Brown haze looking down toward Keele and Bloor from the little hillock of the park. Melancholy intersection, late at night. Fuzzy in the streetlamps, like something shot on grainy video or viewed through a screen door. Sewer smell, familiar, coming up from the ravine below. Dirt town. Toronto is a dirt town. Living in New York, you forget the city is built upon the earth—at least until you get far enough uptown, where the rocks jut up, but not till then. (Central Park feels like what it is, something deposited upon the city, not something the city drew apart to reveal—as if, if you scraped down far enough, you would find the secret basin containing it.) In Toronto, you don’t forget it. There is dirt, dust, mud tracked over the sidewalk, everywhere. People comment on Toronto’s being a very “clean” city, but what they mean is that it does not have much visible human refuse. They forget this omnipresent grime, dirt, residue of the earth.
It was only when I went to Nottingham that I realized it was all fake—that Toronto was a simulacrum of a Victorian midlands town.
To reach the lake you have to cross a high pedestrian bridge, thin as an insect’s leg, over eight lanes of traffic.
“Imagine meeting your enemy here,” I said once to a friend from out of town, a cold wind coming up and the sun going down.
“Imagine meeting your friend.”
I am reposting one from the archives today. I will return to regular updating soon.