Welcome to Babel. This town is an adventure that lurks in waiting for the unwary. You think it is a sleepy little rural way station on the way to Muskoka. You are wrong. It is a bustling place where happenings happen and nothing ever gets finished.
From the vantage point of our aerie, 15 stories above all, we see it all. From the condom-wrapped historic Allandale train station to the scurrying streams of cars and trucks on the provincial highway, we are witnesses to Babel.
For the past seven years we have been in the midst of the action. Next door at the Water Pollution Control Centre, they spent years driving piles into the marshy soil to hold the settling tanks for our night soil. In front, down the Lakeshore, they buried the mother of all sanitary sewers—as though for a re-enactment of the Phantom of the Opera.
Not content to gift wrap the old Allandale station—which they have absolutely no idea what to do with—they are building a new GO Train station on the other side of the property. As it is on the other side of the property, the new station seems to require a tunnel to get you to and from where you have been or where you are going. Why they cannot convert the old train station into a new train station is not considered a fair question by Babel politicians.
In all this construction over the years, there has been something of a bottleneck in logistics. The constipated thinking of the planners has often left the town with very few routes between the north and south and anywhere else. Thank goodness for the provincial highway. As congested as it might be, it is a reliable connection for the town.
The main street of Babel, Dunlop Street, has been undergoing construction and destruction for years. Babel is the only town in Ontario where the hookers have to wear hard hats to ply their trade.
Nobody seems to care about the retail businesses trying to make a living in Babel. Our barber has a small shop near the new GO Train station. For the past month, her customers have had to climb mountains of earth and risk life and limb to get a haircut.
Babel is still building the Taj Mahal of community theatres in the main intersection of town. It will replace the auditorium at Central High that Simcoe County School Board is so intent on closing down. (Nobody has ever explained why Babel is not considered competent to have its own school board to make these decisions.)
If there were one thing that is really bugging us currently, it is the lackadaisical attitude of the town and its contractors who left a deep ditch between the Lakeshore and the Water Pollution Control Centre property. The water in that ditch is stagnant and produces some of the biggest mosquitoes we have seen in a long time
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