Peter Kuitenbrouwer has spent previous summers walking across Toronto, Mississauga, and up Yonge Street. This summer he is spending his time on water, catching a new perspective on the city.
The wave that washes over the gunwales and sloshes on the floor of our canoe is hardly worthy of mention, save for a stupid decision by a landlubber: I have strewn my cell phone, watch, camera, notepad and change on the bottom of the boat.
Dave McDonald, a construction labour relations consultant who lives in Bloor West, owns five canoes and runs white water on his days off, has invited me for an afternoon paddle on Lake Ontario. We are aboard the prize of his fleet: a 15-foot blue canoe lovingly handcrafted in 1996 — with eastern white cedar ribs and western red cedar planks — by Will Ruch of Bancroft, whom Country Roads, a magazine of Hastings County, described this summer as “the Stradivarius of wood canoe builders.”
“Responsive, quick, fast, light,” says Mr. McDonald in describing the boat.
We put in at Cherry Beach Thursday afternoon. “The bowman goes in first and comes out last,” Mr. McDonald says. “If the sternman gets in first the bow pops out of the water.”
Mr. McDonald learned to sail as a boy in the lakes of Muskoka. “I can remember being a little kid at a cottage [on Muldrew Lake, near Gravenhurst] in a heavy wind, and wanting to go visit friends across the bay, and I didn’t have a clue how to paddle. And my parents let me, and I sat in the bow, and I made it.”
I get in first. A brisk wind blows from the west, so Mr. McDonald sets a course west along the shelter of the shore, and we bob across the Eastern Gap without incident. Then we beach the canoe and go for a swim at Ward’s Island Beach; Lake Ontario here in August is clean, refreshing and quite comfortable. Sunbathers crowd the beach, which is, it turns out, somewhat clothing-optional. So far so good.
We continue west a bit, in the lee of the island to shelter us from the wind, then turn southeast to cross the Shipping Channel. (Mr. McDonald chose this course to put the wind at our backs during the trickiest part of the trip.) Disorganized waves rise to four feet, bouncing at us from several angles.
“Sit in the bottom of the boat,” the skipper orders. He does the same, just before the waves hit us. I realize why most boats here are bigger and have motors, or — in the case of an Albacore sailboat which whistles past — at least boast keels.
Mr. McDonald confesses that pride inspired him to bust out his showpiece cedar canoe, admitting that, given the wind, we would have been better off in his 17-foot ABS plastic canoe. However, he makes no apologies for my shorted-out cellphone or soggy notepad; he wrapped his own camera in a towel and put it in his pack. All told, we fare quite well.
“We took water. If we had been sitting in our seats we likely could have been rescue material,” he adds. “It’s a survival game.”
There is a good reason to approach this section of the Leslie Street Spit with a silent water craft that turns easily and floats in a few centimetres of water. A sign describes this as a “sensitive bird area” protected by federal law, and Mr. McDonald wants me to see the curious spectacle of incalculable flocks of double-breasted cormorants who have moved in, tinting the beach black with close-pressed huddles of feathers.
One cannot call the colony beautiful. The cormorants’ guano has left the poplars on this stretch denuded of leaves and, largely, dead. Nests speckle the dead branches. Ducks, gulls, geese and cranes also share the space but the cormorants predominate, filling the beach, their long black beaks facing the same direction. The place reeks of dead fish.
As we glide up, the birds take wing, a silent mass of wings blocking the sun.
Toronto’s cormorant population has raised concern on two of my previous floats this summer; both a tugboat captain and a sailor complained of how they kill the trees. Some jurisdictions in the United States have in recent years ordered culls.
“When I was younger I looked at them as pests and thought to myself, ‘Why don’t we just shoot them?’ ” muses Mr. McDonald. “Now I see them as a wonder of nature. We don’t want to use this land anyway. It’s just awe-inspiring to just see them.”
And so we float home, under the flight path of Porter; four of its prop planes buzz overhead, coming in from Montreal and Ottawa to land.
We arrive back at Cherry Beach and leave the lake and the cormorants behind.
I put my Nokia phone in a bowl of rice to draw out the lake water. About 24 hours later, a surprise: it seems to have worked. Advantage, landlubber.
National Post
pkuitenbrouwer@nationalpost.com
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