Water Log

As I paddled into Kingston last September, after a six-day traverse along the north shore of Lake Ontario, I spotted a pair of neoprene-covered heads bobbing in the harbour. Val Hamilton and Mary Ann Higgs, septuagenarian best friends, were testing their brand new wetsuits. They wanted to continue swimming as the weather turned cold. Hamilton was in the midst of radiation therapy for cancer. Immersing herself in the water every day, she explained, could help reduce swelling. A few years earlier, she added conspiratorially, detecting my interest in all things lacustrine, she had spent a month swimming across more than twenty of the region’s lakes. Each one smelled different.

How well can anybody know a lake? My stand‑up paddleboarding voyage down the length of Lake Ontario, from the Golden Horseshoe to Kingston — the second-to-last leg of a wider waterborne circuit, starting in and returning to Ottawa via Montreal, New York City, and Toronto — revealed a thin slice of a vast natural and human ecosystem. I saw the interface between urban, industrial, and environmental forces, the tug-of-war between private development and public access, the magnetic pull of the aquatic. Hamilton’s daily hometown swims gave her even more intimate knowledge, a sensory connection with seasonal and corporeal changes.

There are roughly two million lakes in Canada, more than in any other country in the world, and over the past decade a growing body of research has affirmed that spending time in “blue space” can improve our physiological and psychological well-being and encourage more sustainable behaviour. These restorative properties are not exclusive to lakes. Oceans, rivers, wetlands, and even urban fountains can give us (and the planet) a boost. But lakes, because of their prevalence, are often where we first encounter the wonders of water. And in this country, Daniel Macfarlane argues in his resonant book, none are more significant than Lake Ontario.

Although he is now a professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, Macfarlane hails from north of the border. This duality gives him a keen perspective. As its subtitle promises, The Lives of Lake Ontario presents a deeply researched, authoritative account of the physical phenomena that formed and continue to shape the fourteenth-largest lake in the world, from its geological and glacial roots to the evolution of North American flora and fauna and the hydrology of the Great Lakes system. The Niagara River is the main faucet that pours liquid into Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence Seaway is the drainpipe that sends it to the Atlantic; both waterways were the focus of previous books by Macfarlane. Beyond his ability to distill an abundance of complex scientific detail into crisp, digestible prose, the author truly shines in elucidating the reciprocal relationship between the lake and the people surrounding it.

Indigenous and settler societies and Lake Ontario have been altering one another for centuries. The lake is and has always been central to economic, political, and cultural life in this part of the continent. But we relate to the inland sea in contradictory ways: It provides sustenance, but we treat it like a sewer. It’s a utilitarian resource for industry and transportation, but it’s also a place for recreation and reverence. It’s one of the main reasons why we are where we are and who we are, but we’re the reason its future, alongside our own, is murky.

The ecology of Lake Ontario, like that of any natural realm, is fluid. But human impacts on the lake, primed by colonial exploitation, have been most pronounced in the past couple of hundred years. Toxic pollution and sprawling cities, eutrophication and algal blooms, canals and invasive species: we haven’t been great caretakers. Despite this abuse, however, and the fact that Lake Ontario’s health is in the hands of multiple jurisdictions with competing priorities, it’s in better shape than it used to be. Having turned our backs to the lake on both the New York and Ontario sides, building waterfront freeways and venturing elsewhere to swim and fish, we finally appear to be paying attention again.

Canadians are more attentive to Lake Ontario, Macfarlane suggests, because there are nine million of us living in its watershed, compared with just two million Americans. That’s nearly a quarter of Canada’s population, an “east–west water axis” that made our emergence as an independent country conceptually and financially possible. Hydroelectricity derived from the lake’s tributaries instilled the belief that boundless energy could fuel perpetual growth. It “undergirded the political economy” of a fledgling dominion. By contrast, the completion of New York’s Erie Canal in 1825, linking the Hudson River to Lake Erie, gave the United States a navigable route from the East Coast to the Midwest that bypassed the lowest of the Great Lakes. Toronto boomed thanks to its perch near the western tip of Lake Ontario. Can anybody name the biggest community on the opposite shoreline?

Although Lake Ontario has long been a buffer between the two countries, it’s also a bridge. Commercial ships may no longer ply its sometimes steely grey, sometimes azure and cyan waters as frequently, but American and Canadian authorities co-manage the flow of the Niagara and St. Lawrence Rivers, effectively transforming the lake into a very large bathtub. Macfarlane deploys this analogy to illuminate the mechanics of manipulating water levels, but it’s also a reminder of the need for cooperation. Nobody wants the tub to overflow or run dry.

Regardless of our anthropogenic interventions — a dam here, a diversion there — we don’t really control Lake Ontario. The belief that we can impose our will on nature is an illusion. Floods and intense storms will always trump engineering and concrete, and in a changing climate, respecting their power by restoring wetlands, for instance, instead of constructing subdivisions on the water’s edge could be our salvation. This argument — that we need to recalibrate our dysfunctional relationship with water in an era of extreme weather and climatic instability — is the compelling focus of Erica Gies’s Water Always Wins, from 2022. And it’s at the heart of a philosophical shift that Macfarlane endorses, a move away from deregulation and our addiction to overconsumption toward a mindful balance with the more-than-human world.

It’s no secret that our species is at an inflection point. Like Lake Ontario, we are vulnerable yet resilient. For guidance, Macfarlane writes, we should listen to the lake. As the tumultuous environmental history of Lake Ontario shows, we are capable of adaptation. New problems arise — goodbye mercury, hello microplastics — but the lake does not seem to be getting worse. Small glimmers of hope also abound. Just around the corner from the harbour where I encountered Val Hamilton, for example, the Gord Edgar Downie Pier opened in 2018. A former coal dock, it’s the first urban deep-water swimming pier anywhere on Lake Ontario: A place to jump in and swim on a hot day. A place to get to know the lake, and ourselves, a little bit better.