Jogging into the past … and out of the pandemic

Travelling along these steep, twisting roads, I feel the heavy cloud of the coronavirus lifting

I live in a 100-year-old house in Toronto’s East End where four generations of my family have dwelled. I was 8 when I first stayed with my grandparents on a summer holiday, in these rooms where they brought up my mother’s little brother, the home where Ruth and I later raised our three children.

The memories inside these walls had been a joy for decades.

Then the pandemic shrunk the world. The views through bedroom windows of Norway maples I have watched for 50 years, the scrape of the sliding pocket door into the dining room, the smell of the fireplace where coal once helped heat rooms, were unconscious reminders that grew stale after I had huddled for weeks avoiding the virus. This refuge, once a comfort to return to, began to close in on me.

Then one morning I decided to jog through our old East End neighbourhood, and found a world alive with memories dormant for decades.

Out the front door, up the hill and down into the ravine at the top of Gainsborough Road. The taste of cooler air, the buzz of bugs, the trickling creek, the scrape of bushes on arms and legs summoned a time when I ran faster, before marriage, before kids.

My view of the intertwining streets and parks, back lanes and schoolyards rose up like something “half created, half perceived” as Wordsworth described it in his poem “Tintern Abbey,”

upon returning to a scene in nature visited in his younger days.

Running around St. John’s Norway Cemetery, I realized the winding trails past hills dotted with gravestones were as familiar to me as my peaceful thoughts about time and mortality when I was 40 years younger — the same joy of movement bringing body, mind and spirit together to replace fear with elation and gratitude.

Older memories of running through these familiar green spaces come rushing back … that time when the little storehouse for playground equipment was being built in Moncur Park at the end of our street. This curious (naughty) child dabbed a wet paint stick on a pile of bricks and was chased by a worker up an embankment. I was afraid to go into the park for weeks, convinced I had been fast enough to escape, not realizing he was just scaring me away.

Running in these fearful times, I am thankful for the network of parks and ravines and tree lots I have known most of my life. I am grateful city planners launched a campaign to save these protective green spaces after the monstrous flooding from Hurricane Hazel that killed 81 people in 1954.

Travelling along these steep, twisting roads I feel the heavy cloud of the coronavirus lifting, like the spirits of the dead passing by houses on All Saints’ Day.

On a trail into the woods by Lake Ontario I discover a hidden woodlot, jump a fence, lose my sense of direction and end up 4 kilometres west in a park I

have never seen.

This fearless-to-a-fault curiosity about unknown places was clear when, at 17, I stuck my thumb out on a QEW ramp in Mississauga and hitchhiked to Richmond, Va., during March Break.

At 19, I flew to London, hitchhiked to Athens, and then across Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

Jogging has renewed an awareness of how trapped I am in the city, how deeply I need to be alone in nature, away from cars, buildings, pavement, people.

By shutting off the world I was living in, the virus opened doors to my past — and future.

So what does my running revelation portend for the future?

I know I will be jogging along wider stretches of Lake Ontario and exploring other parts of the hidden forest city — High Park comes to mind — that I have known and loved all my life.

I hope for a return to camping trips in the wilderness with each of my three grown children, an experience — all alone with Dad — that fostered an intimacy and trust that could not have been achieved otherwise when they were two 7-year-olds and an 8-year-old.

Family glamping with Ruth and the kids will also be a postpandemic goal, with exciting possibilities on Lake Huron and in the Yukon and P.E.I., where our two sons live.

And the jogging and exploring on my own will not stop. I have always wanted to see the entire Niagara Escarpment.

I am so grateful my world grew bigger instead of smaller during this pandemic.

DREW PERKINS Running in these fearful times, John Robinson is thankful for the network of parks and ravines and tree lots he has known most of his life.

DREW PERKINS John Robinson, right, after his run and, left, as a boy with his grandfather, William Walsh, in front of the Toronto home where he and wife Ruth would raise their three kids.