Padakun Pages

Saturday 21 March 2015

SPRING HAS ARRIVED

Finally Spring has arrived! The transformation of walking is so welcome. I can now walk longer time and distance without bundling up or dodging around ice-patches or leaping over snow-banks. No need to bundle my dogs up either.
In walking around my town (Renfrew, Ontario, pop. 7,500) I have been distressed by the awful condition of the roads and sidewalks. You can’t even say that walkers are disadvantaged because of cars, because the roads are every bit in disrepair as the sidewalks. One of my maintenance walks takes me out to a new housing development, appended to the back of one of the major shopping malls. With all the talk about accessible communities and the importance of public walking space, I am shocked to see this set of about 50 new dwellings completely ignores sidewalks. There a few lay-bys which run for parts of blocks, but these are clearly intended as off-street parking concessions.
On the other hand, I do have to congratulate some parts of the community which managed to acquire a multi-million dollar grant for the maintenance of the K and P Trail, a local snowmobile track favoured by walkers in the summer. The K and P is one of our best kept walking secrets and this money promises to keep it in top shape for years. I don’t often thank politicians for much, but in this case, a tip o’ the ball-cap is in order.

see you out walking,
Ray

Thursday 12 March 2015

POISONED AIR

It was deeply and personally brought home to me how critical the state of the natural world has become through my afternoon walk on the streets of Havana. The city is a miraculous relic of a bygone era, one which is collapsing and decomposing as we walk through it. The buildings are delightful and precious, yet out of the current political and economic situation in Cuba, so many buildings, streets , neigbourhoods and towns are eroding and disappearing in slow motion.
Even more present was the simultaneous poisoning of the air in and around the city. Driving to the city was passing through waves of toxic black smoke – diesel, gas and plain old dirt. In the city itself the blend of oppressive heat, fouling vehicles and inefficient human and industrial waste removal made it impossible to catch a breath of clean air. The day after our visit, I was obliged to rest most of the day because I could not catch my breath and experienced a aching pressure in my chest unlike anything I’ve known before.
The next week-end, after I returned, I went out walking on a snowmobile trail near Calabogie. There the air was entirely different – until the next wave of noisy, fouling snow machines roared by.
I fear for how this slow and almost unnoticed erosion f our air space will confine us to pockets of usable air or force us to rely, as people are now doing in Japan and China, on wearing facemasks to filter out the poisons. Where will we walk when the air is poisoned?


yours, on the trail
Ray