There came a time when they began to build roads in the air. It was a fad, a certain madness or a fancy that overtook engineers throughout Canada. The States as well: there was a road wended in a snake's curve high over the harbour, above the maze of ship's canals and the grain elevators, in Buffalo. They called it the Skyway and in retrospect she supposed the others followed from this; it was that way then, everything in her youth followed from the States. Now the flow reverses, a river of cars toward Toronto every weekend.

In any case for a time it was a pastime for her father to motor through the air in the way some men motored the river in boats. They would fly over St. Kitts (and he'd recite an elaborate rhyme of pies and a place called St Ives) then settle down briefly along the blue oceanic edge of Lake Ontario before flying up over Burlington and into Hamilton, where on a good day, a clear day, you could see not forever but Toronto, "the toe" her father called it, the spire of the CN Tower a needle over the pearl water. He was the only man she knew who called it the toe. When they told her he had died in an auto accident, she imagined he had taken off into the air on a whirly wheel, motoring high across the water of the lake and beyond the toe.

She imagined an invisible city in the air, its roads like glass.