Just our type

Local readers will know the Iron Horse Trail as the former rail line that runs like a black ribbon through the core neighbourhoods of Kitchener and Waterloo. For those of you from away, I'll say this: The trail is an urban gift whose value has grown in tandem with the number of people choosing to leave the car at home and find other ways to get around.

To coincide with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences taking place in the area this week, some creative, community-minded people decided to set aside this afternoon for Animate the Trail, to give us all a chance to celebrate the Iron Horse, enjoy music and local crafts, and make some new friends. The event was refreshingly short on bureaucracy and long on spontaneous creativity, a kind of pot-luck of community involvement.

My beloved and I decided to get in the spirit by putting an old typewriter (they're all old by now, aren't they?) on a table and inviting people to bang out a few lines of whatever was on their minds. We had no idea how or even if anyone would be interested, but before long, they were stopping to have a go at our 1950s-era Smith-Corona Sterling (just like this one but dark grey).

Our old Smith-Corona clearly needs a new ribbon, but our guests gave it a good go.

It was fascinating to watch people of various ages react to the machine. Kids were all over it, of course, though it was clearly counter-intuitive to them that they should have to be so forceful on the keys, given how easy it is to type on a computer. Older folks looked on with knowing eyes, and not always through a mist of nostalgia; typing meant endless days of drudgery for many, particularly women, back in the day. Those in the middle of their lives seemed to marvel at how quickly the typewriters were made extinct, and recalled high-school keyboarding classes that gave way to university computer courses.

Between visitors to our trailside table, I turned to my BlackBerry 9900, with its familiar QWERTY keyboard, to capture these few close-ups of the old Sterling. We hope to bring the typewriter back into the light again soon, at Waterloo's upcoming series of Open Streets events. Hope to see you there.