One Night in Toronto: a drive out to the Tragically Hip

I left her house that morning; the house of my estranged wife, probably something like ten after nine, I think.  I don’t really know; the clock in my van is off by about fifteen minutes.  I’d been there to pick up some tickets to see the Tragically Hip in Toronto, thanks to some residual generosity on her part,which I’m nonetheless obliged to repay sometime soon, just not now.  She has connections to such lofty and inaccessible things like tickets to the Man Machine Poem tour, and knowing how I’d wept when I heard the news of Gordon Downie’s diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, she pulled some strings and got them.  My estranged wife, my spouse, a woman I had once
loved deeply who was still in tune with my yearnings and needs.  I’d often thought our relationship would make a good Hip tune, full of questionable syntax, with a heavy Johnny Fay battery, something angry and fast paced with a soft, tender and lilting bridge in the middle.


I left Ottawa towards Highway 15 going through Smiths Falls, taking the scenic route that my brothers and I always prefer to take when we are headed towards Highway 401, treating myself to that rocky rolling landscape, that rugged Canadian Shield that I am sure is the basis of a lot of the Hip’s music, as much as the urban drama of the cities they have coaxed into their songs.  I was listening to Live Between Us, their live album from 1997.  Listening to Gord sing Nautical Disaster his delicious improvisations after the main lyrics of the song, I thought of what an anomaly Gord actually is.  No one out there does anything like this, this kind of rampant spontaneous creativity. I thought of the amazing mind that the man has, the deep intelligence from which he can drop these amazing monologues that startle you and draw you in like he was telling you the story of the rest of your life.  It truly does make him a phenomenon. How many thousands of seemingly disjointed sentences have passed from his mind, into the stadium air?  When I write, a lot of times it's his voice that is coming out, because though it's not the same deep intelligence that I draw from, it’s that inspiration that he gets me access to my own intelligence and depth. Right now even, little snippets of his voice turn my phrases.  It’s now like second nature to me, he’s burrowed in that deep.  That’s how important he is to me.

After two hours, I came into the Hip’s hometown of Kingston, where my sister has lived for almost the last 40 years. The Hip would play their last show here in a few days, and it would be broadcast on the CBC as a national event, not unlike the 1972 Summit Series, or the signing of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.It has a place in Canadian History, it does.  Because she lives just around the corner from Robbie Baker’s house, my sister has
her own Tragically Hip stories, but they are not all happy ones. She always remembers how Robbie’s rottweilers menaced her dog while she took it for a walk down Johnson Street. Robbie always had to hold his rotties back, but my sister always felt he could have held them better, and without the sadistic smile, she said.  I had met Robbie myself once, in 2006 at the go cart track just outside of town. Like me, he was there with his kids, doing fatherly things. I shook his hand, that hand that held a guitar and made all that wonderful music.  To this day, I remember how that felt.  There was no sadistic smile, though I found his voice had a surprisingly deep bass tone to it. I talked with him about family, and kids and his side project at the time; Stripper’s Union, then I left him alone with his private time.  I was starstruck, of course, but you could do that; talk to a member of the band as easily as running into someone from your high school graduating class.  They were that accessible.

A redemptive kind of rain started coming down just as I entered Kingston city limits, gentle and soft, where I could smell the gratitude of the earth as it blessed the ground. It had been a horribly hot week in Ontario, so after such a long stretch of weather, the water was welcome. I thought to myself how it wouldn't be hard to walk through this kind of rain in Toronto, how it would feel like holy water at Easter vigil, cleansing the sweat off of me before I walked into the cathedral heights of the ACC.  Merging onto the 401 however, the rain had passed, and I mused on how many times I’d driven down the Macdonald-Cartier and tried to wax poetic about it.  I had tried to write about the rocks and the trees and the test strips just outside of Belleville, but I never felt I was doing it any justice. The Hip, however, they've driven down the road thousands of times just like all Ontario bands had. Rush did it,  Rheostatics did it, Gordon Lightfoot did it.  Yes, an hour later, passing Glenn Miller Road in Trenton, Glenn Miller did it too.  But the Hip have captured that landscape, without coming off stinking of maple syrup.  They know those roads, those rock and trees.  They’ve sung of polar bears, flooding rinks, greasy jungles, garbage bag trees and Bill Barilko.  They just know.

As I came into the busy corridor of Toronto, I passed a woman who was getting out of her car, with no space to do so on the side of the highway.  I wondered at what she was doing, fearing for her safety.  I looked in the mirror to try and see her, but she was out of sight. I beelined it to the Yorkdale Mall, the best logistical nexus where the subway reaches the highway to fetch my brother, who had bussed in from Ingersoll to be there.  We had been to many concerts together.  Pretty much every Hip show I have been to, he has been there; both of us in different phases of our lives, breakups, marital strife, and now we are the same, struggling through post-marital uncertainties.  We ran up to the hotel to shower the salt off our sweaty bodies, then took subway and streetcar downtown into the hustlebustle hurlyburly of a night that hosts not only a Hip show, but a Blue Jays and an Argonauts game.  Bodies passed each other by, allegiances on our shirts, expectancy in our eyes. Some fans had the same tee shirt that I had on; the maple leaf crested highway sign.  We high fived each other in camaraderie as we passed by.

The concert was surreal. Gord didn't do much of his customary monologues and improvisation, but his energy level was at its peak, as was his voice.  He didn't hold anything back, pouring everything into his singing. Maybe that's what he wanted to do. Maybe the time of improvisation was over, maybe his work was done and it was time to present it, faithful to its source.  The band as usual was amazing, hovering like bees around the songs’ familiar frameworks. At the start of the show, they all seemed to play no less than 6/7 feet away from Gord, all facing him like they were playing the small bar as they played when they were just starting out, or maybe they were all just playing for him, circling him like a wagon train under attack. When they reached one of their intermissions,  they hugged him and even kissed him before they all filed off the stage. There were three intermissions that night, and before leaving for each one, Gord lingered after the band and just waved to the crowd  to share a few moments with us.  He always had a smile as he did this. I don't know whether he was putting on a brave face for us or if he wanted to give us a positive experience rather than a morbid one. There was no morbidity in the show, just heartfelt gratitude and love.  That said though, there was that moment while he was singing the part of Nautical Disaster before he was supposed to drop a word, when he stopped over the natural pause of the song and hovered over it tentatively for just the briefest moment, then shrugged and said the word, Death. He said it, all with a smile like he was accepting it, like there was no other way to get around it. Such is the inevitability of death. The word is not even in the official lyrics of the song, but it’s in the recording and all live versions of it.  It is unmentioned but resides as a natural part of the song, dropped like a dirty job that had to be done.  The show then drove on, with pitstops and resurrections until its climax, Ahead by a Century, ending with Gord lingering again on stage, smiling, nodding, waving to the crowd, even once in a while giving a cheeky wink to a few, until he left us behind on the stage, to a place where it will take a hundred years or more for us to catch up.

We took the subway back to the hotel.  In the station, a musician was playing an synthesized  musak version of Auld Lang Syne that irked me with its sense of apropos. After a restless night, I still got up at 5:30 the next morning to take my brother down to Union Station so he could catch a train. Driving down, we passed by horrible wreck on the highway; the hull of a semi completely burned out, with nothing left to it but charred metal. Someone had died last night somewhere in the city. Gord was hopefully somewhere, far off, peaceful, sleeping that morning and not conscious of this.  Later, having breakfast at the Airport Gate diner, I saw on CP24 News that a 69 year old man was killed getting out of his car on the on ramp to 427 near Dixon this morning, which was very close to my hotel.  I remembered the woman I’d seen doing that very same thing the day before as I was coming into Toronto.   How precariousness is life, really?  Am I beating the inevitability of death to death just a little bit?

Heading back home to Ottawa, I decided to take Highway 7, which at the start I found to be a big mistake.  A torrential rain had finally come, but the traffic, still linked to the suburbs of Toronto, was congested with an overabundance of humanity.  Everything moved at a sickening crawl and I began to sink into a brooding misanthropic mood.  I was tempted to take Yonge Street north to its alterego of Highway 11, where it could take me as far as the James Bay Basin if I wanted.  But no, instead I moved through that battery of thick rain, inching east in the stop and go of urban Greater Toronto, past boxes of commerce as far as the eye could see; the ugliest part of an ugly industrial sprawl.  I began to think that we, as humans, collectively, are ugly. When we congeal en masse to assume one entity, we are ugly, amoral and soulless. En masse, we are corporations and mobs. It's the individuals that are beautiful,  that stand out, beautiful and cherubic and righteous and worthy of praise. Just like Gordon Downie. A total nutcase, a total eccentric, he may seem like a madman muttering to himself  but if you listen closely to him you will hear his genius and perhaps your life will be changed forever.  I remembered the last night when the crowd did not want to let him go. You could tell he was tired.  His eyes were puffy and he walked with a slight hunch.  He probably just wanted to go crash on a couch somewhere but we, the greedy palace just kept keeping him up.  He complied and still delivered 100%. What a wonderful man. What a giving man. What an artist. What a gracious man. The way he lifted his arm to give us that heavy wave. Good bye and thank you.

Finally, my strained patience paid off and the speed limit jumped from 50 to 70, then finally 80 km/h, while the congestion was relieved and I could relax behind the wheel.  The highway goes down to one lane at Little Rouge Creek and I start passing little parishes with their 200 year old cemeteries. There are patches of light and blue sky in the canopy of cloud though the rain still falls, a little softer now.  Somebody had a rainbow somewhere.  Eventually, I reached the Land of the Lakes;  Lennox and Addington county, where the rains stopped and I could finally feel quiet.  I rolled the windows down to find that I was in a new climate that was much cooler.  Thankfully, the worst was over and I was closer to home.  I had wanted to do this drive for a long while and it was nice to finally be there, in communication with the rocks, lakes and trees. Even with all the urban memory in The Hip’s songs, the bottom line is this landscape, which is truly Canadian, not the neurotypical repetition of commercial colonialism; the box stores and franchises you can find anywhere on the North American continent.  Here, each rock and root is feral and native, in and of itself.  Sovereign.  You hear this place in the lonely loon call at the beginning of Wheat Kings, the asserting lyrics in the zenith of Lake Fever and the musky cottage comfort of Bobcaygeon.  This is where Gord lives when he thinks, where he transcends us to when he sings.  A distance sign passes me by which envigourates me. Wayward ho! I am just an hour away from home, though I already feel like I am there already.