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The Top Of The World, End Of The Wilderness
The towers of North American cities try to outdo one another in height. They try to penetrate the heavens and end up lost and lonely in the sky. We pay to sit on the tip of their elongations, looking down at the city with our mouths shut. At the top of the Toronto Tower they played loud disco music. There were the casual Australians, a group of Moslem women with their children, a fur hag from Calgary, Alberta and Japanese tourists. None of us understood why we were here or what we were doing. All the lures pulled us eventually from the view into the souvenir shop and restaurant, where they served mutli-coloured drinks in glasses shaped like towers. Even if you managed to avoid this, in every drink was plopped a grey plastic spike like the shape of a tower. In each weary hand supported by a wrist was an ornament designed for drinks, 'Toronto, Top Of The World.' I thought of the whole factory out there somewhere, making these grey plastic ornaments for drinks, and how there would have been enough land left for a moose or a landing place for twelve dozen Canadian geese, if only that factory hadn't been built. These towers are false mountains on which we stand to view the apocalypse. Toronto top of the world, end of the wilderness. I have been brought here by The Boy, to see the sprawling waste of cities on every horizon, until a lake stops their progress, and to know that those lakes are polluted. He wants me to face it, so that I can be sure of what my purpose is. Already I am missing Ingrid. At least the birds now enjoy the city rubbish dump built in one of the ridges. Many Toronto citizens go there for bird watching, and may observe the odd stray coyote scavenging amongst the fallout. Their faces beaming as if all their lives, and all these generations of birds from the wilderness, had waited for the plonking down of this rubbish dump, to save them from themselves and heartless nature. The North American tourist bureau has stuck a miniature metal tower into the amethyst crystal in the souvenir shop. The Canadian society has stuck the tower into the earth renamed Toronto. They were trying to make The Toronto Tower as famous as The Statue Of Liberty For Some, but as yet it wasn't working. It was just a tower and not a full- bodied woman striding into a harbour. But just a tower looking out over some buildings like all the other towers. The Tower like a body part, disguised as The World Trade Centre and The Empire State Building, with Toronto beneath it shivering and concealed. In The Toronto Tower souvenir shop they are selling a plastic snow storm with the Canada goose inside it. The tower and buildings painted on in the background. We always want the Canada goose in the foreground of our new possessions, when in reality it isn't there at all. Some of the silver had flaked off the buildings of the souvenir, and had mixed in with the snow at the bottom. All this happened in the palm of my hand. When I shook it up, all this grey polluted snow fell down upon the goose and corrupted its feathers. I wished the plastic wasn't so clear, so that I wouldn't see too far down into the snow storm. I wished that when I went up into the Toronto Tower, that it would be a dull snowy day with a blizzard, so that I wouldn't to see too deeply down into what was really Canada. |
