Escape into city’s semi-wild side
In his Meditations in an Emergency, the great New York poet Frank O’Hara wrote, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
That line seems made for Toronto, where town and country meet throughout the city in ravines and along the waterfront. They are the defining, near-eternal feature of this city, yet one that remains aloof and not part of the lives of many people who live here.
A beautiful new book by Toronto photographer Robert Burley captures a lot of it. An Enduring Wilderness: Toronto’s Natural Parklands has more than 250 pages of photographs of the ravines and Lake Ontario shoreline, and has been launched in conjunction with a show containing some of the photos at the Aird Gallery, part of the Contact Photography Festival that runs through May.
It’s easy to become obsessed with ravines and buried creeks in this city once they capture your attention. They’re often hidden enough to create some mystery and are not just off the grid but they defy it, crossing the city’s right-angle obsessed streets as they please.
All great cities have good parks, but few cities enjoy the semi-wild spaces that Toronto has with its ravines that weave deep into it like arteries and capillaries. Burley’s photos of all of it are stunning and will surprise some people: this is Toronto? It’s evident that he did an incredible amount of walking to create this book and his pictures capture a vast geography, from Etobicoke Creek on the Mississauga border to the Rouge River where Toronto meets Pickering.
In his opening essay, Burley writes he was daunted at first by a project that would “explore and document the equivalent of approximately 30 Central Parks, many of which had been fragmented and interwoven into residential, industrial and high-density developments over an area of 630 square kilometres.”
He also quotes famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams, who said to try to represent such vast spaces is “the supreme test . . . leading to the supreme disappointment.” This book passes the test, though.
Burley went to places most people don’t go to get some of his shots, so even those who know the ravines well will see them from a new angle. His photos also show the variety of landscapes contained in Toronto: a fern gully along the Rouge, meadows in the Don Valley, vistas across the Humber Marsh, cathedral forests along the Humber and the edges of the Scarborough Bluffs that don’t seem quite real.
Throughout the book and at the gallery exhibition, there are aerial views of Toronto that show the ravines don’t exist in the city, but rather, the city exists in between the ravines, sometimes laid out on ridges that might contain just one cul-de-sac or apartment tower cluster in between clefts in the land.
Paging through, I recalled my first encounter with a Toronto ravine the day I arrived here 17 years ago. After moving into a Yonge and St. Clair apartment, I went for a late evening walk in my new neighbourhood. I had heard tell of Toronto ravines, but hadn’t seen one and, walking east on St. Clair, I was surprised to find one next door to me. Looking over the side of the bridge, into the dark Vale of Avoca at night, hearing the trees rustling, smelling the fecund spring dampness and sensing the mammoth space below me, I thought, “What is this place?”
That I didn’t know more about it seemed a failure of Canadian landscape education somehow, but I was hooked. After exploring them ever since, they’ve yet to exhaust themselves: there are more ravines to discover and another path to follow.
Throughout the book are essays by writerly ravine admirers such as Alissa York, George Elliott Clarke and Michael Mitchell. Toronto Poet Laureate Anne Michaels writes that in a city of millions, it’s possible to be alone in the ravines, and how the lake itself remains a constant presence against the relentless change of the city.
Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reminds us from concreteencased Black Creek that these waterways were here long before the city, and that her ancestors drank out of and travelled along them. The book ends with a short history of the ravines by Wayne Reeves, the city of Toronto’s chief museums curator, and a map and catalogue of the “environmentally significant areas” in the city.
Unlike many takes on the natural environment, Burley’s isn’t misanthropic. There is no regret, to flip O’Hara’s sentiment, that the city is nearby or that there are reminders of human life in the form of residential towers poking out of the tree canopy.
There are some who see the city as an intrusion, but Canada is a country with an abundance of humanfree landscape, so to begrudge the uniqueness of Toronto’s hybrid wild spaces seems oddly self-loathing.
People are part of the story here, and Burley includes photos of swimmers at Hanlan’s Point, a fisherman beneath Highway 401, a beach party with clandestine beers in an isolated spot under the Bluffs and a marathon making its way down Rosedale Valley.
Big full-colour photo books like this are expensive to produce and time- consuming efforts, but An Enduring Wilderness reveals a Toronto you’ll want to know better.
An Enduring Wilderness runs until May 26 at the Aird Gallery, 900 Bay St., with a talk at 1 p.m. on May 20. airdgallery.org Shawn Micallef writes weekly about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef