Trash Talk

After nearly an hour on the subway and RT, I get off to await my ride. I'm in Scarborough on the day after Canada Day, and I'm a little out of my element. I never come out this far. I rarely even leave downtown, and here I am in a world made for giants. It's McCowan station, it was my first adventure on RT, which wasn't a big deal, except for the question "do people really live out here?" The answer, it seems, is yes. People with cars live out here, because it would be near-on-impossible to live here otherwise. Here there is nothing in walking distance. A small but pointed example. I have just finished some water. A bottle I purchased, because I forgot to bring my Nalgene (sidenote: did you know that the clear ones actually leech chemicals into your liquid? neither did I until recently). I am standing outside of the station and walk back inside. There is no recycling or garbage receptacle immediately inside. There had been one on the RT platform, but not one here. I go back outside and locate a lone garbage can across six lanes of traffic, possible more, if you count the turning lanes. Make that 8 lanes of traffic. Here's the problem, if 8 lanes isn't already a daunting task, the fact that there are signs prohibiting crossing from this corner to the opposite. Rather, in order to comply with the law, you must cross with the lights (changing with pedestrian-unfriendly-infrequency) all the way around the intersection in a clockwise direction. As an experiment, since I had some time to kill before my ride arrived, I decided to test it out. In all, it took approximately 10 minutes to legally get to the other side of the road in order to toss something. I know what you may be thinking, should you be thinking anything about this at all. And no, I didn't actually throw the bottle out. I put it in my bag, and waited til I got home in order to recycle it. But really, 10 minutes to dispose of an empty bottle? It's surprising there wasn't more trash on the side of the road.