Week 3 18 January 2012 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 3...

Week 318 January 2012

GEOG 4280 | Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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Week 3

Toronto the Wild: Nature and Culture in the Imagined City

GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining TorontoDepartment of Geography

Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

York UniversityWinter Term 2011-2012

There is no city that does not dreamfrom its foundations. The lost lakecrumbling in the hands of brickmakers,the floor of the ravine where light lies brokenwith the memory of rivers. All the wintersstored in that geologicgarden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subwayat Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bonesunder the rumbling track.

[Anne Michaels, “There Is No City That Does Not Dream. From Skin Divers. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999: 16.]



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“The docks are two hundred and forty feet out from the lake’s original shoreline. Landfill pushed everything forward. Buildings erupted out of it like weeds. The city walking on water. [...] There is a vast part of this city with mouths buried in it [.…] Mouths capable of speaking to us. But we stop them up with concrete and build over them and whatever it is they wanted to say gets whispered down empty alleys and turns into wind. People need to be given a reason to listen.”

[Michael Redhill, 2006. Consolation. Doubleday Canada.]



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“It’s a city of ravines. Remnants of wilderness have been left behind. Through these great sunken gardens you can traverse the city beneath the streets, look up to the floating neighbourhoods, houses built in the treetops.

It’s a city of valley spanned by bridges. A railway runs through back yards. A city of hidden lanes, of clapboard garages with corrugated tin roofs, of wooden fenes sagging where children have made shortcuts. In April, the thickly treed streets are flooded with samara, a green tide. Forgotten rivers, abandoned quarries, the remains of an Iroquis fortress. Public parks hazy with subtropical memory, a city built in the bowl of a prehistoric lake.”

[Anne Michaels, 1996. Fugitive Pieces. McClelland & Stewart, 89.]



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“It is a city that burrows, tunnels, runs underground. It has built strata of malls and pathways and inhabited spaces like the layers in an archaeological dig, a body below the earth, flowing with light.”

Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down (2008)



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“In the tee-pee, among sticks of sunlight, I sort through my stone collection and feed Jell-O powder to black ants. Sometimes, overhead, I hear a faint whine I think must be the clouds gliding by. Then there are moments of silence so absolute I am convinced I hear the ants’ footsteps; it is a tinkling sound, as if they wore bells on their ankles. When I lie with my ear to the dirt floor, the tunnelling of the worms is distant thunder. All around me pine trees cross out the view. I am at the heart of an impenetrable fortification. Safe.”

Barbara Gowdy, The Romantic (2003)



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Knowingthat I could walk seventeen miles through a

ravinein the heart of Toronto, and neverdirectly see the cityis of some comfort.

Maggie Helwig, “The Other Goldberg Variantions” (1987).



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“With a few words (an incantation in Greek or English) and the sweep of his hand, Athos sliced a hill in half, drilled under the sidewalk, cleared a forest. He showed me Toronto cross-sectioned; he ripped open cliffs like fresh bread, revealing the ragged geological past. Athos stopped in the middle of busy city streets and pointed out fossils in the limestone ledges of the Park Plaza Hotel or in the walls of a hydro substation. “Ah, limestone, accumulating one precious foot every twenty five thousand years!” Instantly the streets were flooded by a subtropical salt sea. I imagined front lawns crammed with treasure: crinoids, lamp shells, trilobites.[...]

Like diving birds, Athos and I plunged one hundred and fifty million years into the dark deciduous silence of the ravines. Behind the billboard next to Tamblyn’s Drugstore we dipped into the humid amphitheatre of a Mesozoic swamp, where massive fronds and ferns tall as houses waved in a spore-dense haze. Beneath a parking lot, behind a school; from racket, fumes, and traffic, we dove into the city’s sunken rooms of green sunlight. Then, like andartes, resurfaced half a city away.”

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996).



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Athos’ backward glance gave me a backward hope. Redemption through cataclysm; what had been transformed might be transformed again. I read about Toronto’s dried-up, rerouted rivers—now barely gutter streams—that were once abundant tributaries fished by torchlight. Salmon were speared and scooped from the quick vein; nets were dipped into live currents of siler. On maps, Athos outlined the regal paths of the ice ages as they surveyed the province and swept out again, gouging and strafing the land.”

[Michaels, 102]



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“One of the last walks Athos and I took together was along the floodplain of the Don River, past the brick quarry and cliffs embedded with marine fossils. We intended to sit for a while in the terraced gardens of Chorley Park, the Government House, built spectacularly on the edge of the escarpment. The mansion was enormous, a Loire Valley chateau, built of the finest Credit Valley limestone. [...]

We ascended the valley. The hills were scorched with sumac and sedge, cloudy with fraying thistles and milkweed. I could see patches of sweat darkening Athos’ shirt.

“Maybe we should rest.”“We’re nearly at the top. Jackob, when Nikos died I asked my father if he

believed in God. He said: How do we know there’s a God? Because He keeps disappearing.”

I heard the labour in his breath and sadness quickened in me.“Koumbaros . . .”“I’m fine thank you, Mrs. Simcoe.”We bent to pass through the bushes at the edge of the hill. We emerged from

the scrub of the ravine into the garden and lifted our heads to emptiness. Chorley Park, built to outlast generations, was gone, as though an eraser had rubbed out its place against the sky.

Athos, stunned, leaned heavily on his walking-stick.“How could they have torn it down, one of the most beautiful buildings in the

city? Jakob, are you sure we’re in the right place?” “We’re in the right place, koumbaros. … How do I know? Because it’s gone.”

[Anne Michaels, 1996.Fugitive Pieces. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart: 106-108.]



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“I loved the river even here. I loved how dark it was, how it held its secrets with the dignity of the damned. I loved how grass and even small trees managed to sprout out of the concrete that held it captive. [….] I loved the sounds, even if they were the sounds of man rather than the sounds of nature. I loved the rattle of the old bridges as the streetcars went over them. I loved the lap of the water as it licked at concrete. I loved the wind in the slim weeds that grew between the railroad ties. I even loved the sound of the rush-hour trains, the buzzing traffic, the sound of my own feet on the asphalt path. I think what I really loved in those moments when I was cupped in the hand of the city was life.”

Rosemary Aubert, Free Reign (1997).Week 318 January 2011


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Literary Sources

• Dixon, Sean, 2010. The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. Coach House.

• Michaels, Anne, 1006. Fugitive Pieces. McClelland & Stewart.

• Ondaatje, Michael, 1987. In The Skin of a Lion. McClelland & Stewart.

• Sinnett, Mark, 2009. The Carnivore. ECW.• York, Alyssa, 2010. Fauna. Random House

Canada.



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Week 3 18 January 2012 GEOG 4280 | Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Week 3...

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