At home in the cold

Winter Sunrise © Ted Kooser

Blogbeitrag zur Collage «Winter Morning Walks»

 von Rafaël Newman

I come from a country where the winter is sublime: brilliant and lethal, a season of terrible transfiguration. I have escaped it, and returned to it, and escaped it again.

When I was a teenager my family moved from the suburbs of Vancouver to downtown Toronto, from the enfolding mountains and pleasant views of the Pacific in the lower mainland of British Columbia to the flatlands of Ontario, Canada’s Midwest; and I can still reactivate my nascent despair at the first glimpse, from the breezeway as we disembarked at Pearson Airport, of the monotonous, pursed-lipped horizon surrounding our new home.

Toronto also reintroduced me to the canonical Canadian winter. Before my father was offered a professorship at the University of British Columbia, I had spent the initial few years of my life in Montreal, in the francophone province of Quebec, where the snow was dependably high enough to supply the materials for snowball-fight fortresses and to serve as a component in the confection of maple sugar candy. In the middle of town temperatures could regularly descend to 40 below, and your condensed breath, filtered through the balaclava ritually donned before stepping through the airlock of a Montreal vestibule, would freeze, in a comical instant, onto the woolen fabric covering your nose and mouth. Winter in Quebec is proverbial, an identity-constitutive calamity that must be assimilated if it isn’t to be the end of you. The Quebec sovereigntist Gilles Vigneault furnished the axiomatic formulation of this dilemma, and of its resolution, in his song «Mon Pays», written in the year of my birth: «Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver»—My country’s not a country, it’s the winter.

But the years I spent in British Columbia reprogrammed me to expect winter to be mild and damp, perfumed with the pine and cedar that would come truly to life, in the blue breaks between rain showers, under the hedonistic sun of a coastal summer. Our municipality had in fact grown so complacent that it decided one year to cut costs by selling its contingent of snowploughs to its neighbour: and thus one morning we awoke to see that freak precipitation in the night had left 10th Street, where our house stood on the border between Burnaby and New Westminster, impassable; while the district beyond had been smugly cleared of snow, right down to the surveyor’s dividing line.

In Toronto, by contrast, winters were regularly as severe as the city’s horizon, if tempered slightly by the enormous volume of Lake Ontario to the city’s south and therefore only rarely submerged in the little ice ages of my childhood Quebec. Still, it was cold enough in Toronto, between November and March, that when I had arrived at school by bike I was obliged to spend the first few minutes of Latin class with my stiffened fingers wedged between the radiator coils before I could open my copy of the Aeneid. In English class we were assigned Survival, by Margaret Atwood, a study of the way Canada’s mortally dangerous nature has shaped its literature.

My morning bike route, just over three kilometres from our eastside Riverdale neighbourhood to Jarvis Collegiate Institute in midtown Toronto, was super-cooled during the stretch that lay along the Prince Edward Viaduct, a 500-metre span of bridge linking Danforth Avenue with Bloor Street East. Nets had been strung below the parapets of the structure to deter jumpers: perhaps, as well, in memory of the nun who fell from the bridge during its construction, and whom Michael Ondaatje imagines being saved by a Macedonian labourer in his epic novel of pre-war Toronto, In the Skin of a Lion. And indeed, the winds that blew against my bicycle, and froze my hands, made it plausible that a wimpled straggler had been caught up and whirled away over the edge.

Below the viaduct, 40 metres down, lay the Don Valley and, to its west, the Rosedale Ravine. The Don River, in my day not yet renatured, was a sludgy mess, little more than a name—given by Lieutenant Governor Simcoe in memory of a Yorkshire stream—lent to the highway that followed its course, and to the park on whose slopes I played tackle with my brother in the summer. In wintertime the valley was forbidding, as was the entire ravine system running under and through Toronto, the largest such example of urban-silvan symbiosis in the world. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try and traverse either of these impediments on foot, certainly not on my way to school, which would have meant rising even earlier; as for the ravines, my upbringing as a child of the city made them especially unthinkable, an improbably grotesque incursion into ordered civilian life.

So it wasn’t until I made my first friend at high school that I ventured into the realm below Toronto. Eric was a tall, serious young man with a head slightly too large for his narrow shoulders and a runner’s long, bony frame. He was given to compulsive word play—he would simply mumble puns into his lap if no one was listening—and often laughed explosively at what he considered the absurdities of our regulation schoolboard curriculum. He was, at age 17, already a prolific poet, notorious for having once submitted a history essay—on ancient Egyptian religion—written entirely in heroic couplets.

Eric lived in Rosedale, on the far side of the viaduct, and as our friendship developed he began accompanying me, on the common stretch of our way home from school, to the western edge of the bridge. He would stride athletically along our route—Jarvis, Wellesley, Sherbourne, Bloor—while I scurried next to him, pushing my bicycle and, in winter, clumsily negotiating the snowbanks that blockaded the sidewalk from traffic: «as if engaged,» he said once, «in a strange sort of pentathlon.» I had to scramble to keep up with Eric, both physically and intellectually, as he lectured me on poetic form and his current favourites, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, as well as on his other signal obsession, amateur ornithology. Eric’s father was a lawyer with a practice in one of the glass skyscrapers crowding Toronto’s downtown business district, and my friend would patrol the sidewalks around the building, on the lookout for birds that had crashed into its treacherous windows. He would then nurse the stunned things back to health, and once contracted encephalitis from a parasite living on the body of an injured starling. His recovery required a prolonged hospital stay and the ingestion of antibiotics in pills, he recalled, «the shape and size of Vienna sausages.» It left him even gaunter and more ascetic looking.

Eric was also an adept of the ravine system, where he would go to run and to watch birds, both damaged and intact; it was he, Vergil-like, who escorted me on my first descent into the Torontonian underworld. And this is where I discovered, finally, what it might be like to be outside, at leisure, in winter: not on a hectic and frost-pickled bicycle ride; not on a skating party along the frozen canal in Ottawa, where we had family; nor on a sullen stamp around the corner with my brother, sent to buy milk for breakfast at the convenience store, in a silence occasioned by the early hour, our resentment at the imposed chore, and the fact that we were accustomed to gesturing as we spoke, while the arctic chill obliged us to keep our hands in our pockets.

But with Eric, now, a walk in winter was something new. It offered the appeal of an activity foreign to my family’s typical pursuits. Moving through a winter landscape in an enthusiastically exploratory mood had seemed something fantastical, even literary: reminiscent of the scene in the chronicles of Narnia in which Lucy first finds her way through the magical wardrobe, encounters Tumnus the faun, and learns about the curse of endless winter cast by the White Witch. My experience of actual wildlife was similarly mediated by culture: the closest I had ever been to a deer, for instance, was gazing at the caricature pinned to the wall of my Latin teacher’s office, a comical rendering of the scene in Vergil’s epic in which a stag frolics in a brook before it is fatefully shot by Aeneas’s son, which sets off the war between local Italians and Trojan interlopers that ends in the founding of Rome.

And while we rarely spotted any fauna larger than the avian objects of Eric’s ministry, the crackles and susurrations emanating from the woods on either side of our path announced the presence of the squirrels and other large rodents that might also be sighted, in lean periods, on the streets of the human city above. Animals had always been, for me, the purest manifestation of dread, the black eyes of even our familiar household pets seeming a baleful portal to the abyss. One evening I found myself frozen, facing down a stray skunk, as it rooted in the dustbins outside a corner store in our neighbourhood; and a racoon once managed to penetrate my third-floor bedroom, having gained access by chewing through the eaves from its perch on a bough alongside our house. My parents had to call the humane society to remove the terrified creature. (Not me, the racoon.)

With Eric, the proximity of these same animals—and perhaps others—in their proper winter habitat was less intimidating. Indeed, as I moved with my friend through what appeared under the aspect of the wild but was in fact carefully maintained and curated by municipal hand, I felt I was not only imposing my human mastery on a dormant nature but also, somehow, defying the decay implicit in a season of retrenchment. Our mobility in the general stillness was a jovial oxymoron, like a landscape by Brueghel, in which ostensibly haphazard figures turn out to be rebus re-enactments of common proverbs. We were young and alive, unpressed by domestic cares, at liberty to pontificate and broadcast our inchoate plans for the future; and the dangerous Canadian cold, rather than numbing us, activated something essential in our mechanisms.

I was at ease again, at last, in the company of a peer who shared (and shaped) my tastes. I no longer missed the clement weather and mountainous clasp of British Columbia, for I had discovered a substitute embrace in the downward verticality of my Toronto home: the steepness of the ravines now alleviated the agoraphobia that had overcome me at the airport. And, without needing to kill a sacred deer, I had founded my own Rome, in a country that was strangely familiar, and uncannily new.

Rafaël Newman studierte in Toronto, Berlin und Paris und promovierte in Vergleichender Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Princeton. Er ist Lyriker und Übersetzer und lebt seit 1998 in Zürich. Er hat zu literarischen und kulturellen Themen auf Englisch, Deutsch und Französisch publiziert. Seine Lyrik ist in Zeitschriften und Sammlungen erschienen, er schreibt eine Kolumne und er performt und moderiert regelmässig.