NATURE FOR EVERYONE
The third in a weekly series from Randy Boswell on the Rideau River, Ottawa's sometimes overlooked urban jewel.
Mike Nemesvary, a quadriplegic and former freestyle skiing champion, loves his time at the Baxter Conservation Area, and is on a Nature For All mission to make Baxter a “gold standard” attraction. Randy Boswell's Rideau River series continues,
He's been on top of the world as a freestyle skiing champion and travelled around it — literally, on a 40,000-kilometre, globe-girdling auto-odyssey in 2001 — as an inspirational disability rights activist, raising funds for spinal cord research.
These days, Mike Nemesvary longs to be immersed in the world of nature. And he believes anyone with mobility challenges like his should be able to experience the wonders of the wilderness as directly, vividly and adventurously as anyone else.
The 60-year-old Manotick man, an Ottawa Sports Hall of Famer who owned the podium in the early days of freestyle, turned his career-ending injury into a mission to promote greater fairness and freedom for those living with disabilities.
He's led other campaigns for change, but his latest one is especially close to home and close to his heart. For two decades, Nemesvary and his partner Mary Anne McPhee — accompanied in recent years by Onyx, his blacklab service dog — have been visiting the Baxter Conservation Area in Kars, just down the road from Manotick, along a big bend of the Rideau River at the southern limits of the city of Ottawa.
“What a gem we have here,” he says of the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority nature reserve, a place criss-crossed by wetland boardwalks and dirt trails that — within a few minutes' walking or rolling — reach a startling array of habitats: mature forest, marshland, river, pond, shoreline, meadow.
It's all about a 35-minute drive from downtown Ottawa.
“It's 150 hectares of pristine and very eclectic nature which is not very well-known to a lot of people,” he says. “I, as a person with a spinal-cord injury, as a quadriplegic, have been coming here for the better part of 20 years. I loved it from Day 1.”
It's the domain of kingfishers and herons, owls and ospreys, frogs and turtles, perch and bass, bees and butterflies, rabbits and deer. There's plenty for our species, too: a beach, a campground, picnic spots, outdoor education programs, fishing and boating, an interpretation centre, all those trails and much more.
But Nemesvary says his enjoyment of Baxter's delights could run deeper. And he insists that others with disabilities — those without his high-performance power chair or his thirst for adventure, perhaps lacking the daring attitude of a guy whose ski stunts were featured in the opening credits of the 1985 James Bond film A View to a
Kill — deserve whatever accessibility aids would enable them to experience genuinely intimate encounters with nature.
Nemesvary and McPhee called the concept Nature For All, and approached the RVCA and its charitable foundation, the RVCF, for support in making Baxter a “gold standard” attraction for nature lovers in Eastern Ontario and West Quebec — and even across Canada and the U.S.
“We really want to raise the bar and make this a destination property,” he says. “We want to be a model for Canada, if not the world. The way I envision it, in four years — by 2025 — I think this place will be unrecognizable compared to what it is now.”
To say that Baxter's guardians loved the idea doesn't do justice to the enthusiasm with which the Rideau Valley authority and foundation have embraced the couple's vision.
Diane Downey, director of communications for the RVCA and the foundation's executive director, said the Nature for
All mission is helping Baxter and other Rideau Valley sites “achieve multiple goals” by redefining who can be attracted to the outdoors and how they're made welcome.
“Consider seniors. The stats are telling us that this group is going to explode in terms of needing accessible outdoor recreation,” says Downey. “Whether it's with a cane or a walker, or even just gentle slopes, gentle rises, we need to start thinking a little bit differently about the people who come out to our sites. It is a big age group that's wanting to experience nature, and we can't forget about that.”
Then there's young families with children in strollers. Wider boardwalks with raised edges and minimal slopes will appeal not just to mobility-challenged and visually impaired visitors and older adults, notes Downey.
“Imagine, all these demographics of people wanting to see nature, whether it's the forest or the wetland, and being able to reach out and touch it,” she adds.
“And what's great about Baxter is just the fact that it's so flat. The terrain is so suitable to embark on this — plus the diversity of the habitat. People can come here and they're immediately immersed” in an array of ecosystems.
This spring, after a pandemic year in which all Canadians were reminded of the pricelessness of the green spaces in their communities, questions were raised about how welcome racialized communities felt in the great outdoors, and what barriers they faced — financial, geographical, cultural — when they sought to commune with nature.
We've all heard about the
Black birdwatcher in Central Park being reported to New York police for walking in the woods, and the Black man on a trail in Barrhaven prompting a 911 call for taking in the scenery from a bridge.
There have been other questions, too: Can women feel as free as men to go for a hike? Should the nomenclature of nature — the widely despised “gypsy” moth caterpillar is the latest name to give offence — be stripped of stigmatizing terminology?
In this context, any move among conservation advocates toward greater inclusiveness in the enjoyment of nature should be celebrated. That makes it easy to applaud the Nature For All committee's $1-million fundraising campaign to make Baxter a model of outdoor accessibility for the country.
“With COVID, the number of people connecting the dots to outdoor experiences, and mental health — it's really exposed the growing need for these kinds of spaces,” says Downey.
At the centre of the campaign and its gold-standard vision is a proposed multi-purpose accessibility structure spanning the Rideau River marshland between Baxter's main forest trail network and its Filmore Park Nut Grove — a popular pathway featuring numerous varieties of nut and bean trees and shrubs.
The showcase $750,000 bridge would feature a state-of-the-art boardwalk — wide enough for two wheelchairs to easily pass, with safety handrails, minimized slopes, seamless transition points and other mobility-friendly features — as well as two expansive viewing platforms to the north and south, each capable of accommodating an entire outdoor education class or other large groups. The new structure would replace a 30-year-old bridge and boardwalk that's past the end of its life cycle — it's currently roped off for safety reasons — and which features viewing decks perfectly designed to give someone in a wheelchair nothing to look at except eye-level wooden railings.
“The classic construction always puts a two-by-four on top of a two-by-six,” notes Dan Cooper, the RCVA's director of conservation lands and stewardship. “So now you've got eight inches of boards right in the zone where someone in a wheelchair is trying to look and see something.”
The new bridge, boardwalk and observation platforms have been designed with Nemesvary's input and insights from accessibility consultants, says Cooper.
Some of the pieces are already in place at Baxter. An accessible beach mat — a kind of heavy, wide, durable, woven-nylon carpet — makes it easy for someone in a wheelchair to cross the sand and roll right into the Rideau.
All-terrain wheelchairs and sleds available for borrowing offer easier and safer — but more intense — interactions with the riverside forest all-year round.
Picnic tables with special extensions and an accessible outhouse are among Baxter's other, more conventional accommodations.
The Nature For All committee — which includes Nemesvary, McPhee, Cooper and Downey, as well as Rideau-Goulbourn Coun. Scott Moffatt and his assistant Wendy Eberwein — is gathering best-practices guidance from other accessibility-conscious nature organizations, such as the Credit Valley Conservation Authority near Toronto and the British Columbia Mobility Opportunities Society.
BCMOS, founded by disability advocate and former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan in 1988, describes its mission as “making outdoor recreation accessible to empower and inspire people with physical disabilities to reimagine what is possible.”
Ever since the trampoline training accident that changed his life 36 years ago, Nemesvary says he's been working to demonstrate that living with a severe disability doesn't mean living without a sense of adventure, including immersive experiences in nature.
“I broke my neck, not my spirit,” became Nemesvary's motto as a popular public speaker.
“For me, without getting out of my comfort zone, life just wouldn't be the same,” he says, wheeling along a Baxter boardwalk lined with leopard frogs leaping for cover. “I'd feel like I were boxed in. If you don't get outside, how can you really understand where you live?”