The Trent-Severn Waterway has a serious case of the meanders. When we stopped for gas at a marina at Young's Point, at the southern outlet of Clear Lake, we asked the kid at the pump how long it would take by car to get to where we had started the day before.
"The south end of Pigeon Lake? About 45 minutes," he said. But we already knew that you don't take a houseboat to get anywhere in a hurry.
Houseboats for hire at Egan Marine on Pigeon Lake, two hours northeast of Toronto.
(Gerald Martineau - The Washington Post)
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We scuttered down the Otonabee River toward Peterborough under skies washed clear of clouds by the night's mighty rains. This was the day of the locks: We dropped through four of them in less than six miles. We had left the Canadian Shield now, and we watched farms and riverside cottages slip by. The river became the Trent Canal, though it remained tree-lined and bucolic, but we were excited beyond what cruising along a country stream might warrant because we were approaching the grand engineering set piece of the Trent-Severn Waterway, the Peterborough lift lock.
At the city of Peterborough, the waterway engineers had a 65-foot drop to contend with. They met the challenge by building, from 1896 to 1904, a trio of massive towers cradling a pair of elevators for boats.
The "elevators" are tray-shaped chambers, each 10 feet deep and more than 100 feet long, with watertight gates at each end. As boats approach the upper and lower chambers, the gates remain open to allow them to enter. Then the gates are closed, and an extra foot of water is pumped into the upper chamber. Now that the upper chamber holds eight feet of water and the lower chamber seven, the lockmaster opens a central valve in the closed hydraulic system that lies beneath the two gargantuan steel rams supporting the chambers. Gravity takes over. The heavier upper chamber descends, while hydraulically pushing the lower chamber upward. The chamber gates open, and the boats go on their way. The whole affair takes only 90 seconds, but the gentle descent is as exciting as any hell-for-leather amusement park ride.
Arriving in a small city by boat -- especially an inland city, in a boat you've piloted yourself -- is much more of an event than swinging into town off a highway exit ramp. It makes you feel as if you've discovered the place. When we think of history's great discoveries, weren't most of them made by water?
We moored on the wall just below the Ashburnham lock, the first one below the lift lock. Here the canal widened into a lake, and we could step off the boat into a park. Downtown Peterborough, with the bookstores, pubs and ethnic restaurants that come with a college town, was a 20-minute stroll away.
I'd known Peterborough only as the city where my favorite novelist, Robertson Davies, had edited the local newspaper, the Examiner, for 20 years. He wrote The Salterton Trilogy here, and, as we walked the residential streets leading to the business district, I wondered how many of these stolid brick houses (even in a country awash in timber, Canadians retain the British love of brick) might have harbored characters capable of piquing Davies's protean imagination.
With the afternoon to kill, Kay went to a movie while I hiked crosstown to the Canadian Canoe Museum. Canada is the only country in the world that was stitched together by a boat you can throw onto your shoulders. If the canoe had been anywhere near as important to the United States, it would have its own building at the Smithsonian.
The museum offers exhibits of aboriginal craft and tells the story of the voyageurs who covered thousands of miles in boats stuffed to the gunwales with beaver pelts: These were the men who got around rough water not by floating through locks but via backbreaking portages. But the most interesting part of the collection deals with the 19th- and 20th-century boats made in Peterborough, when it was the canoe capital of North America.
The star of the show is a rare early 1900s "courtship canoe," so called because it had a foldout drawer with a built-in phonograph, convenient to where a gentleman could sit and paddle while facing his lady in the bow. I remembered that, on our first date, Kay and I took my canoe down a tidal river in Massachusetts, and I got us lost on a blind channel in a salt marsh. She was kind enough not to suggest I might have taken a wrong turn until the marsh grass started to hem us in on both sides; I was bullheaded enough not to suspect she was right until the canoe was all but immobilized. How much more pleasant it would have been if we had had our own Victrola.
A LINEAR TRIP means a return trip, so we climbed back up through the lift lock, headed north along the Otonabee and tackled that tight succession of locks by floating up instead of down. I pointed out the delightful novelty of this reversal, to little avail.
"Only eight locks today -- and that's counting the lift lock," I said cheerfully.
"That's too many locks," Kay said. "The locks are getting old."
