Live & Learn

We drive the hour and a half south to Portland, where we launch the Avalon into reedy water next to a marina and point south. This should, according to the nautical map, take us through a dozen lakes and 14 locks and get us to Kingston in three days, revealing along the way how humanity can sometimes harness nature without destroying it.

Click map to enlarge

The first lock we hit, the Narrows, takes boats through what is now a causeway between Big Rideau and Upper Rideau lakes. We arrive as another set of boats is being raised in the locks, where a swing bridge opens so that they can pass. Noah watches, trying to figure it out. “What happens when they get to the top?” he asks with concern. “Do they just push the boats off the bridge?”

The mechanics of locks, unchanged in nearly two centuries, are not much more complicated than that, still lifting and lowering pools of water with gravity and muscle, much as they did the day the first boat passed through 176 years ago.

The British, seeking a safe supply line through their fledgling colony and fretful of an American invasion from the south, cut this passage across mostly unsettled wilderness with shovels and oxen. By the time they were done, they had created a man-made marvel that linked rivers and lakes from what eventually became the national capital to Kingston, with 47 stone locks. A large price was paid for the feat of engineering. It’s not known how many men it took to build the canal system, but roughly 1,000 workers - mostly Irish immigrants - died in accidents or from malaria during construction. To complete the job, the government spent £776,000, a fortune more than the £558,000 budgeted. The canal would cost $500 million to build today, according to Parks Canada.

There is something grand and antiquated about passing through the locks. It never gets boring, especially in a small runabout that emphasizes the scale of the walls as the water lowers us into a roofless tunnel of stone. We continue down the system, falling with the water. The lockmasters, mainly university students, expertly organize everyone into a lock, often cramming us in beside boats nearly twice our size, their bows towering overhead.

Waiting for the thick wooden gates of each lock to be cranked open by hand, I begin to understand how dangerous it would have been to build - long before power machinery and computer simulations - and how remarkable it is that the same basic mechanism of gears and levers is still sending boats smoothly through. It is even harder to imagine that the man who made certain it worked, British engineer Lieutenant Colonel John By, died broken and forgotten, unable to fully explain to his London masters why powder blasting through the Canadian Shield and dredging untouched rivers might cost more than they had expected.

STORIES OF THE RIDEAU CANAL WATERWAY are about human achievement, most famously for the stretch in Ottawa that since 1970 has formed the world’s largest skating rink. I had only ever seen the canal from this urban vantage point, with its murky water and stone walls snaking through downtown, but as we putter by boat along the wilder sections, I see its more natural side. Our small boat with a quiet engine lets us duck into the waterway’s nooks and crannies, sneaking up close to a family of loons.