This summer Ian Brown explores how Canadians are reclaiming their lives from quarantine, whether it’s the thrill of a haircut, the risk of a hug or a chance – finally! – to jump in a pool again.
The way to identify a serious swimmer in Toronto during COVID-19 is to determine whether she or he has a secret pool plan.
For instance, on this sweltering, swollen afternoon at Christie Pits – a rambling, city-run outdoor public swimming pool in downtown Toronto – Zahur Surve is quietly churning laps in the lane reserved for the deep-end test.
That may not sound like a genius move, but it is. Over the course of a broiling non-pandemic summer day, Christie Pits can handle 1,200 plashing patrons. It’s like swimming in a mosh pit. But since cash-strapped Toronto’s outdoor pools opened June 20 this year, no more than 40 physically distanced patrons can swim at any time. And they can swim for only 45 minutes before they have to leave, as the pool is cleared and its “high-touch surfaces” are swabbed and sterilized, whereupon a fresh twoscore of sweaty supplicants are admitted.
In other words, public pools in the largest city in the country are operating at a quarter of their capacity. Versions of this recipe for civic fury are in place in every province except PEI.
So, Mr. Surve, a 50-year-old who peels off 100 laps three times a week, pops by the pool two to four times a day, and swims his quota in batches in the lane the lifeguards keep clear to administer the deep-end test – a length of crawl for any kid who wants to rocket off the diving board.
Mr. Surve isn’t alone. Louise Garfield – renowned producer, choreographer and performer, 66 – roams the reopening city to find an empty lane to lap in. “Did you ever watch The Swimmer? With Burt Lancaster?” she asks, meaning the strange 1968 flick in which a suburban stud named Ned Merrill swims home from a party, hopping from private pool to private pool. “That’s me.” Since reopening, she has waited an hour in 35-degree heat to swim for 45 minutes. “Sometimes I get in, and sometimes I don’t.” She has her best luck when it’s raining.
Failing that, she has a backup plan. “My ambition is to get an invitation to Drake’s ginormous pool. And I would be willing to sign a waiver of liability.”
As COVID-19 ebbs and resurges through a hot summer and a nerve-racking reopening, swimming in public pools beckons as a simple balm. (New COVID-19 cases were up again this week in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and B.C., mostly among 20- to 40-year-olds, mostly owing to private indoor gatherings.) Alas, in a pandemic, even a quick dip is a complicated plunge.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “there is no evidence that COVID-19 can be spread to humans through the use of recreational waters.” But pandemics and water have a history. Parisians swam and bathed in the Seine until cholera came along in 1850. At their peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio epidemics killed or paralyzed half a million people, and emptied swimming pools until it was demonstrated that chlorine killed the virus. According to Katherine Ashenburg’s beautifully readable The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, the Black Plague arrived in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, and turned people off washing and bathing for the next 400 years.
Pandemics change a society’s habits. But water, and bathing in it, speak to ancient human longings – for forgiveness, for pleasure, for transcendence, for relief. They don’t call it the deep end for nothing. These days, in a virus-worn city that’s already $2-billion in the hole, the struggle to keep public pools open and safe stands out sharply against the good fortune of citizens who own a private one. The town is full of envy.
Drake posted a video of his new backyard pool in Toronto’s Bridle Path neighbourhood at the end of May, while shut-in Toronto wilted in a late spring heat wave. “Hope everybody in the city is just enjoyin’ the beautiful day,” he added. He made his money on his own, so he got off lightly for flaunting his privilege. The pool is roughly the size of the North Atlantic; he’s on record saying he wants to own the largest residential pool in human captivity. He already has an indoor pool (you can glimpse it and his home in the video for his song Toosie Slide, but his outdoor plunge, he claims, is even bigger than Kanye’s.
A private pool is the ultimate luxury in a pandemic summer. Your correspondent knows this because he spent part of a recent afternoon in a private pool on the striking property of another luxurious home in midtown Toronto. Your correspondent cannot tell you where the pool is because one of the conditions of getting to swim there, after asking to be invited, was that he not reveal its whereabouts.
What your correspondent can tell you is this: The pool is eight-feet wide and 45-feet long. There is another shallow pool beyond its far end. “Is that a wading pool?” your correspondent said to the owner, who replied, “No, that’s actually a sculpture.” There are teenaged oak trees and ginkgo trees and sycamores and giant mature locusts and clipped box hedges and teeming crowds of hydrangea lining its edges. Being in the pool is like swimming within a green formal garden. It is impossible to feel hot or anxious there. The water is cold, but not as cold as your correspondent thinks it will be as he hovers daintily, arms high, on tiptoe, before plunging. He swims some lengths, climbs out, towels off, warms up until he is just fractionally hot and dives in again. He stays cool for hours afterward, even back at his own house as he launches Google Maps to try to count the turquoise pool jewels set across the top of the city. He wants to visit every one of them.
Late last spring, as Toronto’s city managers canvassed immunologists and the Lifesaving Society to figure out if and how the city’s pools could open safely but quickly, two requirements instantly took precedence: the need for physical distancing, and the need for maximum hygiene. “The way to achieve that,” Aydin Sarrafzadeh, the city’s manager of aquatics, was informed, ”would be to reduce your capacity.” The new safe pool number was 25 per cent of a full load, with breaks for hourly sterilization. Lockers were off-limits. Time in the change room was to be minimized: Swimmers would be encouraged to wear their suits to the pool and home again. The goal, Mr. Sarrafzadeh says, “is to ensure we can run the program and still make sure everyone’s safe.” Those objectives front an equally serious one – the role pools serve as a safety valve, especially in a steaming city frustrated by pandemic restrictions. Mr. Sarrafzadeh is a skilled public administrator, so he puts it another way. “We believe that our role is to ensure access for all citizens, especially those who are vulnerable or marginalized. The opportunity to cool off assists with everyone’s well being.”
Louise Garfield suffers from three agonizing hearing afflictions – including tinnitus and an inner ear balance problem. Swimming is one of the few therapies she can administer herself. “When I swim, I don’t hear the noise. And you don’t need equilibrium to move freely in the water.” She has lobbied Toronto city councillors to install a system that would let swimmers reserve a lane – a system Mr. Sarrafzadeh claims is in the works for indoor pools this fall.
But here is the strange thing: If you brave the lineup and make it into a straitened public pool, it’s fantastic. Forty people is nothing. You feel like you have the place to yourself. Maintaining distance is a breeze. “It relieves all of the stress of lifeguarding,” says Andrew, the young man manning the front door and handing out bracelets and taking down e-mails and phone numbers (for possible contact tracing). He’s studying politics at McGill. “But the fear for your own personal safety is higher.”
Denied a locker, people pile their belongings on the pool deck, like a community of beaver huts. The quiet is astonishing. The diving board is closed, but there’s more time to look around. One-piece bathing suits are big this season. “If you don’t start behaving better, we’re going home,” a women in her late 40s tells a small pouting boy: He keeps taking objects out of his mother’s purse and throwing them at strangers, and is clearly bound for a federal penitentiary. Pedro Almeida, who is 16 and in Grade 11, is practising headfirst cartwheel flop dives with his pal, Simao Soares, who is 13 and in Grade 8, but much taller. Two young women, Rene Lewis and Olivia Zagouris, also Grade 10, laugh at everything the boys say and do. It is hard to tell if the girls think the boys are hilarious or idiots, or both. I would go with the third option. You can watch this kind of action with great pleasure in an uncrowded pool while you try not to become infected by a potentially fatal virus. Then you can stand up and tumblesault into the no-diving diving pool and sink to the bottom, floating and resting and thinking and encased. Swimming in a river or the ocean, one’s mind is preoccupied with one’s surroundings, with currents and rocks and creatures of the deep. Whereas a pool is contained, and a city pool especially so, and sets us free to meander.
But our 45 minutes are up. Everyone stands to leave. No one is in a rush, except for Simao and Olivia and Renee and Pedro, who dash around to the front gate of the pool to find only one wristband left for the next 45-minute swim slot. “We’re all loyal,” Simao says. “No one wants to go.”
On the way home, I try to remember the things that bobbed into my head as I floated in the deep end: my father’s face, my daughter’s voice, my brother leaping stoutly off granite rocks into stiff Atlantic waves. Things I love and things I miss. I did not once think of Drake and his enormous private pool.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
