Under the walking shoes, the path looks a bit like a vita course by the river. It’s clean, it’s smooth, it’s neat. You could almost try the adventure by taking off your shoes like swimmers do in summer.
Natural maintenance: thousands of walkers, joggers and dog owners use the Promenade du Saint-Jean priory trail every day in good weather. This Saturday, the parade is uninterrupted at the foot of the cliffs. Along the famous hippo park, the eye is caught by a worksite that has been stopped for ages.
Big nails
He has just lost an entire wall, laid down by the recent breath of the stormy Ciara. The wood was rotting in many places, it did not resist. Good sized nails, rusted from head to tip, stick out of the boards. Their simple sight makes you want to run to the nearest medical center to remind you of tetanus.
Two meters away, children play on the swings. We are not going to paint the devil on the collapsed wall, but the neighborhood still calls out. Especially since this ruined decor does not date from winter. On the contrary, he collects them. In the past – we don’t know when – it went up in an emergency. Falling trees and cliffs. We palisaded the sector with sheet metal, road side; we completed with wooden partitions that did not resist multiple intrusions. Here, a grubbing up, there a start of fire.
Open air latrine
Inside the perimeter, an open pit latrine. Mixture of human and canine excrement. We felt them, now we see them. Like the warning tapes and warning signs planted in this no man’s land which was, the day before yesterday, under the joint responsibility of at least three municipal departments: Logistics and events, Green spaces, Early childhood.
Professional street sweepers guarding hippos, ensure that their area of allocation does not go as far as this endless construction site, transformed into a recycling center. “Geneva, clean city”, okay, but without pushing the zeal to the banks, which do not belong to the road network in its maintenance missions, at least on this side of the river.
Dangerous asperities
The fact remains that this doorstep on the busiest path on the right bank belongs to everyone, summer and winter. As a bucolic business card, one could wish for better, indeed. The sheet metal, already mentioned, also took a beating. The angers of the night give it a strange relief. There is nothing friendly about it. As proof, these partitions separated with projecting roughness like a deli slicer. We run our arms along the body.
A little further, on the unstable sides of the cliffs, troglodyte furniture tumbles down to the surface of the rock. Mattresses, ripped cushions, torn clothes. The winter vegetation hides nothing. This poor man’s bedding has been raining for years. She waits for the arrival of cleaner-climbers to finally disappear from the landscape.
Dog benches
As for the six-seater metal benches that line the path, between the Sous-Terre bridge and the railway bridge, at the Junction, they give the whole its final touch. Their miserable structure does not encourage sitting. The battered benches from everywhere sink into themselves and serve as a platform for small dogs. Agility competition in a disaster scene.
Right next to it, an explanatory panel, useful and well done, summarizes the basic instructions for swimming in the Rhône. Several layers of graffiti and flyers cover it. Its content has become illegible. It will need to be replaced. Faster, we hope, than these stoned palisades that are no longer used for anything.
Created: 02.15.2020, 6:11 p.m.
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