La blanche cérémonie

If you drive to campus, and especially if you enter your vehicle inside your attached garage and then leave it in the shelter of a parkade, you may not have been fully exposed to the wild extremes of weather that the rest of us have suffered in the last few weeks, from the coldest day in some eight years to the warmest January 30^th ever recorded.  One moment it is so cold that exposed flesh will freeze within minutes, and a few days later the puddles of melted snow are ankle deep or worse.  It is completely and utterly mad, in the British meaning of that word.  But what troubles me most is the ice, which makes walking a nightmare.

I have had the misfortune to fall and break bones three times in my life, all of them by slipping on ice: in Toronto, in Victoria, and most recently in Kingston.  Not fun!  And I really don’t wish to add Ottawa to that list.  Being a life-long non-driver, in good weather I usually walk to work in the morning; but lately I have been taking the bus both ways every day.  It is simply much too dangerous not to do so.  And in that process I have come to develop two major peeves.

The first is the main campus bus stop, where you can find me most nights waiting for the 6:51 departure of the #7.  It is a dark, cold and often desolate spot, the one tiny bus shelter usually too crowded to enter, and completely bereft of the heating bars that one finds at many of the Transitway stops.  I can perhaps accept  that lack of concern for those waiting, many of them students who are insufficiently dressed for this weather; but what I can’t fathom is why the OC Transpo bus drivers sit there until the very last minute, their doors tightly closed.  Would it really hurt to let us get on as we arrive, and wait for the departure inside the vehicle, where it is comparatively toasty even without the engine running, rather than outside in the bone-numbing minus-40 degree wind chill?  Just asking!

And the second is the trek between the bus stop and the nearest principal entrance to the main complex of university buildings, namely the door to the University Centre by the Bookstore.  I am willing to wager that if you mounted a time-lapse camera somewhere over Carleton, that stretch of perhaps two hundred metres would emerge as the most heavily travelled outdoor pedestrian path on campus, used by thousands each and every day.  Except for one thing: there is no path!  Most universities locate their principal bus stops immediately adjacent to building entrances, or at least have pedestrian walkways from the stop to a doorway.  But not Carleton!  Our pedestrians have to navigate diagonally across a large parking lot, and one whose surface frequently masquerades as a skating rink.  I can only imagine that those who have designed our campus layout have never journeyed to Carleton by public transit … or at least not in the winter!

But full marks to whichever bright spark, back in the early 1960s when Carleton moved from the Glebe to its present site, came up with the truly amazing idea of connecting all the buildings by underground tunnels.  There is not a day in the past month that I have not thanked that anonymous person from the very bottom of my heart.  Once safely inside the University Centre, I don’t need to venture outdoors again, risking life and limb, for at least another 10-12 hours.  Absolutely brilliant!