Hell, With Donuts

In the midst of some aimless Facebook banter once upon a time, I remarked upon my delight at discovering on Edmonton’s streets some bizarre, extremist Christian pamphlet—a sort of pet fascination of mine. (I take perverse pleasure in the sincere expression of hateful delusions, particularly those that come with titles like, “Sliding to Hell on a Church Pew” or involve impassioned, carefully argued explanations as to how and why the Pope is Satan’s bootlicking honeywhore.)

A couple of friends living in Regina chimed in to express their sorrow at never finding such literature in their own town. This led me to the obvious quip, “Regina: The most godforsaken place on Earth.”

I was being unfair, of course. Regina jokes are akin to making fun of Winnipeg for being windy or Calgary for being redneck or Toronto being the steaming asshole of Canada. Too easy, too obvious. Even worse—I had never been there before in my life.

But now I have experienced Regina firsthand and I can say with all honesty and personal, hard-earned experiential knowledge that it is truly an absolute shithole of a city, a pimple upon the backside of the prairies, waiting to be popped. “Godforsaken” feels too generous a term, as it implies God must have cared about this place at some point in order to forsake it. More likely, Regina flies under the radar of any wrathful deity, who would surely raze it out of sheer malicious boredom if it were ever worthy of attention.

Again, perhaps I am being unfair. My sojourn in Regina lasted no more than a couple of hours, while I waited for my ride to finish up some family business so that we could begin our lengthy trek back to Edmonton. For an entire hour, I simply walked around the city, trying to get a sense for its unique character. Admittedly, this is not a long time to get to know an entire city, but I was still troubled by the experience. An hour walking in Regina on a Sunday afternoon in summer is not like an hour in any other city. Time was seemingly suspended, and yet at the end of the hour I felt so much older. Everything is dusty and corroded in Regina—the streetlights, the bus stops, the buildings, and finally, tragically, my own soul.

The streets of Regina are so desolate that any human presence feels alien and threatening. I walked an hour through a commercial district and only saw a handful of other human beings, mostly clustered around an ice cream stand, which felt like a half-sunken raft of humanity. Some people were just sitting in their cars, which somehow seemed preferable to being out on the sidewalk, where carries the risk of actual human contact.

When one man did approach me, I recoiled somewhat and tried to keep walking, intimidated by this sudden and unexpected flash of social behaviour. I thought he was going to rob me. But instead he asked if I was in a hurry, because he needed help finding an address, and I realized that a mere hour in Regina is enough to harden any soul. Chagrinned at my uncharacteristic rudeness (seriously, I always try to give people directions, even when I don’t know how to guide them to their destination, which as I think about it now is perhaps not all that nice after all), I admitted to being another out-of-towner like himself, and he laughed knowingly at this, perhaps assuming that like him I was trapped in this blighted fortress of rust and plastic.

At times, I convinced myself that the city was populated not by human beings, but rather sentient cars, as this was the only real sign of movement and life I would encounter for ominous stretches of ten or fifteen minutes. These living metal beasts prowl along, rarely ever stopping, thus giving the impression that this place is not a destination but simply a point between somewhere and somewhere else. However, rarely, one of these creatures would come to a rest in order to excrete a mass of skin and bone into one of the dusty brown-grey boxes that line the sides of the road with some regularity.

I know there are people living somewhere in Regina. I have heard the rumours. My friends are surely trapped somewhere in its confines, although I understand some of them even like it (Stockholm syndrome?). However, others do not; one, a graduate student, left after spending two years in the city doing nothing but reading and working out, which, as my friend Nick likes to observe, makes Regina sound an awful lot like prison.

Except that even prison is a more welcoming place than Regina. The city is hostile to human presence. Where is the space for community, for simple, physical existence? This is surely not just Regina’s problem, but it is the problem of all cities, magnified through Regina’s smallness and poverty. Even in Edmonton I have walked through areas where it felt as if the city were physically opposed to my existence, as if it were trying pull the sidewalk out from under me and hurl me into traffic (but all careless-like, see, like it were an accident, if you get my drift). No modern city is immune from this sociopathic attitude towards its own citizens. Wide sidewalks and a few trees—is it too much to ask?

I spent the rest of my afternoon waiting for my ride in a Robin’s Donuts (my strawberry Bismarck was delightful, thank you very much), unable to avoid the dread that this soul-crushing town had injected into me, like so much fruity filling (it really was a good donut, I must confess). It’s not that Regina is a lonely place, though it certainly is. It’s not that Regina is an ugly town, though it’s undoubtedly so. No, the problem is that Regina is a city like any other—it’s just too run-down and minor league to hide the essential loneliness and ugliness that plagues most cities.

So I left with some relief, one donut heavier and at least two years older, aged deeply by the humidity and the wind and that crazy existential heaviness that comes from walking down streets that can’t be bothered to put in a sidewalk. And it occurred to me that for all its flaws, Edmonton does have one advantage over poor Regina. Those demented pamphlets, desperate screeds from passionate weirdos, may be laughable, may be pathetic, but they’re tokens of human presence that remind me I’m never quite alone in the city, no matter how lonely and ugly it appears on the surface. Somewhere, some nut wants to tell me about something, and I find that weirdly comforting. So what if god has forsaken Regina? My real fear is that humanity has as well.