Deachman: Stolen canoe leaves homeless Ottawa woman grounded

Article content

It was the place where she felt safest, and now it’s gone, stolen out from under her.

Frances DeSilva’s aluminum canoe, the one she’d been living in since late May, was torn from the chain with which she secured the craft to a tree along the Rideau River south of Hog’s Back, leaving behind just the boat’s small, now-crumpled, dock plate. Whoever took the canoe emptied it of her belongings and scattered them on the ground before presumably paddling away.

Article content

DeSilva, who has no other home, says the incident occurred sometime on Wed. Sept. 18, while she was away shopping.

The 60-year-old is surprisingly circumspect about the theft. “Whenever I went away, like to go shopping, I always wondered if the canoe would still be there when I got back. I knew it wouldn’t last forever.”

She has no idea who might have taken it. Or, rather, she has too many ideas. A couple of nights earlier, a man she’d met in August when she was moored further downstream on the Rideau showed up in a kayak she says was jury-rigged with a motor. He made her feel uncomfortable, which contributed to her moving from her previous site to her current one. When he recently arrived in his kayak, she didn’t engage him, remaining still in her canoe, which she had pulled up onto the shore. “But he kept saying, ‘I know you’re in there.’”

A couple days after the canoe disappeared, she came across two or three high school-age youths near where her tent and belongings were hidden in a thickly wooded area by the river. When she asked them if they took the boat, they replied “Hell, no!” and quickly ran off, a response she finds suspicious. “Although my daughter said that maybe they thought they’d seen a witch.”

Article content

Article content

And then there are all the others who she thinks might want to harm her. The dogs, she calls then. She subscribes to a number of conspiracy theories and is even mistrustful of the people who genuinely want to help her, including, for example, a woman in a nearby community centre who gave DeSilva an industrial roll of toilet paper and a plate of food. In instances like that, DeSilva worries she’s being “set up.”

A day or two before the canoe disappeared, someone left her a tent, a sleeping bag and a foam mat. She doesn’t know if the events are connected, but has a hard time imagining otherwise.

Since then, she’s been living in the tent, but worries that it, too, will be taken away. She says she phoned Ottawa police the night the canoe went missing, but that led nowhere. She was told to file an online report, but she hasn’t gotten around to it.

I first met and wrote about DeSilva in July, after seeing her and her canoe, the latter then whole and tethered to the railing along the Rideau Canal, just south of Pretoria Bridge near Lansdowne Park.

A transplant from Toronto and Montreal, she came to Ottawa a year-and-a-half earlier with the hope she’d find the city at least somewhat friendlier than those to people who are homeless.

Article content

She says it is, but that doesn’t make it particularly friendly. Prior to purchasing the canoe, she had spent last winter living in a makeshift shelter in the wooded area around Lansdowne Park, until someone tore it down.

The canoe, she says, was a way to achieve some needed mobility — allowing her to move up the Rideau River where she could find a slightly more secluded spot to live. She also feels safer living in the canoe than in a homeless shelter.

More recently, she was faced with the rigamarole of trying to replace her expired CIBC bank card, a trial exacerbated by her lack of proper identification or a fixed address, and the fact that her phone number has changed, twice, owing to her cell phone being stolen while she charged it in public places.

Solving DeSilva’s housing issue is complicated, not the least by the fact that she’s not particularly interested in what she calls “government” housing. “As long as I have my smokes, my coffee and a little bit to eat, I’ll be OK.”

Even the prospect of another winter in the rough doesn’t much faze her. “If it gets below minus-15, I can go to the bus shelter at Billings, at least as long as I don’t fall asleep.”

I can’t pretend I know the solution to Frances’s troubles. I’m not even sure she’d trust anyone willing to help. But, for the moment at least, she appears to trust me. She told me her daughter was thankful for my initial article; it meant there’d be more people looking out for her mom. I think it’s important we all keep doing that.

Article content