It was a sunny spring morning when I left the house. I chatted with a curious rabbit and saw a paddling of ducks—mostly males, for some reason—milling about on the creek. I walked along the creek to a group of willows where once I saw a huge hawk sitting on a horizontal branch. We looked each other in the eye. The bird was only a few feet away, I remember. It glared at me with its cold yellow eye. Then it shat contemptuously and flew away. Its powerful wings made its flight seem lazy and careless. When I walk past those trees, I take out that memory and look at it, and then I put it away again.

I turned away from the creek and walked north through a series of neighbourhoods I had never seen before. The signs were ironic: one, barely attached to a fence, promised security; another mocked something our prime minister said about spreading the novel coronavirus. I took a selfie, reflected in a Christmas bauble. A stolen licence plate rusted in last fall’s leaves. The wind tugged at my hat and coat. I tasted a winter’s worth of dust.

Eventually I found myself on a familiar road: a broad thoroughfare that leads to the multiplex in the city’s northwest. I followed it north until it became a gravel grid road. I had reached the edge of the city. The wind blew harder and I chased my hat across a wet ditch into the stubble of last year’s barley.

Today the city was a tree, and I was counting its rings as I walked. I started in the 1920s, then I walked through the wartime houses of the 1940s and the small frame bungalows of the 1950s. I passed through the 1960s and then the 1970s before finding myself in the 1980s. Then the city skipped ahead to new neighbourhoods before it ended. I thought of something I once read in a book by Will Self:

I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanized matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure—that would be merely frivolous, or for exercise—which would be tedious.

I was “dissolving the mechanized matriculates which compresses the space-time continuum,” too, as I walked today. I was extending space while travelling through time at five kilometres per hour. When I reached the edge of the city, I could see its future: the fields of stubble between the newest development and the highway to Saskatoon were soon to be turned into more tract houses. Maybe that highway will act as a girdle limiting the city’s northward expansion, or maybe the city will leap past it and keep going.

And then the road curved back towards the city. My feet hurt. I thought about how much farther I wanted to walk—not too much more, I thought. Another two or three hours of walking would have brought me home, but I didn’t think I had that much walking left in me, so I called home for a ride. Christine picked me up in a parking lot lined with stores and restaurants and drove me home. We made tea and shared the last brioche and I wrote these words, wondering again if I’m learning to see the city differently, to read it with fresh eyes. I still can’t tell. I’ll have to keep practicing.