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| TANNIS TOOHEY/TORONTO STAR |
| Lake Ontario is "completely drawing. It's like a magnet," says Carol Sebert, sailing her new boat with husband Gregor Herman. |
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Braving the waves
MURRAY WHYTE
TORONTO STAR
Bobbing in a rickety fibreglass dinghy on an unseasonably brisk July morning, Carol Sebert sums up her experiences here, along Lake Ontario's urban shoreline, thusly: "Thrilling. It's been just thrilling," Sebert says, one hand extended from the dinghy to grip a modest 4-metre sailboat, moored offshore at the Toronto Sailing and Canoe Club. She and her husband bought it in June. "I have been down to the lake more times in the past month than I have been in the past 25 years combined. We come four times a week. It's completely drawing. It's like a magnet." Over the years, the city's shoreline has been described by Torontonians as many things, though thrilling and drawing have been rare among them. Toxic, perhaps, or contaminated might top the list, followed closely by filthy, reeking, infested and rancid. How many people have actually been to the water's edge in recent years? A number would be impossible to tabulate. But most of us accept that the lake has been more prevalent in Torontonians' minds as myth than as reality.The force of that myth has driven us inland, conceding to the barriers that have trapped us in our urban existence. It started as long ago as the 19th century, when railroads caged us at Front St. and drove us north, replacing the dozens of boating clubs with rail terminals and industrial sites. In the 1950s, the Gardiner Expressway carved a thicker line along the shore. Most recently, a spate of condo building along the water has served as the current incarnation of the barricade. Prime lakefront land has been surrendered to private developers where, perhaps, public space might have fostered that connection with the water we seem to have lost. These buildings create a wearying sense of "look, don't touch" — the water is aesthetic, as in a view, not practical, as in boating, swimming, fishing. There's a barrier more forbidding than glass and steel — the persistent notion of the lake as impure, unrecoverable, to be avoided rather than engaged. It's a mental barrier too few of us have even attempted to scale.Sebert, though, is proof that the transformation can take place. After a near-lifetime spent minutes from shore — she lives just west of Roncesvalles, north of Queen St. — Sebert has finally penetrated the barrier. "I used to be afraid of it. I thought it was dirty and stinky," she says of the lake. "The surprise last year was that it didn't smell. Now, all of a sudden, I don't even want to leave the city anymore. I've never felt this way about living in Toronto before. I've always been anxious to get away. This is the first time, and it's quite a switch." City and provincial officials say that the lake's problems have been stabilized. While progress is slow, water quality is improving, along with the lake's potential as a fully useable recreational resource.This is not to say the lake is perfectly fine. Far from it. Many city beaches are closed for as much as half the summer due to high bacterial counts. Environmental groups rail at the glacial pace of improvement. Water management issues remain massive and costly problems. But the biggest challenge, perhaps, isn't physical. Time and money may fix material problems, but it may not be enough to sway a skeptical public."We think the lake should be a larger part of the identity of the city of Toronto," says Mark Mattson, president of independent preservation group Lake Ontario Waterkeeper. "We try to get people to the water, and we want them to be part of it, because if they don't love it, they're not going to try to save it." In the summer of 1998, I moved to Toronto from the west coast, with only a job to come to. My personal connections here were few and distant. I had no sense of the city, though I knew that it would be intolerably hot. I wasn't proven wrong. August was a blast furnace, with temperatures routinely topping 30 degrees, amped up, of course, by an impenetrable humidity that made an afternoon walk seem more like a neck-deep wade in a hot tub. Cornered by solitude and heat, I bought a bike and set off along the water's edge, west to the Humber River and into Mimico, then back, past the Sir Casimir Gzowski Park to Sunnyside. Wilted, I would occasionally wade into Lake Ontario up to my knees, leery of the thick weeds and clots of algae, and of the curious scarcity of other people along the shore despite the heat wave. I came to the city with the weight of the lake's reputation imprinted in my mind. But I had also come with fresh memories of my previous summer, spent in Seattle. All of my spare time there was passed on the shores of Lake Washington, a cool, deep body of water. In the shadow of Mount Rainier, I spent almost every evening at Madison Park, plunging into the lake each half hour or so, warming in the evening sun in the intervals between. This was summer as it should be.I was stunned by the abandoned shores I found in Toronto's western reaches, and by the forbidding signs there: "Warning: Unsafe to Swim." Frustrated, I set out for the Toronto Islands, where I found refuge: Clean water, swimmable beaches but still far too few people in the lake. Now, five years later, there has been change on Toronto's western lakeshore, however slight. Along the beach at Sunnyside, the water is clearer, pleasantly free of the choking weeds. The Martin Goodman Trail, its asphalt broad and smooth, is choked with cyclists and rollerbladers. Sunbathers are splayed out along the sand in front of the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion, which underwent a major renovation this year. The pavilion's patio, next to the beach, is jammed, pitchers of beer and various pub foods distributed generously under a canopy of umbrellas.For all this, however, the beach is still closed. Recent rains have raised the E. coli bacteria count to higher than acceptable levels, explains a lifeguard who's on duty nonetheless. "We were open yesterday," he says apologetically, before pointing east, to Budapest Beach, where a couple of swimmers splash in the waters. The 14 beaches maintained by the city, strung along the shoreline from the Humber all the way to Rouge Beach in Scarborough, are tested for water quality on a daily basis. Five samples are taken, and a stringent rule applies: If E. coli is found in concentrations of greater than 100 parts per million, the beach is "posted" — a sign goes up warning that it's unsafe to swim. In recent years, that been the case at the western beaches — Marie Curtis, Sir Casimir Gzowski, Sunnyside and Budapest — more than half the time. It's here, near the mouth of the Humber River, that the problem is most acute. Rainfalls can cause storm sewer overflow and run-off from farmer's fields, washing bacteria into the river and the lake. It's an issue the city has yet to resolve. The standards for water quality applied here are the highest in North America, explains Michael D'Andrea, manager of the city's water and waste water management services division. It's a standard that can sometimes work against them. "The whole issue with respect to beach water quality really only surfaced in the mid-'80s, because it was that time that samples were starting to be collected, and certainly not with the rigour we have today," he says. "Back then, you had raw sewage spilling into the rivers and the waterfront. You certainly didn't have the level of treatment we have today. And yet, we're told of the good old days, when people would swim in the Don River, or the waterfront. Well, I'd hate to guess what they were swimming in." Shortly after the city dealt itself a painful public relations blow by beginning to post water quality issues at the beaches, it was hit again by the International Joint Committee, which oversees environmental issues in the great lakes on both sides of the border. In 1985, the IJC designated Toronto as one of 43 "areas of concern" along the Great Lakes. The region was asked to draw up a Remedial Action Plan to affect clean up.
`We've always considered it another room in our house. 'Glenn Cochrane, on The Beach's beach
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"Our sewers were fingered as a leading cause for all that ailed Toronto surface waters and beaches," D'Andrea says. Also of concern was contaminated sediment in the harbour, which showed high levels of such substances as lead, copper and zinc. Almost 20 years later, people remain divided on how much progress has been made. A 2001 report from the provincial Ministry of the Environment concludes that there has been some improvement in the sediment quality in Toronto's inner harbour. D'Andrea says chemical toxicity is not an issue at city beaches, and hasn't been for years. He points out that all industrial discharge, along with sewage, is routed to sewage plants and is thoroughly treated before it reaches the water table — a vast improvement over even 25 years ago. The next step, a master plan for waste water management in the region, is being designed, with D'Andrea at the helm. But groups such as Lake Ontario Waterkeeper are unimpressed. "It's not good enough to say `We're trying' or `It's better this year than last year,'" says Mattson. "The standards are important, and they need to be enforced."The provincial, legally enforceable standard for the city beaches requires that water quality meet standards for swimmability 95 per cent of the time. Since water sampling began, that standard has been reached only a handful of times by only two or three beaches.As I board the ferry to Ward's Island, the boat, a rustic steel husk outfitted with wooden decking and weathered orange life vests stuffed in steel brackets overhead, is suddenly flooded with children. They swarm over the upper deck, drape along the ship's railings and over its wooden benches, despite the protestations of their teenage chaperones. As the ferry pulls out, chugging along on its 10-minute route, I ask one of the guardians, a counsellor from the islands' YMCA day camp, if they'll be swimming in the lake today. Her nose wrinkles, and she looks at me as though I'm one of her 8-year-old charges. "They'll be spending the day at the camp, playing," she says. The lake question, apparently, does not merit an answer. Actually, though, the island beaches exemplify the vast range in water quality throughout the city: They're consistently open, where the western beaches are closed, on average, two-thirds of the time. It was here, five years ago, that I found myself face-to-face with the myth of a deadly, toxic lake and dismissed it, swimming almost every day. If the daily water testing showed no signs of bacterial contamination — and it rarely did — in I went, wondering how, in a city of millions, just a scattered few would take advantage of this cool, clear heaven as temperatures inched into the upper 30s. On Centre Island, the trickle of swimmers heading back to the water has been slow but constant. Since 1995, Centre Island has been posted about half the season, though this year it's been closed only twice. With the water icy in mid-July after a long winter, the beaches are well-populated on a recent mid-week afternoon, with swimmers staying in as long as they can stand it. Ward's Island Beach has also been closed twice this summer, making it second only to Cherry Beach for water quality. It's here that Kathleen McDonnell, a local children's author and long-time island resident, wades in for her daily 25-minute swim. She's been swimming here for years, at least since she moved to the island in the early '80s, and has heard the scare-mongering. "People wonder why I don't have two heads," says McDonnell, grinning. "I've talked to lots of people who grew up in Toronto who say `Oh, no, I never swam in the lake. We just didn't do that.' And I look at them and think `This beautiful lake — what's the matter with you?'"McDonnell lives nestled in the close quarters of Ward's Island's sidewalk-sized residential streets, where cozy, wooden cottage-like homes shoulder up close to one another amid the foliage near the water's edge. It's a short walk to the beach, which McDonnell does barefoot, along the concrete path and across the expanse of green grass near the community centre. She grew up in Chicago, the city so many Torontonians obsess over as the right to our many lakefront wrongs. "There was a beach at the end of my street, and a beach at the end of every street. There was an almost unbroken string of them all the way into downtown. And they're packed. People go in the water. They just do. It's part of the culture." It's that culture that Toronto lost years ago, when the city succumbed to industrial development on the shoreline. But without that culture, the lake's modest improvements will go for naught, McDonnell says. "People bring their kids over from the city, and you'll see them: The mother is sunning herself, yelling at them: `Jimmy, only up to your knees!' The sign will say the beach is fine, but they're so fixated with this idea: You must not go in the water. It's heartbreaking."This is why we really, really need to clean up the lake. I would love to see that mentality overturned, because if we don't use the lake, then we won't try to make it better." East now, past downtown, where industrial sites have been replaced by parking lots, condominiums and hotels, past the land that serves as Toronto's port, to The Beaches, or The Beach, depending on who you ask.It's here the disconnect between water and city vanishes. Since the 1870s, when the neighbourhood was a string of summer resorts, Beach people have lived near, at and on the water. It's a part of their lives. "We've always considered it another room in our house. That's how much use we got out of it," says Glenn Cochrane, meandering along the boardwalk on a recent morning. Cochrane moved to the area in 1970, just before real estate skyrocketed. He couldn't imagine living anywhere else. "It's a mythical grip. There's no other way to explain it."The Beach, which stretches east from Woodbine along the shore to Scarborough, where the gentle beach transforms into jagged bluffs, is, to many, an ideal Toronto waterfront from days past, preserved in amber: residential streets lead down to the shore, a large park dominates the centre of the neighbourhood. "The difference here is that it's accessible, and always has been accessible," Cochrane says. Still, The Beach hasn't been without its troubles. Through the late 1980s, the area was plagued by high bacterial counts. While people would still use the boardwalk and walk on the beach, the water was off-limits. "It was used, but in a passive sense," Cochrane recalls. Since 1995, the eastern beaches have been closed, on average, about 20 per cent of the time — not acceptable to the Waterkeepers, perhaps, but still open and swimmable far more than not. And people in The Beach have made use of it. "Last year was unusually warm, and people were swimming in it from early July to September. It was a sight," Cochrane says. It is, however, far from perfect. At the Balmy Beach Club, a fixture of the area since 1906, manager Charlene Provan allows that most members won't take a chance in the water. Last year, the beach was posted 20 days of the summer; it peaked in 2000 at 36. Even if the beach is open more than it's closed, the closures build that mental barrier, dissolving the will to surmount it.For Carol Sebert, it took 25 years to get over. Now she wonders what took so long. "It's so weird. I'm as perplexed as anyone," she says. But she's a new advocate — the kind of person the lake needs if it's to move forward from here.She can already answer the skeptics. "I tell them about the sunsets," she says. "And I tell them how beautiful it is and how, as you float away from the city, your stress floats away, too."It's a line McDonnell's preached for a long time. "You should be able to live in the city and do all sorts of wonderful things, and one of those things you should be able to do is swim in this gorgeous Great Lake. It's right here — and you can," she says. "It's up to us, now, to make it the joyous resource it should be for everyone."
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