or school, and if lucky, check out the river valley when weather permits outdoor excursions. I inhabit the city without many senses engaged: as a big, grown-up (somewhat), unconscious city-kid.
I have already begun to question this existence, and hope through exploration of the local, I can find the adult, urban equivalent of a lake-kid once again.
I totally agree with the lake kid/city kid idea. Having moved into the city from the country when I was 9, I noticed a marked shift in the way kids viewed and interacted with their environment. I think the sense of freedom has a lot to do with it. When they're at the lake or an acreage, somewhere out of the way, kids aren't being pushed and prodded into all sorts of activities to keep them occupied. Kids in the country aren't obsessed over by parents in the same way as city kids, at least in my experience. To be fair, the dangers posed by city life (traffic, crime, etc.) aren't necessarily as present in rural areas, so the need for parents to look out for their children is greater.
ReplyDeleteI find it ironic though, that we are so thoroughly warned in our childhoods about the dangers that are omnipresent in the city, but we grow up to become autobots with very little sense of our surroundings. Does the ingrained cautiousness make us too afraid to cope, or are we just ambivalent to the perceived dangers?