Thinking About Exposure and Community on the Trails

by Jordan Bryson

May 11, 2020

I live in a city divided. A city who appeals to markets like housing; a great suburbia. A city that suffers a lack of activities; to keep us all occupied. A city marked by an uneasy sense of stagnancy. Growing up here we made our own fun, roaming the streets, meeting at the spot, but as the population grew the “things to do” did not. The city felt like a land of commuters, always on their way out or in, but not within. People in but not of. Being of suggesting no way out. We know this story, strongly sensed in adolescence; loving to hate the place we live. Knowing it could be more of something. Refusing to stay to see that through. Words like community used but not meant. Words like community hoped but not felt. There’s been a gap somewhere, between who lives here and where we go, what we do. 

Now the thing we all do is nothing, here. 

But maybe the community is emerging, there’s a sense. Stopping the community spread begins to reveal who that community is, the individuals dispersed throughout my day-to-day. Locked down within the limits; cars idle, itching to hop on the 401, to be entertained in places where “middle-class housing” is a little smaller, a bit more expensive, a bit less impressive. But what about the faces here I miss? The ones I miss so as not to infect, faces who are not friends or family.  Preoccupied with a community I’ve always held at arm’s length, and that distance’s increase, revealing our selves to each other.

The trail systems are overburdened on the first spring-like day. The trails overlooked by those who always had somewhere else to go, newly discovered. Did they know of the people who used to live there, in the trails? Their mattresses abandoned in daylight; their laundry strung up in trees.  As Covid-19 brought people out into nature, to a trail system that used to hold no appeal, the mattresses and the clothes were removed. The people who lived at the trails displaced for the housed to pass time. For the housed to wait in lines of measured distance to walk the trail. Caution tape on a trail settlement was an early indicator, maybe in late March, that they had been noticed, evicted. There had been an influx of human objects in nature when the news cautioned danger to vulnerable houseless populations sheltered in close proximities.  I walked and felt close with those seeking shelter away from others, before the trails were found by everyone else. I sense a community’s removal as the commuters find their city, but I hope for something more. Weirdly now in a time of isolation it seems we are all being seen. I think some people look and don’t like being where they are. I hope they stay. I hope I stay. I hope we meet each other.

Reading: Donna Haraway. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press. 

(Having read Chapter 6: Sowing Worlds, as my first introduction to Butler’s Parable of the Sower and so revisiting)