O, Urban Hiking...

The kids have spent copious hours on the phone with friends in TO & negotiations with their Dad, so I went off to a tiny Chinese company that I do long distance through, which was actually in a very expensive office tower downtown, to pay the $18. I owed (isn't it cute, owing that little), but gave them $30., they don't have payment by Internet banking, so it's usually a cheque in the mail, but when I realized their address, why, that's a trip downtown... so I've been trying to get down there all week, but yesterday afternoon was finally gorgeous & sunny.

Downtown looks like downtown but is emptier than the downtowns of big megalopolises... I walked around, enjoying the downtowness, the buildings of every shape, size, colour, from old and tiny squashed inbetween to glittering glass stretching up to the sky, the flower beds of tamed nature, the tiny parkettes with their miniscule splice of nature so vastly different to the wilderness, the close crop of streets, endless cars & the anger of drivers, and wandered down to the water, by the Shaw Tower, the reclamation project a much larger slice of land now, smelled the salt air, watched freighters go by and sea planes land, pondered the lush North Shore, the clouds rushing over the mountains, thought about life and Vancouver and what I'm doing here and am I going to stay, or go, what's possible and impossible, and eventually meandered through a bunch of streets until I found a skytrain station and went home.

The wind was blowing the clouds over the mountains, I was glad that it would be clear enough to see the Solstice moon...

Despite my childhood in the wilderness, and even 20 years of living in the crowded downtown core, the heart of the inner city in Toronto hasn't dulled my love of the beauty of cities... I enjoy hiking the streets of any downtown... even the obnoxious smells of buses doesn't bother me, and as a transit rider I laud their great number going in every direction constantly. I gaze at the dressed-up business types in expensive suits and the hair-matted, clothing-soiled druggies, the young and the old, the energetic beautiful people and the tired grey people, feeling neither desire nor disdain nor pity for anyone, enjoying the mix of people, the flow of the movement of bodies and the various shimmers of the fabrics of clothing on the streets, enjoying being part of this fabulous and strange humanity... in my urban hikes, which are not shopping trips and which can be up to five hours straight, I don't stop at coffee shops, though I wish I did... I always feel it would be nice, to stop & write at oases, and then move on, but I don't, I can't, I'm either walking, or standing staring at something, the ship-heavy inlet of ocean, a flying buttress of architecture reaching upwards like Babel, a group of vibrantly red tulips each drizzled with perfect drops of rain if you look close enough, the madness of wind and clouds mirrored in glass towers, the way birds fly through this urban landscape, fluttering down for crumbs and scraps, nesting in the eaves of inexplicably white painted stone Churches... I'm a great wanderer of cities... need to wander in way more cities too...

(click on photo for its source url)