The way I walk in the city might seem odd to others, as when I go out to think and stretch my legs, I always prefer side streets, and I always prefer it to be dark out. I’m very self conscious about other people when I’m out, so the less there are, the more I can simply enjoy the night air, and the city, which I also find infinitely more beautiful lit up during the night. Hundreds of thousands of little, individual lives going on around me.
Tonight is especially beautiful, I’m drunk, it’s 3Am, and it’s raining. Every streetlight and car that passes by an Instagram worthy photo-if I ever posted. There are few people on the route I take, so my mind is relatively free of the irrational concerns of robbery or violence pervade the mind of every walker. I try not to engage this thinking, knowing how irrational they are to think that every person walking my way has my number, and wants my wallet. That a fear of things that rarely ever happen (at least in Toronto, and my neighborhood) could keep someone from walking saddens me greatly, but I can’t say that I don’t get it. It’s like spiders, or snakes, even though I rationally know that the Mississauga Rattler is the only kind that could do me any harm, I still jump whenever I see them. Too many years of cultural brainwashing to undo in one night of active unlearning.
I’m comfortable taking notes on my sights and thoughts because I know the route I’m taking so well. It is one that I have unintentionally taken to and from work dozens of times, a path that is marked by signs of a river that has been buried for now-20 years. It is called Garrison Creek, and it is not the only river that has been buried in Toronto, it used to be a much more swampy delta coming out of Lake Ontario, but that was too inconvenient for the biggest city in Canada. I learned about it in a class I took in undergrad, and very stereotypically of a 4th year anthropology class, everyone was very melodramatic about this specific idea, a very ‘real’ effect of settler colonialism that erased a creek that nature spent who knows how long forming in a few decades. But as an archaeologist working in Southern Ontario for the last 6 months, I know just what it means to have truly lost something, and Garrison Creek is not lost. Along the entire way, man-holes say its names, parks label the pathway of the buried creek as I walk north, and a bit west. A road kept the side-rails of the bridge that spanned the creek, an information plaque tells you about it in a local park.
We know about Garrison Creek, we buried it, just like we buried lots of things and environments and peoples in Canada’s GREAT nation building project. But we only remember the Creek, not the people who lived long it, I think because its far easier to aestheticize the symbol of colonialism that is these buried rivers, then it is to reckon with the very real history that has been destroyed by the building of Toronto. Becoming an archaeologist was learning that Toronto is a Archaeological void, that digging there gives us nothing. I could dig in any random field, and eventually find the stone flakes that came from working stone tools because indigenous people have been nearly everywhere. Even IN HIGH PARK, we found a few flakes and some small shards of pottery, evidence of a nearby settlement. But that is in a park that has been nearly untouched developmentally.
The rest of Toronto’s dirt has been mashed and mangled and twisted and crushed that to find anything pre-contact is extremely rare, and that fact turns me into a fucking wreck. To say that Toronto is a young city might be true in a colonial sense, but to pretend that no one lived here ignores that we were Eurocentric to preserve whatever evidence existed at the time, plowing right over it. Not just burying it, or repurposing it into sewage like we did with Garrison, but destroying that history utterly.
The rain had gotten heavier as I walked along Garrison Creek, I take off my glasses in hopes of seeing better, but without their aide the mélange of colours grows even blurrier, a real life water colour of streetlights reflected in puddles. Eventually, I make it to my doorstep, my feet subconsciously bringing me home. I think about how I used to marvel at my parents ability to remember directions so casually, unsure if I would ever get so streetwise. But now I know
Reaching into my pocket reveals that my glasses are missing, this is the first pair of glasses I’ve ever lost in my 6 years of wearing them. A fact I was very proud of until now. I think about the arrow tip I found a few weeks ago, I want to think its possible that my trash could be preserved in the earth for 800 years, to tell my story. But in my heart I know how this city destroys history. the concrete and asphalt too dense, too solidly built to envelop my lost glasses. Everything dropped is simply kept on the surface to be cleaned, rather than being buried to be preserved.
Farewell Archaeology.
Farewell Glasses.
I just hope something will come of these losses, and this thirty minute walk home.
