On Mount Royal

Yesterday I took the train home from a few days in Montréal. I was pretty tired out from socializing past my bedtime, and I hadn’t been on the train in a while. Almost as soon as the train left the station, I was filled with a particular feeling I get whenever I travel by myself. It’s a feeling of melancholy, mixed with anticipation and a kind of self-congratulatory grit. It is really a very soundtracky sort of feeling.

Happily, my train car was sparsely booked and I had a two-seat row to myself. So I spread out my stuff, took off my shoes, and went to work on a couple of bagels with cheese and pâté that I had brought along for my dinner. And I jacked in to my iPod and let the shuffle gods do their thing.

They were in a good mood: the first song up, as the train chugged along through the burbs, was so appropriate as to be literal: the Bicycles’ “Gotta Get Out”. After that came a stream of upbeat, bagel-eating numbers from the New Pornographers, the Be Good Tanyas, and the Fembots, who are surprisingly appropriate for picking sesame seeds out of your teeth.

When the bagels were gone, I reorganized myself and curled my legs up on the adjacent seat. Night had fallen by this time, and because it was so brightly lit inside the train car, there was nothing to see through the window but pitch black dotted with white lights and smeared with the occasional orange streak of highway. I closed my eyes and, with the cooperation of the shuffle gods (who obligingly brought things down a few notches) I pretty soon drifted into a lovely little fugue state.

After a time, another feeling began to grow on me. This time, I felt that we were pulling uphill, sort of like the train had just taken off from a runway, but more like the tracks began to climb sharply, because this was a train that was going up, up, up to a high place; a high place that was a sanctuary, where it was clean and snowy, secret and sheltered, where we could all be alone but still safely together. While this feeling grew on me, I had a very strong sense memory of the smell of a wood fire blazing out of doors on a cold, clear night. Sparks from this fire fly up into the sky, and some of them become stars.

The song that was playing was “Birds and Bees” by Snailhouse. It is really a beautiful song, and it struck in me a rich chord made out of all the notes of sweetness, loneliness, hope, memory, wonder and despair that I feel when I am traveling alone, and especially when I am coming home. If it helps, I feel the same way when I am walking in a pine forest or hiking the headlands in winter, places that remind me of being a singularity, alone in a vast, sparkling field of singularities.

I always have this feeling when I have been away. Now I am coming back to you changed. You may even notice in me a lingering shade, as if, however briefly, I truly did go to the mountain.

this will be the year

this will be the year a gene is found for blindness
this will be the year scorsese gets an oscar
this will be the year i finally sell the honda
this will be the year the plumbing starts to crumble
this will be the year i learn to read the recipe
this will be the year the idol will be asian
this will be the year a monsoon hits new england
this will be the year the neighbours build a garage
this will be the year i conquer sudden panic
this will be the year the show comes in on budget
this will be the year i start writing in c sharp
this will be the year america goes critical
this will be the year my brother gets his swing back
this will be the year of full retaliation

a meteor lands
i step off the curb
d turns to e
sing the chorus!
this will be the year

Community Sled

Back in Halifax, I used to walk the dog every morning on Citadel Hill. In the winter, if the snow was happening, I would take along a wee inflatable luge for a couple of high-speed runs down the south-west face. What a blast! It was impossible to be in a bad mood after starting the day ripping down a cold white hill.

Here in Toronto, my local dog park is also sled-worthy. In contrast to the Citadel, Bickford Park is an actual pit, the sunken bed of the now-underground Garrison Creek that runs through west-central Toronto. You slide down the sides of the pit onto the flat bottom, while underneath gurgles a filthy spring that in humid weather gives the park its distinctive ass-like pong.

We did, finally, get some good snow two weeks ago, so I dragged the old wooden three-seater out to the park to have a go. This ancient piece of sleddery spent the summer hanging off the back fence. It's bleached and battered, and the reins have long ceased to function. At best, they are decorative, as much as a shaggy piece of yellow nylon cable can be. But, by golly, in the right circumstances, that thing can rip. It's heavy and straight and flat-bottomed. It's got ballast and straight-ahead drive, unlike those flimsy plastic dealies that are designed to start spinning and heave you out of them halfway down the hill.

So, anyway, I took this Volvo of sleds out a couple of times, and while I was at the hill, I noticed a number of neighbourhood kids trying to have a good time with pieces of cardboard. Since I don't use the sled that much, I thought, why not leave it in the park for everyone to use? I got out a Sharpie and wrote "COMMUNITY SLED" on the front curl, along with a few instructions. ("Use me, share me, leave me in the park!") I hooked the sled up onto the chainlink fence that surrounds the softball diamond and left the old gal there to her next appointment.

The next morning, the sled was gone. Of course it was gone! It's downtown Toronto. Who's going to leave a sled just sitting there, when it's way more fun to steal it or smash it? Ah, well. I marched the dog around the park anyway, and hey - I found the sled leaning up against a tree trunk! We had a couple of runs and then I left the sled up against the fence.

For the next two days, we came twice a day and always found the sled somewhere, hanging in there, clearly being used. But on the third day it was gone for good. Whether it had been dragged up an alley and set on fire, or shoved into oncoming traffic, or simply heaved into a dumpster by some zealous Parks employee, I'll never know. It was a good sled, though.

Now I have nothing to slide on. I may have to try out the cardboard. It doesn't slide very well, but at least nobody's going to steal it.