There’s an oft-repeated story that the water in Lake Ontario was once so full of chemicals it could develop photographs.

It’s not just an urban legend, as a 1990 Los Angeles Times article featured Ryerson student Jeremy Lynch who developed a portfolio of pictures using Lake Ontario water, a story corroborated by his professor.

The Great Lakes have come a long way since those bad times and today in Toronto alone, there are eight Blue Flag beaches, an internationally recognized designation that monitors beach standards. Friends and I have been swimming off the Toronto Island beaches for a decade and a half, gulping the occasional mouthful without a problem. It is one of the great joys of living here. Lake Ontario is a deep cold lake, colder than shallow Muskoka lakes to the north, but on dirty, hot city days there’s nothing better to slip into.

It’s important to swim in your lake. It’s a true, untamed wilderness that begins abruptly where our built civilization ends at the water’s edge. Under water it’s a foreign land, an almost science-fiction landscape, as wild as the Algonquin or Banff parks, but mostly taken for granted by those who don’t use it.

In a city like Vancouver, the mountains tend to take the focus away from the city, but in Toronto it’s the opposite: the city gets our attention rather than the much subtler lake. A new project called A Love Letter to the Great Lakes aims to change that.

With a series of murals at the mouth of the Don River and near the intersections of Queen and Spadina and Queen and Ossington, the project hopes to reconnect people with the lake by celebrating it and highlighting some of the threats it still faces, such as disappearing native species, invasive species and pollution.

Last week Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, a charity that advocates for and monitors the lake, fished out dozens of condoms and other sewage “floatables” from the waters off of Ashbridge's Bay that entered the lake with storm water overflow. Not fear mongers by any means — the Waterkeeper’s popular Swim Guide monitors 7,000 beaches in four countries and encourages people to “swim, drink and fish” their particular waters — their work is a warning there’s still much to do despite the Blue Flag beaches we have now.

“Only three per cent of Toronto’s 44 kilometres of waterfront is parkland with water monitoring and beaches,” says Mark Mattson, Waterkeeper co-founder and president. “The other 97 per cent needs improving, as do all our rivers.”

Currently the Waterkeeper group is running a “Swimmable Summer” Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to sample water in the Toronto Harbour and elsewhere along the waterfront.

“There is no city sampling there as there are no beaches. But it’s hugely popular with boaters, paddlers, and others who are dunking in the lake,” says Krystyn Tully, Waterkeeper co-founder and vice-president. “We think they have a right to know about water quality too, so we’re raising funds to visit recreational hot spots and collect samples.”

Tully is also excited about the potential to create a new public beach in the east under the Scarborough Bluffs. “It’s a beautiful stretch of shoreline that people use for swimming, but isn’t officially sanctioned as a beach by the city,” she says.

Forget about the Scarborough Subway debate for a while and think about more beaches for Scarborough. Currently some can be accessed by following unofficial paths east of the R.C. Harris Water Filtration plant at the end of Queen St.

Outside of Toronto, Tully says, Burlington Beach is the place to be this summer, one of the most popular sites in their swim guide.

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Connecting with the lake won’t just cool people down, they’ll come to care for it too. And it needs more defenders: in May, Waukesha, Wisconsin was given permission to divert water out of the Great Lakes watershed, setting a troubling precedent as other parched parts of North America look for new sources of water.

It’s going to be a hot Toronto weekend, so go jump in your lake.

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