The Canal

Hello Everyone

I heard a story once from the First World War, where a small German village held a funeral march for its church bell. It was late in the war and Germany was desperate. Every last scrap and resource was being poured into the war effort. This beautiful old bell, that had marked the pace of life in this village for generations, was to be melted down and turned into bullets.

On the scale of horror in the Great War, this doesn’t even rank. But still, the story has stayed with me. There’s something about it that so clearly shows that we went wrong. It’s hard to point to any one factor that caused the war or where exactly humanity could have made a different choice to avoid it, but the story stays with me because it so succinctly shows that we failed.

I thought about it recently while skating on the Canal with the Munchkin. It wasn’t our first time, but I worry now about how many more opportunities she’ll have. The Canal is an outdoor skating rink, meaning it needs cold winters to work. How many more of those do we have?

Ottawa, my beloved hometown, is many wonderful things, and while very cold, it is not cool. We don’t try fun experimental things that improve city life. We mostly build suburbs and roads and occasionally throw in some piece of public infrastructure that has been tried and proven elsewhere. We almost had a pedestrian mall across from Parliament Hill. It would have been great, but it interfered with cars that wanted to drive there, so the idea was dropped. But the Canal is something we did right. We don’t get full points for turning it into a skating rink, it’s a pretty obvious idea, and the thing is right there, already built, in the city. And they didn’t fully do it until the 1970s. But still, we did it and it’s great.

I try not to be a climate doomer. I think we’ll pull out of this crisis, as we do with many, too late and with too many casualties, but mostly intact. I fear, though, that skating on the Canal will be one of those casualties. It doesn’t need to get a lot warmer for it to not work any more.

I have a lot of great memories of skating on the Canal, and I worry the Munchkin won’t. As a country kid, coming up to the big city to go skating was an adventure. I remember a friend falling through the ice when we were on it, contra the red flags, at night while in university. I skated on it the day before moving to Peru. I used to race Sophie on it, again, at night, the better to hide our breaking of the rules.

And now, I get to share this with the Munchkin. The cold toes, hot chocolate, the fun of skating through the middle of the city. All of it.

As with that bell, sacrificed because we couldn’t organize ourselves well enough to avoid a terrible war, or stop once it had started, skating on the Canal might go because we can’t stop something we are doing, that we know is bad.

Wes