The Architecture of Beltline Walking

The Toronto Beltline Trail stretches from a little detour on Mount Pleasant cemetery, and stretches past Eglinton West Subway station. It reaches into the deep stretches of York region, going past Caledonia and into a little-known street called Bowie Street. It is a blend of simple trees lining the walkway, old electrical lines, family homes, and graffiti-eaten warehouses. But the graffiti is quite artistic. It sports a strange mixture of the cartoonish and the surreal. I decide that the art must capture the essence of personified animals, without bordering on the boringly real.  

One of the graffiti paintings sports an alligator on one side, and a whale on the other. The whale on the left has an unmistakable row of baleen along its mouth. Somehow, baleen has become for me a hallmark of what it means to be a whale, whether in a photograph or a drawing. It has become a kind of cultural marker that allows me to quickly note it as a whale, rather than as a big grey fish.  I wonder if I had been able to otherwise identify it any other way. Such is the way we communicate with each other. We use codified markers to signal what we mean, rather than trying to spell out in detail what a whale (or anything else) should look like.

Walking from Yonge to Caledonia Street, I lose the sense of time. Though my body may feel tired, I don’t actually feel that tiredness mentally. Why is that? I imagine making the same trek along an urban scene, such as what I normally see on a busy main street in Toronto. I imagine that perhaps I wouldn’t even make it past the 30 minute line, let alone the 2 hour line. I remarked this to Judy, my hiking companion, and she could see this as well. As we reached the end point of the walk, we started to do quad stretches to counterbalance the effect on our calf muscles.

What is it about the landscape itself that helps me forget that I should be feeling tired? Or should I be feeling tired in the first place? This question makes me think about where tiredness really comes from, as well as the nature of being tired. The trees on this walk talk to me, and they sing about impermanence. Could the big square skyscrapers along Bay and King Street do the same? The families with their backyard barbecues remind me of togetherness. I wonder if the average pedestrian on a busy intersection in Toronto could spot the same scene of ‘together’. I believe that a walk in a natural path such as this gives me an exhilarating sense that I am not a prisoner to the body. Even though I might be physically tired, my mind is replenished with evidence of its own nature: its interconnection with things around it, its changing perspectives, its winding gregariousness, its awareness, and its lack of self, and the simple companionship of soul. These signs of being are found in the kinds of settings that most remind us of our basic nature. In the urban core, on the other hand, the complex geometry of nature is hidden behind utilitarian box-structures. It’s all grand, but there is no evidence that buildings twist and shake the way trees do. And so when I look at those buildings, I forget who I am. I become entranced by the architecture of sameness, rather than being reminded that nothing is ever the same from one minute to the next.

Is it any wonder that concrete is called as such? I think it’s because the concrete city represents the illusion of something that is ‘fixed’ and ‘more real’ than anything around it. Concrete suppresses death and change, while signalling death to the natural elements it conceals. In fact, concrete is hardly ‘concrete’ at all. I see evidence of its wear in the warehouses we pass by. Some look so derelict that I wonder if and when they stopped being used altogether. But most of all, people find ways to humanize the concrete, even if it is through street art or the art of spray-paint swearing. Both spell out a defiance against an architecture that emphasizes fixity and the illusion of solidity. But in doing so, they break the monotony of sameness and herald something more organic. They make walking enjoyable. They put an element of sentience into the buildings. And most of all, they put an end to the exhaustion we feel when we travel long distances on foot. This leads me to suspect that the root of mental exhaustion is not ‘constant change’ as some would suggest, but, rather, constant, illusory sameness. That ‘sameness’ deadens the mind’s ability to see its own still but ephemeral nature. It also tempts the mind into mindless diversions, feeding one thought after another. 

For this reason, I feel that a walk in a city nature trail is quite a limitless contemplation.  And it is a source of energy that hopefully will not be paved over by condominiums or other such projects.