Morning people are chipper. We non-morning people are reminded of this on the rare occasions we engage in activities that by some cruel convention are thought best done in the early morning, like canoeing.

Last Sunday, well before 9 a.m., there were hundreds of people in E.T. Seton Park below the cascading concrete of the Ontario Science Centre, waiting to be launched in a canoe down the Don River, part of the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority’s (TRCA) annual Paddle the Don event.

Along the river, colourful canoes were lined up on the grass waiting to launch. “We’ve been here since 5 a.m. and the river’s up a foot,” said one of the canoe guys. Usually too shallow to navigate, TRCA opens the G. Ross Lord Dam upstream at Finch Ave. and Dufferin St. to raise the water level for the paddle.

An official from the federal government was on hand checking each canoe. Got your whistle? Check. Got an emergency rope? Check. Life vest? Check, but I had put mine on incorrectly and she asked if it was “broken.” Even the feds are passive aggressive in this country.

Paddle the Don is no slip into a gentle pond though. Getting 600 people safely down the Don to the Port Lands is a major operation, and I didn’t expect to experience some mild white water terror in the middle of Toronto.

Now, seasoned canoeists will scoff at the notion of Toronto white water the way people in British Columbia make fun of what Ontario calls a ski hill, but I was anticipating a lazy river akin to the kind people float on in inner tubes at water parks in Florida.

Instead we were going through rapids, ramming hidden rocks, and trying to make a 90-degree turn in moving water within minutes, jumping right into vigourous canoeing but with little interest in jumping into the water itself. The Don River has come a long way from its toxic past, but there’s still enough murky street runoff and storm sewer overflow to provide considerable incentive not to not capsize.

Paddle splashes do ensure a fair amount of Don water is swallowed, but it doesn’t taste as bad as you might think. Perhaps mixed with alcohol, a Don martini could become a signature Toronto cocktail. Brackish and a bit dangerous, it would pair well with filterless cigarettes.

At one bottleneck we found a keystone cops scenario of canoes floating backwards down the river and people clinging to overhanging branches. You can hear them laughing at us up in Algonquin Park. However after two portages, and many bends in the river as it flowed south past Thorncliffe Park, even us novices got the hang of it. There was time to look around, and up, at the city we were passing through.

Toronto from the river seems both wild and urban, a hybrid topography where the scars of urbanization and industrialization increased as we paddled, eventually reaching the long unnatural straightaway where the Don runs next to the DVP.

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At Keating Channel, where the journey ends, Toronto’s finest collection of flotsam and jetsam must be navigated, an obstacle they can’t touch up north.

Paddle the Don happens just once a year, but you need not wait till next May to paddle Toronto. Rent a canoe or kayak just below the Old Mill subway station and paddle the Humber Marshes to Lake Ontario. Downtown there are rentals at Harbourfront where you can explore the inner harbour and Toronto islands.

Canoeing a river is a quintessential Canadian kind of activity, but doing it in the middle of the country’s biggest metropolis is a rather joyful reminder that the GTA is a region full of rivers and that we all live in the watershed of one of them. We can all be river people here, even if we sleep in.