Guest Column: Back to the Beaches — 30 years later

By STEVEN HIGNETT

The crunch of maple leaves beneath my feet and the fog rolling over Lake Ontario pulled me into a moment I hadn’t felt in 30 years.

It was Thanksgiving of 2023. My fiancé and I had flown back to Ontario for a family visit, and my father, now in his seventies, insisted we drive into Toronto so he could see his old favourite, and mine, The Goof. How could I refuse such nostalgia?

As we drove down Kingston Road, memory seemed to rise from every street corner. I hadn’t seen these blocks since I was 15, when our family left the city.

My parents had bought my childhood house from my great-grandmother. I was a fourth-generation Beacher, one of those legacy families whose histories wove through the streets like the roots of the huge maples that lined the area. The neighbours weren’t just other adults; they were the people my mother had grown up alongside.

Once, as a small child, I told her I was scared of a woman down the street. She laughed. “Yeah, I was scared of Mrs. Samachuck too when I was your age,” she said. Across the street lived the Bates family. The patriarch, the elder Mr. Bates, had babysat my mother when she was a child, and years later he watched over my brother, sister, and me. Eventually, his own children would babysit us as well.

From the stern ones to the kind, I knew all the names. Every neighbour felt familiar, a part of the neighbourhood’s rhythm, a presence that tied generations together. The city was layered that way; our childhoods stacked like film reels of the same story.

Nearing our destination, driving down Queen Street East was like a guided tour of memories. My internal dialogue never stopped. Woolworths used to be here. Shoppers Drug Mart over there. IGA. Hobbit Town. The corner store where I’d stop after Cub Scout meetings for a Coffee Crisp and a bottle of Coca-Cola, bought with the 50 cents my mother would slip me in secret so my siblings wouldn’t see.

My dad grinned quietly at his own distant memories, while my fiancé, seeing The Beaches for the first time, smiled at its charm.

Then The Goof appeared, its neon sign still glowing. Officially called the Garden Gate Restaurant, the neon had once spelled “Good Food,” with “Good” vertical and “Food” horizontal. Decades ago, the letter D burned out, leaving the accidental word “Goof.” That name had stuck ever since, and I don’t believe the D ever lit again.

From the outside, the restaurant hadn’t changed. It was a time capsule, stubbornly holding its place in the neighbourhood.

Inside, the air carried the same mix of soy sauce, roasted meat, and fried onions that had once mingled with cigarette smoke. Even without the haze, the scent alone transported me back decades. For a moment, I was a boy again, my legs dangling from a red vinyl booth, waiting for sweet and sour chicken with my family.

After a nostalgic lunch, my dad beaming over his liver and onions, thrilled it was still on the menu, we walked down to the water. Or was I drawn to it?

The smell of damp leaves and cold sand triggered memories too numerous to comprehend. Passing under the canopy of autumn-coloured leaves, there it was: the Leuty Lifeguard Station, standing like a sentinel at the edge of the lake. Built in 1919 and the last of its kind, the white clapboard building was unchanged, the same stoic guardian that oversaw our games of frisbee and sandcastle building, our barefoot sprints down the hot sand during those endless summer days, as if the place had been carefully bookmarked, waiting for me to return.

Stepping onto the Boardwalk, generations of memory came rushing back, biking, dog walking, pickup games of catch with a found ball.

When my feet touched the sand for the first time in over 30 years, something in me stirred. A quiet space I hadn’t known was empty suddenly filled. The energy of the sand charged through me, familiar and electric. In my mind, I could hear my younger self joyfully calling out: There you are! We’ve been waiting for you.

After years of moving across the country, 25 of them spent in British Columbia, I realized with a bittersweet clarity that I would never be entirely whole anywhere else. The Beaches still held a piece of my soul.

My dad clapped me on the shoulder, wordlessly acknowledging the weight of the moment, and my fiancé slipped her hand into mine. She wiped a tear from my cheek and didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. My eyes said everything my soul was experiencing.

The Boardwalk stretched ahead of us like a familiar dream. The fog hovered over the lake, the smell of leaves hung thick in the air, and the Donald D. Summerville Olympic Pool loomed empty and closed for the season.

The windsurfers, the sailboats, the sunbathers were all gone until next year. The playgrounds I’d run to as a child stood silent, swings motionless, yet the waves of the smallest Great Lake still lapped at the sand with the same rhythm they always had. A rhythm that seemed to match the beating of my own heart. In that moment, I was all me, and it was all mine, my city, my neighbourhood, my beach, my childhood, my soul.

My thoughts drifted to the summers of my youth. We spent every day either on the sand or by the pool. No one swam in Lake Ontario then; the water was too polluted, the warnings too dire. We’d watch scuba divers and windsurfers pull on thick wetsuits, knowing they risked parasites or worse. Fishing was allowed, but we were told never to eat what we caught.

It seems strange now, growing up beside a lake you couldn’t touch. Dead fish washed ashore, but we hardly noticed. We had the pool, and we had each other. I didn’t know how much of myself I was leaving behind when I stepped off that beach for the last time.

Now, standing there three decades later, past and present collided in a way that was both simple and profound. The fog, the smell of autumn, the crunch of leaves beneath my shoes, all of it reminded me that some places will never truly leave you, and you never fully leave certain places.

The Beaches had waited, patient and steadfast, holding on to the laughter and echoes of a boy who once ran along the sand. My father and fiancé stood beside me, witnessing a moment they could never fully understand, but I knew, for that instant, I was home.