by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

So what'd you do this summer?

Did you hop in your canoe at the top of Mount Royal and drift down one of the many streams and rivers that criss-cross the island?

You didn't, because after the Europeans came to this island, they wiped out countless babbling brooks, streams and rivers that flowed throughout the island down from the mountain.

Imagine we had kept them. You'd be able to kayak to work, or maybe spend your Sunday wending through a small creek down from the top of Mount Royal through Westmount and into the East End.

Mayor Tremblay kicked off the big swim meet with the platitudes about the importance of water to our city. Yet throughout its history, Montrealers have been deprived of the drippy joys of the plentiful watery resources that surround us. For a place loaded with H20, we're seriously aquatically challenged.

We've been wanting access to the water forever. People were so keen on water that they'd swim in the heavily polluted Lachine Canal. Many were pulled down by the sludge and drowned, but others kept coming. The body count got so high that there were serious plans to fence the entire thing off.

Now people will pay big money to live near the canal or at Habitat, shelling out for the mere joy of having water flow near their balcony. The aquatic allure couldn't be any more obvious, yet just a few blocks south of the canal sits the aqueduct, surrounded by traffic, inaccessible to admirers. Same thing with the river in the east (blocked by tracks) and the west (the Bonaventure Highway).

But the city gave us pools. In 1897, there was a whole debate over whether women should be allowed into the public baths (what we'd consider pools). The genders weren't allowed in city pools together until 1936. Women rarely swam. Children were also banned. Kids were only allowed to swim for two hours a day from 1934 on. Of course, these indoor pools were closed Sundays well into the 1950s.

Back before air conditioning, Montrealers would kill for a splash in a pool, but the city would pull stunts like building pools and leaving them empty, such as one at Henri-Julien and Crémazie, which was dry from 1937 to 1942. The city would truck a one-foot-deep canvas pool to the poor parts of town. Old newspaper photos show kids elated with the paltry pool. Conversely, another newspaper photosnap shows depressed-looking kids in St-Henri longingly staring into a pool they can't afford the nickel required to enter.

All of this historical documentation bangs away at a simple, but overlooked, point: water in the city makes people profoundly happy.

Knowing this, it amazes me that there are so few fountains, ponds, decorative waterfalls and other such wet wonders in this town. The city builders made most of our parks without even a tiny brook or stream.

I suspect the sneaky pencilneck weasels who run things would love to eliminate the little bit of public water we still have. Westmount Park administrators dumped its once-impressive wading pool for a sorry bunch of hoses that spray pathetically from time to time. Multitudes of happy young splashers have been replaced by a few desultory children trying to figure where the water is at. NDG Park - surely similarly inspired to avoid paying $8 an hour to a summertime lifeguard - also opted for the same sort of water games rather than install a genuine wading pool.

The city should rehydrate this parched concrete jungle. I'd wager that B-rate shopping strips like St-Hubert, Fleury or Monk could immediately reverse their declines by simply by adding public fountains.

If I had my way, this town would have subaquatic suburbs, houseboats in the harbour, downtown waterslides and overhead Plexiglas-encased streams.

It would be paradise.

Instead of hauling tail out to the countryside, Montrealers might then start feeling that this isn't a place to flee come July.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca