We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 118
SPRING 2009
ESSAY
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS
Broken Mouth: Offerings for the Don River, Toronto
Let us explore any stream, creek, lake, pond and rivulet in our home towns. Water in these places nurtures reveries and sustains our very existence.
Basia Irland, A Eulogy for Water1
On a Monday afternoon in early November my friend Barbara and I walk through Muir Gardens, a small formal park in mid-town Toronto. We’re grateful for the mild sun-streaked afternoon with a loveliness we can’t take for granted in Canada at this time of year. Beyond the gardens we follow a path into the ravine. It winds over roots and stones to dip close to a little watercourse. I step down to the water’s edge, and stand, watching it rush over and along the rocky-bottomed streambed. Listening.
Down here beside the water, the bushes near it green-leafed still, it might be summer, the cool sound a haven in August’s sticky heat. But the light’s too pale, and it falls through bare-branched trees. Barbara joins me and we stand silent for a while looking upstream. We see water catching light, scattering then pulling it back again. It’s rhythmic, like a dance. ‘You might say the water sparkles but really it’s more like a continuous and single vibration,’ Barbara says – and she’s right. I look at the stream, seeing it.
We stand there watching the shiver and quiver. We’re seized by the place and don’t want to move. Isn’t this lovely! one of us says more than once, and, How beautiful it is! the other replies – an inadequate call and response. In another culture, or even at another time in this culture, we might have known or found the right words to express our response to the stream. Perhaps we would have addressed it, giving thanks for its gifts. Poet Ted Hughes wrote ‘the river is a god,’ but direct address to parts of the world don’t come easy any longer. Or perhaps at all.
The forest floor above the bank is thick with mostly yellow leaves, the maples and beeches drawing strong vertical lines with trunks no longer veiled in understorey. Images of fairy forests hover in my mind, but only for a moment. This place is material, feeding several senses as well as our hearts and minds with its tangible being. The longer we stand there the more we seem to be looking at a river at the very beginning of the world, surrounded with clear light and air, pristine. From this river all rivers descend.
‘Where are we?’ I ask, breaking a silence. ‘Is this the Don?’ ‘Well yes,’ Barbara says, ‘it must be, or at least one of its tributaries. I used to play on the Don as a child. It runs by the house in Hog’s Hollow where I grew up, not far from here.’ How little this stream resembles the Don River further south where, shadowed by railway tracks and rivers of cars, it winds through a near waste of worn, and worn-out, land. The difference between here and there shows how we human beings have addressed the world through the last couple of centuries.2
The northern boundary of the Greater Toronto Bioregion – the most urbanised area in Canada – is the Oak Ridges Moraine, an irregular ridge of sand and gravel hills stretching one hundred and sixty kilometres from the Niagara Escarpment to Rice Lake. Created by the advance and retreat of glaciers some 12000 years ago, the Moraine contains the headwaters of sixty-five river systems, including thirty-five in the Greater Toronto Area. It is the source of potable water for many communities, as well as home to significant plants and animals. It is also contested land, eyed longingly by both the aggregate industry and developers.
The two branches of the Don River rise from the moraine and flow more or less south, gathering their tributary creeks and streams, to merge at the Forks of the Don, some eight kilometres from where the Keating Channel delivers it to Lake Ontario. From headwaters to lake the river travels thirty-eight kilometres, much of it through fragmented landscapes, some of it through concrete.
The history of the Don is probably not very different from the history of many rivers that run their course through now urban surroundings. Native peoples used the river for transportation, and so did the first Europeans. As the newcomers settled they worked the river hard, clearing land alongside it for farming, while grist, lumber, and textile mills moved steadily upstream. Quarries and factories followed, as bricks, paper, beer, leather, meat and tallow began to be produced or processed locally. Gasworks and chemical factories were added in the late nineteenth century. All the industries used the river’s water for their work, and dumped their wastes into it.
In the 1880s, to prevent flooding and allow shipping to move further upriver, the Don Improvement Project channelled and straightened the river. Removing its meanders freed more land for industrial development – and further degradation. The project also turned the river mouth at a right angle west to empty into the inner harbour. Before the Improvement the Don flowed into Lake Ontario through one of the largest wetlands in North America. Ashbridges Marsh was both a major habitat and a migratory stopover for birds. It harboured other life of course, including mosquitoes, and malaria and cholera were reported. Early in the twentieth century health concerns led to what remains today the largest lake-filling project in North America: the marsh was drained and filled in, providing yet more land for industrial expansion.
Railway lines had run up the valley since the nineteenth century. Following the Second World War, suburbs spread north along the river, and transportation was again the focus of development. In the 1960s the Don Valley Parkway and the Bayview Extension were constructed, one on either side of the river, and access to it became restricted. Few wanted to go there anyway. Industries had begun to move out but they left polluted wasteland behind. In 1969 the environmental organisation, Pollution Probe, held a funeral for the Don.
Since that funeral much work has been done to clean and restore the river and its valley. The Task Force to Bring Back the Don, a citizens’ group working with the City of Toronto, emerged in 1989. Under its auspices a network of walking and bike trails has been laid out, native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers planted, and several small wetlands established. The area is heavily used by Torontonians, for walking, picnicking, and biking. But the river itself is still polluted. As recently as 2007 a national water quality test identified the Don as the most polluted river in Ontario.3
In the course of its journey from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, the Rio Grande traverses 3034 kilometres, forming the border between Texas and Mexico, and passing through the Chihuahuan desert. In any given year, with variations in rainfall, snowmelt and human usage, stretches of the river go dry.
In 1995 New Mexican artist and water activist Basia Irland initiated an ongoing project, A Gathering of Waters: Rio Grande, Source to Sea. At the time the Rio Grande was the third most endangered river in the United States.‘People described the river as if it were a cut-up pie with the Middle Rio Grande disconnected from anything upstream or downstream; it had no beginning and no end,’ said Irland in an interview in 2001. People living along the river were frequently disconnected from those in towns upstream or downstream; from community to community, the uses to which the water was put were often contested.
Basia Irland’s project was based on a Hopi tradition, in which people planted or buried a jar of water where they lived, to ensure that usable water would continue to flow to their village. Her proposal called for people living along the river to collect water samples, starting at the headwaters and passing them downstream, to be emptied into the ocean at the river’s mouth – performing the river’s flow.
Irland constructed a special canteen, the River Vessel, and began the water collection herself in Colorado. The canteen moved from one community to another, each community adding to it. On its long trek from headwaters to mouth the water was carried by boat, raft, canoe, hot-air balloon, car, van, horseback, truck, bicycle, mail, and, through the pueblo villages of New Mexico, foot, as teams of runners relayed it 240 kilometres in two days. The River Vessel was accompanied by a logbook, in which participants wrote observations and comments.
The project captured people’s imaginations and revealed the deep feelings they had for the river. When the canteen reached Boca Chica on the Gulf of Mexico late in 1998, a giant celebration took place. People from all along the river came at their own expense. ‘They wanted to be there for that final moment of releasing the waters... It felt like an act of compassion, a gift,’ said Irland.
Through their participation in the project people addressed the river. But the river also addressed them. The carried water created relationship – between communities, who were more aware of each other and their water uses and needs, and between individual people and the river.
In 2008, the list of the ten most endangered rivers in the United States did not include the Rio Grande.4
The brochure was titled: The Don River Workshop: Bringing Psyche to the River in the City. It announced an event in late October intended ‘to explore our relationship with the river running through the city’. Basia Irland was listed as a presenter.
The workshop took place along the Lower Don River, a few weeks before Barbara and I stood beside that little stream in the ravine, on our November walk. My brief field notes make the difference between the two sites clear:opaque water – mud, clay, and gravel scuffing concrete edges – weeds
dirty mud-encrusted littered banks, broken and wasted trees, heaps
of torn-out roots
(still full of birds)
junk everywhere
a refuse site –
refused significance
refused recognition
a river scorned and degraded, channelled and diverted, walled with concrete, running between doubled rivers of cars, alongside railway tracks
but it keeps moving
Before the workshop I had never walked beside the Lower Don. For many years if I thought of the Don at all I thought only of a river of cars. Often we joined their flow, driving the Parkway north to escape the city, past the ugly mountain of salt stored on the flats for winter streets. From a car’s-eye view the river, when visible at all, was small and unimpressive, the land around it worn and empty.5
I think of Toronto as haunted by water it hardly knows about. As the city expanded north, west and east, many creeks and streams were buried, often enclosed in storm sewers where they continue to flow, out of sight and mostly out of mind. West of the Don River was Taddle Creek. It ran through the University of Toronto campus until 1886. By then it was so polluted the city covered it over. The Taddle still surfaces after very heavy rains, puddling alongside Philosophers’ Walk, seeping into the basements of nearby buildings. In spring red-winged blackbirds call from the shrubs around the law library as if they remember the creek. Every now and then plans to resurrect it, recreating the sylvan glade of old campus photographs, also surface.
When York (now Toronto) was founded in 1793, Garrison Creek supplied salmon as well as water to soldiers stationed at its mouth to guard the harbour. Because of pollution it was fully enclosed by the mid-1920s. Garrison Creek travels beneath the streets of my neighbourhood and after storms it too surfaces, in the parking lot of a supermarket a block or two north of my house. Though unseen, I hear it when it’s rain-swollen, and am briefly disoriented by the sound of rushing water echoing from grates and manholes, musical and unanticipated in the constant mutter and grunt of traffic.
A map of central Toronto’s main streets, with the buried streams traced on it, looks like a diagram of nerves or blood vessels cutting at an angle across the grid formed by the streets. When I first saw that map the city grew unsteady in my mind. Though for the most part oblivious of its watery footing, Toronto floats over a mesh of waters so thick and knotted I’m still astonished it doesn’t sink into them.6
The brochure had stated: ‘The workshop is designed to renew our kinship with the river and its urban environment so that we may become more conscious of neglectful attitudes.’ Following a talk about the history of the river and the restoration projects underway, we walked upstream gathering garbage. We stuffed torn plastic, old bottles and tins, snack packaging, paper and newspaper, broken toys, single gloves and mitts, bits of metal and unnameable junk into the plastic bags we were carrying. We left a ragged, mud-covered blanket lying there because no one wanted to touch it.
The day was cloudy and cold, wind knifing up the valley, rain in the forecast. On either side of the path grasses, seed-encrusted woody plants and shrubs grew. They were mostly dun-coloured or beige now, but the stems of red osier dogwood and a few purple wood asters stood out like punctuation marks. Brightly dressed cyclists, runners and walkers streamed past in both directions. Crows called, house sparrows twittered, a red-tailed hawk rose in a lazy circle up the east rise of the valley.
We stopped walking when we reached the shovels and seedling trees laid out for us. A short demonstration of how to set the seedlings and we started work. After more than an hour’s digging and setting, we were tired and exhilarated and no longer cold. Light-heartedly we stepped back to see what we’d done – some fifty new trees and shrubs planted. As we stared at their fragile promise for a moment or two, no one wanted to leave them.
Physical work done, the workshop leaders led a small ritual to help us shift into a less gregarious mood. Crossing to the other bank, away from the congested trails, we picked up pebbles or twigs, a seed head, dried leaves – anything that connected us to the place – and a large leaf each. We stopped on a flat stretch of sand, near where a large dead fish lay, half on the bank, half in the water. A salmon, someone said, but no one ventured an opinion about why it was dead. We put our tokens on the large leaf and each of us in turn set the leaf afloat, along with our preoccupations and a wish for the river. We filled tiny bottles with water, then found places to sit out of sight of each other.7
Ritual fosters new ways of knowing by creating a space in which to experience them. Our daily preoccupations and compulsions keep us safely engaged with the familiar, but blur what is beyond. When we let them go we can open to different ways of knowing both the world and ourselves.
I think of ritual as a bridge out of the small self into something larger – the experience of interconnectedness. Victor Turner understood it as a powerful means of creating temporary communities, linking people around concerns or to perform a particular task. It forms a relationship among participants, and also states the possibility of a relationship between participants and whatever the ritual is for. Because participation in a ritual binds you into the intention it expresses, it gathers focus and energy for that intention. Felt connection and obligation are both part of the experience of ritual.
One important function of ritual is reparation. It attends to breaks and tears in things, noticing, mourning, apologising, attempting to reweave what is torn. It wants to make amends. But ritual also celebrates, offers thanks, marks significance. It can express the seemingly opposed together – celebration and mourning, for instance. Both those feelings are called for when we look at the river and how we have related to it.
Ritual offers a means to step out of ordinary time and pay deep attention to something. It is a reverent gesture toward that thing, allowing or inviting it to step forward.
It may be that paying close attention to the river is already a ritual act.8
I propped myself on a forked branch hanging over the water. Many of the large willows around me had broken limbs. Bits of torn plastic and paper festooned the shrubs overhanging the river, marking its high-water moments. The ground was littered with cigarette packages, bits of tin foil, and bottle caps. Everything looked used up. I was tired and chilly and couldn’t get comfortable. Nothing spoke to me. Finally I lay back against the branch and stared, not at the river’s hypnotic, almost-silent motion, but through a tangle of still-leafy twigs to patches of sky.
Small birds materialised: chickadees with black caps and white breasts, olive-green kinglets, a white-breasted nuthatch. They hopped and darted and crept, feeding among branches and twigs, undisturbed by my presence. The river murmur, a rustle of wind in dried leaves, the muted small sounds of the birds blended, making a music I realised was the larger voice of the river.
When the birds moved on I sat up and watched the water running below me. The branch creaked. What would happen if it broke and I fell? I took out my field notebook and started a poem.This riverbank is neither book nor text
but I can read it.
Mud, I read, and flood,
Cold – broken – and
new grass.Garbage it says, over and over again
garbage
garbage
garbage.Birds chant, naming themselves
chickadee, kinglet, red cardinal,
the nasal nuthatch head-downing
along a willow trunk.The river speaks.
Fall! It whispers wryly, fall!
And if I do fall from this tree limb
where I sit, I will be slowed
but not stopped
by thin willow branches,
slowed but not stopped
like the river itself purling over gravel,
rubbing itself along root-threaded banks,
rising into the air, seeping
between roots, into cracks in
the concrete-straightened bankspicking up speed and darkness, racing
along the channel which creases
into a right-angle at its neck and
pours out into the harbour –A bell called us back to the group. Basia Irland was to speak. We returned to the spot by the river where the dead fish lay. She described her work on the Rio Grande, and suggested we could make a similar gesture for this comparatively small urban river. She held a Mohawk pot in which she had placed some cedar. We emptied our bottles of water into it.
Then Basia told of learning that the Don no longer had a mouth, but instead was emptied into the harbour through the tube-like Keating Channel. She said how shocking she had found the discovery, and I felt my own throat narrow in response. It was her intention to bury the pot that evening, somewhere close to where the mouth might have been. She would bury it with our collective wish for a restored river, one that had both mouth and voice returned to it.9
If each of us thought of water as a living being, perhaps, just perhaps, a shift of attitudes and values might occur and manifest through small and large actions of protection and preservation.
Basia Irland ‘The Ecology of Reverence’That things of the world exist for our use is a notion enshrined in western religious as well as scientific thinking. Many of us who have grown up within the western intellectual tradition experience the earth, if at all, as the backdrop for human life; it seems essentially inert, not a living organism, and certainly nothing to be addressed. We don’t think of water as living, though our lives are utterly dependent on it. We deny thought and emotion to other creatures; at times we have argued they don’t feel pain, much as newborns were believed not to feel pain – and operated on without anaesthesia – until late in the twentieth century.
The cost of living on the earth in the light of such ideas is desolation. We need other ideas and some are beginning to emerge – or re-emerge. As we struggle free of attitudes that place humans at the centre, we find an awareness we’ve been taught to ignore: the feeling that we live in an animate world, surrounded by animate beings. This awareness exists in most of us, much as those buried streams still run beneath Toronto. When it surfaces it often brings a flood of emotion, a feeling of awe and reverence for the intricate world we are part of. Such moments demand a response of some kind.
We respond in many ways – with our hands clearing garbage and planting trees, with our minds and voices arguing the river’s importance to a liveable city, and with our whole selves creating communities of care for the river or other areas. When we respond to the river’s presence with reverence and reverie, dreaming new possibilities for both it and ourselves, we are working to correct the balance of the world.
The word ‘response’ is derived from the Latin respondere, meaning to promise or to pledge; and the Latin in turn descends from an Indo-European root, meaning to make an offering or to perform a ritual. To respond, it seems, is already a ritual act. Perhaps the deep human impulse to address the world, acknowledging its call and response, is the most innate ritual of all. In joining that call and response we are pledging the awareness and attention that are the beginning of change.10
But water will go on
Issuing from heaven.In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.Ted Hughes ‘The River’
The workshop on the Don River took place in 1999. So did other events and activities around the river. In 2001, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalisation Corporation was established, and naturalisation of the Don’s mouth was identified as a top priority, with funding promised by federal, provincial and municipal levels of government.
The wheels of government grind slowly, and it wasn’t until 2006 that the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority was granted approval for its environmental assessment terms of reference by the Province of Ontario. The assessment addressed the restoration of the river’s mouth to green and accessible land, and the construction of a berm to provide flood control to an area west of the Don. It was completed in 2008, and its components are now under construction.
Work remains to be done. How to reduce pollution in the river is a major question. But general interest in, and concern for, the Don River and its mouth remain high. Whether work on the area will be slowed or deflected by the current economic downturn is anybody’s guess. In the meantime, Torontonians and others continue to walk, cycle, and run by the Don. The Don itself continues to sustain the vision of what it might be, flowing as its own reverie and uttering ragged tones ‘through its broken mouth’.
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS won the 2009 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize with this essay. She is a Toronto-based poet and essayist who has published two collections of poems: A Possible Landscape (Brick Books, 1993), and Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press, 2004) which was awarded the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. In 2008 she won the Sparrow Prize for Prose from The LBJ (Reno, NV).
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