On “join[ing] her,” striated spaces, and 13th Avenue Safeway

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A photo of the Wascana trails, with lights and shadows forming an eerie pattern.
This looks beautiful, but you might also slip and fall. Allister White

Ruminations on walking at night

In her essay “Why I refuse to be a woman afraid of walking alone at night,” Darby Minow Smith tells us a story: “a girl walks home alone at night and isn’t raped or murdered.” This, Smith says, is “hardly a story,” and she’s completely correct when she says that “it happens every night.”

Smith’s essay interrogates the relationship between fear and walking at night– “how do we make her [the girl] feel safer?” – Smith asks. Smith’s answer is that other women, women who walk, and women who feel fear while walking at night, should “join her.”

Smith isn’t the only person constructing thinking, art, film, or literature about walking without fear. Kyath Battie’s Nocturne chronicles a woman’s walk alone at night in Toronto’s urban forests – heralded by locals as particularly dangerous. Nocturne doesn’t encourage feelings of fear or apprehension, and its protagonist wanders freely. She is curious, in-tune with and sensitive in her observations of the world around her, and perhaps most importantly, walking without fear.

The “stories” that I was told, and that I told myself when beginning to walk alone, at night in the city as a woman, were both unsatisfying and entirely insufficient. Battie, Smith, and others, like Tanis MacDonald, the author of Straggle: Adventures While Walking Female, or Libby Michalski, the founder of Regina’s “She Runs at Night” running and walking group, tell more hopeful stories about walking as a woman. I’ve taken these stories to heart, held them close on all my walks – the long, the short, and especially those I take in the dark.

Advice from local walkers has helped, too. So does seeing the beauty of the city – of the meeting of the natural and the urban – and the small reminders that when we walk, we walk in the footsteps of others, and alongside our more-than-human kin. We never walk alone, and if Smith is right, as women walking, we join each other when we walk at night, when we, like Michalski, demand the space to move through our cities on foot and unafraid.

For me, walking alone is liberating. I am allowed physical space, I’m in a relationship with the earth, the city, other walkers, whose footsteps leave indentations in the snow ahead of me, and more-than-human relations: rabbits, deer, field mice, towering elm trees, and others.

All of this to say, for several months now, I’ve been walking as much as I can, and so far, the only times I’ve felt unsafe walking at night are the times I’ve been on a bus, and then left it. Sure, I’m not walking downtown, or in a particularly busy part of the city, but I feel safe, and that feels like a victory.

To borrow terms from Deleuze and Guattari, while walking, even if through the city, there is an element of smoothing at play. Demarcated pathways, and the grid system that organizes many cities lead to a striation of space. So does a car-centric culture and city infrastructure. Walking, in resisting a car-centric way of being enforced by striation of public spaces, is smoothing – not entirely, not even a lot, but it’s something. That smoothing, I think, contributes to the meditative state brought on by walking.

The safety that goes along with the agency of a walk and the smoothing of striated space that occurs is interrupted when I, for example, walk into Cathedral’s Safeway.

The Safeway on 13th Avenue is one of the oldest grocery stores in the city, and is an institution in the neighborhood. On my walks from the south end back home, the Safeway is a frequent stop. During the day, and with staff, I’ve had consistently positive experiences. I’m easily overwhelmed by loud, flashy stores and large crowds, of which Safeway has neither. They have a large variety of natural and organic food, and they’re close to other favourites of mine, like Butcher Boy Meats, or the Mercury.

Walking in the grocery store, knowing some distance is spread out for me to make a return walk, means there’s an element of relaxation. During the week, though, I rarely make my small, evening shopping trips during daylight hours.

At night, Safeway becomes increasingly, and uncomfortably, striated. Male plainclothes security guards follow me as I shop, and for the first several visits, I worried that I was being followed by these strange men for far worse reasons. It was deeply disturbing, and still is unsettling.

These men are not protecting us, they’re protecting a business that, seemingly, cares more about profit margins than people’s sense of personal safety. My sister walks with me occasionally in the evenings. She doesn’t live in the city, but she deserves to feel safe while walking.

These plainclothes security guards will triangulate around a person, or a pair of people, for no reason it seems, other than to entertain themselves on a slow night. I don’t see how using these tactics to follow someone, for example my sister, who is sixteen years old, for no warranted reason, is anything other than a ridiculous, ugly product of capitalist impulses.

Crombie, a real estate investment trust, acquired the Safeway in 2013. It’s likely, then, that the decision to hire these ‘security’ guards stems from Crombie, not a store manager.

Realistically, I don’t think that it’s unfair to say that Crombie is, at least in part, to blame for the treatment of customers by the 13th Avenue Safeway’s security guards. I also don’t think it’s unfair to say that while there are countless reasons to be uncomfortable with the presence of aggressive plainclothes security guards in an everyday space like a grocery store, the centuries-long process of finding space, and agency, to walk at night makes the atmosphere created by these guards seem especially brutal.

Why is it that I can walk for miles on end and reasonably expect that I will not be followed, but I cannot buy a few cinnamon buns from the grocery’s bakery (which is lovely, by the way) without feeling as if I am being hunted for sport?

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