The cicadas drone almost as loudly as the cars as the descendants of Charles Sauriol look for signs of his former kingdom between the East Don River and the Don Valley Parkway.

Sauriol is a mythical figure whose life followed the same meandering curves as the ravine he loved so much. His father came to Toronto for a job straightening the lower part of the Don river in the 1880s, and Sauriol fell in love with the wilderness in the city as a boy scout in 1920. He later bought a cottage at the forks of the Don, and spent every summer there until it was expropriated for the DVP. He spent the last decades of his life acquiring land across Ontario for conservation.

His grandson Jean-Paul Flys, and his great-granddaughter, 8-year-old Shelby, are standing on a ridge that slopes to the highway, off a lonely city access path near Don Mills Rd.

This is the approximate place Sauriol stood in 1958, watching crews demolish his cottage, which was in the way of the new expressway. “You poor old thing,” he later wrote in Trails of the Don. “We have lived together for thirty years and now I am going to hold your hand while you die.”

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“It would be really cool if we could find evidence of it, but this is where it would be,” says the enthusiastic Arlen Leeming, TRCA’s project manager for the Don and Highland watersheds, who has been cross-referencing old photos, land deeds and current maps. Sauriol saw the beauty here and fought to protect it, but he also understood the forces of development, Leeming says. “He worked so hard in the confines of that to find a balance.”

We walk along the shoreline of the East Don, where a thick cloud of mosquitoes delights in the rare presence of human flesh. The summer growth is thick, making it difficult to see ahead. We turn a corner, and find a set of railway tracks rising vertically from the ground.

“Bingo,” Leeming says.

Sauriol’s name is on plaques, a school and conservation areas, but these rusted tracks tell a story that has faded from memory.

He seemed to know that we might come looking some day.

“These rails once served to hold the supports of my cable bridge over the Don,” he wrote in 1984’s Tales of the Don. “They may well be there forever.”

When Lt.- Gov. John Graves Simcoe assessed the Toronto waterfront for the capital of Upper Canada in 1793, he saw a “landscape of possibility” in the sheltered, eastern harbour where the Don River meets Lake Ontario, writes Jennifer Bonnell in Reclaiming the Don.

Before Europeans arrived, the Humber River or “Carrying Place” was the preferred route north for First Nations — and the more predominant river, although aboriginal people used the Don as a travel corridor and food source. Simcoe’s decision to locate the town of York near the Don “set the two river valleys on different historical trajectories,” she writes.

The Don was rich with dense forest, clay and wildlife. By 1860, there were more than 50 mills in the watershed, supplying paper, flour, wool and wood, and pollution. With a small water supply, the mills were ephemeral creatures, Bonnell says, closing because of droughts and floods. On the lower stretches of the Don, factories and tanneries opened as the railways stretched across the waterfront.

By the 1880s, the price of Toronto’s growth was told in the river. Industrial runoff, deforestation and sewage had turned the meandering lower Don into a festering flow of pollution. Politicians and industrialists came up with an idea to straighten, widen and dredge the river, Bonnell says. It would make the river better for industry, and provide the space for an eastern rail approach to the city.

A bad flood in 1878 had destroyed bridges and businesses along the Don, and “they thought they could flush floodwaters more effectively into the lake,” she says.

A young man named Joseph Sauriol moved from eastern Ontario to work on the project. In the first years of the new century, the youngest of his seven children was born. His name was Charles and he would become an important protector of the river his father tried to tame.

Cottage for rent, $5 a month

As a teenager, Charles Sauriol fell hard for the upper reaches of the Don Valley, still remote, bucolic and wild.

“The perfume I liked was the smell of a wood fire. Planting seed or trees was preferable to throwing one’s seed around recklessly,” he wrote in an unpublished manuscript. “The dance floor I knew best was a long carpet of Pine needles.”

Sauriol had grown up downtown, near the lower Don — never giving much thought to the river surrounded by factories. By 1920, his family had moved to East York, and he joined a scout troop.The scouts walked through buttercup-laden meadows of the upper Don past the stands of pine and cedar and the odd solitary farm or cottage.

By the late 1920s, Sauriol was beginning his career in the publishing industry when he inquired about renting an old cottage at the forks of the Don, near Don Mills Rd. The CNR agreed to lease it to him for $5 a month.

He wrote in white ink in a scrapbook that marks his first year: “The sighing Pine/ The shallow stream/ A setting in a woodland dream/ The hours saved/ from Life’s “oubli”/ Turn pages now, a life to see.”

The Don Valley was not known as a cottage destination. There were people who lived rough in the valley, farmers on the rural edge of the growing city, and a handful of other people who rented or owned houses like Sauriol.

His family helped him improve the ramshackle dwelling, bypainting, planting trees and building a verandah. People called him Trapper and Wild Life Reilly.

Early romances were “frostbitten,” but he would find a young woman who was a “wealth of common sense, industry and intelligence.”

He proposed to Simonne Menard in Montreal in 1931, telling her they’d “get along fine together.”

The family, which grew to include four children, spent summers alongside ducks, a goat and a pet raccoon named Davy.

The raccoon followed Sauriol around like a dog, and when the family was ready to leave for the city, Davy hid under the cottage, his daughter Denise remembers.

Simonne took care of the kids, cooking and canning. Sauriol was bilingual, and Simonne only spoke French initially. She learned English by reading the dictionary, and never lost her accent.

Life in the valley wasn’t all wildflowers and sunny days. One nearby farmer let his cows and horses roam and Sauriol hated how they trampled his gardens. He put up a fence, which was suspiciously breached.

Then there was the Skelhorne farm across the river, where 300 pigs lived in a pen. Flies were terrible and “malicious looking rats infested the bank,” he wrote.

When a storm destroyed part of a pigpen, Skelhorne patched the hole with old car parts.

“I tried to forget about it, consoling myself with the thought that I would some day screen the view of Skelhorne’s with a row of willow,” Sauriol wrote.

Sauriol loved exploring the Don, pencil and paper in hand. In his rambles, Sauriol learned about beekeeping from an intellectual hermit named Murph. It became a lifelong passion, a tradition his grandson continues in Nobleton, making honey with the same name his grandfather used: Pioneer Brand.

Sauriol’s face is on a pamphlet in the shop, and André Flys wonders if he’d be OK with that.

“Are you kidding?” says Denise Flys, Sauriol’s eldest daughter.

Sauriols are often told they look younger than they are, and her dad delighted in asking people “Do you know how old I am?”

He was rarely afflicted by bouts of bashfulness.

A Depression destination

On an “inky black” night in September 1931, a Star reporter left Danforth Ave. to venture into the “hobo jungle” of the Don Valley. The reporter was looking for reaction from the homeless men to the news that the board of control deemed the valley an unfit home for them.

“It’s a lot healthier living in the open during the summer than in some dump in the city,” a man told the Star. As the reporter left the “crude dwellings,” he heard the 40 men around the campfire belting out a song: Home, Sweet Home.

For hundreds of years, the Don has been an “edge space” that provided shelter for people who had no other option, says Jennifer Bonnell. There is a long history, from the American Revolutionary War veteran Joseph Tyler in the 1820s, to the Roma who camped along the river in the early decades of the 20th century. “I think we still see that in who lives there now,” she says.

In summer 1931, Toronto Mayor William Stewart called the squatters — mostly men who had lost their jobs in the Depression — “disgraceful.”

Their numbers changed constantly, and the men would come and go on freight trains that rumbled through the valley.

Many were able to get an odd day of work, but most were in the valley because they couldn’t afford life in the city. Eventually, they were sent north to work on the Trans-Canada Highway in October 1931.

“I’ve owned a home in Toronto for 22 years,” said one man, declining a photo. “I wouldn’t want my friends to know I’m here.”

Charles Sauriol felt the stress of the Depression too, but he was a valley resident by choice.

“In trying moments, the thought of it bolstered my spirits,” he wrote of the tough 1930s.

For much of his adult life, Sauriol was an ad manager — “a heck of a salesman” — for a French-language magazine publisher based in Montreal. By January 1930, “the house of cards began to tumble about me,” Sauriol writes in one of his manuscripts, though he didn’t specify what job he had at that time. Anticipated accounts didn’t come through, and Sauriol made “constant harsh remarks” to his brother and colleague, Gene.

He bought a field guide for wildflowers from a Yonge St. bookstore. He was able to put names to the flowers he saw on his walks through the valley: Hepatica, Trout Lily, Bloodroot, Blue Cohosh, Phlox, Jack-in-the-Pulpits. They reminded him of Ontario’s pioneer days. It was a “flood of sunlight in a darkened room.”

Sauriol didn’t live at the cottage year round, although he visited it in every season. During the winter of 1932, there was a break-in during one of his long absences, and Sauriol offered the cottage to two unemployed men living at a nearby swamp. He thought the steady smoke from a fire in the stove would keep people away.

As people struggled to make ends meet, a neighbour cut some of the trees. Sauriol vowed to ensure that the man’s lease was cancelled if he did it again: “From then on I watched his movements closely.”

He was doing well enough to buy the cottage — he and his father chipped in $100 each to buy it in 1931. In 1939, he bought more land from the CNR, including the acres where his pig-farming neighbour used to live. He now had a second cottage — he named it the de Grassi cottage, after a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had once lived in the same tract.

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“The acres I had transformed, the acres I loved so well were to be mine,” he wrote in one of his unpublished manuscripts.

The Depression would eventually end, but the city was changing and threats to the land he loved would only grow.

Don Valley heartbreak

After the Second World War, it was the age of suburbs and expressways. Rumours about one proposed highway had Sauriol worried.

As he drank tea at his first cottage one summer day in 1955, a pair of men came calling, holding maps for the proposed route of the DVP. “Everything had changed in less time than it took for a cup of tea to cool,” he wrote in Trails of the Don.

Pragmatic but heartbroken, he moved the furniture and beehives to his second cottage in 1958. “I thought it would hit him badly, but he never let on,” his daughter says. “He was a realist.”

The site of his first cottage is not an easy spot to get to. You have to cross the Taylor-Massey creek, hopping from rock to rock, and then walk north up a gravel city access path, between the East Don river and the parkway. In 1999, before the access path was built, archeologists found the remains of the Sauriol cottage with artifacts “indicative of a low to middle socioeconomic class bracket” including “brick fragments, ceramics, bottle fragments, faunal items and nails.” The access route was realigned to avoid the cottage site.

The East Don trail, slated for construction in 2017, will bring more people here when it is built. The project is still in the environmental assessment stage, but Sauriol’s life in the valley will likely be a consideration when signage is developed. (Bringing the ravine’s history to life is a part of the city’s ravine strategy.)

Flys remembers walking up the DVP with her family just before it opened in 1961. She was a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, working at the costume department at CBC. She was in her mid-20s, her childhood in the Don behind her, life unfurling ahead. She didn’t realize the sadness of that moment until years later.

She hasn’t been on the parkway since she was rear-ended 15 years ago. She has no love for that ribbon of concrete.

A second act

In 1957, Metro chairman Frederick Gardiner, the driving force behind the DVP, changed Sauriol’s life for the second time. Local conservation authorities were merging, and Gardiner wanted Sauriol to be a part of the Metropolitan Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. Sauriol and a group of friends had created the Don Valley Conservation Association after the war, but he had never been asked to be on the local conservation authority, which had rankled him.

This was an unpaid position, but Sauriol had a budget to assemble land for conservation areas across the region. He accepted.

“Charlie put on a big push, particularly in the headwaters of the Duffins Creek (between Ajax and Uxbridge),” says Ken Higgs, then a senior field officer with the authority, now retired.

Sauriol tramped through wetlands, ravines and farmers’ fields, assessing land and convincing people to sell or donate it to the authority rather than developers. During his tenure, he wrote, the board approved 74 projects and acquired 25,000 acres of conservation and flood plain land. He was also the person who suggested the MTRCA one day acquire the Don Valley Brick Works, Higgs remembers.

“He wasn't promoting the acquisition of lands to glorify Charlie Sauriol, he was doing it because it needed to be done,” Higgs says.

The push for conservation became important to all levels of government after Hurricane Hazel devastated the city in 1954. Houses built along flood plains had been swept away, dozens of people killed, roads washed out, bridges gone. Sauriol, who had seen the dangers of flash floods in the Don, was grateful these measures would save more land, but there was a personal consequence: in the late 1960s, he was evicted from his second cottage in the Don Valley.

Sauriol left his publishing job behind. His dedication to conservation was “all-consuming,” his daughter says. “Whether he made a huge salary or not did not matter to him.” He worked for the fundraising arm of the authority, and later, the Nature Conservancy of Canada. He wrote a series of books about the Don Valley — the Star called them gentle and nostalgic.

He was a go-to source for the media in the 1980s, offering reporters spoonfuls of Don Valley honey with their coffee, writing letters to the editor in support of purple loosestrife.

Mike Fenning, now the TRCA’s associate director of property and risk management, met him in 1989. Sauriol was retired, but still helped with land acquisitions — he saw himself as an on-call “old fashioned country doctor.”

Fenning drove Sauriol around to fundraising appointments. He saw him two days before he died — working on a land acquisition.

Fenning smiles at the memory of the confident senior who had a brisker pace than men 50 years his junior. “To do what he did, you had to be like that.”

Jean-Paul Flys said his grandfather could be an imposing, no-nonsense guy who had “enthusiasm on Red Bull.”

Years before he died, he moved close to 4,000 photos, negatives and boxes full of his writing to the Toronto Archives. The collection showed a wild Don Valley few remember.

Bonnell read through his collection and had an “ambivalent relationship” with her subject. At times, she was irritated by his assertions that his work would be valued by future generations — and there she was, poring over his work.

His name is attached to a school and conservation areas, and he was awarded the Order of Canada, but most Torontonians don’t know who he is, or how hard he fought, albeit unsuccessfully, to keep the valley from turning into a highway, Bonnell says.

“Even though you have valley parklands that are now considered so valuable to the city, he was disgusted with … the loss of his beloved places, and the general direction the city was moving in.”

He counted Sept. 6, 1989, as the most rewarding day of his career: the dedication of the Charles Sauriol Conservation Reserve, stretching from the forks of the Don to Lawrence Ave. At the time, the Star called the landscape “virtually impenetrable.”

“As far as them naming it after me, I couldn’t care less,” Sauriol had earlier said. But he was honoured.

“In 1927, Charles Sauriol acquired part of the de Grassi tract. From that date, he dedicated himself to the preservation of the Don Valley’s natural resources,” The plaque at the site reads. “His lifelong determination and dream of the east valley of the Don protected as a publicly owned conservation reserve became a reality on September 6, 1989.”

Sauriol suggested the text himself.

Remembering bliss in the Don

Denise Flys, 81 walks out of her country home north of Nobleton wearing a flannel shirt and jeans. She is one of the little girls swimming in the Don in those old black and white photos. Her hair is white, and she looks so much like her father.

“It goes so fast,” she says looking through the photos.

She has lived here with her husband, John, for more than 50 years. Her acres are covered by trees and wildflowers. Her father made a point of knowing all the names, but she is an artist and sees them differently — “that looks like a good tree to paint,” she says, smiling. Inside her house, she has a studio filled with colourful canvases and a computer chair speckled with paint, pictures of her father on the wall, scenes of the valley lining the walls.

All around her, farm land is being swallowed by big homes with granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and polished tile floors. They had to call the water truck three times in August because the well ran dry. She never thought about conservation like her dad did when she was younger, but it has always been a part of her life — and it’s more important than ever.

“As years go by, you think, ‘What is going on? We’re going to lose all the good stuff we had,” she says.

Her father loved the little things that connected people to nature, and he fought for the big things — the green spaces. At the close of his first summer at the Don Valley cottage, he wrote about how hard it was to say goodbye.

With summer’s heat the weeks sped by,

And springtime streams did all but dry.

But days grew short and followed on,

Oh, blissful memory of the Don.

Of you we think with saddened heart,

Our time is up and we must part.

Her land feels wild with bees, butterflies and frogs plying their trade in the back acres. A garter snake slithers near her feet and she is careful to step around it. At the very back of her property, the large brick homes loom.

What would her dad think about that?

She smiles. Not much.

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