The Wallace Line
on buried rivers and impossible distances
This past Sunday was a beautiful sunny day in Toronto. I woke up late, but with a mission. Something insisted to me that what I needed that day was to be by the water, and that it should move. I began packing a bag for a bike ride to the Humber River.
If you’re not familiar with the geography of Toronto, the Humber River flows through the city’s west end down to Lake Ontario. Toronto is a city of several waterways — the Don, the Humber, the Rouge River, and many creeks, including the Etobicoke Creek and Highland Creek, among others buried under the city itself, Garrison Creek being the most famous among them. Years and years ago, before the city was established in its current colonial form, the creek used to run through what’s now the big parks of Christie Pits and Trinity Bellwoods, and the slope of the banks is what gives both of those parks their distinct bowl shapes. Christie Pits is of course also the site of a famous race riot in Toronto’s history, when in August 1933, Nazi sympathizers disrupted a baseball game with a Nazi flag, prompting the Jewish players to put their bats to good use. Sometimes if you stand at the centre of that park, at its lowest point, near the baseball diamond where the riots happened, you can still hear the water rushing beneath you. It never quite stopped flowing.
The Humber River is not far out of the core of the city, an easy bike ride, which was just about what I was up for that day; not to punish myself, but simply to push. To sweat. And it felt strangely necessary, almost urgent. In what has, now in its second year, become an annual late summer pilgrimage to the River, I hopped on my bike and set out, determined to stage a confrontation with the moving water.
Back in October, nearly a year ago, I began dating a boy who I knew would be moving to Australia for medical school in the new year, at the end of January 2024. Foolishly, we decided to date anyway, just for fun.
Australia is kind of the farthest away from you a hot guy can go. The time difference is 14 hours, a monumental and inconvenient chasm that makes it impossible to align. I showed him the moon on FaceTime (8pm for me, 10am for him) and he told me that it’s the same moon he saw last night, which was romantic but also insane. The sheer difference of his location is one of those topics that keeps coming up because it informs everything. On the subject, he told me about this thing called the Wallace Line, an imaginary biogeographical line running through the southeastern end of the Malay Archipelago. On either side of the line, as a result of tectonic plate movements, even in relatively similar climates and with bare hundreds of kilometres separating them, the fauna are totally unrelated. One side is inhabited by Asian species, and the other, by species of Australian origins.
The temptation to render such a thing into metaphor is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the more one pushes, the harder it fits. Human connection is not allegorical to faunal evolution, and there are sure explanations for why marsupials, for example, are so geographically limited. Still, it’s charming to reflect on this deeply felt, natural parallel to the kind of isolation that I feel in thinking about Australia and my far-flung ex-boyfriend, the place where he lives now being so far away that it constitutes its own biological world, such that even its closest neighbours can’t quite connect with it.
Other things feel like this. For example, my mother and I are trying our best to connect across difference as well, this time, politically. I’ve had a lot of conversations with other young Jewish people about how the last year-ish of Israeli aggression has caused major conflicts in their families, bringing up all kinds of issues, making connection feel impossible. It’s low on the list of related issues to care about, but on a purely personal level, it’s been a real challenge. It’s difficult and unpleasant to stand across a vast and expanding chasm with someone you love, to the point that the things they believe and say feel as disturbing and strange to you as a kangaroo unfurling a swastika at a baseball game. And yet, I feel on some level that I must, and I’m glad that my mother feels the same. I love her immensely. And though I would never tolerate this kind of thing in anyone else, I have to find a way for us to connect. I don’t think this kind of love-across-difference approach really applies anywhere beyond a relationship as intimately significant and politically inconsequentially as that of a mother and child. But in that case, and perhaps no other, it simply must be done.
If there’s a thesis here (there isn’t), it is that love is not necessarily a good predictor for stability in connection, but it is a good indicator of how hard one will try to keep that connection alive. Some differences are extraordinary — geography, politics — and yet, when the situation allows for it, love demands we push through. Thinking about this — love and difference, love and intractability, love and politics — I am forced to confront the fact that I am someone who cares very deeply about love, to the point perhaps of compulsion. I feel and act like love can fix the world, a dreadfully hippie-ish impulse that refuses to die. I will always opt for the big feeling, even if it kills me. I am a glutton for punishment, but I won’t walk away from love. I’ll keep coming back to it, trying to pull more out of it, reaching my hands down into the well of it, coming up soaking wet.
I thought about this on Sunday, by the river. Around 10-ish months ago, in December, I told that boy who is now in Australia that I loved him. We had been dating for maybe two months, if that. It was, by every account, way too soon. Yet I had been holding off for days and days, and couldn’t bear it any more. I could hear the word “love” rushing inside me, begging to soak through onto the surface. The moving water found its way out. I remember the moment distinctly, what it felt like to say it; like a waterfall, like the rain, like being drenched. I remembered that moment today when we spoke on the phone and said “I love you” before hanging up. I meant it back then and I meant it now, too.
The last time I wrote to you all was a year ago, almost exactly. In that post, I mentioned a great loss, a breakup. That was the relationship that occurred prior to the one I’m describing here. It is perhaps not insignificant to the timing of this long, meandering creek of a letter about love and difference that, on the Saturday before my river excursion, I met with that ex-partner for the first time since the summer we broke up. We walked along the route of another one of Toronto’s buried rivers, Castle Frank Brook, and did our own excavations. After the breakup, it was hard to find a place to return to that honoured our friendship, our camaraderie, the way it was fun to just hang out. It felt good and right to be reminded of why we loved each other, even if it’s so different now. In its own way, the love found a way to get through.
Water is, in its essence, unstoppable. Sure, it can be dammed up, dried up. But where it exists, it flows. It is diverted or evaporated, but still, it must always move. What you put in its way, it will find its way through.
When I arrived at the water, I found myself thinking about what this river once was, how it has been changed, and how it has endured. I found myself thinking about the boy in Australia, and how somewhere inside me, that love is still flowing. It never dried up or diverted, at least not for long. For months and months, I have felt it rushing below my feet.
What does it look like to live alongside something that refuses to give itself up? To share space with this deep, moving force, to live with it, to feel it move? How do you make something unstoppable into something manageable? At what point do you have to just accept it as it is; to flow with the river, to be carried out?