I feel fortunate to live in a city whose chief geographical feature is a network of ravines courtesy of melt water from the last ice age. The ravines interrupt Toronto’s urban geography with trails and green space. There is a significant canopy that improves air quality and moderates temperature and, most importantly during the pandemic, offers forested areas where people can retreat and decompress.
Throughout the pandemic, I have seen posts about the benefits of a walk in the woods to emotional and mental health. For example, during our first pandemic summer, the UK’s Woodland Trust posted a piece titled “Why walking in woods is good for you.” A year later, Medium.com offered an article about the Japanese practice of forest bathing. But before contemporary declarations about the benefits of walking in the woods, we had William Wordsworth, an inveterate walker who was forever rhapsodizing about the joys of communing with nature, as we see in this snippet from “Sweet Was the Walk”:
Musing, the lone spot with my soul agrees,
Quiet and dark; for through the thick wove trees
Scarce peeps the curious star till solemn gleams
The clouded moon, and calls me forth to stray
Thro’ tall, green, silent woods and ruins grey.
For a number of years now, I have been taking regular walks through a nearby ravine where Yellow Creek flows from the northwest and drains into the Don River. The ravine passes under the St. Clair Avenue bridge through what is poetically called the Vale of Avoca which served as the opening scene for Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: a car careens off the bridge and into the river below.
Over time, I have noticed a shift in my emotional state. This is not merely a place I pass through on my regular walks. It doesn’t serve a merely utilitarian purpose as an alternative to the treadmill in my local gym. Instead, I find myself developing a relationship to the place, with feelings of attachment and fondness. In particular, I have discovered that I have developed feelings of attachment for a number of the trees here.
Walking north where the trail begins a long rise out of the Vale of Avoca, there were two trees which I used to visit each time I passed. I liked to go down to the shallow water and pick my way over the rocks that formed a stepping-stone path. There, I would set up my tripod and photograph the trees or simply stand and pay my respects. They were two mature maples, intertwined roots exposed where erosion had swept away most of the supporting soil. They leaned away from each other, like a pair of dancers, precarious but somehow holding their position.
Inevitably, one of the trees toppled. It happened last April. I came upon the fallen tree during a snow storm. A week later, city crews had come with their chain saws and chopped it up.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I mourned the tree, but I was struck by a feeling of sadness for its loss. I had taken from it a sense of constancy, and then it was gone. The destabilizing effect of the pandemic has been a challenge and, as much as possible, I want the external circumstances of my world to remain untouched. The tree betrayed me. How could it fall like that?
The remaining tree stands alone now. I visit it often, but I can tell by the exposed roots that its turn is coming soon.
