Date
Tue June 15, 2010
The Topography from Here
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Lake, my pretty name
Submitted by amy on February 16, 2010 - 12:37pm
by rob mclennan This article is a part of rob's personal essay series on Toronto, following The CN Tower.
How appropriate to begin this book on the water, looping to return to where her Toronto begins, where the city started. Rising up from the water, starting there and working slowly back. As Patricia McHugh wrote in the second edition of her Toronto Architecture: A City Guide (1989): “This is where the city began. The Indian ‘place [of] trees [and] water’[…]” Named after the native word “ontario,” but disagreements on who spoke it, and what it meant, back and forth from the Huron, meaning “great lake,” to the Iroquois, meaning “beautiful lake” or “sparkling water.” First called by such by Europeans in 1641, and on maps as early as 1656, drawn in as “Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois” in the Relation des Jésuites (1662-1663).
Trees and water, and Captain John’s Harbour Boat Restaurant and Banquet Facilities at the lake’s end of Yonge Street where we threatened to dress up like pirates, and celebrate “international talk like a pirate day” in September. Her home underwater, when Front Street originally ran along water’s edge, building landfill up along Lakeshore south, the Leslie Street Spit, inventing street after street over parts that weren’t previously land. Even earlier, the water up to what now Davenport, the Scarborough Bluffs. As John Bentley Mays writes in his emerald city: Toronto Visited (1994):
The land and the lake, given similar names, this parcel of land where she lives belonging to both, if but one at a time. Where once lake now land, standing Ontario firm, upper Canada. Staking up from the shore. Loyalists, and shades of the War of 1812, what those south of the border called “Madison’s War,” after the single-minded President who had initiated such, despite the protests of much of the American population, with even a New England that nearly seceded to join us.
Rain. In mid-October, a haze over the upper stretches of skyscrapers. The dwindling tower, going slow fade to Canadian grey. Indistinguishable cloud cover. The whole city spreads to fade. She tweets a reference to rain, something she has to remember to adapt to, after her near-decade in Alberta. The night before, Lainna reading my Tarot, placing cards on her carpeted floor. What do I know about Tarot? More children in my future, she says, and a happiness to come beyond anything I’d imagined. A question at the end I have to ask, picking cards to read my answer. I don’t tell her what my question is, but when she says yes, she catches my eye and smiles. Leans over and kisses me, slow. Which, by itself, is the correct answer. Eventually I compose a series of poems on that lake outside her condo window, but nothing, as yet, on the tower on the alternate side, beyond her bedroom window.
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