The Last Bastion of Civilization
"And so we passed through Lindsay, the last bastion of civilization before the wild north of cottage country, if you could even call Lindsay a bastion of civilization" (Road Trip, Alex Luyckx). I shall forgive Alex his ignorance, for he has never had to set foot in this abysmally derelict "town", but the task has now fallen to me to correct the incorrect assumptions that this innocently appearing sentence has made. Indeed, I commend him for his courage, since even in the mentioning of Lindsay one runs the risk of being pulled down with it, down into the depths of oblivion, from which one can never return!
Kent Street�s Claim to Fame
Everyone seems to have some interesting fact about their hometown. For example, St. Catharines has the most Tim Horton�s donut shops per capita in all of Canada, and hence in the entire world. The city of Guelph is classified as a no-pee zone, and Peterborough has the highest single lift lock on the planet. Lindsay, however, has a slightly more unique claim to fame. This petite metropolis has one of the widest main streets in the country.
However, unlike most people, the citizens of Lindsay have nothing to be proud of when it comes to this bit of trivia. Indeed, anyone who hails from this town and boasts of the wideness of Kent Street is simply revealing their ignorance as to its history. Though the annals of Purdy�s Mill were long ago destroyed in a tragic fire, a long-lost manuscript found in the attic of one Robbie Makinson, 19, has finally solved the mystery of why such a small town as Lindsay has its primary road wider than the average highway.
In 1892, the road planner for the district, Hans Moronitzer, a native of Ottawa, set about the arduous task of planning the extremely uniform streets of a quaint little town then known as Purdy�s Mill. An extremely well-schooled man, Hans had a theory that splitting the main street in two at the western, commercial-intensive end would allow for more expansion in the areas of banking and trade. As a result, Kent Street was created extremely wide, so that a small, elongated city block could be placed in the midst of it. In this way, the road itself would be split not only into west and east, but north and south as well.
However, Hans was not local, and he knew not the Curse of Anti-Expansion.
For a while, things seemed to be going well; his own office was set right in the middle of the radically placed city block, and he was confident that applications for relocation would come pouring in very soon. But then a month passed, and a year, and once a decade was over, and Hans was growing rather wrinkly, he understood why things were not working: it was different. Most of the population of Lindsay had moved there for a stagnant place to live out the rest of their years in misery, but this boulevard on the main street stuck out like a sore thumb. Though entrepreneurs may not have minded locating their businesses there, they in their wisdom saw that it would be a foolish move, since all but the most rebellious avoided the "Kent plague," as it came to be known, at all costs.
Being absorbed into the culture of the unchanging that Lindsay so proudly wore had affected Hans deeply, though in this case it simply allowed for him to defy his friends and colleagues and be a stubborn old man. When he finally passed on, in a freak accident involving a disfigured carp, a piece of the as yet unformed Berlin Wall and shrapnel gone awry from the Battle of the Somme, his son had the sense to sell the land for a hefty price. The townspeople hailed him a hero, for he demolished his father�s life�s work, burned his theories, and settled down to a quiet life in the newly-named town of Lindsay, which, incidentally, was his name. This was the last change to come to the area.
The townspeople decided not to reduce the size of Kent Street, for, of course, that would be changing something. And they just couldn�t stand for that!
Of Nancy Sweetnam
For a town of less than twenty thousand, and with a history about as varied, interesting and indeed existent as a polar bear�s stripes, Lindsay has produced a surprising number of well-known individuals: one of them is Nancy Sweetnam. The medal-winning swimmer is the standard that all Olympic hopefuls from the Lindsay Lightningbolts competitive swimming team are compared to. However, this fact, when properly investigated, begs several questions: why did Nancy�s parents, seeing her aptitude for the sport, not relocate to a place more able to accommodate their daughter�s needs? Was there a miracle involved? How did the child manage to become so skilled in a place without the proper facilities?
It turns out that just as these questions seem to follow each other quite logically, so do their answers.
Unfortunately, the Sweetnam family did not do their research properly before locating to the innocently appearing town of Lindsay. Research papers, dropped by the U.S.S. Vigilance at Glen Mhor Presbyterian Camp, Canada, during a brief stay there, have uncovered some distressing facts:
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"All habitation centres contain observable trends, that may be studied over a long period of time. These trends have been classified into several categories, each likened to a spacial anomaly." Here follows a long list, which seems to associate every single hamlet, town, city, or metropolis that existed at the time of the survey mission. Some noteworthy entries:
The Cluster Phenomenon � New York, London, Paris
This can be observed in some of the largest, most concentrated populations on Earth. The large amount of people makes for many advances in culture and technology, and hence growth increases exponentially. As the population continues to grow, so do the advances. Eventually no more people can fit in the burgeoning area, and so growth continues in an outward direction, much like the slowly decreasing densities seen in galaxy clusters.
The Wormhole Paradox � Toronto, Istanbul, Khyber
Usually observed at what is termed as "the crossroads of the world," multiculturalism abounds in all examples of this effect. Much like a wormhole, where cultures thousands of light-years away can interact much as if they were adjacent to each other, these centres of enlightenment allow for the exchange of different ways of life. Called a paradox because of Toronto, which, though multicultural, is about as far as humanly possible from any "crossroads."
The Black Hole Effect � Lindsay
Observable only in the remote yet seemingly harmless town of Lindsay, Canada, the Black Hole Effect is the most dangerous and potentially fatal trend in the cosmos. Once an individual passes within the critical radius, they may never be able to leave. The laws of physics are also different there, so that a temporal shift exists; time passes much more slowly inside Lindsay than in the rest of the universe. The stresses upon the average human cranium are such that to even attempt to leave would be lethal. Other details are, however, sketchy; no one else wants to get within forty thousand parsecs of this ghastly rift in time, and no one who has is in any condition to report back.
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The Sweetnam family unwittingly surrendered themselves to this frightening and all-consuming fate, and condemned their daughter to nearly two decades of sub-standard facilities to improve her skills in swimming. They cannot, of course, be blamed for those years, for their many valiant attempts to escape the web that is Lindsay only made things more difficult.
How, then, did young Nancy manage to win all those Olympic medals? Was there some kind of divine intervention? There must have been, for it is physically impossible to leave the Black Hole, and no committee in the world would be moronic enough to host an Olympic Games within three hundred miles of it, though in recent years their intelligence has been questionable.1 The answer to this question is, however, not quite as angelic as some people might be led to believe.
In fact, Nancy only escaped because she cheated the system. Just as Hans learned a century before, she understood that the only thing that the citizens of Lindsay truly abhorred was change, and they would do all in their power to rid themselves of it. With that in mind, her energies were directed towards improvement in swimming, and thereby changing herself. With her skills becoming more and more well known, it was only a matter of time before town council saw it as a threat to local security. After all, change was like the plague: destroy it at the source, and it will not spread and cause disorder. Once things had gotten out of hand, they exiled Nancy, sent her to a renowned coach, and etched her name forever at the Recreation Complex as a warning to any who would seek to follow in her footsteps.
The question, though, remains � how on earth did she manage to become so skilled? With such horribly inadequate facilities in her hometown, surely a limit would be reached, and her full potential could only be realised in a larger swimming complex. Even hours upon hours of training every day in a clearly inferior pool could not prepare her for the Olympics in the way that centres in large cities could.
Or, at least, that is the way non-locals would logically assume things. The majority of the planet�s inhabitants assume that the threshold of normal human tolerance to one continual activity is approximately eight to twelve hours. Unfortunately, in Lindsay, there are so few outlets for the individual to while away their time that, for the sheer lack of other things to do, and for stagnancy�s sake, the same pastime is continually practiced for superhuman lengths of time. Nancy, then, in her childhood years, had the equivalent of approximately sixty-four years of training, which more than made up for her seriously lacking facilities. Thus, when she miraculously came back out of the Black Hole, it took almost no training at all to put her on par with the best swimmers in the world, and the Olympics were hers.
Apologies to Nancy, for this disturbingly revealing look at her past � it may come as a shock to many that her talents were in no way unique, but simply honed past normal human disciplinary limits. We may still praise her, however, for her daring and patience, for no one else has ever escaped this dangerous phenomenon, and she shall be remembered eternally for it.
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