Petro-Canada: 3100 Ellesmere Road // Ryanne Kap

Ryanne Kap talks about the place of the Scarborough Petro-Canada as part of our guest edited month examining Urban Ephemera.

When you come to Scarborough, you’ll find it has other names. People call it a slum, Scarberia, Toronto’s scummy younger sibling. It doesn’t matter much; you aren’t in Scarborough proper anyway. You’re living in a townhouse in UTSC’s north residence, a Russian doll of mediocre housing. But at night, when the school suburbs feel too much like home, you come here.You bring your roommates, who are from towns as small as yours. You’re not quite sure how you fit in with them yet, but on your first day together, you journeyed to Wal-Mart and back and now you’re bonded for life. Plus, you’re all terrible at getting enough sleep, and there’s nothing on campus that stays up as late as you do.So on weeknights past 1 a.m., high off of half-drunk karaoke, you leave residence behind, taking a wooded trail that spits you out on the sidewalk. It’s not such a long walk, only a few minutes at most, but when you’re half-drunk it might as well be a Greek epic getting down to the intersection of Morningside and Ellesmere.Your trophy is the Petro-Canada, gleaming red and white, where the slushie machines are heaven and you can make your own milkshakes. It’s a real step up from what you had back home, where the only flavours were lime and cherry and sometimes, disconcertingly, banana. You burst through the doors laughing, talking too loudly, thinking the world is something you anchor. The cashiers barely acknowledge you, but that feels like a type of friendliness, too. On the way back, you drag your feet up the hill, not so much a hill as a slight incline, staring fish-eyed at the buses that pass you by. All the lights are behind you, pretty and urban and so much more exciting than endless cow pastures.On nights when you come home alone, when the university-bound bus has stopped running, you spend your change on Kit-Kats and Kinder Eggs. You’re an adult now, and you’ll waste as much money as you want on overpriced junk food. You’re self-conscious of it, this loud and exhausting need to prove your independence, but no one here will remember you anyway.That’s the whole point of a gas station. Here, better than anywhere, you slip out of memory. It’s a place you’re only meant to pass through, a place that operates with its own strange, separate logic. In the aisles, tins of cat food sit next to Armour All Rim Cleaner, next to a 24-pack of birthday candles. In the back, for some indiscernible but amazing reason, there’s a tiny A&W that blesses you with the smell of grease.It’s the kind of place that only feels half-real, somewhere you could meet the prime minister and not think much of it. If there was a zombie apocalypse—a situation you think about far too often—you could imagine hiding out in here, rationing the “fresh” sandwiches and salads in the Ready to Go section. Plus, it’s fairly clean for a gas station. You wouldn’t even have to be that desperate to use the washroom. Roaming the aisles makes you feel like a kid again, awed by the selections of Push-Pops and Hubba Bubba. It reminds you that you’re still a kid now, trying so laughably hard not to be. But this is the kind of place that makes you feel like you could be any type of person, especially on these late nights when the world is only half-awake.And when you visit years later, it feels just the same. But it’s not a curse, this stasis. By now you’ve realized that everything changes. It’s good to find something that won’t.Before you leave Scarborough for the summer, you walk through north residence for maximum nostalgia. The townhouses seem even smaller, now that you aren’t in them. You find that path again, not so much wooded as thinly lined with dying trees, and follow it to the sidewalk, sloping down to that great crossroads. In an ideal world it’s night again, not four o’clock in the afternoon, but you can imagine the dark on your own.You cross the threshold of the Petro-Canada, home of the drunk and desperate, land of bored teenagers and tired truckers. Here, you can be anyone. You can be eighteen again, not sure of where you fit but happy to figure it out. No one can tell you where you belong; no one cares. And that feels like a type of freedom, too.If there’s any place that’s preserved the past, it’s here. And it knows, somehow, that you’ll always come back. 

Ryanne Kap is a Chinese-Canadian writer studying English and creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Grain Magazine, Ricepaper, Scarborough Fair, and The Unpublished City Volume II. Depending on the time of year, Ryanne can be found reading and writing in Strathroy or Scarborough.