Toronto Reborn by Ken Greenberg

Author:Ken Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2019-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

5

The City in Nature

Fifteen minutes by bike from where we live, Eti and I keep a double kayak at the Harbourfront Canoe and Kayak Club on the Toronto Harbour. We have made a mutually beneficial arrangement with the owner, Dave Corrigan, donating it to the club. Dave stores and maintains it; we can use it when we give notice, and he can rent it out at all other times. Whenever we do have time, usually on a weekend when the weather beckons, we set out with a picnic lunch from the Rees Street Slip, paddling in the direction of Toronto Island, circumventing the buoys protecting the Billy Bishop airport runway, and eventually heading for the Eastern Gap, one of the two openings to the inner harbour from the lake, when we are feeling ambitions.

At first, we are in the busiest section of the harbour. We have to time our movement very carefully to dodge the three fast ferries as they travel on fixed routes (with very little ability to manoeuvre) to the ferry terminals at Hanlan’s Point, Centre Island, and Ward’s Island. Sometimes we have to deal with the choppy wake thrown up by powerboats. As the hard edge of the seawall recedes, delineating the historic piers of a once-active port and now lined with a dense wall of new buildings, we get closer to the continuous band of vegetation ringing the Toronto Islands, and things calm considerably.

Heading east past the remnants of the industrial port lands and passing the mouth of the monumental ship channel that served it, we make our way through the busy traffic in the Eastern Gap and breathe a sigh of relief when we enter a new, expansive, even quieter body of water, the Outer Harbour. Here there are no ferries and fewer powerboats, and, depending on the day, more small sailboats and windsurfers. To the east, there is popular Cherry Beach on the south shore of this harbour, to the west around the bend a sheltered beach on Ward’s Island. Sometimes these are our destinations, but mostly we continue across this second harbour, making for a new fringe of green shoreline defining the edge of Tommy Thompson Park, commonly known as the Leslie Street Spit, extending some five kilometres out into Lake Ontario from the foot of Leslie Street.

We usually find a convenient place to pull the kayak up onto a small stretch of beach where we might find a fallen log to sit on to rest and enjoy our lunch, often entirely alone, before continuing our exploration of the openings to inner bays along the shore. At our leisurely pace, it may have taken us fifty minutes to an hour to cross a little over five kilometres of water. We are still in the city, but in an entirely different world. It is sublime.

This is an entirely artificial place. It was never intended to be a park, but it became a magnificent one. We are on the edge of a wild area where

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