A Walk into the Apocalypse of the Past (and other hyperboles)

North East of my sister’s house in London there’s a marshland of frogs, beer cans and lily pads that constitutes the best semblance of nature within easy walking distance. Return trips to my teenage skulking grounds usually feel like a step into a netherworld of lost time. I often spend time thinking about the Jonathon Lethem book in which its protagonist is a Lack. Similar to this object ingesting, miniature black hole-like entity, London is a city which takes in people’s lives, leaving them only a negative space by which to judge themselves.

What possible worth can be found in those barren teenage years in the city’s west end? With the exception of learning to run, London, in many ways was where I finalized the worst, most insulated version of myself. The raw material of insulation, found in the Kootenays, was crafted here into the type of working machine that no one should choose to operate. Perhaps it’s no surprise that during my brief trip to what is affectionately known as The Forest City, the most joy found was in a solitary walk along train tracks and past power lines reclaimed by the marsh.











Possessing a faint echo of the tracks that traced the valley wall, south of Montrose, The CN tracks intersecting the South East part of London grant instantaneous entry into a world of one’s own. Tempered by similarly niggling concerns for hurtling locomotives and gangs of skids there is actually little other connection between the two rail lines. It was, however, on the rails where my own company was all that felt worthwhile.

The tracks appear through a clearing after winding, mosquito laden single-track reaches an incline. Down-slope the trail opens onto a middle-aged European man with a limp and a makeshift cane eying me with some amount of suspicion. Breaks are taken to examine the rocks and flora around the creosote timbers so as to assuage his fears that I’m about to roll him for his walking stick.

There is little point in arguing with the post-apocalypse genre, especially if you find the world difficult to come to terms with. If you believe something, somewhere has gotten incorrectly shuffled, much hope comes from the purging fires of judgment. The sense of the world having left you behind, having left completely, comes quickly on a set of tracks, no matter the surrounding terrain.

Such a sunny day, such a lovely breeze and, by god, those lily pads are radiant as they cluster around the half submerged phone lines.

Apocalypses’ aren’t supposed to be pretty (with the exception of some of the panoramas of The Quiet Earth) but for reasons known only to the gods of terror and equalization, London shows improvement on an expanding scale along the oil soaked timbers of a rail bed.

And so I walk. After stopping to photograph a bird’s nest solemnly disintegrating in the gravel a pond soon comes into view on the left side of the tracks. It mirrors the right; the beauty of this swamp becomes a reflection of itself – the reflection I’ve been seeking in the city that offered me nothing except my own lameness. More submerged poles peek at each other over the high ground of the tracks, the lily pads can’t see each other but know they are not alone as the frogs call out to each other in a conspiratorial dialogue. The sun shines down.