B. invited me to a Halloween party at her house this past Friday night. When she asked me I knew right away I would probably not make it. She lives on Roosevelt Ave, outside of my zone. I have been to her house before, mostly in the day time, and I'm always a little nervous.
And I really wanted to go, mostly to thank her for throwing the party and because she is a good friend to me. I knew I would be going out biking on Friday no matter what, so I decided to go over towards her place, and then decide how I felt once I got there. The weather was mild and I had a certain amount of energy, although I had moments in which my entire body would relax, while in motion, into tiredness.
I took William to Roslin. As I turned onto the wider street, the dark sky opened up all around me and I gazed into the blue-black silhouettes of the trees lining the street as they faded into the sky. I found comfort in these silhouettes, dark empty spaces that smell like living damp, cold and sublime on first glance, gentle and warm after some time spent with them.
I turned onto Dawson and then on to Westmount, where the car lights shone electrically as they blasted past, and then the street was empty, strangely empty, and I crosssed among drifting dy leaves. As I neared the farther side, a car rushed up behind me in the darknes and I moved quickly in the leaves and lights.
At the top of Westmount and Erb, I sent Brenda a text to say that I was not going to come to her party. I felt sad about this but I remembered the promise that I made to my body that I would never make it do anything it didn't want to do. I could feel myself wanting to do this thing for my friend, and show her my love, and at the same time, my body's tiredness, my mind's tiredness.
And, still, my body didn't want to turn around, so I continued to bicycle towards her house, and all the way to her driveway, where I stood looking into the window at her friends, wondering if I might just go to the door, give her a hug, and then leave. I thought this might be disruptive and pointless, there she was with all her friends around her, enjoying her party, and that was good. I felt sad, not sad from being left out, but sad from not being able to show my love with presence.
I felt at peace with my decision to leave so I turned and returned via Karen Walk, my old street. As I bicycled past the identical suburban houses, I realized I could no longer remember which I'd lived in - there were two that were a possibility. The only identifying trait was a long line of tall pines heading east away from the house's backyard, which I remembered looking at from my bedroom, so by lining up the house with the trees, I might be able to discover which house had been mine, for 4 months, in my third year of university.
I went around through the Keats Way school yard and up to Waterloo Park. Coming into the park on the west side, I looked up into a forest of tall trees in which the leaves were quivering blackly against the night sky. Through my muffled hearing under my hat and helmet, I heard strange shrieks and rough calls - there was a sudden movement, and hundreds of crowss flew up off the trees in a shimmering, black, rasping body. Crows were everywhere, circling, glimmering, shrieking, against the sky in the dark and moonlight. I stood to watch as they settled again, lifted off, murmured, conversed. It was so lovely and cold and clear in the park.
I carried on through the moonlit dark of the west field, through a clump of trees, nervously, keeping my sense alert for people moving in the darkness, but everywhere was empty. I came down over the bridge in the centre of the park, through the pitchy woods where the crows normally congregate, empty now, bare branches against the sky. As I came out of the woods, a train was coming south on the tracks the cut through the park.
It was an old train, and lit up from inside, one car only, filled with people in black and feathered costumes. I could see woman with bobbed hair, a feather elegantly rising from it, and a little black mask. As I came towards the train, I watched her, framed in the bright lighted square window of the pitching and rumbling train, and then as I came alongside the train in the parking lot I raced it, watching the people laughing and shimmering in the car. I raced it all the way down the dark path, where the Japanese trees had lost their leaves in little yellow piles, and the lights from the little light poles winked in the night. Before the bridge, I decided not to follow to see them come off the train, although I longed to, more than I have for any human in a long time.
Instead I turned east and bicycled down the board walk. I sat down in the middle part, where I could gaze out over the black, still lake.
To my right there were two girls sitting under the gazebo, taking pictures of themselves. They were posed against the water, back to back, with their knees up, facing the camera, like a perfect reflection of each other, a set of twins. Two ducks drifted by on the lake's stillness, and a couple passed by behind me, holding hands. I remembered that this was Lover's Lane, where everything happens in twos. The lake was so still that I wanted to lie flat across it, while my limbs drifted in different directions, staying connected by finer and finer threads.
Bodies around me reflect each other, mirror to create twins, while I dissolve, flatly, a prairie plain.
I started to become actually cold so I left the park via the dark path along the easts side of the lake, coming up onto the busy streets. I went to the grocery store, where two giggling university girls moved in an irritating, irrational dance around the produce section, as I tried to get directly through it. One said to the other "Do you want to get corns?" and this ridiculous moment of childish bad grammar, making a plural out of a singular, repeated itself again and again in my head, as I tramped resolutely through the store, like a crow collecting berries before rising into the vast night sky.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Bridgeport
It was very cold this morning - there was dull white frost turning the grass blue grey, and the air was sharp - but the sun was shining, for the first time in days. At the end of the driveway, I decided to go to the town of Bridgeport, and to see a big sky, and heaps of colourful trees piled up against it.
At the roundabout, where Lancaster meets Bridge, I felt a push not to go South, like a sharp yellow tightness in my chest. I felt myself being drawn north, up Bridge into the suburbs, llike a gentle blue plain in my heart. But what new beauty would I find in suburbia, when the sun lay to the south and splashed and sang in the muddy Grand River? I'm sensitive these days to my intuition, and it's always telling me not to do what I want to do. I crossed onto the bridge, carried along by my vision of the tumbling, rushing river. At the end of the bridge I turned into the parking lot at Joe Thompson Park, as the tightness and resistance continued in my chest. Then - "fuck it, fine!" - I turned around. My strange intuition - but I promised to listen to it. It occurred to me that my mind simply didn't want to do anything new today, so I convinced myself that going east further into the town of Bridgeport would keep me on the soft blue plain, because it was a familiar route from years past, unlike the eastern direction. This seemed to convince my heart enough to loosen a little, and I went east on Tyson St. I felt pangs of agoraphobia, and settled into them comfortably, knowing that those feelings meant I was on familiar ground emotionally, and experiencing nothing novel.
Tyson St stands in my mind as the name representing one of my dreams, to live in a very small house on the outside of town by myself, in a house with a lot of wood furniture and cast iron and exposed beams, or wood shingles, wearing dresses with wool sweaters and rainboots and carrying things with chapped hands on cold days. Since going to the Maritimes to live out this life of an LM Montgomery inspired eccentric seems far-fetched, given my current realities, I settle (in fantasy) on the town of Bridgeport. Being realistic in a fantasy makes it all the more vivid and real and delicioius.
As I bicycled down the street, and then turned on to Market St, I looked carefully at all the little houses, strange and irregular and sublime, wondering if I would discover one that would delight me in particular.
Some of the little homes came right up to the road, close together, with wild flowers growing in front of thick paned windows. Others had European inspired top floor additions, with wide glass windows, through which I could see comfortable lounge chairs. Some were tiny clapboard houses, romantic in their dullness, homey yet strange.
At then end of Market I turned and came back and found an elevated, fine gravel path running along the Grand River. I climbed on to it next to a little house, where a low foundation wall ran strangely on a diagonal, cutting through the path, so that on one side (the side I was on) it was wide and gravelly, and the other, going along beside the little house, it was narrow and made by footsteps. I could see it widening again later on when it met up with Schaefer Park to the east.
I took this path back west to the main bridge. Up on the path, my heart released like a bird rising from the river. Only sky, and woods, and water. Only this. And sun, and cold. Only. O.
A time passed. I write this as a marker of time that passed free from everything.
I swooped under the bridge, on a path I had never seen before, next to the wild river on its grassy banks, and came up back in Joe Thompson park, where I was once again touched with yellow tension. I left again to circle back to the bridge but then released my heart by tying this new space to the old one I'd just left, so that any new discovery might flow from the stillness of the old.
Although I was gripped by the strangest sharp sense of newness, I had been on this path before, 12 years ago, after a long day of biking, with my friend Emilia. We later sat on the field and ate sandwiches. I had forgotten about that meal until now. It doesn't seem like 12 years - it always feels like no time at all.
Below the path, there were great willows spreading over wild grasses and smaller trees, creating little rooms of green light beside the river. Clear ponds, islands of water caught in the low areas near the river after days of rain, reflected the light whitely and captivated me, inseparable in their gentle magic from the deep green grasses that surrounded them. It is the time of year where I say - next year, I may come to know and love this place, on the very edge of this year's beloved circle.
In order to avoid a man walking his dog, I turned around and returned to Bridge St. I followed Bridge past Schweitzer, where the big trucks are parked, where it becomes an open country road. A gravel road travelling alongside the paved is protected to the west by the high grassy banks of the elevated path. From the gravel road, I couldn't see the other side of the bank - just grass waving against sky. I was thrilling to imagine the river opening up on the other side. I climbed up into the light and wind on the embankment and looked beyond to see fields and trees, the river far off and hidden. Charming, but not thrilling. I knew the man with his dog must be coming around the bend shortly, so I came down again, feeling a little tired, and went back to Lancaster.
I pedaled slowly and happily up Lancaster, thinking of not much, in no hurry, warm in the sun, looking at the signs in shop windows, wondering how my day would unfold when this trip was over. Wondering if I should go to sit in the woods at Moses Springer Park, wondering if I could stay warm if I stopped moving. I turned right onto Lang to avoid the traffic and followed it back to Springdale and then Bridgeport.
There is a patch of woods between Brideport and Highway 8 where it curves. I locked my bike at the edge of the woods and swished through tall plants into the wet and yellow brown cathedral. Climbing a leafy, soft path, I saw movement ahead. A large, grey deer bounded into view for a moment and then disapeared. My heart beating, I followed the path up the hill, watching the woods to my right, and now there were two grey deer, leaping and bounding through the trees, th. To say that a deer leaps is to begin to understand a deer as more bird than a mammal - a deer lives half in the trees and in the air.
I didn't see the deer again, and I didn't follow anymore - I didn't want to scare them any further, especially because they were between myself and highway. I imagined them in the sunshine of the meadow beyond the woods, near the highway, two lost, gentle, leaping siblings. For, if they weren't lost, then surely this was an enchanted wood, much vaster and more capable of sustaining the wild of life than it looked from the outside.
As I came to the east edge of the forest, before turning north to go back to my bicycle, I realized a man with long hair and beard was watching me, while smoking a cigarette, from the balcony of a house touching on to the woods. I felt like an intruder, and strange in my leather jacket, helmet and white running shoes. I wondered if the man had been watching the deer. I wondered if he felt that in some way, they were his deer. He puffed with equanimity and watchfulness, like a wizard, his thoughts obscure. I moved off.
I walked slowly along the outside of the woods until they met the highway in a chain link fence. I could see the sunny meadows beyond. A little further, on the other side of the highway, I slowed my pace in the sunshine and looked back at the forest, and realized how actually large it was. I wondered where the deer were. I felt sad and worried, enchanted and touched.
I walked for the better part of the road home, in no hurry to get anywhere.
At the roundabout, where Lancaster meets Bridge, I felt a push not to go South, like a sharp yellow tightness in my chest. I felt myself being drawn north, up Bridge into the suburbs, llike a gentle blue plain in my heart. But what new beauty would I find in suburbia, when the sun lay to the south and splashed and sang in the muddy Grand River? I'm sensitive these days to my intuition, and it's always telling me not to do what I want to do. I crossed onto the bridge, carried along by my vision of the tumbling, rushing river. At the end of the bridge I turned into the parking lot at Joe Thompson Park, as the tightness and resistance continued in my chest. Then - "fuck it, fine!" - I turned around. My strange intuition - but I promised to listen to it. It occurred to me that my mind simply didn't want to do anything new today, so I convinced myself that going east further into the town of Bridgeport would keep me on the soft blue plain, because it was a familiar route from years past, unlike the eastern direction. This seemed to convince my heart enough to loosen a little, and I went east on Tyson St. I felt pangs of agoraphobia, and settled into them comfortably, knowing that those feelings meant I was on familiar ground emotionally, and experiencing nothing novel.
Tyson St stands in my mind as the name representing one of my dreams, to live in a very small house on the outside of town by myself, in a house with a lot of wood furniture and cast iron and exposed beams, or wood shingles, wearing dresses with wool sweaters and rainboots and carrying things with chapped hands on cold days. Since going to the Maritimes to live out this life of an LM Montgomery inspired eccentric seems far-fetched, given my current realities, I settle (in fantasy) on the town of Bridgeport. Being realistic in a fantasy makes it all the more vivid and real and delicioius.
As I bicycled down the street, and then turned on to Market St, I looked carefully at all the little houses, strange and irregular and sublime, wondering if I would discover one that would delight me in particular.
Some of the little homes came right up to the road, close together, with wild flowers growing in front of thick paned windows. Others had European inspired top floor additions, with wide glass windows, through which I could see comfortable lounge chairs. Some were tiny clapboard houses, romantic in their dullness, homey yet strange.
At then end of Market I turned and came back and found an elevated, fine gravel path running along the Grand River. I climbed on to it next to a little house, where a low foundation wall ran strangely on a diagonal, cutting through the path, so that on one side (the side I was on) it was wide and gravelly, and the other, going along beside the little house, it was narrow and made by footsteps. I could see it widening again later on when it met up with Schaefer Park to the east.
I took this path back west to the main bridge. Up on the path, my heart released like a bird rising from the river. Only sky, and woods, and water. Only this. And sun, and cold. Only. O.
A time passed. I write this as a marker of time that passed free from everything.
I swooped under the bridge, on a path I had never seen before, next to the wild river on its grassy banks, and came up back in Joe Thompson park, where I was once again touched with yellow tension. I left again to circle back to the bridge but then released my heart by tying this new space to the old one I'd just left, so that any new discovery might flow from the stillness of the old.
Although I was gripped by the strangest sharp sense of newness, I had been on this path before, 12 years ago, after a long day of biking, with my friend Emilia. We later sat on the field and ate sandwiches. I had forgotten about that meal until now. It doesn't seem like 12 years - it always feels like no time at all.
Below the path, there were great willows spreading over wild grasses and smaller trees, creating little rooms of green light beside the river. Clear ponds, islands of water caught in the low areas near the river after days of rain, reflected the light whitely and captivated me, inseparable in their gentle magic from the deep green grasses that surrounded them. It is the time of year where I say - next year, I may come to know and love this place, on the very edge of this year's beloved circle.
In order to avoid a man walking his dog, I turned around and returned to Bridge St. I followed Bridge past Schweitzer, where the big trucks are parked, where it becomes an open country road. A gravel road travelling alongside the paved is protected to the west by the high grassy banks of the elevated path. From the gravel road, I couldn't see the other side of the bank - just grass waving against sky. I was thrilling to imagine the river opening up on the other side. I climbed up into the light and wind on the embankment and looked beyond to see fields and trees, the river far off and hidden. Charming, but not thrilling. I knew the man with his dog must be coming around the bend shortly, so I came down again, feeling a little tired, and went back to Lancaster.
I pedaled slowly and happily up Lancaster, thinking of not much, in no hurry, warm in the sun, looking at the signs in shop windows, wondering how my day would unfold when this trip was over. Wondering if I should go to sit in the woods at Moses Springer Park, wondering if I could stay warm if I stopped moving. I turned right onto Lang to avoid the traffic and followed it back to Springdale and then Bridgeport.
There is a patch of woods between Brideport and Highway 8 where it curves. I locked my bike at the edge of the woods and swished through tall plants into the wet and yellow brown cathedral. Climbing a leafy, soft path, I saw movement ahead. A large, grey deer bounded into view for a moment and then disapeared. My heart beating, I followed the path up the hill, watching the woods to my right, and now there were two grey deer, leaping and bounding through the trees, th. To say that a deer leaps is to begin to understand a deer as more bird than a mammal - a deer lives half in the trees and in the air.
I didn't see the deer again, and I didn't follow anymore - I didn't want to scare them any further, especially because they were between myself and highway. I imagined them in the sunshine of the meadow beyond the woods, near the highway, two lost, gentle, leaping siblings. For, if they weren't lost, then surely this was an enchanted wood, much vaster and more capable of sustaining the wild of life than it looked from the outside.
As I came to the east edge of the forest, before turning north to go back to my bicycle, I realized a man with long hair and beard was watching me, while smoking a cigarette, from the balcony of a house touching on to the woods. I felt like an intruder, and strange in my leather jacket, helmet and white running shoes. I wondered if the man had been watching the deer. I wondered if he felt that in some way, they were his deer. He puffed with equanimity and watchfulness, like a wizard, his thoughts obscure. I moved off.
I walked slowly along the outside of the woods until they met the highway in a chain link fence. I could see the sunny meadows beyond. A little further, on the other side of the highway, I slowed my pace in the sunshine and looked back at the forest, and realized how actually large it was. I wondered where the deer were. I felt sad and worried, enchanted and touched.
I walked for the better part of the road home, in no hurry to get anywhere.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Victoria and Fischer Hallman, October 15, 2011
Rain was falling steadily and in gusts this morning. I wore my warm jacket and clipped my rain pauncho to my bike rack in case it came to that.
It wasn't very cold, just blustery and raining steadily. I put on my pauncho right away. The cemetery was dull and shining at the same time, in parts, with russets and burnished yellows and damp greens, the comfortable brooding dark blue green of spruces in a line. Looking into the spruces, between their wide boughs, at the wet brown trunks where their limbs met their bodies, I thought of all the thousands of things I can look at during the days of my life, and how looking at those things makes up my mind, and how I look at so many, many things, when I could just look at a few, a few things like this wet tree trunk, a little damp cavern in the boughs, safe for being real, not for being comfortable. I could look only a things that grow from the ground, things that stand in the weather, and make my mind this way.
I pedaled up to the hospital and then down Glasgow as the cars rushed past me in the spray. South on Belmont, west on Gage, past a garden of wildflowers interspersed with stones outside a monolithic warehouse. Goldenroad, purple asters, little white flowers. It was raining harder and I was becoming damp in my pauncho. When I saw these wildflowers in the rain, I thought to myself, this is something meaningful I won't forget - but I forget now why. Yet the rain does now seem very important, - not the rain, exactly, but the way the light shone through it, dull and subtle and wild.
The wind was coming out of the west down Gage and it became tiring. I felt set on my goal for the day, the height of Victoria St just past Fischer Hallman. Rain, wind, tiredness and growing dampness were my environment, my skin, my surroundings, not something to fight against.
On Westmount I turned south again and jogged up to Chopin Dr. I began to wonder what the best way to get up to Fischer Hallman was - through the woods (possibly quite muddy) or up Victoria (possibly quite a tiring uphill struggle in the rain). I felt uncharacteristically uninclined to go into the woods - it was as though my ability to withstand the wind and rain was somehow reliant on my having a specific goal (top of the hill) rather than enjoyment of surroundings (through the woods). I felt somehow that only pavement could sustain me. And yet I dreaded an uphill battle. I began to feel uncertain of my goal and then I began to feel irritated and uncomfortable with the weather. I rolled around the mall and into the entry to the woods, feeling more and more uncomfortable.
I made the quick decision to stick with my goal and turned left down the path that leads to Victoria St. My calm returned, and then my joy. It felt to me in that moment that my calm was related to my commitment to a goal - that as soon as I'd focused specifically on enjoying myself, I began to enjoy myself much less.
It felt good and right to be on the path heading south. It followed a steam that had been paved many years ago to form a downward sloping aquaduct, and, in the rain, the muddy water was rushing and swishing along uniformly, like the water in a splash park ride, taking the slight bends and twists of the duct in a body, up the sides and then back down again, in a race to the south. I flew along the path at what felt like the exact speed of the water, feeling myself move with it, slide with it, rush with it, curve along with it, race with it in the rain and the wind, with the colourful hedgerow whipping along the side of my vision, and the big park sky opening up ahead, high and grey.
Turning west on Victoria, I discovered the hill was not so big as I'd imagined, and began to climb. I needed to put in a steady effort and a firm mental concentration, as the wind was strong, I was becoming cold and more wet, and was about to leave my zone. Crossing Fischer Hallman, the ground leveled out, the wind dropped, and everything became still, as if I had arrived where I wanted to be, and could now quietly, carefully, slowly inspect every part of it.
I followed Victoria until the road curved and dipped down to Eastforest Park. At this point I stopped, having come nearly to my goal. If it had been sunny and cool, I would have tried to go further, but I had no more motivation in the rain. I enjoyed the view, the swoop of the road into the hilly distance.
Once I turned around, I began to look around carefully at the trees, signs and my own mind. I turned north down Fischer Hallman and into Monach Woods. I stood on the bridge, watching the stream flow beneath, bubbling rising and floating on the dusky surface, water dripping from the high trees all around, wet pale green everywhere. I was feeling colder. I walked for a while in the woods, watching the water, until I realized I was waiting to feel uncomfortably cold before I could leave. I decided to leave before that happened, and pedaled comfortably down the trail back to the mall. At the mall, I readjusted my pauncho until I felt as cozy as possible, given how wet I had become, and then made my way back to Gzowski Park, on Chopin Dr.
In the park, I got off my bike and walked slowly. The rain seemed to fall more softly, and the pale morning light settled onto the branches of young trees. I smelled fresh air and damp ground. Birds were calling out in the trees, and far away across the park, a massive turkey vulture was swooping against the clouds. As I watched, he came closer and closer, tilting left and right on the air currents, until he soared directly above me, and I tilted my head back to see his dark profile against the grey and white sky. A blue jay, a flit of blue and white in the trees, screamed. The green lawns fell away down the hill to the south, under a wide open sky of thick clouds. My face and my mittens were damp.
I started pedaling again back at Gage. In Timm Park, a very tall popular was shaking yellow in the grey light, tossing up high in the wind. Dark boughs danced next to it on great, tall pines, and the park was a quiet, empty place of green and shimmer. I took Gage all the way around the church, on the little swooping corner road, which, if I kept going straight at the curve, would take me to Tom's house (I remembered that warm, golden, late summer day, and my heart made itself known to me). Looking right off the curve, I saw the lovely lost corner by the stream where I starting reading Remembrance of Things Past on the early days of my holiday, when Autumn still felt like a dreamy summer.
I went home through Cherry Park, growing more enamored of being cold and damp, feeling more alive by the moment, speculating that I was made for such climates as this, imagining Scottish moors, comparing this moment to July, feeling like a foreigner in a land where those who love the cold thrive, but popular opinion suggests that loving the heat is more sane. Ah well! It is something to feel a spark of damp, wild, joy on these blustery days when other people tell each other, "The weather is terrible! I guess fall is finally here! Oh well ..."
It wasn't very cold, just blustery and raining steadily. I put on my pauncho right away. The cemetery was dull and shining at the same time, in parts, with russets and burnished yellows and damp greens, the comfortable brooding dark blue green of spruces in a line. Looking into the spruces, between their wide boughs, at the wet brown trunks where their limbs met their bodies, I thought of all the thousands of things I can look at during the days of my life, and how looking at those things makes up my mind, and how I look at so many, many things, when I could just look at a few, a few things like this wet tree trunk, a little damp cavern in the boughs, safe for being real, not for being comfortable. I could look only a things that grow from the ground, things that stand in the weather, and make my mind this way.
I pedaled up to the hospital and then down Glasgow as the cars rushed past me in the spray. South on Belmont, west on Gage, past a garden of wildflowers interspersed with stones outside a monolithic warehouse. Goldenroad, purple asters, little white flowers. It was raining harder and I was becoming damp in my pauncho. When I saw these wildflowers in the rain, I thought to myself, this is something meaningful I won't forget - but I forget now why. Yet the rain does now seem very important, - not the rain, exactly, but the way the light shone through it, dull and subtle and wild.
The wind was coming out of the west down Gage and it became tiring. I felt set on my goal for the day, the height of Victoria St just past Fischer Hallman. Rain, wind, tiredness and growing dampness were my environment, my skin, my surroundings, not something to fight against.
On Westmount I turned south again and jogged up to Chopin Dr. I began to wonder what the best way to get up to Fischer Hallman was - through the woods (possibly quite muddy) or up Victoria (possibly quite a tiring uphill struggle in the rain). I felt uncharacteristically uninclined to go into the woods - it was as though my ability to withstand the wind and rain was somehow reliant on my having a specific goal (top of the hill) rather than enjoyment of surroundings (through the woods). I felt somehow that only pavement could sustain me. And yet I dreaded an uphill battle. I began to feel uncertain of my goal and then I began to feel irritated and uncomfortable with the weather. I rolled around the mall and into the entry to the woods, feeling more and more uncomfortable.
I made the quick decision to stick with my goal and turned left down the path that leads to Victoria St. My calm returned, and then my joy. It felt to me in that moment that my calm was related to my commitment to a goal - that as soon as I'd focused specifically on enjoying myself, I began to enjoy myself much less.
It felt good and right to be on the path heading south. It followed a steam that had been paved many years ago to form a downward sloping aquaduct, and, in the rain, the muddy water was rushing and swishing along uniformly, like the water in a splash park ride, taking the slight bends and twists of the duct in a body, up the sides and then back down again, in a race to the south. I flew along the path at what felt like the exact speed of the water, feeling myself move with it, slide with it, rush with it, curve along with it, race with it in the rain and the wind, with the colourful hedgerow whipping along the side of my vision, and the big park sky opening up ahead, high and grey.
Turning west on Victoria, I discovered the hill was not so big as I'd imagined, and began to climb. I needed to put in a steady effort and a firm mental concentration, as the wind was strong, I was becoming cold and more wet, and was about to leave my zone. Crossing Fischer Hallman, the ground leveled out, the wind dropped, and everything became still, as if I had arrived where I wanted to be, and could now quietly, carefully, slowly inspect every part of it.
I followed Victoria until the road curved and dipped down to Eastforest Park. At this point I stopped, having come nearly to my goal. If it had been sunny and cool, I would have tried to go further, but I had no more motivation in the rain. I enjoyed the view, the swoop of the road into the hilly distance.
Once I turned around, I began to look around carefully at the trees, signs and my own mind. I turned north down Fischer Hallman and into Monach Woods. I stood on the bridge, watching the stream flow beneath, bubbling rising and floating on the dusky surface, water dripping from the high trees all around, wet pale green everywhere. I was feeling colder. I walked for a while in the woods, watching the water, until I realized I was waiting to feel uncomfortably cold before I could leave. I decided to leave before that happened, and pedaled comfortably down the trail back to the mall. At the mall, I readjusted my pauncho until I felt as cozy as possible, given how wet I had become, and then made my way back to Gzowski Park, on Chopin Dr.
In the park, I got off my bike and walked slowly. The rain seemed to fall more softly, and the pale morning light settled onto the branches of young trees. I smelled fresh air and damp ground. Birds were calling out in the trees, and far away across the park, a massive turkey vulture was swooping against the clouds. As I watched, he came closer and closer, tilting left and right on the air currents, until he soared directly above me, and I tilted my head back to see his dark profile against the grey and white sky. A blue jay, a flit of blue and white in the trees, screamed. The green lawns fell away down the hill to the south, under a wide open sky of thick clouds. My face and my mittens were damp.
I started pedaling again back at Gage. In Timm Park, a very tall popular was shaking yellow in the grey light, tossing up high in the wind. Dark boughs danced next to it on great, tall pines, and the park was a quiet, empty place of green and shimmer. I took Gage all the way around the church, on the little swooping corner road, which, if I kept going straight at the curve, would take me to Tom's house (I remembered that warm, golden, late summer day, and my heart made itself known to me). Looking right off the curve, I saw the lovely lost corner by the stream where I starting reading Remembrance of Things Past on the early days of my holiday, when Autumn still felt like a dreamy summer.
I went home through Cherry Park, growing more enamored of being cold and damp, feeling more alive by the moment, speculating that I was made for such climates as this, imagining Scottish moors, comparing this moment to July, feeling like a foreigner in a land where those who love the cold thrive, but popular opinion suggests that loving the heat is more sane. Ah well! It is something to feel a spark of damp, wild, joy on these blustery days when other people tell each other, "The weather is terrible! I guess fall is finally here! Oh well ..."
Monday, October 10, 2011
Laurel Creek to Sugar Bush Park, October 11, 2011
The next day I was still thinking about Erbsville and decided to see how far I could get towards it. I wasn't thinking of it as a distance challenge, so much as I knew that every point further would reacquaint me with once familiar scenes, even more enjoyable in the light of autumn sunshine.
I went directly to Columbia Lake, enjoying every turn of my wheels. My mind was steady, and if it was a little distracted, it was distracted by and into emptiness, which is a form of being settled, although not the deepest form. As I came through the narrow hedgerow entrance to the back fields, past the lake, I remembered that during my first trip through here at the beginning of this season (a fast dash in a new territory), I had seen a board swing on a tree overlooking a stream just to the west of this very path. I had meant to stop and explore this spot all summer, but the time hadn't yet been right.
It was a brilliant day, a slow and quiet one, and suddenly I discovered that it might not be a day for exploration so much as for contemplation, and that seemed right. I pulled onto the narrow dirt path surrounded by thick tufts of wild green grass, and left my bike there. I followed the little loamy, hilly path along the side of the stream bed and came to an open space under a spreading willow. The little swing was tied to a branch running along side the stream, and I sat down and watched the bubbling water. The banks on the opposite side were high with grass, and beyond them I could see the pale blue of the lower sky. After a while I climbed into the many low limbs of the willow and looked out of over cornfields, a colourful woodlot dividing them, protecting the little stream all the way to Laurel Creek Conservation Area. The slight mistiness or dustiness of the horizon, the yellow of the fields, the hum of the morning. Freedom is somewhere out there, in the dust or mist. Freedom is sitting here, looking for itself, finding itself, quietly. I listened to birds warbling softly, and the tingle of leaves falling, and the hum of the powerlines nearby.
I took a picture and sent it to my mother, because I knew she would appreciate the charm of this spot. I read for a little while down at the bank of the stream, and watched a Shepherd dog come down and wade in the water near by, then shake off and return to the path. I began to wonder what effect it might have on me to sit under the humming electric lines for so long, and suddenly this charming spot felt a little strange, as though occupied by a mysterious or dangerous or uncertain force, like a beautiful old sunny apartment next to a clinking factory sending out strange odours. I decided to carry on with my trip.
I came up onto the main path again and followed it a little further to the edge of a cedar wood alongside the stream. Crouching down and entering into this dim and burnished space, I was delighted to see another swing. The woods are filled with lovely human surprises, artifacts of beings and doings. I read a little while, and explored a little, admiring bright green moss on an eye level fallen tree branch, and then carried on my way.
I decided to scrap the plan of trying to get any further west and just come up around Bearinger. I felt happy that this had always been the further point of my journeys, a dangerous ground, and now it was familiar and comfortable. I decided to enjoy that feeling today, instead of trying to go further. I stopped in the shade of an old tree halfway up the hill, between the road and the cornfields, and had some water, and looked at my map and felt burstingly happy and filled with bright light. I turned north east and ventured into the unexplored suburbs via Toll Gate Blvd, feeling that familiar thrill of fear in my body at an unknown path. I slowed my mind, became ordinary, and trusted the map. Coming out onto Glen Forest, I experienced a moment of disorientation, knowing that I knew where I was, and yet not recognizing. And again, everything shifted and it was familiar again. I was still holding on to trust, the reliability of roads to return to their usual places after the surreal dances they would do in my mind.
I took the bikepath east through the school yard, past the mysterious yellow woods, and turned at the last minute northeast on Parkside, inspired in a flash of cool wind and sun to see if I could make it out to Benjamin Rd. I pushed with strength and comfort, steady willingness of body and mind, out to and then north on Weber, all the way to the lights at the top of the small hill from the top of which you can look down at see the confields peeking out around the corner of the bush to the east, the Best Western and the outlet mall to the west.
Just to look at these fields, slightly blue and misty, filled with light and space instead of concrete and movement, like what follows when the world as you know it comes to an end, and you realize it is just something so completely different and wonderful as to be incomparable with what you currently experience. Just to look at these fields, in the distance, to be freedom recognizing freedom, to feel something disapear from your mind, to feel nothing replace it, to feel the health return to your bones, to feel air return to your lungs, to feel silence return to your ears and yet within that silence, the natural and obscured answers to simple questions, which you could never hear in the din of the city. Just to look and then I turned around, feeling that it was enough, that fear kept me at this line, and that I was committed, since Riverbend Drive, to never push against fear, but rather, delight in experience.
I came back down Weber all the way to Sugar Bush Park. I was feeling a little tired from sun and exposure, and I also wanted to really sit and read for a while, and this dimly, greenly, sunlit woods was the perfect place arriving at the perfect time. The trees in Sugar Bush Park are magnificently high, so that you find yourself in a great green hall, tiny maple trees covering the floor with a gentle, whispering green carpet, with deep rich brown paths weaving through it. I found a comfortable spot at the base of a tree and settled myself.
I looked at my phone and my mother had sent me a reply to the picture I sent her.
"I should have named you Joy :D"
it read, and I cried, and realized that I was Joy, and always had been, but only now could see it, in this golden green moment under the trees.
My identity is re-written, by my mother, by the trees, by the sunlight, by autumn, by bicycles, by books, by breath. Now I am, can be, in this green space, that which I have loved and dreamed of for so long.
I will return to the city, attend a Thanksgiving dinner, experience anxiety, experience tiredness, go to the house of someone I care for and feel invisible to him, wonder if love makes sense, enjoy a quiet moment with a friend while she eats turkey at 10 pm and I lie on the couch, and then fall asleep, and things will return almost but not quite to ordinary.
I went directly to Columbia Lake, enjoying every turn of my wheels. My mind was steady, and if it was a little distracted, it was distracted by and into emptiness, which is a form of being settled, although not the deepest form. As I came through the narrow hedgerow entrance to the back fields, past the lake, I remembered that during my first trip through here at the beginning of this season (a fast dash in a new territory), I had seen a board swing on a tree overlooking a stream just to the west of this very path. I had meant to stop and explore this spot all summer, but the time hadn't yet been right.
It was a brilliant day, a slow and quiet one, and suddenly I discovered that it might not be a day for exploration so much as for contemplation, and that seemed right. I pulled onto the narrow dirt path surrounded by thick tufts of wild green grass, and left my bike there. I followed the little loamy, hilly path along the side of the stream bed and came to an open space under a spreading willow. The little swing was tied to a branch running along side the stream, and I sat down and watched the bubbling water. The banks on the opposite side were high with grass, and beyond them I could see the pale blue of the lower sky. After a while I climbed into the many low limbs of the willow and looked out of over cornfields, a colourful woodlot dividing them, protecting the little stream all the way to Laurel Creek Conservation Area. The slight mistiness or dustiness of the horizon, the yellow of the fields, the hum of the morning. Freedom is somewhere out there, in the dust or mist. Freedom is sitting here, looking for itself, finding itself, quietly. I listened to birds warbling softly, and the tingle of leaves falling, and the hum of the powerlines nearby.
I took a picture and sent it to my mother, because I knew she would appreciate the charm of this spot. I read for a little while down at the bank of the stream, and watched a Shepherd dog come down and wade in the water near by, then shake off and return to the path. I began to wonder what effect it might have on me to sit under the humming electric lines for so long, and suddenly this charming spot felt a little strange, as though occupied by a mysterious or dangerous or uncertain force, like a beautiful old sunny apartment next to a clinking factory sending out strange odours. I decided to carry on with my trip.
I came up onto the main path again and followed it a little further to the edge of a cedar wood alongside the stream. Crouching down and entering into this dim and burnished space, I was delighted to see another swing. The woods are filled with lovely human surprises, artifacts of beings and doings. I read a little while, and explored a little, admiring bright green moss on an eye level fallen tree branch, and then carried on my way.
I decided to scrap the plan of trying to get any further west and just come up around Bearinger. I felt happy that this had always been the further point of my journeys, a dangerous ground, and now it was familiar and comfortable. I decided to enjoy that feeling today, instead of trying to go further. I stopped in the shade of an old tree halfway up the hill, between the road and the cornfields, and had some water, and looked at my map and felt burstingly happy and filled with bright light. I turned north east and ventured into the unexplored suburbs via Toll Gate Blvd, feeling that familiar thrill of fear in my body at an unknown path. I slowed my mind, became ordinary, and trusted the map. Coming out onto Glen Forest, I experienced a moment of disorientation, knowing that I knew where I was, and yet not recognizing. And again, everything shifted and it was familiar again. I was still holding on to trust, the reliability of roads to return to their usual places after the surreal dances they would do in my mind.
I took the bikepath east through the school yard, past the mysterious yellow woods, and turned at the last minute northeast on Parkside, inspired in a flash of cool wind and sun to see if I could make it out to Benjamin Rd. I pushed with strength and comfort, steady willingness of body and mind, out to and then north on Weber, all the way to the lights at the top of the small hill from the top of which you can look down at see the confields peeking out around the corner of the bush to the east, the Best Western and the outlet mall to the west.
Just to look at these fields, slightly blue and misty, filled with light and space instead of concrete and movement, like what follows when the world as you know it comes to an end, and you realize it is just something so completely different and wonderful as to be incomparable with what you currently experience. Just to look at these fields, in the distance, to be freedom recognizing freedom, to feel something disapear from your mind, to feel nothing replace it, to feel the health return to your bones, to feel air return to your lungs, to feel silence return to your ears and yet within that silence, the natural and obscured answers to simple questions, which you could never hear in the din of the city. Just to look and then I turned around, feeling that it was enough, that fear kept me at this line, and that I was committed, since Riverbend Drive, to never push against fear, but rather, delight in experience.
I came back down Weber all the way to Sugar Bush Park. I was feeling a little tired from sun and exposure, and I also wanted to really sit and read for a while, and this dimly, greenly, sunlit woods was the perfect place arriving at the perfect time. The trees in Sugar Bush Park are magnificently high, so that you find yourself in a great green hall, tiny maple trees covering the floor with a gentle, whispering green carpet, with deep rich brown paths weaving through it. I found a comfortable spot at the base of a tree and settled myself.
I looked at my phone and my mother had sent me a reply to the picture I sent her.
"I should have named you Joy :D"
it read, and I cried, and realized that I was Joy, and always had been, but only now could see it, in this golden green moment under the trees.
My identity is re-written, by my mother, by the trees, by the sunlight, by autumn, by bicycles, by books, by breath. Now I am, can be, in this green space, that which I have loved and dreamed of for so long.
I will return to the city, attend a Thanksgiving dinner, experience anxiety, experience tiredness, go to the house of someone I care for and feel invisible to him, wonder if love makes sense, enjoy a quiet moment with a friend while she eats turkey at 10 pm and I lie on the couch, and then fall asleep, and things will return almost but not quite to ordinary.
Ira Needles, Keats Way and Clair Lake Park, October 9, 2011
On Saturday morning I went directly up Erb St to Ira Needles Blvd. I hadn't been that direction since last year. The hill was as difficult as I remember, but I didn't remember how far I could see from the top of the hill. I could see all the way to Bearinger Rd. This felt so strange to me.
Things had changed at Ira Needles and Erb. New condos were being built on the south east corner, and a new box store was fully grown on the south west. Past it, the high, wide hill leading to the dump was a free and open as always. To the north, past the stores, the rising fields of corn still lay open against a background of red and yellow trees and big sky.
Inhale. At the end of the universe, where the city stops, where I can breathe, where wild thoughts have room to fly without crashing, wheren fear empties into freedom and then returns again, fills and empties. I turned north up Ira Needles and followed the wide, curving bikepath. I had decided to go all the way around to Keats Way. I wasn't able to do this last year - I was only able to go part of the way down Ira Needles, and then turn around.
It was longer than I expected. I asked an older woman, walking towards me along the path, if Keats Way was ahead, even though that I knew that it was. She told me it was at the next lights. I feel safe when I ask for directions. They are even safer than a map. This is someone's most ordinary space, their intimate neighborhood.
As the path curved and the lights didn't appear, I began to tighten and then to repeat the woman's words: "Keats Way is at the lights". I was coming up to a pond on my left and everything felt much more open and rural than I remember from my travels up here years ago. I couldn't locate the co-op which I had used to visit. In a moment everything was strange and I felt disoriented, afraid. I continued to repeat "Keats Way is at the next lights", knowing the lights must appear. I was on the very edge of the turn, looking into a colourful forest, the road going right through it, amazed at the abundance of leaves and sky, the feeling of being so far from the city, afraid to be so far, grateful to be among trees, filled with tension.
I thought to myself, imagine you are on the train, and the world in colour is slipping past, while you watch, your mind has let go, you have given over to movement towards your destination. No will, just waiting, watching. My mind emptied into the circles my legs were making, the quality of the air, and the colours of the big gathering of trees ahead.
The tension in my body hummed under the emptiness of mind, building as the scenery became more unfamiliar to me, particularly so because I expected to recognize it. As it sharpened, in my belly, my shoulders and then spiking into my brain, I made hasty plans to retreat back down Old Erbsville Rd, and then scared myself thinking I would find it also too unfamiliar. I told myself that I must continue to empty my mind and move forward, that this mind and body motion were my salvation and my sanity, my peace of mind, my reality. And then I recognized where I was, as it sometimes happens, when a landscape re-arranges itself to fit a memory - at the joining between the Erbsville Road and Ira Needles. Then I knew I must be close to Keats Way, and then, up ahead through the trees, I saw the lights.
I knew I wouldn't go further west or north today, although my imagination was delighting at what lay within and beyond the colourful west woods, and my memory took me north down Erbsville Road to the town of Erbsville, to Conservation Drive, to the farmer's fields and little woodlots beyond, golden in my memories of late summer evenings of over 10 years ago. Instead, I pedaled more slowly and breathed in the expanded moment.
Turning down onto Keats Way, I swiveled my head to watch the big tree lot rear up high against the sky, and then I let go and flew down the hill, stopping once to admire the view down a narrow path to the north, following under the power lines for miles, imagining where it came out on Columbia, in that little park where I'd enjoyed the wildflowers after my trip around Bearinger. I turned off Keats Way into Mary Johnston Park, following the bikepath down through the woods where the dirt hills under the trees have been built up into waves for bike tricks. I remembered a day last year, or maybe the year before, where I'd been biking down this path, out in the open section of it, under a wild blue sky, and a very low flying bi-plane had come up so suddenly and violently I was thrilled to my bones, afraid and joyful all at once. I smiled with this sparking memory, feeling that same blast echoing today in my body, the smile a living ritual of remembrance.
Coming out onto Fischer Hallman, I made my way through the suburbs to Clair Lake Park. Instead of going around to the main section of the park, I came down the hill by the school, on the south side, into a little clump of sumacs, buckthorn bushes and old willow trees about 5 metres thick by the lake's edge. In this very quiet and solitary world of small yellow leaves against the sky, trailing grape vines, water like a rippled mirror, ducks, and deep sun on grass,I spent the rest of my morning reading, grieving, meditating, exploring, dreaming, eating and finally, finally, being. The sun was atoning in gentle gold for summer's fire, and prolonging summer dreams more real than those dreamed in July. You can live a lifetime, remembering something that you loved and that loved you, and not quite catching it, and then right before the end, it flashes for a time, that golden moment where you have always existed, and here it is today, a perfect summer day in October. I closed my eyes and faced into the sun, under the lattice of sumac and the grapevines bobbing in the wind.
The week having caught up with me, I left the woods at 12:30 and went to the grocery store, and then home, to put away my groceries and prepare my home for another week.
Things had changed at Ira Needles and Erb. New condos were being built on the south east corner, and a new box store was fully grown on the south west. Past it, the high, wide hill leading to the dump was a free and open as always. To the north, past the stores, the rising fields of corn still lay open against a background of red and yellow trees and big sky.
Inhale. At the end of the universe, where the city stops, where I can breathe, where wild thoughts have room to fly without crashing, wheren fear empties into freedom and then returns again, fills and empties. I turned north up Ira Needles and followed the wide, curving bikepath. I had decided to go all the way around to Keats Way. I wasn't able to do this last year - I was only able to go part of the way down Ira Needles, and then turn around.
It was longer than I expected. I asked an older woman, walking towards me along the path, if Keats Way was ahead, even though that I knew that it was. She told me it was at the next lights. I feel safe when I ask for directions. They are even safer than a map. This is someone's most ordinary space, their intimate neighborhood.
As the path curved and the lights didn't appear, I began to tighten and then to repeat the woman's words: "Keats Way is at the lights". I was coming up to a pond on my left and everything felt much more open and rural than I remember from my travels up here years ago. I couldn't locate the co-op which I had used to visit. In a moment everything was strange and I felt disoriented, afraid. I continued to repeat "Keats Way is at the next lights", knowing the lights must appear. I was on the very edge of the turn, looking into a colourful forest, the road going right through it, amazed at the abundance of leaves and sky, the feeling of being so far from the city, afraid to be so far, grateful to be among trees, filled with tension.
I thought to myself, imagine you are on the train, and the world in colour is slipping past, while you watch, your mind has let go, you have given over to movement towards your destination. No will, just waiting, watching. My mind emptied into the circles my legs were making, the quality of the air, and the colours of the big gathering of trees ahead.
The tension in my body hummed under the emptiness of mind, building as the scenery became more unfamiliar to me, particularly so because I expected to recognize it. As it sharpened, in my belly, my shoulders and then spiking into my brain, I made hasty plans to retreat back down Old Erbsville Rd, and then scared myself thinking I would find it also too unfamiliar. I told myself that I must continue to empty my mind and move forward, that this mind and body motion were my salvation and my sanity, my peace of mind, my reality. And then I recognized where I was, as it sometimes happens, when a landscape re-arranges itself to fit a memory - at the joining between the Erbsville Road and Ira Needles. Then I knew I must be close to Keats Way, and then, up ahead through the trees, I saw the lights.
I knew I wouldn't go further west or north today, although my imagination was delighting at what lay within and beyond the colourful west woods, and my memory took me north down Erbsville Road to the town of Erbsville, to Conservation Drive, to the farmer's fields and little woodlots beyond, golden in my memories of late summer evenings of over 10 years ago. Instead, I pedaled more slowly and breathed in the expanded moment.
Turning down onto Keats Way, I swiveled my head to watch the big tree lot rear up high against the sky, and then I let go and flew down the hill, stopping once to admire the view down a narrow path to the north, following under the power lines for miles, imagining where it came out on Columbia, in that little park where I'd enjoyed the wildflowers after my trip around Bearinger. I turned off Keats Way into Mary Johnston Park, following the bikepath down through the woods where the dirt hills under the trees have been built up into waves for bike tricks. I remembered a day last year, or maybe the year before, where I'd been biking down this path, out in the open section of it, under a wild blue sky, and a very low flying bi-plane had come up so suddenly and violently I was thrilled to my bones, afraid and joyful all at once. I smiled with this sparking memory, feeling that same blast echoing today in my body, the smile a living ritual of remembrance.
Coming out onto Fischer Hallman, I made my way through the suburbs to Clair Lake Park. Instead of going around to the main section of the park, I came down the hill by the school, on the south side, into a little clump of sumacs, buckthorn bushes and old willow trees about 5 metres thick by the lake's edge. In this very quiet and solitary world of small yellow leaves against the sky, trailing grape vines, water like a rippled mirror, ducks, and deep sun on grass,I spent the rest of my morning reading, grieving, meditating, exploring, dreaming, eating and finally, finally, being. The sun was atoning in gentle gold for summer's fire, and prolonging summer dreams more real than those dreamed in July. You can live a lifetime, remembering something that you loved and that loved you, and not quite catching it, and then right before the end, it flashes for a time, that golden moment where you have always existed, and here it is today, a perfect summer day in October. I closed my eyes and faced into the sun, under the lattice of sumac and the grapevines bobbing in the wind.
The week having caught up with me, I left the woods at 12:30 and went to the grocery store, and then home, to put away my groceries and prepare my home for another week.
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