The Best Piece of Toronto
Weirdly, now that I’ve gone to Toronto for the third time and seen many of its 2000 parts (bad soap commercial reference – sorry), my favorite part has ended up being inside the tourist trap that is the CN Tower.
Of course the CN Tower contains many gift shops, cafes, tourists, and scams to drain the tourists of their money. It costs $20 just to get inside. I only went to fulfill a promise to my 8-year-old son, because he studied it in school and wanted a picture.
The first thing they take you to is the 141st floor, where you can look out the windows with $2-per-minute binoculars, or else, if you’re cheap, then with your naked eyes. That part was okay.
After that, they encourage you to ride the elevator down one story and see the glass floor. The glass floor is a lot of fun, despite the crowd. Some people didn’t mind standing on the thick piece of glass that was the only thing between them and a thousand-foot drop to certain death. Some people (like me) could barely do it without throwing up. The babies didn’t care. They crawled across it with no worries at all, because babies are stupid. One huge guy from Brooklyn didn’t even want to try. He was sweating and trembling. We told him he just had to stand on it, or else he’d regret wasting his $20 on sweating, trembling, and nothing else. When he finally edged out onto the glass with his eyes closed, and then opened his eyes, everyone applauded. It was fun.
The best part, though, was what most of the people were ignoring. If you walked all the way around the glass floor crowd, and around the bars, and around the elevators and the washrooms and the professional photographers… there was a door that led outside.
Outside, they had put up two layers of steel grids to keep people from falling or jumping off the 140th floor. Inside that cage, you could lean out into the sky in a way that made the city seem much closer/bigger/farther than it had upstairs. Through the grids, you could feel the wind flying in from over the water. In another context (like, between East and West Berlin or something), all that steel might have felt oppressive. But here, that day, it felt safe.
Cate and I found the perfect spot where the wind blew right into our faces instead of messing up our hair. We stayed there and talked and looked out at the water and watched the few other people who’d come outside. We found the perfect way to photograph the view, and honed the technique on a couple from New Zealand, who won’t realize how clever we were until they get home and develop their film.
It was so incredibly peaceful. I imagined we knew the way knights felt, during peacetime, when they stood behind the ramparts of their castles and overlooked their kingdoms. All we needed was a few holes through which to shoot arrows, and we’d have the perfect apartment balcony. And we’d need hammocks, too. (And the decor from Cate and Peeter’s balcony, because those people know interior and exterior design.)
If my bladder was impervious to Diet Coke, we’d still be standing there now. But it’s not, and so I’m sitting here back in Houston, wishing the words I was typing could make you feel the way we felt. I’ll try to post pictures tonight or tomorrow, and maybe that’ll help. If not, you’ll at least get to see how stupid I look in an Anne of Green Gables hat and wig.
