Ted’s fight

Ted Maczka on his farm on Fish Lake.

Ted Maczka’s decades-long struggle to ease flooding on his Fish Lake land ends with his passing

Ted Maczka was an outrageouslly passionate man. He fought hard and relentlessly for the things he cared about—long after what others would think reasonable. Rational. Sane. Ted died last week. His clogged arteries narrowed to the point that the flow of blood dwindled until there wasn’t enough to sustain him. The cause of death was listed as a stroke. But for the man who spent much of the past 40 years fighting to improve the flow of the creek that drains Fish Lake, he would have appreciated the parallel between the fight to sustain both body and land.

Ted was born in Poland. As a child, he was thrust into forced labour camps by the invading German army. He endured years of deprivation and backbreaking work—permanently damaging his body—rendering him twisted and hobbled in his later years. But his spirit was never broken. His fight was only extinguished when his last breath rattled out of his chest.

When the war ended,Ted left Poland, eventually emigrating to Canada. He found work as a machinist in Toronto. He married. Raised a family.

In 1971 he bought a 188-acre farm on Fish Lake in Sophiasburgh. About half a dozen years later, the Conservation Authority erected a dam on the creek that drains Fish Lake into the Bay of Quinte. A key purpose was to provide a ready supply of water for the village’s fire department.

Ted argued that the dam obstructed the natural flow of the creek, and that rising levels of Fish Lake would inundate surrounding properties, including his property. Indeed walking through over his land decades later revealed 15-inch diameter silver maples marinating in a foot of stagnant water.

He argued that the Conservation Authority, by erecting the dam, had, in effect, expropriated 44 acres of his land. He wanted the land back or to be compensated for its loss. He had witnessed government- sanctioned oppression and tyranny. This would not stand.

For much of the next three decades, Ted went from doorstep to doorstep of any municipal, provincial and federal official who would give him a couple of minutes—always clutching a fistful of papers he claimed as proof of his claim.

Ted was a skilled and relentless publicist for his causes—but he was a poor diplomat. He had little tolerance for those who failed to rally to his cause. If you were a government official or engineer and didn’t accept his argument, you were branded as either incompetent or corrupt. It did little to advance his cause. Yet he pushed on.

By the middle of the last decade, Quinte Conservation chief Terry Murphy had grown weary of talking about Ted Maczka and the dam at Demorestville.

“Mr. Maczka bought a swamp,” said Murphy to the Times in 2005. “That’s the end the story.”

But of course it wasn’t.

By now, each spring would see Maczka and Murphy immersed in a well-rehearsed game of cat and mouse, in which the hobbled septuagenarian would clamber onto the dam in the bright light of day. There, using one of his two canes he would pull at the logs from the dam until two or three lay haphazardly nearby. A few days later, Conservation Authorities would replace them.

The Conservation Authority threatened to take legal action against Maczka. The threat backfired. He welcomed another stage from which to tell his story. Instead, the Conservation Authority erected barriers to make it more difficult for Ted to remove the logs.

Ted was more widely known as the Fish Lake Garlic Man—aromatically preceded by the living produce fastened to the brim of his hat. For years, a massive crafted bulb adorned the roof of his minivan. He preached the virtue of the garlic at festivals and food events from the Hudson Valley to Sudbury.

Back at Fish Lake, he experimented with varieties and growing techniques, mixing and matching qualities, searching for the elusive garlic grail. They were the most entertained garlic—he played classical music to the crop from loudspeakers perched atop a school bus / laboratory near his garden.

He frequently irrigated the budding crop with his own God-given hose—imparting a bit more of his essence into each bulb. Ted did things like that. His own way.