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04/19/2005: "Toronto the Warm"
It’s warm out in Toronto now, so we’re all rediscovering the city. I didn’t really lose it though, I knew it all winter long, but there are the usual things to be said about spring, and the quite bearable lightness of wearing less bulky clothing.
Today I went for a bike ride downhill, towards the lake. Toronto has a general slope towards the lake, so it’s never trouble heading in that direction. I sped down Rosedale Valley Road, onto the Bayview Extension (I love the technicality of that street’s name) and down to the Portlands. Some guy was flying one of those huge kites that are almost like parachutes at Cherry Beach. It looked like fun, as the huge kite would drag him through the sand, but as I watched I realized that it probably got boring fast, and I decided that the big kite people are probably a little weird. Maybe they are like the Exxxtreme sports people, and to be avoided.
I continued on to the Leslie Street Spit. No more snow, though the ice and frozen toes of that snowshoeing night seem very recent. I rode out to the end – to Vicky Keith Point, named after the Toronto swimmer who finished a number of her lake crossing swims here. There is so much great rubble at the end, chunks of concrete and bricks. Somebody built a replica of the CN Tower out of the stuff. It looked good in the setting sun, with the real thing in the background.
I took these pictures with my camera phone, so they’re not so great. But they remind me so much of 1970s poleroids – that grainy crappy quality. It’s strange when bleeding edge technology goes so far into a new area, like tiny cameras, that the output is really “olden”, and sort of retrograde.
On Sunday Chris and I drove the Red Rocket out to Scarborough – nearly to Pickering – to the Highland Creek Sewage Plant – if you forget about the plant (which is easy) the area has some of the best bluffs around. No city in sight, soft grassy paths following the contours of the cliff edges, the curves of the beach 100 feet down below, and the ultra clean water, all blue and turquoise – you could see rocks and sand far out into the water. We laid in the soft grass for a while, with our heads jutting out over the cliff, looking down at the deserted beach. With the erosion, we were actually over air. It seemed safe enough. It reminded me of Nova Scotia at times, and those Irish cliffs that were in Ryan’s Daughter. We found a place where we could scramble down to the beach – there was a Toys R Us buggy in the water – I pulled it out and filled it with some driftwood.
We sat on the beach for a while – there’s the feeling of being watched, with cliffs all around. I felt like there were small faces peeking everywhere up above. It was like “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, but less Australian.
Last weekend, the first real warm day of the year, I rode up to North York, to Toronto’s very own Ski Hill. The slushy man made snow hadn’t melted yet, perhaps the only snow left in the city. I didn’t ride my bike down though. There is a good view of North York’s skyline from the top of the hill.
