in 2013, the university of toronto paid 9.5 million dollars / for a green carpet rolled over // Grass

Part 1: Grass

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

(Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 74-76)

The most famous body of poetry about grass — that I know of — comes from Walt Whitman. He describes the grass as a place to lie upon, in June under the morning sun, to kiss one another. I think our attempts to imitate grass via turf struggle to recreate that intimacy.

Before 2013, Back Campus was real, live grass. It was an open space for students and pedestrians to utilize for leisure, to “loafe” and loosen the stops from their throats. It was, of course, also used for sports practice, and even for drilling soldiers at one point. The land’s purpose for leisure seemed most important however, evinced by students who protested the turfing not with chants nor signs, but by playing on Back Campus.

Despite the strong resistance, the protestors lost. We see that defeat clearly now. 

Though Back Campus claims to be an open space, and certainly you can take a shortcut through it without much resistance, I have never witnessed it being used for casual purposes beyond that. I have never seen someone read a book here, or picnic or nap, and certainly no one is taking their loved one on a date here. The lack of shade; the strange dampness that never goes away; the plastic that crumbles off; the fencing that makes it hard to enter and exit (I mean, I think it’s just a little weird that an open field has exit signs, don’t you?) — all contribute to Back Campus being a less-than-welcoming space.

But I don’t want to dwell a long time on what we lost. We lost. The protesters lost the resistance, and we, eternally, will have lost the grass. There is little hope in trying to reverse what has changed so fundamentally, so let us focus on the transfiguration.

Part  2: Change

Bruce Kidd, who was Warden of Hart House and a public spokesperson in defense of the turfing, claimed that “The landscape of the Back Campus will remain essentially the same.” For reasons that I have listed, time has proven that Kidd’s statement is fundamentally wrong. 

I also think he contradicted himself with that line. Anything there is to gain from a turfed Back Campus comes from change. 

He’s right that there is much less mud. I am not an athlete myself, but I’ve borne witness to many sporting events that happened here: soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, track and field. I’m glad for the athletes that reap value from this space. The point of the turfing was to provide a safer, better space for professional-level sports, and just that was achieved. 

With some techniques of black-out poetry, I can appropriate Kidd’s quote a little to make it more accurate: 

“The landscape of the Back Campus will remain essentially the same.” 

Back Campus is a space that was changed so entirely it could never change again. After the snow melts upon the land, its soil will not soften. The grass will not grow too tall. But the resilient moss has other plans.

Part 3: Moss

We took away the grass but moss is here. Moss grows beneath the fences, between cracks of concrete, in the seams of turf, and in some spots, on it. Before the turfing, grass would have likely outcompeted moss, but now there’s no soil, which is a terrible detriment to grass and great news for moss.

Moss is incredible evolutionarily since it needs so little to survive. It can tolerate being nearly completely dried out, losing 98% of its water content, and still survive for months until the next contact with water. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her Gathering Moss, “Mosses have a covenant with change.”

I was so angry when I first heard of Back Campus’s history. The concept of killing something that lived and replacing it with a plastic replica — at such a steep cost — is maddening. But I very quickly realized there is so little room for anger after the change has been made; there is only space for grief, and it’s an important emotion. 

Now I have a choice to direct what I should do with that grief. We all have a choice. We must look ahead and make better decisions, because now we have learned the consequences of breaking the land’s back.

Conclusion 

Like grass for Whitman, nature has inspired so much art and poetry. I questioned if Back Campus would still be able to beget art, and it still does, because it still lives. I have a poem to prove that.

on back campus i find the meaning of carpe diem

in 2013, the university of toronto paid 9.5 million dollars

for a green carpet rolled over 

Grass

they broke the Land’s back 

for a game of field hockey 

and claimed

nothing would change¹

they were right

nothing will change 

because everything has

they crushed 

a flattening iron against the crinkled Earth to make it straight

now nothing will live or die because everything that breathed 

stopped

and now it’s perfect

~

did i ever tell you

i hate growing up 

but not growing?

the process is too vertical for me

when i was 13 and mad at my mom i used to sit on Grass fields 

and tear up the blades fistfuls at a time

i cried because

the world was spinning so fast

a treadmill on which i could not run fast enough

i gripped onto Grass to keep me from falling off

~ 

in Grass’s wake, Moss grows in the seams of astroturf and concrete

i think Moss is practicing kintsugi

the japanese art of repairing broken ceramic with lacquer

and dusting the cracks with gold

the golden ruptures here are one-dimensional

too straight to appear broken but Moss knows 

to be complete is to grow

not up but sideways and sometimes 

not at all

but She never stops striving for Her one need and want:

life 

which She lives

and She gives

clinging on to crumbling plastic 

never worrying about the strength of Her hold

¹Paraphrase of “The landscape of the Back Campus will remain essentially the same” (Kidd, 2013). 

References

Kidd, B. (2013, June 4). U of T’s unsafe grass and mud have no heritage value. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/u-of-ts-unsafe-grass-and-mud-have-no-heritage-value/article12343992/

Ackerman, A. (2013, June 9). U of T back campus is no place for plastic grass. Toronto Star. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/u-of-t-back-campus-is-no-place-for-plastic-grass/article_7bfaefc9-47a5-5624-9c2f-780727e91e1e.html

Caldi, H. (2013, May 7). Demonstrations against Back Campus construction plans grow. The Varsity. https://thevarsity.ca/2013/05/07/demonstrations-against-back-campus-construction-plans-grow/

Kidd, B. (2013, June 4). U of T’s unsafe grass and mud have no heritage value. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/u-of-ts-unsafe-grass-and-mud-have-no-heritage-value/article12343992/

Kimmerer, R. W. (2003). Gathering moss : a natural and cultural history of mosses. Oregon State University Press.