A New Don

Around the corner from where I grew up in the middle of Toronto, a cedar-lined path between a pair of lawns leads down to a small ravine. At the bottom, pinched between steep hillsides, shrouded in summer by a high, leafy canopy, there is often flowing water. If you cross a couple of busy streets and cut through a condo complex, you can follow the channels and culverts of Burke Brook all the way to the west branch of the Don River and, ultimately, to the cool blue of Lake Ontario.

I didn’t venture that far on foot when I was a kid, content to explore the neighbourhood creek, dropping sticks into the current and excavating rocks to assemble dams. Ravines may be “the heart of the city’s emotional geography,” as Robert Fulford observed, yet locals tend to look at this network in fragments and neglect to see it whole. My friends and I certainly didn’t think of our stomping grounds as part of an aquatic ecosystem that has played — and continues to play — a leading role...