Ice adventures
When the waters of Lake Ontario around Toronto Islands freeze, it’s time for its hardy residents to come out and play, writes Catherine Porter
The hardy residents of Toronto Islands
It made the local news: two figures were spotted walking across Toronto’s frozen downtown harbour. The afternoon newscast labelled them “tricksters.” Even for Canadians, it was freezing outside – the city was on Day Nine of a 14-day “extreme cold weather” alert, with the temperature at minus 13 degrees Celsius and going down. City officials were scrambling to open emergency shelters, and warning residents to limit their time outdoors.
Who in their right mind would walk across the frozen harbour?
By the time the fire engines arrived, one figure was heading back across the ice, groceries in hand. The other had hurried off to a downtown squash game.
“Why did we do it? Because we’re alive!” one of the men, Michael Harris, 54, says a few days later from the warmth of his kitchen across the harbour on Ward’s Island.
As it happens, Harris did have a tough moment as he returned across the frozen harbour with his shopping, falling through some slushy ice to his knees. He was unhurt.
Falling is precisely why the city’s marine police and its harbour master warn against venturing onto the ice, though their big worry is that people will fall right through.
Harris’ mishap, however, did not faze him. He is, after all, a man known to jog bare-chested in the winter and dive through a hole in the ice in search of an errant puck.
Harris, who owns a sales training company, includes himself, if grudgingly, among the Toronto Islands residents he calls “wonderfully nutty.” They aren’t the minority: eccentricity is part of the DNA of the 620 souls who choose – or get the chance – to live in a rural community smack in the middle of North America’s fourth-largest city.
By rural, I mean this: it is not uncommon to come across a coyote or mink while strolling around the archipelago of 14 islands that includes Ward’s Island, just 10 minutes by ferry from downtown. Private cars are restricted here. Instead, local residents travel down the snowy footpaths between their homes on bicycle.
The closest thing to a store is the “trading post” – an open wood shelter where residents leave their cast off books, toys and clothes for neighbours to pick through. If they need booze, or rice, or a light bulb, well, they have to ask a neighbour or head across the lake.
It makes for a very tight-knit community of handy, patient and hardy people.
There are no cinemas or nightclubs, so people turn to what’s at hand for fun – nature. Only two of the islands are inhabited, and part of a third is taken up by the city’s small, downtown airport. The rest are city parkland.
When the temperature is so cold that the entire harbour freezes, that signals “time to go out and play,” says Whitney Webster, a sixth-generation islander, standing out on the frozen harbour before Algonquin Island, the crowded concrete and glass spires of the city’s downtown rising like a ghostly battalion.
Webster, 61, is out walking in the minus 23 Celsius afternoon when he glimpses a friend whizzing by in one of two local ice boats. Sure, he is dressed in jeans and leather gloves, but he can’t resist. The boom knocked off his hat, and his left hand went numb, but it was thrilling, cutting across the frozen lake in a sailing boat rigged with three large blades.
For residents, it is country-home life in the midst of a city. “It’s like living at the cottage,” says Webster, a retired government manager. “But look at the view you have.”
The islands were once a sandy peninsula stretching 5.5 miles out from shore and shielding downtown like a sleeping arm and hand. But in 1858, a big storm cleaved a channel. Then it grew.
Since the early days of settlement, the islands have offered an escape
Sales are overseen by a community trust that both sets the price and selects the buyer from a waiting list, kept at 500
from the city – a place where colonists once went to ride horses or picnic.
As the city grew, so did the attractions. There was a theatre, an amusement park and a baseball stadium, where Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run in 1914. Cottages and tents went up, too, with as many as 8,000 Torontonians moving there for the summer.
“There were hotels and restaurants and chemists,” said Jimmy Jones, who moved here 85 years ago, when he was two. “Everything was there. You didn’t have to go to the city for anything.”
Jones made headlines at 75, wakeboarding at a summer festival. He still bikes, and he skates the islands’ lagoons – though not the way he once did, racing against a neighbour who once rowed across the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1956, the city’s newly formed metropolitan government announced that it was converting the islands’ residential and commercial properties, all on leased public land, into a park and began demolition. The battle for the community on the two most easterly islands continued for almost four decades.
The high point, islanders will tell you, came in the summer of 1980, when the volunteer home guard’s air raid siren went off, alerting locals that the sheriff was en route with eviction notices. Whisked from their downtown jobs by the “Island Navy” of volunteer boats, hundreds gathered and linked arms across the road to block his route.
The following year, the provincial government passed a law allowing the 262 remaining homes to stay put until 2005. Those leases were later extended to late 2092.
While the rest of the city has seen a real estate frenzy, here house prices have remained astonishingly low because the few sales are overseen by a community trust that both sets the price and selects the buyer from
a waiting list, kept at 500. Last year, a tumbledown lakefront house and lease here went for just over 72,000 Canadian dollars, while a similar fixer-upper on Toronto’s beachfront rang in at more than 1 million Canadian dollars.
“We are here to care for the island, not to profit from it,” says Elizabeth Amer, a retired editor and City Council member who inherited her mother’s home, and likes to watch the swans navigate the ice.
A trip across the islands on a bus, brought in when the ferry was broken, has the ambience of a school outing, with neighbours chatting across the aisle. Most are noticeably older. The median age of Island residents is 55.6 – making the islands among the country’s most elderly census tracts. (By comparison, the median age of Torontonians overall is 39.3.)
That is one consequence of the community trust. Since only one or two houses go up for sale a year, it can take 30 years on the waiting list to buy a house here. By then, many buyers are already into retirement age.
The irony, of course, is that the park is the ideal place to be a kid.
Julian Ganton, now 31, recounts summers spent sleeping in tents high in the trees and winters spent playing shinny – that’s Canadian for pickup hockey – right outside his house.
He laces up a pair of skates and climbs down a ladder onto the frozen harbour, where he skates over cracks and frozen methane bubbles. A hockey stick in hand for balance, he pushes off toward the middle of the harbour.
Toronto city officials are not the only ones to put out reports on ice conditions. So do the islanders. As a rule, they say that three inches thick is safe to go on, two inches if it is bitterly cold. When Ganton went out, it was at least a foot thick – 18 inches, in Webster’s estimation.
Even so, the sound of the ice groaning and cracking made Ganton’s heart jump – with both fear and delight.
“You never get used to it,” he says. “It always fills you with awe.”