NESTED BETWEEN TWO STONES

I. 

It was a Friday when the big uptown parkade finally came down in a brilliant demolition involving arguably excessive explosives and a complex rig of pyrotechnics set up by the teenagers that had finally been busted for setting off fireworks every night in the park. It was revealed that they operated as a hive mind led by a 12-year-old from Baden whose street name was J-Dawg. It was a careful negotiation, motivated by an attempt to redirect the passions of youth towards community work and collective good.  

And so, we gathered at dusk, put on our safety goggles and hard hats, and all Uptown shook as the explosives were set off, the fireworks lit. The parkade came crumbling down. Then we heard it, the quiet trickling of water and a soft gasp as the creek took its first breath in a long, long time. We high fived, wahooed, and biked home with smiles on our faces and fell asleep with the windows open, the warm summer wind pulling us into one grand, collective slumber as we shook with excitement and the feeling that this really was the advent of something great.   

A future in which our lost rivers and streams, buried under tar and concrete, were returned to the surface. Their names stolen, the harmony they once partook in eroded and destroyed. A future free of impermeable surfaces, of watching rain be resisted and forced to scatter in search of home. That is our mission. Doctor Nettle Douglas calls it daylighting. 

II. 

There is a stream that flows underneath the Erin Mills Town Centre. I tell Doctor Nettle Douglas about this as we are biking home from a town hall meeting.   

I tell her how I had heard it one night when I was 18 and working a closing shift at the Tim Hortons inside. I was taking the garbage out and heard it whisper my name, only it wasn’t my name, it was a summation of my entirety, what had been, what was, what would continue. I tell her that it sounded a little bit like water collecting between two stones along the bank of a woodland stream. She nods and mumbles something. I think she might be sleepy.  

We wave each other goodnight, and I veer off the bike trail, down the road to my apartment. In my slumber, I dream of myself on a walk. A long walk, across roads and highways, and several acres of farmland–both hobby and commercial. It’s after the seventh day of this journey that I begin to understand where I am headed. Towards the beginning, the origination, the headwater of the stream that flows underneath Erin Mills Town Centre. I am tracing the language of clouds and morning dew, listening to echoes of its form in hopes of finding its voice. Time loses its power, and I measure my existence only in increments of rain. I am no longer sure if I am still dreaming, or perhaps I have long awoken and since then forgotten the need for dreams in this new reality of uninterrupted purpose. I wade through marshes and creeks and a whole lot of private property. I pass through Baden, finding myself standing across the street on a wide sidewalk, staring up at a window, the only one on this street with the lights still on.  

A shadow emerges. It’s J-Dawg, and he is 22 years old now, just finished his degree in chemical engineering. He wishes me good luck.  

I find the source finally, at the mouth of a culvert built to channel runoff below the parking lot of an outlet mall. It calls out to me, in a name I had forgotten until then, one undefinable under the limitations of language. I sleep there that night inside the corrugated piping, letting the surface runoff wash me anew. As dawn emerges across the sky, it begins to rain. I let the stream that begins at the mouth of a culvert and flows underneath Erin Mills Town Centre carry me down into the underground drains, rattling against the metal interiors, deep into a sewer system where I meet two other streams who are not in good moods and decline to  
introduce themselves.   

A creek is also there, named Pebble, who remembers me from when I was 16 years old and had peed in it. It remembers how I had set off a firework, how I had drunk half a beer and spilled the rest of it out on a willow sitting along its bank.  

“Why’d you do that, man?” Pebble asks me.  

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I think I was lonely.”  

Pebble sends me on my way, through this dark labyrinth before I find myself, finally, underneath Erin Mills Town Centre, deep underground between layers of bedrock, clay, soil and, of course, pavement. I feel it all, the weight of commerce and 50 per cent off sales, and the new Cineplex they added with those reclining seats, and I see myself, twelve years old, learning to ride a bike on the wide expanse of that parking lot, sweat dripping down my back and spilling into the ground, most of it returned to the sky except for a single molecule, falling down through a grate and leaving nothing more than a microscopic splash, right before my eyes.   

“What is my purpose?” I call out.  

I think I hear an answer, but I am whisked away once again by a sudden rush of water. It must be raining. In the darkness I am unsure where or what I am heading towards. I grow weary and find myself falling asleep, something I have not done in a long, long time. When I awake, I find myself along the bank of a woodland stream, nested between two stones. The smell of mud and wet moss. It is still raining.