The High Park Portage

• Posted on June 7, 2009 at 2:30 PM
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“Lake Ontario Paddling and the High Park "Portage"”

It’s about 3.5 kilometres south from my Toronto apartment to Lake Ontario.

That’s not the worst portage in the world.

You see, I have long harboured this little fantasy. In that fantasy, I throw caution to the winds, throw a left hook at my boss, come home on the subway, pack a bag, grab the paddle, carry my canoe down to the Lake and just paddle. I make my way up the old fur trade route – Rouge Valley, Lake Simcoe, Georgian Bay. I gradually get past the lakeside factories, the highways, the cottage boat traffic. The land gets wilder. I’m living on tea and stale Wonderbread and beans. Lake Superior, Wawa, the Pukaskwa Coast, the Grande Portage. I’m skinny and lean and in the best shape of my life. I’m writing a good chunk of the next great Canadian novel on my windbound days. All I’ve got to decide is whether my next destination is Lake Winnipeg or James Bay. I’ve got $300 bucks left in my bank account...

Anyway, it’s a great fantasy. And it makes a regular appearance in my daydream rotation every Spring as I sit in my office on Bay Street looking out over Lake Ontario.

The problem is that damn portage. I hate portages. And since I don’t have a car, I really hate portages.

Well, this weekend, I cracked it.

Instead of spending a couple hundred bucks on a car rental to take us out of the city and up to canoe country, my wife and I spent half that amount on a canoe cart. We strapped our green, 16 foot boat to its two-wheeled cradle, threw the paddles and gear in and started walking down the street like kids pulling a very large, odd wagon.

We crossed Bloor Street with an assortment of dog walkers, tennis players and Chinese tourists heading for High Park. One of the tourists video-taped us on his camera. We wheeled the boat along the sidewalked-road that runs through the park. As strollers, joggers and bikers approached, we veered off onto the grass to let them pass and ogle. Past the tennis courts, past the hot dog vendors and the Japanese gardens, after half an hour we finally reached the lakeshore highways that make up the park’s southern border.

The cart had worked like a dream, even taking into account that the walk this way was mostly downhill. Torontonians often get pegged as frigid big city types. That’s not true. And there’s no better way to see that than to pull a small watercraft through the city. People smiled at us. They asked us questions. They wanted to put their kids in the canoe. We chatted with strangers like they were neighbours we’d known for years. About the lake, the weather, canoeing, kayaking canoe carts.

This wasn’t Bill Mason’s wilderness. But it was a lot of fun. And we hadn’t even reached the Lake yet.

Crossing Lakeshore Boulevard and passing under the Gardner Expressway, we tugged the boat to the boardwalk that lines the shore. Rollerbladers and cyclists whizzed by. A beach volleyball game was in progress beside the water and a group of dj’s raising money for the foodbank were playing house trance music from big speakers set up under an open tent.

The last time we’d paddled a boat had been a year ago on Lake Malawi, where pretty much nothing in the previous paragraph exists.

You also can’t get pizza and chicken fingers from a lakeside take-out on Lake Malawi. We’d brought a healthy snack of fruit, grains and water with us. But for some reason, eating luke-warm fastfood and cold fizzy drinks made so much more sense now.

A pair of swans and a group of Canada geese glided quickly away from us as we pushed our canoe into the green water and paddled east towards the downtown core. Small birds darted low over the water. Cormorants bobbed, so much more comfortable submerged than flying.

I had not seen Toronto from the water before. And paddling along the Lake Ontario shoreline, I really saw it - a group of Hungarians in a beachside park, flags waving, gathered to mark some occasion; the golf-shirted sunglassed set, milling about their yachts at the boat club; a turbaned Punjabi family, some kicking a ball on the sand, a father holding his son’s bare feet above the water. The screams of kids echoed from the waterslide at Ontario Place as a musician did a sound check on the stage of the Molson Amphitheatre. We paddled past the blue-gold domes of Exhibition Place, the churning white spokes of a massive wind turbine and the glass forests of condominiums and office buildings.

The CN Tower soared above it all. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the city’s most famous landmark. But from the water, like so many things on this little adventure, it took on a new element of charm – an elegant grey spike, pinning the whole skyline together.

We put in for a break at a beach on Toronto Island, a Dash-8 from the Island airport roaring over our heads as we landed. We sat on a sun-bleached log and watched the plane climb and bank south towards Chicago or New York. Our long-unused paddling muscles were now whining that it was time to turn back. Apparently, I’d have to toughen up a bit before heading for Wawa.

We agreed it had been a fun trip so far. Then we agreed, judging by the well-endowed man walking towards us, that we had beached our canoe on Toronto Island’s nude beach.

Maybe next weekend we’ll try paddling westwards. I hear Hamilton is lovely this time of year.