Recently, I was out for a walk in my Winnipeg neighborhood and came across a structure, a translucent plexiglass cube, known as the Little Red Library. This had been one of the many architecturally designed warming hut structures that had once graced the surface of the frozen Red and Assiniboine rivers during winters when the sub-zero temperatures were stable enough to allow safe skating and walking. Several years ago, it was repurposed into a free community library, a walk-in structure used for the sharing of magazines and books. I hadn’t checked it out for several months, but the last time I was there I had found an autographed, first-edition copy of Salman Rushdie’s novel Quichotte, which I loved, so thought it would be worth another quick hander.
As it turned out, “quick” was the operative word, alright. Because, let me tell you, there was quite the heady and funky aroma. I guess it didn’t help that the temperature that day was in the high-twenties. The place smelled like some terrible hybrid of a Turkish bath and a Parisian pissoir.
Ah, the complex bouquet of days, weeks, and years of residual public urination. It’s a fragrance that is familiar to anyone who has ever had cause to use the stairwells of multilevel parkades, or cut across urban alleyways, or take shelter from the rain in downtown doorways. This is not, of course, a problem unique to my home city; it’s the sort of thing you find in every populated area.
Part of the reason for this, of course, is that the sorts of places I mentioned above are heavily used by the ever-increasing numbers of urban unhoused. Bus shelters, bank ATM kiosks, bridge underpasses, and the like provide convenient, at times life saving, shelter from the elements.
I do not for a second begrudge the people who are forced to take advantage of these flimsy and degrading refuges. The real shame, belongs to a society that can’t provide the basic necessities for people who don’t have access to resources. A society as wealthy as ours, mind you, in which the most privileged people are obscenely over-pampered and under-taxed, and the disenfranchised and dispossessed have to struggle for every shred of dignity.
I am very lucky. If I’m away from home and need to access the facilities, I can climb in my car and drive to the nearest shopping mall or Starbucks. Many don’t have the luxury. Just try finding a public washroom in Winnipeg! You’d have better luck wandering all over the town in the hopes of coming across an organ grinder’s monkey or a recently-landed u.f.o.
Homelessness, poverty, health care, addictions, climate change, and crime: there are so many problems in society that are devastatingly difficult to deal with. Perhaps impossible to deal with, without dismantling the vicious and wasteful machinery of capitalism as it is currently manifested. Surely though, providing something as simple as clean and safe washrooms for everyone to use (and, beyond that, providing adequate access to affordable housing for those in need) shouldn’t be beyond our capacity to solve.
A place to go, and a place “to go.” Pretty basic, pretty real.
