The Natural Setting Of Toronto

One of the memories of Toronto that had fashioned an overly-romantic vision of my great Canadian city was that of the physical setting in which she has grown.  Unlike the pancake landscapes of Detroit or Chicago, Toronto was born on some more realistic, diverse ground.  Unlike Manhattan, she has since not paved it over in order to create the illusion of flatness.  In general, Toronto is like the other Great Lakes cities in that she is dominated by her most prominent feature, the water.

Yes, that is open water even in frigid February 2014.  Lake Ontario is the most protected of the Great Lakes, at least from the cold north-western winter winds.  It also gets sloshed around quite a bit by the inflow from the mighty Niagara.  This obviously has a heavy effect on the surrounding climate, both good and ill.

Lake Ontario is the reason why Toronto is here, really.  The city was founded on one of the great portage places between portions of the Great Lakes, specifically Huron and Ontario, a route that had to wait for the dropping of Iroquois hostility to become viable (hence Toronto had never been a French city, even though a fort had been established here in 1750).  Near the lake, the land is level and the shoreline is relatively protected by the offshore islands, making the site attractive to settlement once English Canada became a going concern.  The climate was also a nice, inviting feature.  Further east, the winter gets a bit snowier from lake effect squalls, and the growing season grows just a little bit shorter. 

Toronto, in fact, is noted for being one of the northernmost places in Eastern North America where the eastern deciduous forest (known in Ontario as the Carolinian Forest) exists in the same recognizable form before giving way to the north woods.  As part of this package deal, Toronto gets Atlantic coastal flora, some boreal elements, and even the easternmost extension of the great Prairie Peninsula which is an extension of the central grasslands well into Ontario and even parts of western New York and interior Virginia.  In Toronto, the best place to see surviving grasslands is in High Park, where some oak savanna remnants can be found.

Indeed, in comparison to the mysterious transitional forests and rolling terrain further inland and to the east, the oak openings and level shoreline must have seemed very inviting to settlement.  Early English speaking Canadians were very eager to find land comparable to what they might have had further west along the Lakes or in the Midwest and Ohio Valley, and it helped that Toronto had just this available to them, all at a comfortable (but not ultimately safe) distance from the American border.  That said, again, the place is hardly a level grassland in it's entirety.  Things get very steep, very fast.

Much of Toronto is within a few minute's travel (by any means) of deep ravines and even minor cliffs.  This affords for a very dramatic cityscape, at least as far as eastern urban North America goes.  The other Great Lakes cities, with the exception of Hamilton, really do not offer much in the way of relief, and the end result is that Toronto features some pretty natural park spaces right beside high rise buildings, and not merely because someone thought a park would look nice there.  Back in 1954, in fact, there were actually buildings going up in the ravines.  Then came Hurricane Hazel, the first time in modern history when the Great Lakes got to remind us that they are really little freshwater oceans; the ravines flooded in rages that put an end to both people and urban planning alike.  After the floods had reminded Torontonians just how fragile their up and down rolling city landscape could be, the city started building around, rather than on top of or through, it's topography. 

Most other major cities in eastern North America simply can't say the same.  No defensible ridge of land remains where Detroit was once founded atop the rise where Woodward avenue now runs atop.  Manhattan is relatively flattened in comparison to what it once was and even now is surrounded by.  Our ancestral city of ancient urban concept, London across the sea, has long since fooled people into thinking it was always solid ground devoid of water in all but the Thames.  Boston certainly has done a good job of containing the aquatic geography of its foundations!  Miami looks nothing like the combination of barrier islands, mangrove swamps, and limestone pine ridges that it once was.  Toronto, on the other hand, is a nice lake plain, set of islands, one river valley after another, and even has, well, sea cliffs.  These are better known as the Scarborough Bluffs, one of the coolest and most under-appreciated features of the city.  Sadly, I took no pictures to truly do them justice, but the ones below can decently illustrate how interesting they are. 

So what sort of city has since been built around and on top of these features?  That's in our next post.

Toronto And The Power Of Memory

To a Detroiter, Toronto is a thing of distant majesty, be it seen in either the eyes of envy or romance.  In comparison to a decaying industrial behemoth which once had the possibility of rivaling Chicago or Los Angeles in terms of culture and influence, Toronto looks to be the promise of a Great Lakes capital fulfilled.  Here we have a stable city of incredible economic strength and fortune with all the diversity one would expect of a city the size and importance of New York.  Here we have gleaming skyscrapers, a remarkable landscape of ravines and naturalistic city parks, all within easy travel of anything from oceanic expanses of water to cliffs, mountains, and north woods.  Here we have a city, which while being well-developed, is still so full of promise and young enough to proudly declare that she is far from being finished and ready for so much more.  I always thought so.  Part of me still does.

This, of course, is the viewpoint of an expatriate looking back ever so passionately over that long, so-called undefended border and dreaming of what life without exile in this United States would have been like had I stayed.  Like so many Torontonians, I can only envision my gleaming city as the accepting, open, safe alternative to a post-911 New York.  I would love to envision her as being as equal among names like the city at the mouth of the Hudson, London, Paris, or Hong Kong.  While instead I realistically consider her to be of the same caliber as a San Francisco, Milan, or Sydney, part of me still imagines Toronto to one day, along with Canada, claim her position in the supreme pantheon of global divinities.  She is, after all, extremely well connected and perhaps one of the most tolerant places on the entire planet.  Therein, of course, lies the problem.  Toronto is too Canadian.

Before I have my countrymen come down on me like a bad case of NAFTA, I would very much like to qualify that statement.  I realize how self-hating I sound in writing this, akin to the James Joyce who loved Ireland but for the Irish and their culture (something I could never seem to forgive him for), but the truth of the matter is that so much of the Canadian cultural and political identity is based off of a defensive self-image: namely, we are not American.  Even my presentation here of Toronto proposed that part of her greatness lies in being an alternative to an American city!  Canadian culture, at least what I have known of it from Ontario, the most defensive province of all, has little maple leaves everywhere poised to force Canadians to remember that while we share material culture with the Yankee beast to the south, those little leaves acting as an apostrophe in a fast food sign tell us that we could not be more different.  To a great extent, we are, but again we have the problem in having to point that out to ourselves or the the American tourists who pass through southern Ontario and see strip mall after strip mall standing in silent reminder of just how much control branding has over the world these days... but of course we think instead just about how surely they point and laugh and call us the fifty first state.  Some do, to be fair.

But we also don't look at government, guns, or history the same way.  The border remains largely because a difference of mentality marks far more of a difference between, say, Michigan, New York, or Ohio and Ontario than there is noticeable between Ohio and Kentucky.  Sure, as neighbors we live on the same street, have half the time fought on the same side in battles, to say nothing of fighting in the same battles, and we both eat far too many Big Macs.  The truth remains, however, that we are still neighbors and not part of the same family in the same house.  This truth, time and again, keeps getting neglected by those in the Canada house, at least in the Ontario department.  Those people instead prefer to see their house simply as being either better or worse than the house next door!  Any concept of what is Canadian thus evaporates beneath the heat of the comparison lamp.  Meanwhile, that city of Toronto keeps getting larger, keeps adding in more people from every part of the known world, and turns into some settling basin where the diverse elements never really add something to the mix but tend to keep to themselves.  Unlike New York, where the magic of the city has always been the transformation of cultures into something American and then ultimately into something New York in it's own right, Toronto does not have a Canadian or even Torontonian glue sticking it all into some amazing sculpture.  There is neither assimilation nor destruction here, but, in true Toronto fashion, people lowering their heads to the ground or a phone and ignoring one another.  Here tolerance is taken to the ugly extreme of opted compartmentalization. 

That, of course, is a cultural sin.  No, it is not the apparent evil that is the mutually agreed upon racial and socioeconomic segregation popular in Detroit and Buffalo, the two closest border cities, but it is perhaps just as dangerous considering as how this sort of self-absorption is preventing Toronto from becoming truly world-class at the highest levels.  This sort of selfishness is deadly insomuch as it is passive-aggressive to the point of not even being acknowledged, even by people who look out for that sort of thing, like your author here.  You see, until I was able to see the people avoiding eye contact and concerned about the possibility of random conversation, I did not believe that my Toronto had become so cold and indifferent.  I figured that such an image of the city was the result of a worldly friend who wanted more than the mundane every day of next door.  Torontonians, after all, have a legacy of self-loathing to uphold, at least in the realm of civic pride.  Yet the Toronto that I remembered was through the eyes of a child, who did indeed remember more hopeful people back in the early to mid nineties, who saw those gleaming skyscrapers, and more importantly, who saw that incredible parliamentary mace, gloriously surrendered back to us by the neighbors who finally had to admit that we made it as a country.  When I looked at that mace, when I looked at those old buildings next to those new buildings, I knew what Canada was.  I knew what Toronto was.  I knew that I was the citizen of a country that proclaimed liberty with a dressing of tolerance, a desire to move cautiously forward with a healthy respect for the past, and a passion for freedom both from without and within.

I also remember a small cluster of the most beautiful tree in existence planted out front.  There, in plain sight, I remember three Eastern White Pines not much taller than our teacher, planted surrounding a smaller Colorado Blue Spruce, which then I figured to be nice but unimpressive.  The trees, like the mace, were still part of a Toronto that I simply had refuse to acknowledge had changed, or rather refused to change.

A quarter of a century later, these native pines have grown from the fresh landscaping Christmas tree size into their more natural, flowing, majestic sway.  The American-born Colorado Blue Spruce has grown with them, and in a rather amusing and illuminating way has not managed to overtake its companions, yet probably still draws more attention than the common place pines.  The truth here, though, is that the image has changed somewhat.  Like the city around them, they have remained the same but taken on a much grander form... but those who pass them every day probably don't even look up, as they surely don't look around at what an amazing thing has grown around them in the past thirty years, let alone the past ten.  Instead, Torontonians are busy with the illusion that they are at the top of bottom of the world, depending on perspective; the city has indeed become something global, and yet...  They cannot see the miracle of transformation and continued growth with the fascinating world of formal identity specifics that exist both in the now and then.  Toronto is a city that denies itself a taste of what it can be, what it has been, and even what it has become, amazing in being a living example of philosophical potential being, that "which is possibly everything but actually nothing". 

I do promise to show, as I do in this blog in general, what Toronto is.  Better yet, I invite you to see it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

A Primer On Hudson Bay: For Those Tired Of Ice And Snow

In the last post we explored the fact that our last decade of winters have had some curious ups and downs.  For the most part, the last few northern United States winters have been relatively mild, with 2012 giving us 80's in March and 60's in the dead of the season.  Then we had an usual event for 2014, a brutal winter full of snow and ice and intense cold.  Again, we explored the details, and found out that we have seen some deep chills even in our better winters.  The truth is, they are part and parcel of life in the temperate zone, and we really need the cold to maintain our surroundings properly.  Ice and snow have wonderful ways of keeping things moderated, without which life could be much worse for the planet.  You see, we live on a round rock floating in an unforgiving interstellar space which is anything but moderate.  Move our distance from our star even slightly, we have problems.  Remove our protective layers of magnetic force and atmospheric gases, we have problems.  Remove either the stable water thermodynamics of our oceans or the vast land spaces of our continents, we have problems.  Remove the snow and ice...

Well do we have problems!  First and foremost, the thing to keep in mind about ice is that it is cold.  While this may seem to be rather obvious, think about what effect large masses of ice have on the waters and land which they freeze to a crisp.  There is a reason why northern Ontario has the furthest southern tundra in the world: Hudson Bay.  Here is a look at what that tundra, at the same latitude as Edinburgh, Scotland, looks like:



Yes, that amazing body of water is often frozen for the vast majority of the year.  Unlike the rest of the world ocean, Hudson Bay is only lightly saline, a condition partially held in check by the ice it generates.  The Bay is fed by a vast area of rivers and lakes draining into it, somewhere close to a third of all the water draining away in Canada and even a small amount of what escapes from the United States.  These waters are thus able to more easily freeze in the winter, and when they melt when summer finally does reach her, the mighty Hudson is able to keep the salt water at bay (no pun intended).  Like her perennial rival the Gulf of Mexico, the Hudson thus also influences the global circulation of water by adding fresher, colder water to the warm and salty mix elsewhere.  This role ensures that heat is transferred out of the Bay, especially during those heated months.  Masses of ice float around in the water even in August and September, and just like in the winter, they not only moderate the water temperature directly, but also reflect solar radiation back into space.

Needless to say, this has an effect on North American weather systems.  Although the heat and humidity factory of the Gulf of Mexico usually kicks that tar out of the Bay during summer months (worthy of another post), the ice-influenced lower temperatures of the place tend to keep a nice forty to fifty degree dome of cold air that occasionally pushes southwards enough to keep our continent from baking in a total Gulf Sauna.  You see, during the last ice age, the Bay actually reigned supreme in this regard; it kept on pumping out more and more ice as the climate cooled.  Over thousands upon thousands of years, the ice made enough progress to spread far to the south, and summer no longer had the same effect that it does today.  The ice started building up upon itself and, like a mountain, cooled off the rising air masses making their way over the higher elevations, at once cooling off the air and increasing the amount of precipitation to fall on it, which of course was snow.

This is the important part, now.

Snow and ice both reflect solar radiation, but snow has the added benefit of also insulating whatever it covers.  Snow on top of a glacier thus blankets the ice and keeps the temperatures beneath relatively stable.  On ground, this does the same thing, usually to the opposite effect of keeping the protected soil and associated life warmer than normal.  Back in January when we hit that terrible low of -16F, my underlying brown Michigan clay stayed at about 28F under a foot and a half of snow, thus saving my outlandish experiments in botanical curiosity.  Different experiments have revealed degrees of effectiveness in regards to insulation, but most findings report that every inch of snow gains us about 2 degrees F or so of protection.  In our continent of playful temperature shifts, this is sometimes responsible for allowing things as tender as palms (mostly Sabal Minor) from growing naturally as far north as Oklahoma and North Carolina.  Again, this is on the continent that also features Tundra as far south as Ontario.  Its the gift of our winters that enables us to have productive farmland well into Alberta or apples as far south as Florida.  We can have tundra in Ontario and freezes well into Mexico but we also don't have the brutal, crushing, seemingly eternal record low winters that Siberia gets.  If you ever think that this cold has been nuts, take a look over at the Russian continental deathly cold factory known as Verkhoyansk.  I dare you!  They don't have the same powerful melting cycle-climate changing power that Hudson Bay presents, and they definitely get a lot less snow than we do; the atmosphere just does not have a decent enough source of moisture to draw off of.

You see, ice cools through multiple means, and snow blankets.  Without them many species of plants would not flower, pollinators would be in an even worse shape than they already are, agriculture would suffer severely, and the deer would simply eat every seedling in sight that would otherwise be covered by snow.  There are so many benefits to having snow come along with the cold, the most excitable one this year being a chance to finally punch the emerald ash borer in the face.  Gradual melting of mountain packs in the Rockies and Sierras gives us the wonderful rivers that we have out west in the midst of some very hot and dry deserts.  A sudden rush of melting and spring rains means that the moisture does not benefit from the time released majesty that snow would provide.  I could go on, but that said, try chewing on this article by fellow blogger Johanna Dominquez:

The Benefits Of Snow!

What's With The Cold?

After a succession of mild winters, northern United States dwellers are biting their lips on the cold reality that has lately set in just out the door.  Things are cold, growing zones have been laughed all the way back to Washington, and everyone and their brother is suddenly looking to castrate Al Gore.  Then we have the mainstream media, with their horror stories of how awful this slightly difficult winter has been, and how freezing temperatures have made it all the way down to (gasp) northern Florida.  I have news for these people, I really do: It's been pretty cold in snaps as recently as 2012, that very same year where we thought we were going to all die from being consumed in a huge fireball of drought and intense heat:

That's a polite map too (I never took a shot of the map that we had back in 2011 where Miami clocked in at a lovely 32 for an overnight low), but it does tend to illustrate a point nicely.  In the west we see all sorts of blotches on the colorful landscape, indicative that there are some mountains there throwing things off a bit.  Not so back east, where we have a lovely arc heading southward, nearly uninterrupted.  The Great Lakes, at least in their southern reaches, seem to moderate things a little bit, and there is a discernible line of defense in Virginia and North Carolina where the cold seems to taper off in a sudden halted advance (those Appalachians are doing their work, yessir), but by and large the only thing stopping the onslaught is a very warm and moist Gulf of Mexico giving a punch back northward.  Without it, that 30 we see over in Laredo, Texas (right east of where the US-Mexico border curves southward again) would be a more familiar sight in New Orleans or Daytona Beach.

The last great glacial period of our climate was pretty much a situation where the Gulf of Mexico had the tar beaten out of it by a mile high mountain of ice that spent thousands upon thousands of years pushing south of it's chief rival, Hudson Bay.  Really, if we want to know what is with the cold, we can blame Hudson Bay, because it is inviting it's friend the Polar Air Mass/Vortex/Flavor of the month name south, and they then decided to crash a party over at Jet Stream's house, and... well, those are some pretty cold days we have been having lately, right?  Back in the late seventies, this sort of thing happened for a few winters, and combined with the cooling trend we saw from the forties until then, all sorts of scientists (many of whom now argue in favor of global warming) were thinking that our interglacial period was up.  What they did not know was that while things are quick to warm up (a melting glacier is like a runaway freight train that melts under itself and heats up by virtue of getting lower in elevation, melt-water heating the surrounding ice, etc.), the freezing process, at least in terms of climate, takes a lot longer.  That huge continental glacier still had to fight off summer melt, lower-elevations, etc.  Hudson Bay is the endurance fighter to the Gulf of Mexico's quick show, for sure.

Anyway, that could open up a whole other can of worms regarding Climate Change (gasp), which I am more than eager to jump into, but for this post at least, I will keep things simple:

1. We have seen this sort of cold before and this is not the apocalypse.

2. You can get a hard freeze as far south as Tampico in Mexico or Miami in Florida, simply because we don't have east-west mountain ranges to block off the Arctic air masses which Hudson Bay can send far more south than anything resembling similar latitudes over in frosty Siberia (which, as a rule, gets even colder, but tends to keep the freezer up farther north; they have forests which can see -70F in a normal winter while seeing 70F during the summer, while we have a much more southern treeline than they do, because Hudson Bay keeps us on ice longer).

3.  It's actually been uglier in some parts before:

4.  As you can see from the map, there are people in Montana and Alberta that have experienced in actual temperatures what we whine about regarding wind chill further east.  They have airports there too, not to mention freeways and schools, but manage to survive.

5.  Don't think this leaves us out of the water as far as "no more normal winters" are concerned.  We could very well have another scorcher of a summer with next to no rain, like California is current experiencing.  I think they got an inch in parts today, but you know what I mean.  A day of rain hardly makes up for a year without it.  What's that, you say, not every part of the world is frozen right now?  Indeed.  We are experiencing a lot of extremes.  Our continent is no stranger to periodic extremes, true, but prolonged?

6.  You can probably panic a little bit at that thought.  Still, wait to see how the next few winters turn out before declaring victory of your opposition in the climactic political game.  It's cold, but not outrageously so, nor is it normal.  This is a spike in overall trends.

Just throwing some of this out there... in the meantime we can explore more of what cold means.

Harriet Tubman And Johanna Dominguez

I'll probably get back to the real posting soon, but just two things for today to pass along to my readers:

1. Harriet Tubman is getting a shout out today on Google's front page.  She is extremely important not only for persons of color in this country (or the world in general) but also for women who long struggled for enfranchisement.  Like many other fine Black people of the 19th century, she also contributed to the development and enrichment of cultural and intellectual life in central New York, namely in Auburn.  She is honored in statues and memorials in many places, and at two National Park sites, one being Women's Rights National Historical Park in nearby Seneca Falls, NY, and the other in the newly created Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Church Creek, MD.  In nearby Cambridge, MA is a dedicated museum to Harriet run by the Harriet Tubman Organization.

The two areas offer the visitor a major contrast between the sides of the abolition struggle.  Safe, tranquil central New York is and was largely agrarian, domestically serene and proper, and somewhat removed from the rest of the major stress areas on the Underground Railroad.  It was close to the safety of Upper Canada in either Niagara or Kingston, and by and large the reception given to liberated Black people was much warmer than elsewhere in the North.  The eastern shore of Maryland, however, is and was still relatively wild and swampy, as well as deep enough into the Slave States to make this perhaps one of the most stressful parts of an escape to freedom further north.  I'll let such distinctions speak for themselves, with the mention that swamps are pretty amazing places when one is not running in terror.

2. A friend of mine has recently started diving into a blog project regarding human-induced climate change.  While I often teeter carefully on the political abyss here on American Voyages, I have not been shy to present blatantly obvious evidence, admittedly at face value, that something is going on with our planet.  I present her post and take on what is happening in the Albertan Boreal forest and Boreal-Prairie Interface because it is very scary.  Factually speaking, the Boreal forest is perhaps the last great wilderness remaining on the planet, doing all the wonderful things that forests do in a very vast scale.  In North America, the Boreal world connects the east and the west by means of the all-encompassing north in a series of ecosystems and biomes that bear similarities enough that one cannot otherwise tell the difference in some landscapes if they were standing in Alaska or Labrador.  I roughly consider the Boreal world here to be found wherever the shaggy but noble Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) can be found in the wild:

Yes, even down in the Poconos or in rare remnants in southern Michigan or nearby Southern Ontario.  Where one finds Black Spruce, one finds cool, damp conditions that even the hardiest temperate species can't tolerate.

That said, I do confess to another bias, notably that I am pretty much from this world of spruce, bogs, granite, sand, Ericaceae of extraordinary abundance, the Aurora Borealis, a lot of Cree, Moose, and tons of other amazing things.

Near Deux-Riviers, Ontario.  This is a more southerly example of the Boreal world.

Passions and home spirit aside, the boreal world is notable for not only still being generally unbroken by the hand of humans, but also packs in a ton of carbon and pretty much serves as one of the biggest positive storage spaces in the planetary carbon cycle.  Start digging up fossil fuel from and burning or otherwise destroying any part of the Boreal landscape and there are going to be very consequences for the rest of the world.  Natural consequences aside, the Cree are also fighting an uphill battle over the poisoning of their Albertan homelands.  While this would not be the first time a treaty has been broken or bended between the First and Second Born, uh, come on, we can surely do better by this stage in the game?

Anyway, I could go on for days about this subject, and I probably will as things get worse.  I consider the Tar Sands issue to be something to go to legitimate war over.  In the meantime, I'm passing a long Johanna's article because anything that exposes this travesty for what it is worth is definitely getting shared:

Click here for the blog!

I'm excited to see what she can do actually.  While I tend to try and link to other blogs with North American significance, and Johanna is definitely more of a citizen of the world, this piece is not only covering continental news but news with a global impact and is definitely worth broadening the horizons of our coverage here.