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11/14/2005: "Mounting Toronto"
This first Thursday in November, I meet Mitchell outside his Castleview apartment. I tell him that tonight we're walking for the Psychogeography Society.
He says, What's Pshychogeography?
It's forgetting, for the moment, that Thursday might mean something, that Starbucks sells the best coffee in town, that you have a time to wake up tomorrow. Instead, let's plow through piles of fallen leaves, announcing each step with a smunch.
Smunch. Smunch. Smunch. Smunch.
Our smunching leads us to the crest of a hill, and since we have yet to read Shawn's piece in The Eye, we don't yet register this as the ancient shoreline of Lake Iroquois. Instead, we say what a big hill, let's follow it for a while. This leads us to what even a Psychogeographer knows to be the vrooming traffic of Bathurst Street. And as we wait for a break to cross, we ridicule the passing cars for their topographical ignorance. Way to not notice the hill, car.
We continue west, along streets called Hocken and Benson, to admire door knockers and wooden-slat fencing. And in honour of Mitchell's native Montreal, we turn on Westmount, passing a yard laced in yellow caution tape backdropped by a house with darkened windows. Only after we stop do the woeful sounds of some Jack Johnson song grow coherent. This gets my vote for the most subtly spooky Halloween house in the city.
We take the hill south, then cut east on Davenport, where the northside sidewalk slopes and the homes have driveways that ramp at a considerable angle; angled to the point where on one step I lose my balance and must take to the road.
Up to our left is a retaining wall, and behind that a school on a plateau. We're curious about the access road which extends from the western-most corner with Dovercourt to the eastern-most corner of the plateau. It seems that the architects tried to build as gradual a slope as possible, but still it's especially steep. When I point this out to Mitchell, he says they should've made a cutback to decrease the slope. But then we decide that cars couldn't turn that cutback, but they can make this rise. Rather than check it out ourselves, we decide to keep walking. Like a lot of things in Torontoto, it's cars in, people out.
