It was on the final, fourth day of the extended weekend that we decided to take a walk. Not a walk to the post office, or a walk to grab the milk, but a walk for walk’s sake. A walk to allow the soul to breathe, for the mind to think, for a gentle sense of quiet to suspend over us.
In the first five kilometres, I was overcome by the urge to take pictures at almost any well-manicured garden and roadstop that I found pleasing to the eye, frequently stopping to note to Jonathan the dappled light on through the forest leaves, the bright yellows of marsh marigolds, the cute mannerisms of dogs splashing or bathing through shallow creeks. But as we rounded our eastward march north, following the Don River, I found myself transfixed in a haze. Each step was a drumbeat in a silent song, a melody unknown marching me forwards.
We stopped only as the river’s path forced us back westward, Jonathan noting the sadness of human-built rock walls stopping the river’s natural change of course, and how beautiful the river’s remaining walls of clay were. The river was massive, open, something you could swim across — or drown in. I found myself growing a respect for the beleaguered Don river, once a place nourishing turtles, fish, and wetlands, spoiled by industrial waste, settler-colonial planning, and now everyday sewage pumped into it. My city was a beautiful place — and also a site of quiet self-destruction.
We soon stumbled onto the York University Glendon campus, replete with modernist building of raw, industrial, simple geometries only of ninety and fourty-five degrees. We passed by with little sentimentality, only noting a small group of… students? Alumni? A set of friends, perhaps, all dressed in suits, around the same young adult age, laughing and talking to one another. Perhaps this was a reunion. After a kilometre or two more spent alongside the houses of the imminently wealthy, we re-entered the ravine pathway system, arriving finally at Alexander Muir Gardens.
“Man, I feel… settled somehow. Safe. Free,” I said to him.
“I know”, he said. “It’s how I make every one of my biggest decisions.”