It’s as Canadian as the loonie, as Canadian as maple syrup on a beavertail, as Canadian as making love in a canoe.

Skating on a frozen pond under the stars, lungs filled with fresh winter air, blades rasping on the smooth, black ice feels like such a birthright to Richard Sanger it’s even moved him to poetry.

Skates, toddlers, hockey sticks

Piled on the sled,

We galumph down the slope

To see how hard the ice is, take a step

And test our weight —

Our boys can hardly walk,

Let alone skate,

But the pond is a dare

We can’t resist . . .

Sanger, who happens to be a poet and a playwright, grew up in Ottawa, played hockey as a boy and skated often on the Rideau Canal. This Christmas, he skated and played a little shinny on Meech Lake in Quebec. “It was just beautiful black ice. You could send a pass for a hundred yards.”

Every winter he’s lived in Toronto, half his 54 years, Sanger has headed over to High Park to skate on Grenadier Pond. That was the title, in fact, of his ode. And if that seems a touch romantic, well, he’s not alone. “I know couples who met there.”

Now, he finds the winter pastime — as once famously put in the late broadcaster Peter Gzowski’s contest to define the country — to be “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”

Through Toronto’s history, skating on Grenadier Pond was a seasonal delight, compensation for the winter climate. When Sanger returned to Toronto in the late ’80s after a time living in Europe, the city still cleared a great oval for skating and lit fires to warm skaters.

In recent years, however, after parks department officials banned skating on city ponds, getting his winter exercise has been a cat-and-mouse game with the police and a source of ongoing frustration with “liability-chilled” municipal officialdom.

Still, Sanger was skating there last weekend and saw where homeowners had cleared rinks on the pond at the bottom of their gardens.

They use an augur to measure the thickness of the ice. Sometimes, Sanger takes a hand-drill with him to do the same. Usually, he says, three inches is ample for safe skating.

He sends an email message to a small group of kindred spirits advising when the skating’s good. His sons, 16 and 20, often skate with him. Sometimes he runs into people he knows or joins pickup games.

“One of the lovely things is there’s no boards and when it’s really clear you can make passes forever.”

The only place it’s dangerous, he says, “and apparently people did fall in this year, is where water’s flowing in or out around the edges . . . The centre is fine.”

As for police, they show up occasionally to shoo people ashore, but a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy often prevails.

“It just seems ridiculous,” Sanger says. “I don’t know why (the city) can’t say, ‘We will not be liable: use at your own risk.’ ”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

So he and others skate on, Canadians against the “no-you-can’t” current, defenders of a national institution and simple joy.

“At nights it’s really fun,” Sanger says. “There are coyotes. You can see the streetcars going by and the GO trains, but you also feel like you’re in the middle of the country.

“If you’re skating really hard you fill up your lungs with fresh air. There’s something about getting really fresh air in the middle of Grenadier Pond and being out there with the stars and the moon. It’s really wonderful.”

Sanger notes that one of the most memorable passages in William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude is about skating on a frozen lake.

The English poet wrote:

It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud

The village clock tolled six, — I wheeled about,

Proud and exulting like an untired horse

That cares not for his home.All shod with steel,

We hissed along the polished ice in games

Confederate . . .

His recent skates on Grenadier, Sanger says, have been more satisfying than his turns on the Rideau Canal.

“That has something to do with danger and the forbidden, perhaps.”

Rather like amorous Canadians and canoes.