The Vinyl Café Notebooks (9 page)

Toronto is so committed to salt that the city is ringed with seven salt camps. These camps are set up like army bivouacs and include trailers that are staffed around the clock, complete with cots and kitchens—camps of truck drivers paid to stand by so the moment snow begins to fall, they can run for their salt trucks. City officials expect them to be on the road within
five
minutes of the first snowflakes.

The same officials say they have tested and rejected other alternatives. Calcium magnesium acetate is too expensive. Sand, I am told, is not without its own environmental problems. They even tried a liquid called MAGIC, a byproduct of the beer industry that they sprayed on the streets, with mixed results, sadly.

Toronto has 118 salt trucks in service this winter, and those trucks will dump in the neighbourhood of 125,000 tons of salt on city streets. My neighbours will add to that.

It is a practice the ancients would find beyond belief. Homer called salt
divine
. Plato named it a substance
dear to the gods
.

But Homer and Plato lived in warmer climes and at a time when salt was so highly prized, and so difficult to obtain, that religious significance was attached to it. A meal where salt was served was sacred. It created connections and the Arabic phrase,
There is salt between us
.

The Greeks, the Romans and the ancient Jews all used salt in sacred ways. While the Germans fought wars over saline streams.

Some academics believe the oldest roads were the salt roads that the clattering salt caravans followed through the Sahara and the deserts of Libya. One of the oldest roads in Italy is the Via Salaria.

So it seems that in some way salt has always been linked to roadways, although in the ancient days the roads were there for the salt, rather than the other way around.

Today, Canada is the fourth largest producer of salt in the world. From salt mines in Windsor and Goderich, Ontario, from Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and from the Magdalen Islands, Canada produces more salt than it needs—enough surplus to export tons to the United States.

This salt, the salt we send abroad and the salt we see on the streets, the salt we pass around our tables, the salt that I pick out of my dog’s paws, all comes from ancient deposits, remnants of long-forgotten oceans.

And now, I read, that if the mines ever ran out, there is enough salt suspended in the world’s oceans to make five fullsized relief models of Europe.

So we don’t feel profligate when, in the darkness of December, we greet snow by scattering salt at our feet. And, as we do, we may well be reaching back to some ancient memory, and saying, in our own way, that these streets where we live are holy streets, worthy of keeping clear; and the white florets of salt that marble them in the cold winter mornings are there to remind us that we are
the salt of the earth;
and the trucks criss-crossing the city in the winter
nights are prayer trucks, reminding us in the dark of the winter, when the snow piles around us, that we have nothing to fear, that we are not alone, that we are here for each other, for there is
salt between us
.

5 February 2000

FEBRUARY

February is the oddest of the months and not my favourite. And here, stuck in the middle of it, I am looking forward to the day when I can watch February fade into the rear-view mirror of the year.

I know February does have Valentine’s Day, which recommends it to some—to the glad spenders, and the hawkers of roses, and all the fancy dancers who know the right things to say to a girl or to a boy when they catch their eye—but I’m with Carl Sandburg on this: Valentine’s Day has taught me more about the taste of cabbage than the mystery of roses.

It
is
the month my mother was born, but apart from that, and the odd flutter from Sandburg’s little white bird of love, February has added up to just too much winter. The Fathers of Confederation, or the trickster Raven, or whoever it was who designed the month must have agreed. They did their best to whittle away at it, doling out twenty-eight meagre days in most years, grudgingly handing out a twenty-ninth from time to time. Why they didn’t just do away with the whole month while they were at it, and add the twenty-eight days to say, June, when love is
really
in the air, or September, a month I have always thought should be longer, is beyond me.

But they didn’t, and we are stuck with it, and this year, being one of the years when February has twenty-nine days instead of twenty-eight, we are stuck with it more than ever.

It is a curious construction, this notion that a month can accordion in and out every four years—I don’t know how they got that past the board of regents. You are commissioned to codify the year, to design a system that makes the year solid and reliable, and you do that eleven out of twelve months, but then it’s as if you shrug and say, “What the heck? I’m hungry. I’m going home.” You leave February to some maniac from the basement who has radical theories about child-rearing, and what you should eat for breakfast, and has been just waiting for a chance like this. He gets February in a thumb grip, and this is what we are left with: a month that can’t keep track of itself. A month that loses days willy-nilly. Days fluttering out the backpack of the month and vanishing into thin air like those school notices your kids never bring home.

It’s Leap Year, which any sensible person might conclude means we leap ahead, skip out of February a day early in our headlong lunge to spring, but this
being
February—a month, upon reflection, I am beginning to think of as more perverse than odd—it means our leap is a leap to nowhere, a leap to where we started, stuck in this month, sometimes a day short, sometimes with more days on our hands than we want. Perhaps the best idea this Leap Year is to embrace that other February holiday—Groundhog Day. I’m pretty sure I saw my shadow. I’m going back to bed. Wake me in March.

24 February 2008

SNOWMAN

My favourite moment of the winter past was the afternoon we stumbled upon the snowman on Howland Avenue. It was the biggest snowman I have ever seen. It had a base bigger than a Volkswagen and took up most of the front lawn where it stood.

Intrigued, I knocked on the front door and introduced myself to the man who answered. His name was John Keefer. John told me he had built his snowman on a Friday night in February. He says he was just “inspired by the moment.” The air was warm that night, he said, or as warm as it had been all winter, and the snow on his front lawn was piled as high as he’d ever seen it. And it was perfect packing snow. John started building his snowman before dinner. He went out after he finished eating to finish the job.

John said he worked in the dark, knowing that his two-yearold daughter, Elsie, would wake up Saturday morning to a snowman as big as a buffalo.

When he finished, John rooted through his recycling box and found a face for his snowman. He used a bright green cap from a detergent bottle as a nose and a yellow plastic peanut butter lid for the mouth. He fashioned red eyes with lids from two pickle jars.

He said the temperature dropped that night and turned the snow as hard and strong as cement, making his snowman a fixture in the neighbourhood. All through February, local kids came to play with it, adults brought their friends, teenagers dropped by just to hang out.

After a few days, a handful of pennies appeared in the trench that surrounded the snowman. By the end of the first week there was nearly a dollar of change in the trench.

John says he isn’t sure what the money was about. I like to think each penny came with a wish, maybe for an early spring, or for a warm summer.

I never know what to do with my pennies. But scattering them around a snowman and wishing for warm weather does not seem like such a foolish thing to do in the middle of February—seems like a particularly Canadian thing to, so this summer we’ll be saving as many as we can, and we will keep them for the dark days of
next
winter when we are really going need a wish or two.

22 March 2004

BOY, BIKE, CHAIR

I was on my way to the grocery store when I spotted him. A boy, about eleven years old I guessed, riding his bike up the middle of the street. He was riding awkwardly, weaving from side to side, as he was holding on to the handlebars with one hand and to an office chair with the other. The chair, which was black and was also on wheels, had clearly seen better days.

“That looks like hard work,” I said.

“Yup,” said the boy, not unhappy someone had noticed.

Then he stopped pedalling and stood, astride his bike, pleased, it occurred to me, to have an excuse to rest for the moment. Resting is not something eleven-year-old boys do intuitively. I was happy to provide the excuse.

“You taking that home?” I asked.

The boy nodded.

“Nice day for it,” I said.

I tried to keep my questions non-threatening. I was, after all, a stranger. I assumed he had been warned about talking to people like me.

“My name’s Stuart,” I said

“My name’s Matt,” he said.

Then he said, “When I get home I am going to tie a rope to this chair and pull it behind my bike, and my friend is going to ride in it. Then we are going to switch.”

He smiled proudly.

I smiled back, imagining all sorts of horrible things: the chair careening around in traffic, the rope breaking, cuts, bruises, broken bones.

I almost said, “Be careful.” I restrained the impulse. He presumably had parents to tell him that.
And
to warn him about talking to people like me.

“Sounds great,” I said. Then because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I shrugged, and said, “I gotta go.”

“Me too,” he said.

I stood there for a moment and watched him pedal up the street, part of me wishing he had said those magic words of boyhood.
Wanna come?
Remembering with great fondness, those days when a broken chair, a piece of rope and a bicycle were all you needed to make the world perfect.

1 October 2006

TORONTO

The celebrated Canadian geographer Cole Harris once described the
inhabited
part of Canada as an island archipelago spread over four thousand east-west miles.

Professor Harris’s archipelago spreads farther if you factor in all the islands of the great north, and is as thoughtful and encompassing a description of Canada as any, and better than most. It accommodates both the
distances
and
differences
that make Canada so surprisingly watertight. And, as an analogy, it holds up well when measured against the rocky shores of our many cultures, against the still waters of our tolerance, and against all the other tidal surges that both pull us apart and push us back together, endlessly and relentlessly.

I like how it makes me think about Canada, but also, I should say, I like how it allows me to think about myself. Because if we
are
a chain of islands, stretched along the border, well, that makes me the island-hopper. And, I have to say, I like the sound of that.

I spend a good part of my life, these days, hopping around the country. But when I am not—hopping, that is—Toronto is the place I return to. Toronto is my home, and when I come home, I always feel a little like I am
leaving
the islands and
returning to the mainland—which is, I suppose, how you should feel about coming home, wherever your home is, whether it be a city home, a country home, in a big town or small one, or even on an island. Home should feel like solid ground.

This city hasn’t always been my home. I was born and raised on the island of Montreal. I know Montreal the way you know the town of your boyhood. I know it intuitively.

Toronto is a city I had to learn.

I came, some thirty years ago, because CBC Radio asked me to. I came for my work. I didn’t give my coming, or, more importantly, my leaving, a moment’s thought. I departed Montreal on the waves of my youthful enthusiasm. Although, like so many others who leave their hometowns, I left believing it would only be a year or two before I returned.

But those years add up, and now, all these years later, I find that I have lived in Toronto longer than I lived in the city where I was born.

Toronto is my home now. And whether I admit it or not, it is my home by choice.

When I travel across the country and talk turns to hometowns, people often look at me with compassion when they learn where I live.
Oh, I wouldn’t want to live there
, they say. Often they don’t say it quite that directly, but I can see it in their eyes and hear it in the things they choose to tell me about
their
hometowns.

I wouldn’t want to live in a place where you don’t know your neighbours. Where people are in such a hurry. Where the driving is so impossible. I counted sixteen lanes on that highway near the airport
.

Well, yes. It is heavy lifting living in a big city. No doubt about that. But not in the way those who don’t live in one might think.

This city asks a lot of those of us who live here. But there is much to love too.