I spent the whole week doing census work up North and about mid week my prescribed route landed me in a town I’d heard about but had never thought I would visit, let alone knock on every single door: Eaglesham.

If you’re googling the name of your town and come across this post then yeah: I’m the guy who got a temporary government gig to earn some good cash  and it landed me in your town delivering census documents. 

The Route

Again, I didn’t really track this one as I normally would one of my walks (or runs) because, well, privacy. I was walking up and down every street, knocking on every door, trying to locate someone to whom I could hand a census paper.

In the cities and larger towns the census came by mail. My mail comes to my house. My home specifically has a mailing address. If you send a letter addressed to my street address it will find me. But up north (and in a lot of rural communities) most folks it seems just have a PO box. And the difference is that the mail is then addressed to the person and not the home. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s different enough that it matters for the census. And guys like me need to go to each home and hand out those census cards by hand. 

But it matters, and you were counted, and now the government can account for the things your little town needs.

The Effort

I walked through Eaglesham for about five hours all told, a lot slower than my walk through Watino a couple days earlier, and if my watch is telling me the truth—and I subtract the lunch break I took in my car—I can guess I probably traveled about 11km in that town in 4:30.

This brings my walking total up to 65.75km in around seventeen hours on the roads and paths of my wanderings.

The Highlight

Karin’s aunt was a teacher in Eaglesham for years. Along the way I had a conversation with another (current) teacher just outside the elementary school and he knew of her—called her “an institution in this place”— and shook my hand. Small towns are tight knit communities, for better and for worse, and I experienced the gamut in that little place. I can never give you specifics, but my day in that little town delivering whatever little fragment of democracy that the census plays was definitely an adventure walk.