mad.

I grew up in what is considered to be a big city, Toronto. My parents had a new 1963 split level in north York that was considered at the time, suburbia. I was always within walking distance of schools and strip malls. The streets were wide and there was ample parking for as many cars as you owned on your driveway.

Even with its urban setting there was always some adventure that found my friends and I following a creek, hacking our way through an overgrow path or riding our bikes over dirt trails. All of these travels inevitably were taken for the same reason, the hidden treasure at the end of the trek. It might have be a rope swing that you could use to tempt your courage to cross raging rapids, or an urban fort that your friends built from discarded 70’s paneling and carpet samples, a rusted out car, or even a secret factory dumpster that contained all the sample stickers you ever needed, all urban “Urban Easter Eggs” for the taking by an urban adventurer.

It was usually no small feat to navigate the concrete jungle in order to uncover these uncharted destinations. There were no maps, no GPS, only unmarked paths, passed on from one kid to another by word of mouth or, if you were lucky, direct personal escort. Regardless of how you obtained the knowledge, it was your obligation not only to remember the way but to past it on to the next generation as the passage was often based on physical landmarks.

“You go down the hill near the old ladies place, when you get to a stump turn right, but don’t take the path that is clearly marked, take the one beside it. When you get to the broken fence be quiet, a dog lives there.”

That was part of the attraction. You felt like you were going some place that no one had ever been. Now, certainly in an urban atmosphere, this kind of adverture is lost but has been to some degree replaced with Geocaching, the high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices but our sense of direction seems to has been lost as well. I still live in Toronto right downtown and still navigate to this day with landmarks. I often don’t know the names of streets but I usually arrive in a timely manner. Don’t get me wrong I love the GPS in my iPhone but I have to wonder as I am soon becoming a new father whether my kids will ever same the same sun filled days I had trying to discover the next hidden treasure in the urban landscape.

-30-

Hanging out in my backyard (left to right, Herbie, Jackie, Me, Brian, unknown girl)

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