Saturday this past weekend: I discover the spot all over again. It’s not that hard to find. In fact, it used to be much more difficult. You used to have to stroll on past a big office building, and squeeze yrself through a sketchy fence hole, then rappel down a stone wall just so you could walk through a bunch of thick brush. But now, there’s construction. Two huge sets of tracks carve a path right down, and the only thing to negotiate now is a bunch of loose soil that gets into yr shoes.

We go there once in a while, for no reason in particular. It always feels like a celebration but there’s rarely an “occasion” to speak of. Wait, no. The occasion is life, I suppose, if that doesn’t sound too Hallmark. G brings a bunch of scrap wood, someone always brings musical instruments, and we construct makeshift seating arrangements out of whatever we can find. Tonight, we make a bench out of a long 4×10″ balanced on a car tire. Put an equal weight of people on one side as much as the other, and you’ve got yrself a bench with some bounce, and good support to boot. Some others sit on the bare ground, or use some local plant life for cushioning. A song starts up and the instruments trickle in. Voices bounce off the concrete supporting beams with a sweet reverb that would rival any expensive club. And we’re all the main attraction.

Also, tonight, someone brings a little over a dozen vegan biscuits, infused with dill. So fucking tasty, I have to eat three, which isn’t very generous of me, I know, but it’s been a long night with a lot of biking. Though twenty minutes ago there were only four of us, now were approaching ten, maybe more, and the circle is spreading. Greetings are made without the usual awkwardness reserved for social functions. Hugs are the order of the day. We’re all friends here.

The fire gets bigger to accommodate the swelling group. Someone makes a speech about the recent election and a fresh flag is thrown on the flames. The story goes that the flag was stolen from a police station just outside of Ottawa, one where I myself was harassed by cops for hitchhiking. I laugh at the symbolism, and the gutter poignancy. We are good people, trying to do right by our words and our actions. The polyester bubbles and melts, and we laugh at ourselves for not predicting it: In a way, the flag is “burn-proof.”

I leave close to 3am, with a smile on my face. I know you might say that it’s easy to romanticize, but there are so few romantic moments like this left in the city, it seems. If I can’t romanticize this, what’s left? As I walk away, back up the bulldozer ramp and back into the world of taxes, political simulacra and joyless jobs, I wonder if that’s really the real world. Maybe the real world is under that bridge, singing and hugging and sharing whatever we have, while the imagined world is the crust over it all, the world of paperwork and e-mail and racing through the game of life.

Or maybe I’m just romanticizing. But when I get home on my bike, my hoodie still smells like campfire. And that’s real.