Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

First time at Biidaasige Park

Photo by Jess

I had a great Saturday. It was cool enough not to be oppressive, and I was able to ride down the Don past the Brickworks to the new Biidaasige (bee-daw-sih-geh) Park. The park is very impressive. They have turned the engineered, industrial, concrete landscape around the mouth of the Don River into a real human space again, and an alluring one. There is a large outdoor adventure playground with ziplines, charmingly rendered animal play sculptures, and two-story high treehouses shaped like a raccoon and an owl, the latter of which has a tiny amphitheater in front. Within a large landscape of springy concrete, kids can use human-powered pumps to move water into a simulated watershed with controllable floodgates and sand areas to play in. There are curving paths along the new rivercourse, which is lined thickly with native plants. There are also boat launches and fishing spots.

The park grand opening was happening just a short ride from the Neon Riders BBQ, so I was able to see some friends there and bring one back for another ride through Biidaasige Park. After that, another friend from the Riders had a charmingly creative and playful music gig in Bickford Park, which was further enriched for me by a pair of very friendly dogs who were part of the small audience.

A river mouth should be a geographical anchor and natural point of interest. As someone who has walked extensively all over Toronto, the way the Don came to an end failed to satisfy those expectations. With Corktown Common, Biidaasige Park, and the other park areas still in progress, the city is doing a great job at making the river mouth part of the human landscape again. I have thought for years that Toronto’s greatest planning blunder was cutting off the city from the lake with the Gardiner Expressway. Personally, I would be fine with getting rid of the whole thing through the mechanism of less driving downtown, but while we are waiting it’s great that at least the river is being reclaimed.

The ziplines all had long lines of small children on Saturday, so I will need to return when things are less crowded. I expect Biidaasige Park to become a popular break spot for Neon Rides.

P.S. At an arts and crafts station, I was taught to make ‘seed bombs’ out of dirt, pottery clay, and heirloom open-pollinated seeds of Common Evening Primrose (Oenothera lamarckiana) from the Ecoseedbank in Montreal. The flowers are native to the region and good for pollinators, and the initiative reminds me of charming videos of dogs who help re-seed the forest after fires in Chile.

Island ride

I had never taken a bicycle to the Toronto Island before, so yesterday I went with my friend Lance to ride the different tracks:

He also very kindly made us bannock, coffee, and bacon on his portable twig stove, and even brought along hammocks and lent me one after:

Soon, some friends are planning to ride up the Humber from Old Mill station toward the West Humber trail and Claireville conservation area.

Processing mortality

Even though it wasn’t my life at risk, the experience of my brother Sasha’s stoke and brain surgery has had a profound and lasting effect on me.

I feel like the last few years have been a waterfall of grief. I learned about Peter Russell and John Godfrey’s grave illnesses shortly before their deaths and funerals. I have gone through the loss of my relationship with Katrina, as well as an initiative which I hoped would finally give me a functional platform to fight climate change from.

In the lead-up to Peter and John’s funerals, I spent large amounts of time pre-grieving: deliberately working through, naming, and experiencing the feelings, so I might be able to avoid being overwhelmed when the time for dignity and gratitude came at the celebrations of their lives. I was doing much the same in Victoria (along with fervently, atheistically praying for his welfare): emotionally working through every possible outcome, steeling and reinforcing myself for whatever might come.

In the time since I returned to Toronto, I have still felt seized with these feelings and questions. In part, the experience underscored how I am now definitively past any sort of preparation or training stage in my life. There is no escape from dealing with life at its most serious, and from deciding how to use it in furtherance of one’s values and goals. Figuring out how to cope with a world where some beloved things are gone forever and where all others are threatened is a substantial challenge if you refuse to fall back on feel-good rationalizations or unjustified optimism.

Life is fragile and subject to arbitrary and abrupt revocation. It is also a realm where a person can be easily dominated by those who feel entitled to control them. Coping with and making sense of life, with all of its limitations and confusions and conflicts, remains an ongoing effort.

The day after the surgery — and following a practice that Sasha taught me — I walked from the hospital to Thetis Lake and walked around the water under the cover of ancient trees. The feeling of relief and gratitude was overwhelming, but I was surprised by the realization that this would also have been the right thing to do if the worst had happened: to thank the land from a position of agony and gratitude for the gift that had been my remarkable brother.

Linking routes in western Toronto

Yesterday’s route in green

After work yesterday, I took advantage of the Bloor bike lanes prior to their removal and connected some disconnected tracks in the west of the city. I rode all the way to where the bike lanes end at Kipling, then took Dundas West northeast to where it splits: with St. Clair Avenue north of the rail lines and Dundas south. I took St. Clair to Prospect Cemetery, and then the familiar route north up the cemetery and then east along the York Beltline and Kay Gardiner Beltline trails.

Bad weather projected for Thursday has the Neon Ride delayed until Friday, and I am also talking with friends about a daylong ride north up the Humber ravine to the arboretum.

Pandemic walks extentification project

My pandemic walks project has involved a lot of densification: trying to exhaustively make use of all possible routes within a geographic area, acting as a kind of human radioactive tracer running through the city’s circulatory system.

This has been interesting and has led to some nice still and animated art.

At the same time, the whole project was motivated in part by the desire to avoid visiting and re-visiting the same areas during the pandemic. That, combined with pleasant spring weather, has me thinking about reorienting from densification toward extentification, both undertaking new rides to expand the total area explored and working to add days with over 100 km of riding.

I made some maps to get a sense of how long it would take to get beyond the explored region. I added lines to show the distances to places on the outermost edges of the explored area and, in parentheses, added the Google Maps bicycle travel times there from Brentwood Towers:

(Sorry the travel times are glitched in the final map; I wanted to make all the lines the same colour and accidentally overwrote the manual Google Maps travel times labels.)

These maps show only analog / mechanical / acoustic bicycle trips, including my year on Bike Share Toronto, my Dutch bike, and the loaner I used while it was being serviced.

I need to go a long way in most directions to get beyond the network: 10–15 km in most directions. The most direct route to new kilometres is northeast, through the Bridle Path and into the areas east of the northwestern branches of the Don.

The 10,000 milli-amp-hour portable phone battery which I bought for the 2015 CUPE 3902 TA strike at U of T had started bulging, so I replaced it. I should be set for day-long extentification weekend excursions now.

P.S. I figured out how to do this in a more automated way using QGIS. First, here is the area of all the rides converted into convex hulls:

And here is a set of automatically-generated spokes radiating in all directions from the centre point of all my rides (which is predictably enough right between home and work):

The only buggy element is how it projects spokes out into the lake. Nonetheless, this provides a useful visual guide to how far I need to go to get beyond my total area explored so far by bike.

Not doing well

I don’t like the practice of answering people’s questions with the response I guess they most want to hear. Lately, with people who I know to a certain degree, if they ask, I have just been saying that I am not doing well, and if they follow up provide a brief explanation of how multilateralism and evidence-based policy are collapsing while the world commits itself to climate chaos.

I tend to get two fallacious responses.

The first is the inductive fallacy: bad things have happened before (Black Death, WWI, etc) and people and civilization have endured, therefore we will endure whatever climate change brings as well. In terms of logic, this is an obviously weak argument. If a man is playing Russian Roulette and manages to pull the trigger once without getting shot, that doesn’t prove that trigger-pulling is nothing to worry about. Furthermore, there are excellent reasons to think the world is more dangerous now than at the times of the Black Death or WWI. It wouldn’t take too many nuclear strikes against cities to produce a nuclear winter which would essentially kill us all.

The other is motivated reasoning: you need to have hope. This approach basically rejects the value of knowledge and thinking, or at least the idea that hypotheses should be tested against logic and evidence. Deciding how you want to feel in advance, and then seeking out beliefs that reinforce the feeling, is a recipe for ending up totally deluded about the world. Someone who decides what they think based on how they want to feel loses the connection which a skeptical mind maintains with the empirical world. Instead, they become like transcendentalist gurus who only care about how the world seems inside their own mind. They are no longer able to help anybody, except perhaps to become as disconnected and useless as they are.

I know people who ask how you are doing seldom want an honest answer. It’s a social cue to come back with a light and social answer. At the same time, I am utterly terrified about how the population normalizes and ignores the dismal signs of just how much trouble humanity is in. The mechanisms that let people cope and maintain a tolerable emotional bubble around themselves seem thoroughly interconnected with the mechanisms which are letting us destroy the future because we don’t want to think about scary things, or give any consideration to the interests of others when we choose what to do for ourselves.

I have been trying to make sense of why I feel so intensely unhappy now, especially when in numerous ways life was a lot worse while I was in the PhD program. The closest thing to answer is that before I felt like there were worthwhile things to try to achieve in the world, but I was just being blocked from taking part effectively in them by nearby obstacles and barriers. Now I feel like I have no idea whatsoever of what to do to try to dodge the planetary calamity ahead. With the climate change activist movement distracted and disempowered, I also feel uniquely alone.

Fiction, versus reality’s lack of resolution

In all the time while I have been concerned, and later terrified, about climate change and the future of life on Earth, I still had the narrative convention of fiction influencing my expectations: the emergence of a big problem will imperil and inspire a group of people to find solutions and eventually the people threatened by the problem will accept if not embrace the solutions. A tolerable norm is disrupted and then restored because people have the ability to perceive and reason, and the willingness and virtue to act appropriately when they see what’s wrong.

Now, I feel acutely confronted by what a bad model for human reactions this is. It seems to me now that we almost never want to understand problems or their real causes; we almost always prefer an easy answer and somebody to blame. The narrative arc of ‘problem emerges, people understand problem, people solve problem’ has a real-world equivalent more like ‘problems emerge but people usually miss or misunderstand them, and where they do perceive problems to exist they interpret them using stories where the most important purpose is to justify and protect the powerful’.

If the history happening around us were a movie, it might be one that I’d want to walk out of, between the unsatisfying plot and the unsympathetic actors. Somehow the future has come to feel more like a sentence than a promise: something which will need to be endured, watching everything good that humankind has achieved getting eroded and destroyed, and in which having the ability to understand and name what is happening just leads to those around you punishing and rejecting you by reflex.