Keep your social distance: Hamilton pedestrians face off in game of sidewalk chicken

One thing I don't miss about life before COVID-19 is what I call sidewalk chicken. You know, when you're walking along the sidewalk and someone's coming the other way and you're thinking, Hey, is this joker trying to crowd me out? Do they even see me?"

Then this battle ensues. All unspoken but it's like, in your head, Oh, I'm not moving, clown. You move."

Sidewalk chicken. There you are of a quiet evening - four hips passing in the night - on a narrow strip of pavement, gingerly, stubbornly scrunching and inching around each other like football players threading the sidelines trying to stay inbounds. The two of you, unwilling to colour outside the lines, even though there's a big patch of unused car pasture on one side and a lawn full of grass on the other.

Why should you back down?

I'll tell you why. Because, human beings. We are deranged. Unhinged powder kegs. Not all of us, but you just don't know which ones. We shoot store clerks for asking us to wear a mask. We're an animal that, for all its brain power and aptitude for institutionalizing behaviour, has had to use those gifts to set up international tribunals to try ourselves for war atrocities, atrocities, you know, because the wars aren't bad enough. Those tribunals, far from sitting idle waiting for the rare monster who qualifies for their judgment, will never get to all the cases before it.

So, there's your reason why." We're dangerous to the core. Back down.

I know it's just a sidewalk but it's also a microcosm. Best to imagine that everyone who approaches you on the curb is a walking fury of manic disorders not only armed with assault rifles, machetes and all manner of nerve agents in the tip of their umbrella, but also, on top of that, having a bad day.

I would always give wide berth. I would do an exaggerated bullfighter's veronica, go onto the road, go into the next area if I had to.

Since COVID-19, I don't have to. What was a potential blood sport of territorial imperatives has turned into a beautiful dance.

I call it the sidewalk waltz. Everyone is only too happy now to take a broad swerve rather than, as they used to say, catch one's death." I reassure people, stepping away from them as from a bad smell, Nothing personal."

I worry, now that lockdown seems to be loosening, the dance will turn back into West Side(walk) Story, all Jets and Sharks, writ small, with no Officer Krupke.

We had reached a point in this city recently where our civic leaders were asked to consider blocking off lanes of streets, repurposed for pedestrian traffic, as the sidewalks themselves are too narrow for proper social distancing and the streets too wide for the much-reduced car traffic.

That's not likely to happen now, with reopening" (what a word). But it should. Cars should not have more rights than we do.

I was out on York Boulevard for a long walk. That is what sidewalks should be. Broad, spacious, with scope for tipping your hat to your sidewalk sharer rather than scowling.

On the weekend, on a much narrower sidewalk, I passed my neighbour (he probably didn't even have a switchblade). We bowed to each other, with sweeping arm movements as if to say, as much room as you need, good sir," all courtly, like we were going to dance a quadrille at the annual cotillion, but six feet apart.

City sidewalks, pretty sidewalks, dressed in pandemic style ...

Be safe out there.

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jmahoney@thespec.com