The Jungle Tamed

I believe I may have made reference in the past to the sidewalk which runs in front of my apartment building and on down the side street on which I live. Dependable sidewalks are not to be taken for granted here. Many streets in this city do not have any sidewalk to speak of, and on those that do, there are many points at which they are nearly impassable for one reason or another. The block on which my building lies has a good sidewalk on both sides, but one side on one end is rather treacherous at times.

It will not take any great stretch of your imagination to accept that the city is slow to carry out maintenance on things which would seem to be within its purview, sidewalks being among the most neglected. Forget about keeping the concrete of which they are made intact- it's more than they can manage to trim back the overgrowth on anything like a consistent basis. That's what makes this little area so interesting.

Should I want to go out to the grocery store, I start out along the sidewalk, and as often as not come to a section more thick with vegetation than anything Stanley had to brave in pursuit of Livingstone. It's a cascading effect. It starts to get overgrown, and then people cease to respect it. Then they feel license to dump their trash there, extending as far as objects the size of mattresses. That is when it begins to get genuinely scary.

The city does get to it, although their policy of addressing such flora is along the same lines as the punctuality of their buses, which is to say that action can be relied on to commence just after it's too late to be of any real service. Now, I rail against their ineptitude, but I find that there is often a silver lining in incompetence. I appreciate the lack of security on inter-city buses, making travel easier as it does, and I likewise kind of enjoy the wild natural quality that poorly-kept sidewalks bring to our street. If I were still a boy I'd be playing and enacting fantasies there in the brush all the time.