Last Saturday I sat in the front window of our downtown house, eating lunch.
“Dear,” I said to Jonathan. “A small truck just went by with FUCK TRUDEAU on the side of it.”
Busts of Roman Emperors on the second floor
“It’s the truckers’ protest at Bloor and Avenue Road,” he said from the kitchen. We had heard they were coming to Toronto. “Would you give them the finger for me?”
Instead I put on my coat and boots. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I have an sudden urge,” I said, “to visit the ROM.”
Angry protesters? No; mourning figures made from mud
Heading south to Bloor I passed vans, cars with flags and rude signs, cargo trucks, flatbed trucks and rent-a-trucks, whose occupants were either joining the fun or having the worst moving day of their lives. On Bloor Street it became impossible to hear anything but horns, even next to Koerner Hall, where inside Royal Conservatory graduating students tuned their instruments to play the most important concert of their young lives in front of their beaming parents.
The intersection at Bloor and Avenue Roads was completely blocked by an 18-wheeler and a big rig in front of a row of concrete barriers. I turned right into the Royal Ontario Museum. It was fairly empty except for a few dozen families accompanied by children holding their fingers in their ears, nervous staff and bored security guards envious of the police outside. I purchased a ticket for the whale exhibition and wandered around upstairs. The day’s protest, with shouting and organized chants, may have been deafening, but inside the Roman era it was absolutely silent.
Two burly men in their 50s, dressed in plaid and denim, walked nearby looking at busts of Roman Emperors. “Wish you brought Eleanor?” one of them asked the other.
“Nah. She doesn’t approve of all this,” said his friend. “She got vaccinated. Better off in Barrie.”
Nothing like a protest in Sothern Ontario to do a little advertising
The whale exhibition in the basement of the ROM comprised three gigantic skeletons of different species of whale bathed in eerie blue light. In contrast to the hubris of the smaller, man-made statues upstairs, the whales’ natural size embodied a powerful, timeless beauty dwarfing the tallest of exhibit visitors, the walls and the museum itself. These gargantuan ghosts were surrounded by informative texts, videos of whale conservators and the journey the skeletons had made to the ROM as well as exhortations to exhibit-viewers to join efforts to preserve and protect them.
Unfortunately, my favourite part of any exhibit is the gift shop. At the Victoria & Albert Museum in London I have been known to sprint through centuries of rare artifacts to check out William Morris print knapsacks. The whale exhibit gift shop had mostly stuffed whale keychains, books and small cushions. No beautiful bones to take home. It was time to go outside again and face the music.
A creature in danger of extinction, and a whale
Sunlight, bleats, songs and shouts. I wandered into the mob, pretending to be the journalist I was a thousand years ago, and took pictures. Hundreds of unmasked protestors rubbing elbows around me weren’t belligerent or even particularly angry; no one bothered me for wearing a mask. One Toronto Sun reporter later described the atmosphere as ‘one big street party.’ It’s been speculated that many in the crowd, particularly those with children, were vaccinated, but had joined the protest because they are sick of nearly two years of quarantine and lockdowns. I am too. But I would prefer to join a vaccinated dinner party; feel free to invite me. Despite chants of “What do we want? Freedom!” and suggestions of indignities involving members of Parliament, it was a pretty friendly crowd. I went home to await the end of this goddamned pandemic, sitting once again in my front window and wearing the same expression as the Emperor Tiberius.
* part of the now-defunct slogan of the ROM, engraved upon the eastern face.
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