Tag: Thunder Bay

Categories
City Life

Doors Open or Closed?

Gritty door with a sign on it that says: Stan's Pizza
Side door to pizzeria, Cumberland St N and Tupper St, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In my marriage, there are certain areas of domestic life that are subject to battles of the will.

For example, there is the question of cleaning the toilet. My wife insists that because I cause the greater mess, it’s my responsibility to clean it. I have suggested that we should take a more global approach to domestic cleaning. By way of illustration, I point out that I routinely wash the floor even though my wife does half the walking on it.

As an experiment, I’ve tried to measure my wife’s stubbornness as expressed in days without cleaning the toilet. Ordinarily, she is fastidious about these things (she absolutely refuses to use portable toilets and outhouses), but it turns out she’s not as fastidious as she is stubborn. We could go for decades without cleaning our toilet because she insists absolutely that it’s my job. It’s a matter of principle.

We have a similar battle of wills when it comes to our bedroom door. When I’m in the bedroom, the door must be shut. My wife doesn’t care.

My insistence on a shut door has nothing to do with fear or anxiety. I don’t worry that urban ninjas are going to break into our house and storm the keep. It’s more a symbolic matter. I need a sense of enclosure. Completeness. An open door is ambiguous. It allows for a leakage into the wider world.

Intellectually, I enjoy ambiguity. I love to read stories that leave me hanging in indeterminate positions. I love arguments that see-saw on a fulcrum. But as an emotional matter, I can’t abide an open door.

My wife is the opposite. If she watches a movie, she likes it when all the story lines come to clean resolutions. Art house films drive her bonkers. But as an emotional matter, she’s comfortable with open doors and the leakages they imply.

I’ve noticed lately that if I let the toilet go for a few weeks, I wake up in the morning and find that the bedroom door has been left wide open all night. And so the battle rages.

Categories
Architecture

Buildings that were but are no more

Night shot of a low building illuminated by a single street light.
Algoma Street South at Night - Thunder Bay

When I began sifting through my photo archive for images related to this month’s theme (what was but is no more), I was astonished at the number of buildings I have photographed that have later met with accelerant and a lit match. See my previous post on Notre Dame de Paris. I swear I had nothing to do with it. Today’s featured photo is a night shot of a building on Algoma Street South in Thunder Bay, ON. I shot this in May, 2016 and a few months later it was gone.

There have been a rash of fires in the vicinity. Two years ago, a building on Bay Street went up in flames. Before that, it was the Hells Angels clubhouse. And in December, the town lost the historic Finnish Labour Temple and, with it, the Hoito restaurant, located just around the corner from my lonely building featured here. There isn’t any evidence to suggest that these fires are connected. But when there are so many fires in close proximity, one does wonder.

As far as I’m aware, none of these fires resulted in injury or loss of life. Even so, each of them has been an occasion for grief, especially in the case of the Finnish Labour Temple, which had been a community hub for more than a century. There is something shocking about fire, something irrevocable. We do our best to clean up the site, but traces remain for years. We smell it in the soot. We see it in charred bits of wood.

Whenever I drive up to Thunder Bay, I see evidence of fire all along my route. In the town of Heyden, just north of the Sault, there’s Pruce’s Motor Inn lying in ruins, ironic given that the local fire station is just next door. And 20 km west of Nipigon was a gas station, abandoned for years, then torched to the ground. Further along, in Dorian, another motel was abandoned then torched, or torched then abandoned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which came first.

For a lot of sites in Northern Ontario, it’s typical simply to walk way. Let nature deal with the charred remnants. Snow melt and rain turn it into a black slurry. Seedlings hatch there. Moss and lichen creep over the exposed surfaces. In time—natural time, not human time—the burnt out buildings vanish beneath a layer of living matter, joining a larger cycle of decay and rebirth.

The Finnish Labour Temple and Hoito Restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario
The Hoito, Thunder Bay, Ontario (2015)
Categories
Country Life

Snow-covered railway tracks in Thunder Bay

Rail marshalling yard, Hardisty Street, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In Thunder Bay, the railway tracks come up alongside Hardisty Street North which is where I was standing when I made this shot. I was struck by the high contrast of white ground, dark rails running to the horizon, and dark utility pole set off against a gloomy sky. When I was done making the shot, I collapsed my tripod, strapped it to my pack, and walked over to Simpson Street. I was heading down to the Fort William side of town.

Because of the light, I made a lot of good photos that morning. Perhaps the most memorable photo was nothing special, at least not from a photographic point of view. I saw what I took to be a small derelict theatre and, without looking too closely, assumed that somebody had bought the building and converted it into a retail space. It wasn’t until after I made my shot that I noticed it was the local Hells Angels club house. I quickened my pace and hoped nobody had been watching me. I worried that if they saw my camera, they might think I was from a law enforcement agency. I’d vanish and people would later find my body in a boxcar off Hardisty Street.

As happens to so many buildings in Thunder Bay, somebody torched the Hells Angels club house almost exactly two years after I made this shot. The CBC article says the cause of the fire was unknown, but come on. This is the Hells Angels we’re talking about.

When I heard about the fire, my lawyer brain immediately wondered if the Hells Angels had insured the place. Given their efforts in recent years to carry on legitimate business enterprises, I don’t see why not. Even so, I tried to imagine the first time an insurance broker met with a Hells Angels rep to discuss insuring their place of business. How would an actuary even begin to go about evaluating potential risk?

Finally, I note that the street address is a fractional number, like the platform where aspiring wizards catch the train to Hogwarts. It seems that fractional numbers lead us into magical realms where we can alter our reality by eating gillyweed or shooting heroin.

Hells Angels Club House, Thunder Bay, ON
636 1/2 Simpson Street, Thunder Bay, ON