It is impossible to grow up in Oakville and not feel a sort of kinship with Lake Ontario. It is always there, in its changing faces and characters, and it has shared with me the journey through the years.
My early memories of the lake are vague and a little jumbled: walking along the pier in Bronte with my father holding my hand; splashing in the waters by Coronation Park on hot summer days in the 60s; playing on the swing sets and spring-mounted ponies at the park overlooking the waters by the Thomas House and Erchless Estate in Olde Oakville. That’s where I fell off the swing – the kind with the steel safety bar across it to prevent falling off – and split my lip so badly that it bled all the way home.
Later, I recall rolling up my pant legs and walking along the shoreline, collecting rocks and trying to get them to skip three, four, even five times across the surface. When I ran out of rocks, I climbed onto the huge boulders and concrete slabs that jutted from land to water and listened to the waves and their slap-suck sound against the rocks.
It became a sort of ritual, going to the lake. Often I went alone, to let the waves ease whatever burden I felt I was carrying. Sometimes I went with friends to walk along the pier in Bronte. I liked to watch the people fishing from it, or show those who were not from Oakville what beauty it had to offer. I also went with my brother, who tried to teach me the names of the different species of ducks there.
But I was more interested in how they managed to find us, all those species, every year, and how they bobbed so non-chalantly with the waves. I envied them their closeness to the lake.
My favourite spot, though, was the boat launch ramp by Coronation Park. It was a small, isolated place that few people seemed to know – a perfect spot for counting sailboats on a clear summer day, for looking at the night lights of Hamilton or Toronto, for watching the crash of waves against an unrelenting land or the crush of winter ice and the waves. That is where we went, at three in the morning, to try to catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet. (It was unusually cloudy that night, and the lake a crystal black).
I remember too that there have sometimes been so many dead fish along the shore that walking by the lake is stomach wrenching. There are mornings when the stench of dead fish and algae and pollution from the lake seem to hang over the whole town, mornings when the water is a deep impenetrable brown. Some days you can see more garbage in the lakes than ducks.
I still go to the lake, but less often. We have both changed. Sometimes, when I watch the gulls soar and swoop over the lake, I wonder what they see. From my land-locked vantage, the calm of the lake seems too often intruded on by man. I wonder if the gulls really are crying, for what has happened to the beauty of Lake Ontario.
Judy Wedeles,
Oakville Today, Feb 23 1989
