The best daily commute I ever had was by row boat on the Toronto Islands. I was about 20 years old and teaching sailing at an island marina. For convenience, I was staying at the Queen City Yacht Club, where my family kept a sailboat. I slept in our equipment locker, which had a cot pushed against one wall. A family friend had lent us a beautiful wooden rowing skiff, of lapstrake construction (board overlapping board), with white hull and interior of honey-coloured varnish. It was wonderfully light and slid through the water with ease, shooting ahead with every stroke of the oars in their brass oarlocks.

Every morning, I would launch it at the QCYC and row to work at the marina, travelling through the still island lagoons as mist rose over the water. When classes were over, I would row back, watching the poplars turn gold in the slanting light of evening.

I thought of that trip when Jack Layton died last month. The islands were a favourite place for him. He and Olivia Chow were married in 1988 on Algonquin Island, at the east end of the island chain not far from the QCYC, and the islands were one of the three places his ashes were to be scattered.

The islands claim a lasting hold on those who know them. I practically grew up on the islands, spending weeks every summer sailing out of the QCYC junior club and making weekend trips on a succession of sailing craft owned by my father, a Second World War Navy veteran who loved messing about in boats. Every spring, he would impress my younger brother and I to scrape, polish, paint and scrub those vessels as they lay on land in their wooden cribs. Every fall, we would haul them out of the water again and swaddle them in tarps for the winter.

I swam at Ward’s Island Beach, raced in white fibreglass Albacores on the harbour, went to teenage dances at the Ward’s Island Association clubhouse, sat on the iron bollards of the Eastern Gap to watch the ships come in, rode my bike to Hanlan’s Point and back, explored the trackless wilderness of Snake Island, and rode the Sam McBride back and forth across the harbour so many times that the smell of diesel oil always make me think of the island ferries. After I returned to Toronto in my early thirties from a decade on the West Coast, then abroad, I didn’t really feel at home till I heard the rustling poplars of the islands.

For one reason or another, I don’t get to the islands as much as I like. So when a friend suggested a kayaking trip, I leaped at the chance. We rented boats at a waterfront outfitter, paddled across a choppy harbour to Hanlan’s Point and followed the lagoons east, the same course I used to take home from the marina. We passed the Island Yacht Club, glimpsed Toronto’s first lighthouse at Gibraltar Point, saw a heron fishing on Long Pond, passed the amusement park at Centre Island and stroked past rows of moored yachts at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. Coming ashore for a break at Snake Island, we followed a dirt path to a clearing with a spectacular view of the city skyline.

Along the lagoon formed by Ward’s and Algonquin islands, we passed the cottagey houses of the island community – saved from the wrecker, thank goodness, after an epic battle in the 1970s. It all seemed much the same as when I first knew it. Even the little white boathouse where I spent my junior-club summers has somehow survived, just by the arch of the heavy old wood bridge to Algonquin that we used to jump off on hot summer days.

What is so entrancing about the islands? Part of it is their history. City dwellers started escaping to the islands (originally a peninsula, before a violent storm in 1858 created the Eastern Gap) in the early days of York to fish, walk, ride or watch horse races. Hanlan’s Point once boasted a baseball stadium and a resort whose most famous attraction might have sprung from the mind of an earlier Doug Ford: a horse that dived off a platform into the lagoon. By the boardwalk on Ward’s you can see the foundations of the old Victorian mansions where wealthy Torontonians passed their summers.

Part of it is their distinct natural beauty. Though much of the islands is now groomed parkland, you still find the quiet lagoons, the stands of poplar and willow and sand beaches that characterize the Lake Ontario shore. Countless migrating birds in spring make the islands their first landfall after crossing the lake.

Above all, it’s the sense of apartness that gives the islands their magic. Fifteen minutes from the heart of Canada’s biggest city you find yourself in another world, a green and watery place that, even when flocked by thousands, still seems somehow secret.

via Beautiful Toronto Islands offer serenity in the city – The Globe and Mail.