Diving deep into black waters of the past
Tom Thomson Centennial Swim project puts a living artist in close contact with the painter who died 100 years earlier
ALGONQUIN PARK— Tucked into a jetblack track suit, his neck comfortably swathed in a thick fluffy towel, Paul Walde surveyed the black waters of Canoe Lake early Saturday morning with a look of mild concern.
“It’s a little windier than I would like,” he fretted, observing the choppy ripples rushing onshore from a brisk north wind. A jagged array of grey and black clouds, the leftovers of an overnight thunderstorm that had left most of the region in a blackout, hung heavily overhead.
Walde shrugged. “Well, the water’s fine — warmer than you’d think,” he said, and strode briskly off to the nearby beach to stretch.
Not 15 minutes later, Walde, clad in a black triathlon singlet, his head snugged into a black bathing cap, would enter the root-beer-coloured water with a goal in mind: To swim its entire length, all the way to the memorial cairn to Tom Thomson at its distant northern tip.
That the beloved painter had died on this very day, drowned in this very lake, 100 years earlier, was of course the point. “It had to be today,” said Walde, who, at 49, is wiry and boyish. An overnight spate of lightning and a deluge of rain gave pause, but no thought of cancellation.
“We were going out there, no matter what.”
Walde’s regalia indicated as much: His suit, bathing cap, a banner and the nautical flags of an accompanying flotilla of canoes were all festooned with a logo: the Tom Thomson Centennial Swim.
On the beach, a troupe of synchronized swimmers, each of them in matching caps and suits with the insignia emblazoned on them, entered the water first. As a canoe-bound brass band began a mournful dirge, the troupe arranged itself in a circle, rotating slowly counter-clockwise. At just before 7 a.m., Walde, goggles in place, slipped into the lake, slicing through the troupe with great ceremony, and began his long front crawl to the other end.
To understand just what Walde was up to, it helps to understand where he’s coming from. An artist with a long history of performance, Walde, now a professor at the University of Victoria, has mounted several sitespecific projects in recent years, most of them around environmental concerns.
For Alaska Variations, from 2015, he arranged a dance performance, an array of simultaneously boiling kettles and a ski pole outfitted with a record-player needle as different ways of interacting with the surfaces of frozen lakes. In 2013, for his Requiem for a Glacier, Walde trekked a makeshift orchestra of several dozen musicians up to the Farnham Glacier in British Columbia to perform a mournful piece regarding its inevitable demise from global warming.
At Canoe Lake, the symbolism is more loaded, at least culturally. Thomson, a close associate of the Group of Seven, perhaps Canada’s most-loved artists, died before the group could be formed. But he remains perhaps its most revered, a status that has made his work both sacrosanct and, in the eyes of many, a symbol of mass-market Canadiana kitsch.
“It’s really Tom Thomson mania up here,” Walde said after he towelled off, noting the array of Thomson memorabilia opportunistically displayed at the Portage Store, a largescale outfitter at the foot of Canoe Lake. (The store had gone so far as to introduce a new series of canoes, painted “Tom Thomson green” and adorned with his name, for the centennial.)
“There’s an industry around him — Roots even had a clothing line based on him a few years ago — so we’re doing that in our own little way. We wanted to dress it up like a sporting event and brand it.”
While he makes clear the swim is not mere homage — it’s “Centennial,” not “Memorial,” partly for that reason — he’s careful not to position it as a satirical project, either.
When he was growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., “that was art, period,” Walde said, referring to Thomson and the Group. After living in New York in the mid-1990s, Walde came returned to Northern Ontario and struggled to conceive how a contemporary artist there could interact with the overpowering presence of the past.
In1997, he made a work called Index 1036 — the number assigned to the alleged skull of Thomson, exhumed when rumours of his drowning death being the result of foul play prompted further investigation — that allied the painter with more avant-garde artists whose lives had mysteriously ended in water: Arthur Cravan, a Dadaist forebear, whose sailboat never reached Mexico, as planned; or Bas Jan Ader, an early conceptual art icon, whose boat was found, unmanned, four months after he embarked on a solo crossing of the North Atlantic.
“When I was a younger artist, Thomson and the Group were something to react against,” he said. “And there is an element of dark humour to doing a swim on the anniversary of his drowning, for sure. But he is my favourite of that gang — anyone who cares about painting can appreciate his sketches. The fact that he could make sense of this landscape, work in this landscape, and then have it consume him — that was compelling to me.”
Halfway up the lake, the wind stiffened as Walde fought his way into the narrows, between an island and Camp Wapomeo. The synchro troupe splashed back into the water from a waiting boat, and formed its circle again. Walde swam in and stopped in the middle, the troupe this time circling clockwise around him as he disappeared under the choppy surface.
Here, a moment of silence was observed, before Walde resurfaced and began the final leg of his quest (Walde had entered the water in 2017, he later explained, had swum back to 1917, and then, as the troupe reset the clock, swam back to the present).
But just outside the narrows, the past seemed not quite ready to let him go just yet. Walde veered west, off course, the cairn growing further, not closer, with each stroke. Startled, Walde flipped over on his back and course-corrected, turning sharply toward the point and the end of his journey.
Pulling himself slowly from the water, he climbed the steep stones up the cairn, where a memorial plaque to Thomson had been installed. Breathing sharply, water dripping from his body, he put a hand on the rough mound of stones and closed his eyes.
“I didn’t mean to veer that way, but we were really getting thrown around in there,” he said. “But where I ended up — that’s right where Tom’s body was found. And that’s where I got lost.”
Thomson had achieved a certain mastery over his environment, but only on canvas, and in the end, there was no mistaking where the balance of power lay.
“Landscape painting is about beauty,” Walde said. “But the landscape is dangerous. It doesn’t care if you live or die. That was the very limit of what I could do. For me, to be in the water where he died — that was powerful.”