Not much has been published on this site in the last year. Shortly after my return from a trip to France, a series of events started to modify my personal circumstances, beginning with my mother’s death. New personal responsibilities appeared, and changes of plan. For quite awhile, I remained in no mood for personal communications. But while I have not had much time to write casually for the site, I have been in fact researching and writing a great deal. Now I’m beginning a new phase, since I have stopped outside work and expect to survive entirely by writing. This will mean some sacrifices — living frugally being one of them. But there are benefits. For years, now, I could rarely indulge in one of my greatest pleasures — walking the ravines and distant corners of my city. I simply did not have the spare time, and outside work that kept me on my feet ten hours every day left me too tired to do it. But now I will be sitting at a computer for most of every day, and some walking will be necessary to stave off a classic writer’s peril: overweight. So, no longer walking to make a living, I am free to walk for pleasure again.
I had a monthly subway pass in connection with that work, and it still remained valid until yesterday. Realizing that I was letting it go to waste, I used it on Sunday and Monday, to go to two remote parts of the city for some walking. On Sunday I went to Old Mill Station on the subway, so that I could walk along the Humber River. Bloor Street and the Subway trains cross the river that separates the old City of Toronto from the Burrough of Etobicoke [1] at this station. But a short walk from it there is a much older and quite handsome little bridge that was built in 1916. This was the point of crossing for the river for many centuries. Here was the17th Century Seneca town, Teiaiagon, at its peak having about 5,000 inhabitants in long houses. It was a major center of trade along the Toronto Carrying-Place trail that joined Lake Ontario with the fertile Huron lands to the north, and upper Great Lakes. But the Seneca town was the culmination of a very long history, as there were people living along the Humber as early as 12,000 years ago. The local historians have been busy, and now there are several plaques in English, French, and Seneca indicating this and that. The handsomest one commemorates Étienne Brûlé, whose name has been given to the parklands along the river north of Bloor. This gave me great pleasure, because he is one of my favourite characters in Canadian history, and one of my cats (now adopted by friends) was named after him. Arriving in Canada from France at the age of 16, Brûlé chose to live among the local people and, after learning the Algonquin and Wendat languages, began a series of extraordinary travels that ranged over four of the five Great Lakes, most of present-day Southern Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. It was in 1615 that Brûlé arrived at this spot. The next recorded visitors were in 1678 —- René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Sieur de La Motte, and the Récollet Louis Hennepin. Their ship was grounded and frozen at the mouth of the river, and they walked upstream to barter for provisions with the Seneca. In the next century the Anishinaabe-speaking Mississauga people had largely supplanted the Seneca, building a separate village on the opposite bank, closer to the present subway station. Trade in the region flourished under the Great Peace of Montreal, and by 1730 there was a French magasin royale and garrison, stationed further downstream and to the east of the river mouth at Fort Rouillé. A handful of French came to live along the river. But all of these things vanished during the violence of the Seven Years War, and this portion of the river, for which the Seneca name was Niwa’ah Onega’gaih’ih and the Anishinaabe name was Gabekanaang-ziibi, was deserted until settlers from Yorkshire arrived and renamed it Humber, after the largest river in that part of northern England. A series of mills were built at the river crossing, the last of which, a grist mill, burned down in 1881 and remained a picturesque stone ruin until its walls were incorporated into a new hotel in 2001.
With all this history in mind, I walked south towards the wetlands of the river mouth, and within minutes I was out of sight of any building. Occasionally, a canoe would drift by. The forest here is rich, an unspoiled remnant of the Carolinian forest that covered what is now Toronto before it became farms, then city. There are many tall and ancient oaks here. And these, link to more history. The largest cluster of them, about 150 trees, is known as the Tuhbenahneequay Ancient Grove, named after the daughter of the Mississauga chief Wahbanosay, who was the main negotiator and signatory of the 1805 purchase of the lands that were to become most of Toronto. Tubnahneequay married Augustus Jones, the principal surveyor of Upper Canada. Jones was a longtime companion of Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), and was with him when he led the Loyalist migration of Six Nations from New York State to Canada. Tubnahneequay was one of his two co-wives, for Jones followed native custom. Tubnahneequay married him in a Wiidigendiwin [2] ceremony, for she was a strict traditionalist, but Jones’ other wife, Sarah Tekerehogen was a Mohawk and a Methodist. One of Tubnahneeqay’s sons, though raised by her in the Mississisauga midewiwin tradition, in later life became a famous Methodist preacher, touring the world. The grove is named after her because at this spot, Mississauga warriors, led by her and her father, took a stand, claiming that Etobicoke township, on the west side of the river, was not part of the purchase. The legal wrangling surrounding the Toronto purchase went on until finally resolved in 2010!
Not only the oaks, but all the trees are especially splendid. The land becomes wetter as you walk south, until it becomes broad marshes. Here there’s a wealth of bird life, and in a very short time I saw countless monarch butterflies and dragonflies, numerous ducks and cormorants, a tern, a red squirrel, a muskrat, and a magnificent white egret, perched on a limb with lordly dignity. I had not been in this place for years, and forgotten its wealth of wildlife. There are beaver here as well, and fox, and even deer, but I saw none. A bit closer to the lake, the west shore of the Humber is blocked by a steep bluff, and one must make a detour away from the river to get past it. This detour took me into a quiet residential neighbourhood, known as Stonegate. It is partly low-rise apartment buildings built in the 1950’s, all very well-kept up, and partly handsome houses in tree-filled streets. Stonegate Road has some of the finest houses I’ve seen in the city, in the sense of good taste rather than wealth. Reaching the end of that street, dense woods began again, and I followed a winding footpath down into the rather isolated South Humber Park. Here I saw a forgotten item of 1950’s Modernism, the “Suncatcher”, a strange pavillion inspired by science fiction art of the era, serving no identifiable purpose, except perhaps to be the best local place to smoke a dube. After that, the tree-cover thinned, a huge water treatment plant appeared on the right, and the the pathway ran beneath the Queensway Avenue bridge, then under the CNR railway, then under the Gardiner Expressway, and finally ended where the Humber River empties into the inland sea we call Lake Ontario. There, a modern footbridge allows one to cross the river out of Etobicoke back into the City of Toronto.
At this point, I was very hungry. No problem. A short streetcar ride brought me into the neighbourhood that is coming to be known as Little Tibet, and I love Tibetan cooking. Here, within a few blocks, are most of the best Tibetan restaurants in Toronto — The Lhasa, Norling, Shangrila, Tibet Kitchen, Tsampa Café, Tashi Delek, Himalayan Kitchen, Le Tibet, Om, Kasthamandap. I settle on Loga’s Corner, because there I could order take-out momos, those delicious Tibetan dumplings, with the owner’s fabulous home-made hot sauce, and bring them home with me to eat at leisure. Soon I was back home, feet propped up, dipping momos into sauce, with no worries other than keeping the cats from grabbing them.
On Monday, the last day I could use the pass, I chose to go eastwards, into the part of Metropolitan Toronto called Scarborough by its inhabitants, but “Scarberia” by people downtown. It is largely the product of post-WWII suburban expansion, and is mostly on flat land, but at it’s east end there is a major, heavily wooded river, the Rouge, and along the lake it is a long series of sandy cliffs, known to the explorers as Les grands Ecores, and today as the Scarborough Bluffs. These are as high as 90 metres [300 feet], gradually diminishing in height as one goes east. They are always eroding, and houses and streets are now kept away from their edge — after a few ended up tumbling into the lake. There has been considerable new erosion this year, since the lake is at it’s highest level on record, and there have been a number of storms. I took the subway out to it’s eastern-most station, Kennedy, then took a bus that wound slowly eastwards, through various neighbourhoods, little “strip malls” of Tamil, Afghan, and Caribbean shops, and finally left me off on a quiet street. A short walk led me to the entrance of a park. It had few parkish ambitions, for it was nothing more than the space between the back sides of the suburban houses and the edge of the cliff, random patches of mowed lawn and woods, mostly just a place where the locals could walk their dogs. The only people I met were a couple doing exactly that. Their retriever frolicked about happily and came over to me to make friends. There were numerous signs warning people not to stand on the edge of the cliffs. They are only about 30 metres high in this part, but the soil is very loose, waterlogged, and slippery, and some of the warning signs no longer exist because they were once located in what is now air full of swooping seagulls. As I walked eastwards, the patches of grass disappeared, and I followed a narrow path through the woods. This turned abruptly, because I had reached a point where a creek had eroded through the cliff face. I followed this inland to a point where I could scramble down, to the creek that would take me down to the shore. But there was no trail going down, only a dense tangle of trees, brush, and mud. One has to be careful, since stinging nettle abounds in such places. Stinging Nettle has a recognizable flower in the spring, but at this time of year it looks like any other random weed. When its leaves brush against your skin, thousands of microscopic hairs stick to you and release histamine and acetylcholine, causing burning and itching for hours after. There’s also plenty of burdock, thistle, poison ivy and poison oak. But I avoided these perils and found myself down below, on the shore of the lake. It was growing late, and for the last hour I had been hearing distant thunder. Eastwards, out above the lake, dark clouds were piling and roiling. Nothing of the city was visible from this part of the shore, only the bluffs trailing westward and eastward and the vast extent of the lake. Lake Ontario is the smallest of the five Great Lakes, but it is still about the size of the whole country of Slovenia. Though at midday its waters shone their famous bright blue, celebrated by Walt Whitman in his poem By Blue Ontario’s Shore, but now they were a cold gray. In fact, Whitman sailed by this very spot on the lake steamship Algerian, on July 27, 1880. He specifically mentioned, in a diary [3], that the ship kept close to the shore, and the brilliant blueness of the lake. He was a keen observer, always quick to notice and identify a particular flower or tree, keen to evaluate the farms, noticing house-styles and how well or poorly made a street, a building, a train or a boat might be. Here are sample entries:
I am in the midst of haymaking, and, though but a looker-on, I enjoy it greatly, untiringly, day after day. Any hour I hear the sound of scythes sharpening, or the distant rattle of horse-mowers, or see loaded wagons, high-piled, slowly wending toward the barns; or, toward sundown, groups of tan-faced men going from work.
To-day we are indeed at the height of it here in Ontario. A muffled and musical clang of cow-bells from the grassy wood-edge not far distant.
In blossom now: delphinium, blue, four feet high, great profusion of yellow-red lilies; a yellow coreopsis-like flower, same as I saw Sept. ’79; wild tansy, weed from 10 to 15 inches high, white blossom, out in July in Canada, straw-colored hollyhocks, many like roses, others pure white — beautiful clusters everywhere in the thick dense hedge-lines; aromatic white cedars at evening; the fences, verandahs, gables, covered with grapevines, ivies, honeysuckles…
… I spent a long time to-day watching the swallows — an hour this forenoon and another hour afternoon. There is a pleasant, secluded, close-cropt grassy lawn of a couple of acres or over, flat as a floor and surrounded by a flowery and bushy hedge, just off the road adjoining the house, — a favorite spot of mine. Over this open grassy area immense numbers of swallows have been sailing, darting, circling, and cutting large or small 8’s and s’s, close to the ground, for hours to-day. It is evidently for fun altogether. I never saw anything prettier — this free swallow dance.
I rose this morning at four and look’ed out on the more pure and refulgent starry show. Right over my head, like a Tree-Universe spreading with its orb-apples, — Aldeberan leading the Hyades; Jupiter of amazing lustre, softness and volume; and, not far behind, heavy Saturn, — both past the meridian; the seven sparkling gems of the Pleiades; the full moon, voluptuous and yellow, and full of radiance, an hour to setting in the west. Everything so fresh, so still; the delicious something there is in early youth, in early dawn —- the spirit, the spring, the feel; the air and light, precursors of the untried sun; love, action, forenoon, noon, life — full-fibred, latent with them all.
By Blue Ontario’s Shore was the poem in which Whitman most deeply explored the triumphs and tragedies of his own country, the United States, which is almost visible from this spot on the shore as a thin line on the horizon to the south. What one is seeing is not in fact, the actual shore of New York State, but the whiteness of haze floating above the land. As one’s eyes turn toward the east, lengthwise along the lake, the horizon shows only the sharp line of sky meeting water.
By blue Ontario’s shore,
As I mused of these warlike days and of peace return’d, and
the dead that return no more
The poem is practically schizophrenic in it’s unresolved dualities. He seeks to understand, embrace, and take responsibility for all the wild liberty and youthfulness of his country, and its tragic failings.
O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections are you and me,
most of all, the still bleeding wound from its greatest, most shameful evil:
Slavery — the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it
upon the ruins of all the rest
When Whitman visited Ontario, he was coming to a place where slavery had been abolished in 1793, and internal political and social conflicts were so tame that they would barely be on the level of bar-room scuffles in Whitman’s home, Brooklyn. But the country that he came from was not in good shape. After the slaughter of the Civil War, the Republican Party quickly sold out the interests of the African-Americans it had fought to free, and the elite of the South was allowed to use systematic terrorism to drive them back into the semi-slavery of share-cropping, with the poor rural whites kept only slightly above them, while every component of democracy was dismantled. On the Federal level, a few large corporations, known as “trusts” had come to control almost all of economic life, while a conclave of wealthy financiers and industrialists had simply laid out cash to purchase the government. Political and financial corruption were omnipresent, unconcealed, and all-pervading. Stock market and railway swindles, and “pay for play” politics were the norm. The rich boasted that they were supermen, and a small class of prosperous professionals acted as a chorus to them. The wealthiest 1% owned 51% of the property, while the bottom 44% claimed only 1.1%. Most Americans had just struggled through a severe depression that lasted seven years, and had just reached recovery the year Whitman was here. The rich hired private armies to violently crush strikes and the cities had erupted in repeated riots, all of which were followed by ruthless police repression. The rich could always rely on their bought politicians to deliver the booty, and on ingrained racism, religious fervor, and hatred of immigrants (at that time mostly Irish and German) to keep the “peasants” in line. Farms around the country were falling under corporate and elite control, land, credit and agricultural reforms desperately needed, but these reforms required poor white farmers and black sharecroppers to recognize their common interests and work together… something the rich could easily prevent by pressing the racial, religious, regional, and xenophobic buttons on their control console. However, the American people did, eventually, pull themselves out of that hole. The next generation curbed the power of the trusts. This was known as the Reform Era. It would take several cycles of such “reform eras” to build a modern country… work that is still unfinished.
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because the United States is going through much the same thing today, and we in Canada, as then, are standing in relative safety observing it with the same mixture of horror, sympathy, revulsion and pity as we did then. We have our own problems, but they pale compared to nightmare that our American brothers are marching into with a traitor, working for their enemies, controlling the White House, millions of their number insanely embracing a totalitarian ideology no different from Communism or Fascism, and a population so easily manipulated by exactly the same sort of control console as prevailed when Whitman was sitting on the deck of the Algeria, probably looking intently at the swallows flying about the very place I was standing 137 years later.
For the swallows are still here. They nest in great numbers in the cliff face, and behave exactly as Whitman described them.
The sky was, by this time, performing the function of the pathetic fallacy, by which nature mirrors the political condition of society. Very dark clouds were rolling in from the American side, and flashes of lightning. I did not want to be stuck on an uninhabited beach below a continuous line of cliffs, 15 kilometres long, facing a lake whose storms can be extremely violent, and waves extremely high. The path I had taken down was difficult, and retracing it upward would have been more difficult. So I walked eastwards along the beach, looking for a better egress. I eventually found a spot which was sufficiently clear of vegetation, and had secure enough footing to let me climb, and I emerged on the manicured property of a large, futuristic-looking water treatment plant that I didn’t know existed. [4] This was completely deserted, though the city had dutifully filled a large expanse with park benches and picnic tables, and kept the grounds as neat as a hospital scrub room. It was being enjoyed, however, by two very large brown cotton-tail rabbits. One of them quickly hopped away as I approached, but the other strangely stood his ground, and stared me down with that peculiar aristocratic contempt that I have seen in wild Kangaroos in the Australian bush. Perhaps he had read Watership Down in his spare time, if rabbits can be said to have spare time.
I was now in the first stages of twilight, and I had no idea how far I would have to go to get to the nearest bus. Outside of the filtration plant there was nothing but an empty service road running east-and west, parallel to the CNR railway tracks, and behind the tracks there was nothing visible but trees. The part of Scarborough with human beings in it was somewhere beyond that, but how was I to get to it? I walked west along the road, and eventually found an intersecting road that crossed the track and went north. This was a level railway crossing, with nothing but a saltire, lights and a primitive boom bar. It must be the only one left in Metropolitan Toronto on an active rail line, and this is the most heavily traveled line in the country, linking Toronto and Montreal! Nothing could have more effectively underscored my downtown prejudice that Scarborough was a remote and primitive wilderness.
Nevertheless, it was not long before this road brought me to houses, and some teenagers playing pickup basketball in the street with a Spalding portable hoop set up on the curb. They directed me a few blocks north where I could get the 86D bus to the subway. I could, in fact, just see it turning the corner. But it waited at this particular stop to mark time on its schedule, and I was able to run for it successfully. Along its route, it passed a large Tamil grocery shop, so I hopped off the bus to pick up some naan bread, some Chennai-style snack mix [5], and a cold ginger beer. I got home, and, as the night before, happily feasted. There were still some leftover momos.
Amount of writing done those two days: zero. But I would count them as productive.
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[1] Etobicoke is pronounced “Ee-toe-bi-coe”. The “k” is silent. Nobody seems to know why.
[2] Wiidigendiwin — a wedding ceremony in accordance with the Midewiwin, traditional religious teachings of the Ojibway and Cree people. These traditions are still active, sometimes supplementary, and sometimes in competition with other faiths.
[3] Walt Whitman’s Diary in Canada, with Extracts from Other of His Diaries and Literary Note-books — edited by William Sloane Kennedy. 1904 Boston. Small, Maynard & Co. I read one of the 500 original copies, but it has since been reprinted. Whitman traveled as far as the Saguenay in Quebec, but most of his visit to Canada was spent with his friend William Bucke, a pioneer psychologist and coiner of the term “cosmic consciousness.” Their friendship was the subject of an odd little film, Beautiful Dreamers (1992) directed by John Kent Harrison and starring Colme Feore and Rip Torn.
[4] I looked it up when I got home. The F.J. Horgan Filtration Plant was completed in 2011. Since it’s in Scarborough, downtown Torontonians like myself would no more hear about it than we would hear about one in Nepal or Ecuador.
[5] Groundnuts, thenkuzhal, kara boondhi, roasted chana, karasev, murukku, pakoda and oma podi — a much tastier combination than the Bombay and Punjabi mixes you get in my local supermarket.
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