enough murky water that when one squints his or her eyes a bit of elsewhere-ness can be imagined.
Not clean water. Certainly not healthy water. But water all the same. The Don has been abused like most urban rivers. Early in the twentieth century, industries such as paint factories and paper mills bled their waste into the river. As did more than 30 sewage treatment plants. Though much effort over the past few decades has gone into bettering the river and surrounding forest lines, even now, storm water is the primary source of the river’s pollution. It makes up nearly three-quarters of the river’s flow—and carries the waste migrating from freeways and driveways, backyards and truckyards. Untreated and directly into the waterway.
Still, for Thomas, there was plenty of leafy shade there. Mature trees and a sense of oxygen, non-existent in the core of the city. A bit of resistance to the conquering sun. Thomas was there, in the shade of a shrub, counting change from a coffee cup, when the sky was finally squeezed. Not a gentle squeeze. Certainly not an anticipated one. It was a shocking bear hug from behind. What one television weather anchor called a “spontaneous late-summer torrential macro-burst.” What simply felt like the inevitable result of a demolished dam hidden beyond the clouds. It didn’t rain in drops. Or even buckets. It came down in thick sheets of blinding, pounding rain. Apocalyptic rain, both unpredicted and unforgiving.
That same Don River runs in tandem to the Don Valley Parkway; the city’s only freeway running north and south. The rolling motorway dips deep near the river in several spots resulting in enormous flash-flood zones during severe downpours.
On this day, the rain simply had nowhere to go once it landed. In addition, the excess streamed into the natural basins from the ill-equipped sewer system. One of the great dim pools rose beneath the unofficial sky-high border to “downtown proper”; The Bloor Viaduct, known well for its history of suicide jumpers. Right where Thomas was.
The late night television news would ultimately show police on jet-skis and wave-runners, rescuing stranded drivers who had abandoned their submerged automobiles and shimmied onto concrete bulkheads. Homes some 20 kilometres north had basements under four, six, and eight feet of water. All of it charged in, had its tantrum, and hissy-fitted away without warning. Thomas, nestled in his remote pocket of wilderness, was caught off guard as much as any homeowner with satellite TV and access to weather forecasts by the minute. Heat, heat, heat…then with the city worn into submission, the clouds dropped a black curtain, flexed their muscles and said “gotcha!”
Somewhere between the mystery of it all and thanksgiving for cool relief, Thomas was besieged by the volume and incredible speed of the rising water. As crisp grass and dry soil softened and bloated the sloping hills, things began to float. Then bob, then swirl, then escape. Literally within minutes the river swelled and surged over the banks. And Thomas—young Thomas—panicked his way through the gloomy undertow on a desperate retrieval mission.
When I arrived long after the flood, Thomas was rolled in a ball on a dry rock slate, weeping. He had been a severe victim of the storm. As is usually the case for the forgotten few—the forgotten too-many—absent of both “home” and shelter. But his absence of everything caught me off guard. Every single thing. No backpack? No sleeping bag? So few items to maintain and save? Items so at-hand. As rapid as it was, it was not as though he was struck by a tidal wave. How? How did the boy who had so little now have nothing?
I was eager to ask. But I was not sure how to do it without sounding condescending. So, I just sat beside him. He wept and I just sat. For a long, long time. No words. Just the unnerving sense that there was far more to his tears than I knew.
“We can get stuff, new stuff, better stuff…whatever you need,” I babbled.
“Maybe this is a good time to try another route. Find you a place,” I continued, committed to the exhausting philosophy that long-term success in guiding young, severely broken lives into healthy adulthoods best, and almost always, starts with trust. Then moves to action. No matter how long that takes. The “absolute” I have indoctrinated myself with, and committed to, for better or worse.
But he heard none of it. He was not purposely ignoring me. Just crying so intensely that he literally could not hear me. So I waited while he sobbed, oblivious of my presence or the passing of time. My fierce curiosity and eagerness to intervene begrudgingly gave way to the better judgment of allowing him his time. His grief. His desperation.
Sirens echoed in and out of earshot forever as we sat side by side in silence. The awkward sounds of others getting help, others mattering, others inconvenienced.
Finally a long shaky sigh.
“My sister. My, my….”
Then more tears. More time. And several more sirens clearing their throats in the distance—heard and not seen. Everyone else getting fixed up.
“My sister was 14 when she left. Now how will I remember her? How will I find her?”
Thomas carried her picture in his fanny pack. She was two years younger than Thomas, but escaped their abusive home a year earlier than he did.
While the waters gobbled up all of his belongings, Thomas sacrificed it all for a search-and-rescue mission through the mire. Desperate for the eight-inch sack that housed the image of his sister.
His grief was shocking. His response was on par with that of a death, rather than the loss of a photograph. His heart broke open and his grieving words dribbled out.
“I was in the park. Waiting, just waiting! I should have been there! I should have been there!”
The critical history, in short, was this: while Thomas was waiting out his father’s rabid drunkenness—waiting for it to submit to a state of unconsciousness—his sister hit the unavoidable wall that comes with the fatigue of chronic abuse. She left a picture on Thomas’s bed as she snuck away. On the back of it she wrote:
I’ll die here. One day come and find me. I love you.
“How will I remember her? How will I find her? How…how…how…,” his weak body collapsed and he sprawled back, arched along the shiny rock face.
Who are the homeless?
Why are they like that?
Why don’t they just go home? Or go somewhere else?
They’re pathetic.
They’re ruining the city.
Delinquents. Lazy. Troublemakers.
Hideous.
After all of these years I have heard everything. Every question, every assertion, every concern, every query, every self-righteous and self-absorbed commentary. On the streets, in office buildings, at luncheons in church basements. But stuck in the moment, sitting beside soaking, stinking, exhausted, torn-apart, magnificent Thomas, all I wanted to do was hunt down every person I had ever heard spout out their uncompassionate ignorance and scream into their faces. Scream them away.
It happens often. And usually lasts until I bump into my own hypocrisy. When God allows it to drop-kick me off my feet. When I remember the guy on the crammed subway who bugged me by flopping around fast asleep in his seat. The girl at the convenience store I thought was kind of dopey because she was taking too long counting my change. The well-dressed kids bumming smokes outside the corner store that I shake my head at. Me. Me indeed. Me not embracing the very song I sing whenever I am asked about those I know on the street:
EVERY
