The ever-changing river
Five rivers our region: The Nith, the Conestogo, the Eramosa, the Speed and the mighty Grand. In our final instalment of The Watershed we tell the story of the Grand River
— It’s early afternoon on the muddy bank of the Grand River and Norbert Kocsis is methodically casting into the shallow waters.
Kocsis comes to this spot twice a week to fish for smallmouth bass. In his native Hungary, he competes in high-stakes fishing tournaments against anglers from around Europe. But here, in this little patch of green and mud, the catch is secondary.
Like a lot of people, Kocsis comes to the Grand River to escape. It’s where our growing city fades away and all you’re left with is the birds and the bugs and the water. You can still find plenty of solitude here.
“It’s quiet,” he said. “I just come here to relax. The fishing is not great, but it’s close to the city.”
It might feel as if the Grand River is an ever-constant, natural connection to our rural past as this region grows and urbanizes. But look a little more closely, and you’ll see a river that’s constantly evolving.
As humans, we have left our imprint on the river, just as much as it’s left it’s imprint on our region.
In the 19th century, European settlement reduced the river’s natural water flows by converting thousands of hectares of forest and wetlands into farmland.
That changed the Grand River’s natural hydrogeology and reduced the river valley’s ability to absorb unusual amounts of snow or rain, setting the stage for more flooding.
“We don’t have a lot of those historic flows anymore because of the change in land cover,” said Sandra Cooke, a senior water quality supervisor with the Grand River Conservation Authority.
“Those trees and wetlands allowed for a balance when we had lots of snow and snow melt. If we had lots of rain, it would hold into the water and let it drain at a slower rate.”
Couple that with increasingly extreme weather patterns, and you’ve got a river system that is at the mercy of a warming climate. Add in a population of nearly a million people who now live in the watershed connected to the Grand River, and you can understand why it’s increasingly under pressure from human activity.
Every time a powerful weather event such as this spring’s massive ice storm roars through the region, it leaves its mark on the big river. Islands are flattened, silt is washed away and the physical layout of the river is changed.
When we paddled the river last fall, travelling from Waterloo to Cambridge, we saw the scars of intense flooding from the past. Debris from lawn chairs to barbecues to picnic tables were scattered up and down the river, shattered into pieces and swept away by powerful currents.
The remains of someone’s deck were wrapped around a tree, a crushed porta-potty was dragged kilometres downstream and a bicycle was mangled into the woods, perched a dozen feet off the ground.
“I just get overwhelmed by the power of that stuff. It’s just amazing,” said Bob Fraser, a member of the Ancient Mariners Canoe Club, a group of seniors who have been paddling the Grand River for 30 years.
Those big storms can alter the river in subtle and dramatic ways. This spring’s ice storm changed the way the river runs — prompting some residents to report what they thought were reduced water levels this summer.
But the Grand River’s water flows haven’t changed much in recent years, according to the conservation authority. The river just looks different than it used to. It’s been rearranged, with an altered riverbed and sandbars appearing where none used to be.
“It certainly changed some of the direction, and some of the depth of the river,” Fraser said. “Some of us have found there’s been changes, and strainers that weren’t there or sandbars that weren’t there before.”
Humans have been leaving their mark on the Grand River for as long as the two have been connected.
Upstream from Waterloo Region, residents in Centre Wellington are ringing the alarm about Nestlé Canada’s plans to draw up to 1.6 million litres of water a day from a well about 100 metres from the Grand River.
They say taking that volume of water is bad for the watershed — especially for a river that flushes the discharge from 30 municipal sewage treatment plants handling the waste of over 700,000 people.
“This is water that would otherwise be making its way into creeks and streams and be feeding the Grand River,” said Jan Beveridge of the citizens’ group of Save Our Water. “It’s the sheer volume that’s astounding ... It’s about a third of all the beer produced in Canada every year.”
Nestlé can’t take any water out of the well until after a provincial moratorium ends this December. The township has asked that be extended until 2023, so the potential impact of the well can be further studied.
The Grand River springs up from the ground in the middle of nowhere, in a pasture outside Wareham, Ont. It splits this region in two, crosses underneath Canada’s busiest highway and grows into a mighty river by the time it rolls into Lake Erie.
We set in at Kaufman Flats off University Avenue in Waterloo, and paddled to the forks in Cambridge near Linear Park, where the Speed and Grand rivers meet. It took us most of the day to get there.
Travelling down the river is like experiencing Waterloo Region in all its contradictions. You pass clusters of trailer parks, and the big, stately homes of Deer Ridge. You often can’t see the city, but you can still hear it, rumbling and beeping and honking beyond the trees.
It’s sometimes intensely urban, passing the roar of highway traffic and dense clusters of subdivisions, then strikingly rural. Near Bingemans, the river echoes with the booming sounds of country music blasting from the amusement park.
At Bridgeport, in a gentle bend in the river, there’s a favourite spot among local anglers. We meet Craig Degen, who left work at noon, pulled on a pair of hip waders, and was soon casting and telling stories about the fivepound bass he’d pulled from the water.
In its upper section between Fergus and Elora, where the Grand River cuts through stark limestone cliffs, flyfishermen from around the world are drawn. Further downstream, where the river widens and flattens, you’re just as likely to see people on paddleboards or in a swarm of canoes.
Near the Doon Valley Golf Course, we surprised a deer that was sent bounding into the bush. The river is a sanctuary for all kinds of wildlife, from coyotes to raccoons. Minks, snakes, snapping turtles all make their homes along its banks.
It’s the deepest and best paddling of all five rivers in the watershed — and not surprisingly. It’s the mother of all local rivers, where the Nith, Conestogo, Eramosa and Speed rivers, and so many creeks, all drain into.
The only formidable obstacle we had to portage around on our trip was the dam at Hidden Valley, which has provided deep water for the Kitchener Waterloo Rowing Club for decades.
Once a highway and source of food for the region’s First Nations people, the Grand became the prize that drew both Indigenous and European farmers to the Grand River Valley. It was a source of economic strength that helped power the region’s earliest industries and mills.
The Grand River was formally settled by the Iroquois in the late 1700s. They were given the land by the British for their allegiance during the American Revolution, to replace what they had lost in New York state.
That deal, called the Haldimand Proclamation, bought the land from the Mississaugas and gave the Iroquois tribes land for six miles on either side of the Grand River, beginning at Lake Erie and extending all the way to the river’s head.
Within a few years, however, much of that land was already being farmed by white settlers. Joseph Brant, the great Six Nations leader, sold or leased more than half of his people’s 675,000 acres, according to Peter Schmalz’s book “The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario.”
Brant was trying to help his people transition to European-style farming, and believed they could learn about modern farming techniques if white settlers lived among them.
It was once called the River Oswego, a Mohawk name that means “small water flowing into that which is large.” It had another name, too: O:se Kenhionhata:tie, which means “Willow River.” The French called it GrandeRivière, and John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, tried to rename it Ouse River. It didn’t stick.
The Shand Dam, built in 1942, gave the river a year-round flow that’s needed to flush wastewater downstream, and provide a steady supply of drinking water to communities who live along it.
Before the dam was built, creating the Belwood Lake reservoir, it was common for sections of the river to run dry in summer drought. Today, the Grand River flows year-round, although it can drop off noticeably in dry months.
Today, the Grand is the healthiest it’s been in decades, and many of us see it as much a source of recreation as it is a critical part of our wastewater system. Millions have been spent modernizing sewage treatment plants and building natural buffers to reduce farm run-off.
Fraser, who has been paddling the Grand for years, doesn’t need to read studies to know the river is in improved health. He takes the sight of bald eagles, ospreys and herons that fish the river as a positive sign.
Some people are jealously protective of the Grand River, and want public access to it limited. Fraser isn’t one of them. He thinks more of us should explore and appreciate the river in our own backyard, even as it evolves right in front of us.
“They’re worried if they open it up to the world, they’ll perhaps destroy the beauty and the solitude of it,” he said.
“But I think it’s a good river ... and we should get out and explore it.”