Explore: Snowshoeing Toronto in Tom Thomson’s footsteps
Known as the artist of the Canadian wilderness, Thomson did some of his best work close to Yonge and Bloor. A tramp through terrain he knew well.
Toronto Star
January 17, 2014
By Shawn Micallef
In the few years prior to his mysterious death in 1917, the Canadian painter Tom Thomson lived and worked out of a tool shed behind the Group of Seven Studio Building on Severn St.
Sitting at the top of the Rosedale Valley, it is the last building southbound subway passengers see before the train enters the tunnel to Yonge-Bloor Station. It’s also where Thomson started nocturnal snowshoe adventures down Rosedale Valley towards the Don River.
I knew of the Thomson shack, but it wasn’t until Kevin Irie’s 2012 collection of poetry “Viewing Tom Thomson, A Minority Report” was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award that I learned of Thomson’s snowshoeing. The tool shack was moved in 1968, preserved as part of the McMichael gallery’s Group of Seven collection in Kleinburg, just north of Toronto, but I wanted to see if it is still possible to follow in what I imagine are Thomson’s showshoe-steps, 100 years later. So, two weeks ago, I bought my first pair of snowshoes.
If you haven’t seen a snowshoe in the last couple of decades, they no longer look like stretched-out tennis racquets, but rather alien-looking rectangular contraptions made out of plastic or aluminum tubing.
Carrying my new snowshoes, I left home, near Yonge and Bloor Sts., around 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, just as freezing rain was beginning to fall. The quiet man who is always standing outside my building with a cigarette gave me an odd look.
I walked a few blocks to the dead end of Collier St., an isolated stretch of Victorian homes in between Church St., as it curves south towards Bloor, and the Rosedale Valley. A gently sloped wooden staircase here meanders down to the valley floor. Snowshoes have metal teeth on the bottom that dig into the crusty snow, so the buried stairs were easy to descend. With snowshoes, there’s more freedom to walk away from trails in winter and go places you can’t get to in other seasons.
The bottom of the valley was still littered with ice storm debris, creating a kind of tree graveyard. The Studio Building stood about 200 metres uphill, where Thomson would have begun his trek. This moment was imagined in Irie’s poem “Severn Road, Rosedale Ravine, Toronto”:
Don your snow shoes,
slip out the door past Severn Road
down Rosedale Ravine. Snow
falls, not to plunge into darkness
but to keep the blackness from engulfing
the night.
Irie, a third generation Japanese-Canadian, referred to his poetry collection as a “minority report” because of, in his words, “ambivalent feelings towards this iconic painter, not for his brilliant art, but for his status as a representative of what it means to be Canadian.” In the collection, Irie brings Thomson’s paintings to life as he sees them, in Toronto and elsewhere.
The book also provides another reconciliation, that of the Tom Thomson who has come to symbolize a Canada of vast wilderness and the Thomson who did some of his most well-known work a five-minute walk from Yonge and Bloor. Since Canadians live in and around cities, it’s an important urbanizing of the Thomson legend.
As I clomped down Rosedale Ravine in the rain, dodging the slush sprayed by the Porsches and 7-series BMWs whose drivers like to re-create car commercials on this stretch of isolated road, the city seemed far away, yet close.
The backs of Rosedale apartment buildings cascade down the sides of the ravine, one with an indoor pool lighting the surrounding trees and a bouquet of pool noodles visible from below. As the road passed diagonally under Bloor St., the subway rumbled above in an elegant concrete tube. At Bayview, I turned north, walking atop the windrow of snow plowed to the side. Cars passed me slowly on the icy roads, though I was sure-footed. As close as they were, cars are such well-insulated cocoons that the people inside seemed almost not there.
Again I walked under the subway, this time as it rattled along the Prince Edward Viaduct that Thomson would have seen under construction in the winter before his death. Thomson wouldn’t have had to cross the Bayview Ave.-Don Valley Parkway onramps I reached a little farther north, but soon I was off-road again, following the right-of-way created by the Beltline Railway that operated from 1892-94, already defunct in Thomson’s time.
In a region of 5 million people, snow and winter make it easy to be very alone. As magnificent as I thought it was, one Twitter acquaintance, reading my tweets as I went along, said her reaction to being alone in the urban woods is fear. There are some unfortunate privileges to being male, and the ability to walk the ravines alone and without fear is one.
Towards midnight I arrived at the Evergreen Brickworks and climbed the circuitous trail that leads to the Governors Bridge lookout, where the downtown skyscrapers were partially visible in the low clouds. I had a brief rest at the top of the world, with the hum of the DVP and Bayview in the distance and the lights of Rosedale mansions flicking through the trees along the top of the surrounding hills.
Soaked, I decided it was time to head home, back along the Beltline, but this time diverting west at the highway ramps to Milkman’s Lane and up the steep trail that leads to the middle of Rosedale by the Glen Rd. bridge, where somebody was waiting in a bus shelter. Suddenly, civilization after a seven-kilometre urban wilderness adventure.
As Tom Thomson might have done, I’m hoping for a few more snowshoe-worthy blizzards this season.
For more on this brief period of his life, read the ongoing creative non-fiction project “Tom Thomson’s Last Spring” at ttlastspring.com.
