Summer is construction season in Canada. (Sort of like how July is vacation season in Paris—you’re not supposed to be there mid-to-late summer because everyone’s gone.) Any of the larger university campuses, McMaster University in Hamilton, and University of Toronto, become drilling grounds of green netting, tractors, yellow tape, and pylons gleaming under the sun. New dorms are being built, lofty science and tech buildings, with the ambitious goal of completion by September.
Ontario is infamous for slow construction—or giving up halfway. In west Hamilton where I grew up I always wondered why it took six years to erect an apartment on James Street, or why the ice cream store with window signs saying “coming soon!” never came, or why a fenced-off square of land near my high school was a heap of rubble overgrown with weeds and daisies.
And, last Wednesday, I waited beneath a maple tree in the heat for a bus 44 that never came. That very evening I was headed to Toronto on the Lakeshore East GO train when it stopped near Appleby and didn’t move for twenty-eight minutes. Later that night, on my ride back to Hamilton, the same thing occurred (a “signal issue”) and this time they made everyone get off at Burlington and take the shuttle to complete their journey west. It was kind of surreal.
What I’ve learned is that Hamilton is possibly the slowest city I’ve ever lived in—with delays and mishaps occurring at all levels and forms. My local library, for instance, had the entire computer system down for months and just bore with it. It’s partly owing to current funding cuts and cancellations, and to poor infrastructure and regulatory processes as well that take forever to get approved. I’ve learned to swallow some outbursts over the last few weeks because no one else complains and it feels crazy to do it. On the delayed Lakeshore East train that day, the conductor said over the loudspeakers, “Spread out, people, use all doors! Gotta go!” which was the most blatant display of impatience I’d heard from a Canadian.
But all these mishaps, the construction projects that begin with promise but fail to deliver, make my thoughts slow down into more long-term ones. Seoul had lightning-fast construction all year-round and so I’d be thinking in short terms: days, weeks, months. Canadian construction plods along, so I think in years. Personally I liked the wildflower field on my way to school. It became a part of life. Abandoned projects gather dust, which I’ve found is true for less concrete projects in life. Sometimes there’ll be an external jolt—a mandate, a protest from locals, a funding cut—that either demolishes the project or pumps it back to life. In the meantime it teaches people patience, forbearance, and that the most ambitious trains lose steam and enter the midlife waiting zone. Anyone who went to my high school would’ve walked past this field for four years and implicitly learned the same thing, more or less, though it sounds silly. Lonely and depressing, but there, still existing. Pretty in an untended way in the summertime.
