Walking Berkeley

That’s what I’ve been doing a lot of time here:  walking, looking, looking, walking.  The weather is mild and mostly dry and for some reason I keep stumbling across unexplored square patches of town.  Some of these are pretty, some just curious.  For now, I’ve stayed almost exclusively south of University Avenue, with one brief foray to the original Peet’s on North Side and today’s ’splore of Mineral Springs Trail, in Tilden, where I’d never hiked before.

 

A single tree

The ancient wreck along Wildcat Creek

 

 

It’s better over here

While snow fell on most of Halifax this morning and giant culverts fell onto the neighbourhood (okay, they were off-loaded in a new stack at the front of our house, per Bob), I have had to ’suffer” through a delightful neighbourhood walk with lots of roses on display, in Berkeley, and then an even more exotic one through Alameda’s tree-named streets with their Victorians.

Not to mention a good look at Alameda Free’s three-year-old central library (still looking fresh and clean).  And Tom’s Tiki Bar on the Oakland side of Park Street Bridge…and the Aloha (bragging–I think inaccurately–that it has Oakland’s longest bar) at the foot of the Fruitvale Bridge…no, not a pub crawl, more a building inspection tour.

Life’s so rough on vacation!

Like a magnet….

Within 10 minutes of walking out into the berkeley afternoon in search of a good stretch after 8 hours on airplanes, I ran into…road construction.  his version, in front of the Berkeley Bowl, looked positively  delicate and dainty, in contrast with South Park’s big dig.

Nonetheless, road construction is road construction.  I feel like Schultz’s Pigpen…..with construction in lieu of dust motes.

Poppies go kitsch, sadly

Remembrance Day, a week from now on November 11, is a solemn and important date in Nova Scotia.  Military history and presence is deep here.  Lapel poppies spring onto everyone’s lapel even before the end of October; unlike the orangey crepe paper ones I remember from childhood, these are usually bright red and stiff.  Until this year, they seemed to be rather uniformly constructed of plastic flocked lightly with fuzz, a deep green center shining in the centre.

I’ve already seen two “innovations” this season, alongside staid tradition (who knew plastic could be considered tradition?!).  One is the peel-off sticker poppy, a kind of disposable for the shirt.  The other is scarier:  a woman I met on the escalator was wearing what I can describe only as a Happy Face Poppy Fabric Brooch scared my aesthteics as well as my sense of the purpose of the holiday.

And it’s early times.  There’s a week for more collisions to occur between symbol and form.

Signs of the flu

That is, there are signs posted everywhere: large foamcore mounted, full colour ones reminding all of the symptoms of H1N1, illustrating how to cough/sneeze into one’s elbow, and reciting “get a flu vaccine.”  The last note has become an impossibility in Nova Scotia unless you are under the age of 59 months, pregnant or happened to have made an appointment for one precisely last Monday with your family doctor.

One mother of an infant with whom I spoke this morning described waiting for six hours for her daughter’s dose yesterday.  Bob, on the other hand, who had only casually made an appointment on the magic day, clocked himself spending 25 minutes from leaving home to returning to it vaccinated. And yes, he feels guilty.

I’m hoping that the signs get switched out frequently enough that folks continue to attend to their messages.  The whole elbow coverage thing is firmly entrenched among 18-year-olds on the West Coast but older folks lacked the benefit of such a public health education during their formative years. I imagine there’s a divide along the lines of what hand washing introduced 125 years ago.

Given the fact that I don’t fall into any of Nova Scotia’s protected categories, I’ve decided Christian Science may be the way to muster through this.  Plus, hand washing.

Rites of autumn

Years ago, we lived smack in the middle of what turned out to be THE neighbourhood for van loads of trick or treaters to be dropped.  They piled up to the doors on the street like locusts in their seventh year:  ”tramps” and princesses and baseball players and baby mice.  We’d go through piles of candy and would have stocked piles but would always find we had to get close fisted toward the end of the evening just to eke out some for everyone.

We moved from there to a busy street toward the trick and treat parade ended.  Here the street would be busy if there were a street and last year, when there was, it was, and there were no trick and treaters.  This year however, we are being visited by a parade that, to my mind, is wholly Canadian in disposition: the nonperishable food collectors.  Every feasting holiday brings them out: well fed folks collecting goods for the local food pantry (here, Feed Nova Scotia).

Football, that other autumnal activity, doesn’t have the profile it does in the US.  in fact, the very local (two blocks west) St Mary’s Huskies are playing 12 games this season–including repeats with virtually every team they play once. (Dalhousie doesn’t have a football team).  Poor Bob has to feed his collegiate football jones by way of the internet and cope with the variations in time zones.

Moving beyond such social whirls as Halloween and kickoffs, there’s that construct that autumn also brings on both sides of the border: the reversion to “standard” time.  This year, we are running “daylight savings” later than ever, apparently jsut for the Saturday night trick and treaters, although our food for the hungry collectors come in the afternoon.

And there’s the wholly natural rite, the gorgeous one: the turning leaves:

 

What’s the big dig about anyway?

Marg, a librarian on the West Coast who reads this blog with a fair degree of faith, it appears, and whom I ahve never met, points up that my scrupulous reports on the heck the street work is causing has overwhelmed any explanation of what plan was behind the mess in the first place.  So ehre’s a quick recap:

Back in the 18th century, the British used the south mouth of a clear stream they named Fresh Water Brook to restock their ships with potable water when in port.  Fresh Water Brook (which in the Western US would pass for a river and in the Eastern US would be a deep creek) flows roughly southeast across the Halifax Peninsula.

At some point in the mid-19th century, sewer lines were laid on the Peninsula and were set to roughly trace the route of the brook (perhaps because it had cut through the rock?). Then a grid pattern of streets was laid over it–the grid running due east-west/north-south while the brook and sewer line ran southeast.  Buildings were placed on top of the brook/sewer line….

A hundred sixty years later, no surprise, the sewer pipes had had their day and needed replacement.  And some wise person decided to straighten ‘em out to follow the streets (makes sense) and straighten the now undergrounded brook, too….

A couple problems with this scenario:  ”underground” here means 30 feet or so, not six; and “rock means like solid not stoney…..

Thus the big dig-explosion-crater began.

And that, Marg, is your scary pre-Halloween story.

The unmanageable project meets the librarian

Bob has had a day to end all days.  Even if he hadn’t told me this, I would know it, based on the size of the excavation and lifting equipment that greeted me when I opened the front door at 6:45 am, the fact that he was going to have to run interference for the delivery of a new oil tank and hot water heater installation under conditions that have led to no street or driveway access, and the size of the culverts sitting at our door upon my return to the house at 7:30 pm.

But he survived.  And there is now a hot water heater.  And perhaps a functioning oil tank (it hasn’t pumped through to the point that the heat is in effect yet).

 

at my front door, 7:30 this evening

 

 

Just add cabling and get rid of a pedestrian zone

My journey the whole two blocks to the pharmacy and back turned out to be studded with construction obstacles such as I hadn’t yet seen. Fenwick is now a pit at the South Park End and unpaved gravel over which equipment spins and growls–along with pedestrians trying to get in and out of the medical arts building because the sidewalk there is either closed (at the side) or parked upon by construction workers’ trucks (at the front).  Nice.  Works really well with wheelchairs.

I managed to climb, skate and otherwise dodge pipes, vehicles and sliding slag until I got almost to my front door–which was locked by two guys in hard hats hauling very heavy cable along the walk.  They piled it in the parking lot driveway on one side of the house and announced cheerfully that they hope no one tries to access the parking lot until they return tomorrow.  Then they repositioned cones curbside–along the 25 feet of open curb–to designate that as a no parking zone, got in their trucks and drove off for the night.

Nice.

Mysteries continue on the street

At 5:15 this morning, the street crew began arriving, revving machinery engines so that the fuel truck, rumbling up across the gravel, could refill tanks.  The “work day” isn’t supposed to begin, by bylaw, until 7 am, but this apparently doesn’t count as “work”.  There’s no blasting involved and the the dump trucks don’t arrive, honking and hooting their backup signals (and yes, I believe these auditory backup warnings are good and right), until way past 6 am.

Although there’s now a clear patch from the corner of South Street down three houselots, which has it reaching past our house, the digging has continued to the south of that “safe zone” and has commenced with new vigor north of South Street’s intersection, at a point no work plan map we ever saw showed it going.

The dishwasher that appeared upside down in the street, about a month ago, has remained both untouched and solitary.  Its nearest neighbour, within the construction fence as it is, appears to be just as singular of type:  one bale of hay, the only one to appear on the work site even unto the Fenwick leg of the whole.

Meanwhile, the elm trees have turned golden in autumn and other trees are becoming close to bare.  The Provincial government has declared that no road construction vehicles may be doing road construction of a “summer” type after November 1; at that point they must be converted to identities as snow removal equipment, in order to react against last November’s Cobequid Pass debacle.

That remains the biggest mystery to me: how all these holes, pits and unpaved areas can possibly be healed within the next four days.  Unlikely, my dear Watson.