The Belle Park Meadows

I was looking through recent photographs and realize just how regularly I turn my gaze to the up and down footpaths that cross what used to be the old municipal golf course on outer Montreal St. The Belle Park Meadows, I call it. This time of year it’s a stupidly pretty landscape of bedraggled still-icy yellow grasses and wind-blown poplar. The old dump and driving range rise at the northern limit like a long-dead volcano, and there is water on three sides. Obstinate traces of snowpack linger in the shade and its not rare to spy coyotes posed nonchalantly at the horizon. Turfing the small handful of golfers that wheezed up and down the fairways during its last couple of years of operation, and then letting Nature run its course, was the best thing the city has done in ages.

Seen from above, Belle Island, the old forest beyond the fourth green, pokes out into the Cataraqui River like the head of a mallard duck, all emerald green vigilance, and is home to some seriously old trees, even if they do lean, some of them, at impossible angles, and even if miles of strangling vine does threaten to bring down those maples and crowd-wide oaks any minute. It feels like an island that I might one morning discover has sunk without trace into the Cataraqui River, and so I head there three or four times each week, trace its perimeter as keenly as some early cartographer.

Maybe you should explore there too, that’s my reason for writing, before some damn fool decides it’s ripe for development. Round trip from my home on Charles St is not much more than an hour. If you live further afield, there’s a parking lot just off Montreal.