by Louise Ells
Written with love for
Margie (1962–1971)
Dad (1923–1999)
Aunt Joyce (1913–2012)
Aunt Em (1940–2017)
“Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.”
Alice Munro
Table of Contents
SUMMER
Erratics
Melting
Scraping
Grafting
Mirrored
Moon Jellies
Family Tree
FALL
Surfacing
Riffle
Granny Squares
Fiddleback Symphony
Fruits of the Nightshade Family
WINTER
Milk Rime
Push
Northern Lights
Turbulence
Preservation
Notes towards Recovery
SPRING
Stained
Dispatches
Whale Song
Erratics
I wonder what’s left, if there are any proper cottages around the lake. I see pictures of Muskoka now, its multi-storey mansions with all mod cons: air conditioning, televisions, Wi-Fi, wraparound decks, three-car garages. When is a cottage no longer a cottage? I think, and feel old.
I’d like to imagine ours might have survived. The outskirts of Muskoka. On an island in one of the unfashionable lakes, too far north of Toronto. I won’t go back to that part of Ontario; I’m not willing to risk not recognizing the area, not willing to risk missing the correct turn-off. I don’t want to discover the gritty gravel road to the boat landing has been paved and a Tim Horton’s has replaced the chip truck in the nearest town. I choose to keep the cottage exactly as it is in my memory, exactly as we left it.
A ‘flood of memories,’ people say. I can imagine that, if I drove north: my being carried away on the crest of a tsunami, then pulled under, unable to see through the water’s thick, through the onslaught of surfacing memories.
Our cottage was called Lee’s Word - a play on my grandfather’s name, Leslie Ward, with a nod to the crossword puzzles he wrote, published every morning across the country, which funded the land purchase and building of the original wood cabin. He seemed to value the pun enough to ignore the fact that his land was on the windward side of the island. Never mind. It was where my father had spent all his childhood summers and I spent the first fourteen of mine.
Swimming, canoeing, campfires, the occasional bear, loon calls at dusk. Reading novels on the dock, and Mad magazines, and playing marathon games of Monopoly by coal oil lamp, taking care not to burn the wick. There is a second-hand bookstore in Goderich I pass when I take my mother out from her care home, pushing her chair along the uneven sidewalks. As soon as the snow melts, they put out tables of books, and I’ll sometimes stop, pick one up and open it, holding it close to inhale the smell of those summers. Sunshine and mustiness and shared history. I tried this once in the city I now call home, but it didn’t work - the seaweedy salt air held other peoples’ memories, not mine.
I was five years old the summer Peter was a baby. His crib was set up in the other tiny upstairs room, at end of the hall, as far as possible from my own room. Every night he stood up in his crib and cried, and I positioned myself in the doorway of my bedroom, watching and standing guard in case he was kidnapped.
To my young girl’s mind it seemed possible that someone might paddle across the lake in that darkness, dock the canoe and creep along the path through the woods, scale, somehow, the shingles of the cottage to the second floor and open the window to cross the creaky landing and lift my baby brother from his cot, then repeat the whole journey in reverse - without alerting my parents who were sitting in the screen porch downstairs, sometimes reading, more often playing cards with the Jameses. The scent of their cigarette smoke curled up the side of the cottage, along with bursts of laughter, Dick James’ political rants, his wife’s shush-shushing.
Then, I knew nothing about teething, and because I was so quiet and my parents followed their generation’s trend of allowing a child to cry itself to sleep in place of mollycoddling, they would never have come upstairs to see what was wrong and would never have known the role I played - albeit inadvertently - in keeping him awake and prolonging his noise. I knew enough not to go downstairs, not to make a sound myself - bedtime meant bedtime and the only acceptable naughtiness was reading under the covers with a flashlight.
Peter was the most precious thing in my life and I could understand easily why someone would want to steal him and keep him as his own son (in my mind it was clearly a man doing the kidnapping). I was too young to read the newspapers but perhaps I’d overheard the tourists at Lakeside Lodge talk about the missing American baby.
Later, I’d read about the Lindbergh case in one of the Reader’s Digests that lined the bookshelves of every privy on the Lake. But by then I would have known that brothers could disappear in moments. Brent, five cottages along, had been in the Laser that tipped yards from the shore. When his sister, Heather, and the other two teenagers righted the boat and got back in there was no sign of him. They dove, they searched, they called for help, but his body was never found, not even by the Marine Unit that came all the way up from Toronto with scuba gear. Heather’s parents returned, year after year, spending longer and longer at their cottage. They hoped her brother might have hit his head on an underwater rock, Heather confided once when my parents had paddled over to the Lodge for supper and she was babysitting Peter and me. Suffered amnesia, but survived and, one day, would remember his family and the summer cottage and return. Her mother heard him, Heather told me. She said when the wind blew in from the north east, which almost never happened, her mother swore she could hear him calling out her name, waiting to be found. That spooked me and when Mum came home that evening I asked her to choose a different babysitter next time.
The next summer Peter was a year older and he fell asleep instantly, after days spent trying to keep up with me on his chubby little legs, and I realized my job was no longer necessary or urgent in the way it had been. And the summer after that I was allowed to stay up later, for s’mores with the gang of kids my age, or games of Scrabble with Mum and Dad before Dick and Betty James arrived for what had grown into a nightly ritual: drinks, snacks, cards, and a heated discussion in which the world was put to rights, interrupted occasionally by tourists who couldn’t read the lake at night, didn’t know how to navigate by cottage lights and had lost their way back to the Lodge. There was once a canoe, I remember, and two women giggling. I snuck out of bed and looked down; one of them was still wearing her swimsuit - a bright pink bikini and gauzy cover-up; she looked like a Barbie doll. She was twirling her blonde hair round a finger. “Easier if we take you back,” Dick suggested, “eh, Bob?” My father must have agreed, as I soon heard the James’ motorboat - a new purchase, first on the lake - start up, and when it had faded, the sound of Betty sniffling, my mother comforting her. The motorboat didn’t come back for hours, and the next day there was a silence between my parents.
Those summers. Back in the city Pete was a boy and I was his significantly older sister and we had less and less in common. But at the cottage we were best friends. Us and all the full-timers; we were friendly enough to the kids at the Lodge, but they were there for a week or two, three at the most; there was no point spending hours together, sharing too many secrets, exchanging addresses and promises to write (though every summer I met at least one girl with whom I did just that).
It was a Lodge kid, though, an American, who discovered the jumping rock. He’d got lost, taken a wrong turn on the portage that linked our lake to the
next one over, and come out at one of those dead-end lakes, too small to bother canoeing, bullrushes on one side and a rocky outcrop on the other. But he’d launched his canoe, looking, he later admitted, for a short cut back to our lake. When he’d paddled across he saw a giant grey boulder, a glacial erratic it was later decided, because of how different it was from the rest of the rocks in the area. With smooth sides, and a flat top accessible by a series of ledges, it was perfect for diving. That afternoon, when he took us back to the site, he claimed he’d done it, actually dived from the top, but I don’t think any of us believed him. You’d have to be with a crowd, egging you on. I wouldn’t even go to the edge of the top platform to look over, I was that scared.
Somehow it was agreed that it was too dangerous for anyone under twelve. “Aww, that means you can do it but I can’t,” Peter said. “No fair.”
I was smart enough to take a way out when it was offered to me. “Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “I’ll wait till you’re twelve too and we’ll do it together.” But every day we went back with the other kids, watched the older ones leap over the edge, screaming, and disappear into the dark blue water. When they surfaced they laughed at their daring, at the risk, and clambered up to do it again. If our parents wondered where we were, why we were taking picnic lunches with us every morning, they didn’t ask. It was summer, this is what we were supposed to do - be outside playing, getting fresh air and exercise.
The Lodge kid was in tears on his last day of vacation and made us promise we’d name this awesome place after him. I’m sure we agreed; certainly we went to the landing, en masse, to see him off - barely recognizing him in long pants and a button-down shirt, climbing into a fin-tailed Cadillac for the nine-hour drive back to New York. He wouldn’t have been out of Haliburton before we were back at the newfound lake, and before the summer’s end, we’d broken our vow to him and re-christened the boulder The Jumping Rock. What we did keep was the rule that no one under twelve was allowed to jump.
Two summers after that - I was almost fifteen, Peter just ten - Dad was promoted to principal and lost his three-month-long summer holidays. He’d drive up to the lake Friday night and head back to the city Sunday afternoon. We saw less and less of the Jameses and when we did, Dick, still a Phys-Ed teacher, always made a crack about Dad having joined the dark side. Even I noticed how strained the laughter was, but I didn’t care; I had more freedom and that meant the chance to flirt with Stephen, a boy who’d mostly ignored me before. Sometime in mid-July, Mum replaced Betty with a new cottager. She came by most afternoons, sat on the dock, and the two drank white wine spritzers and held tinfoil under their chins to help their tans along.
Peter was desperate to jump from the rock. I’ve no idea why we all clung to the belief that twelve was some magic age, but I pulled rank as his older sister and refused to let him do it. Still, that’s where we went on days we weren’t learning to waterski, or canoeing to the far end of our lake and back, or over to the landing from where we walked the three miles to the crossroads which comprised a gas bar, chip truck and ice cream stall. I was aware, that summer, of my breasts and legs, and had a bikini and a pair of cut-off jeans shorts I wore whenever I thought we might be hanging out with Stephen, who teased me in public but kissed me when we were both sure no one else was around. I sat on the edge of the platform at The Jumping Rock and Stephen sat next to me between jumps, sometimes squeezing me against his cold, wet body. I’d squeal and pretend to pull away, while leaning closer.
There were a couple of weekends when Dad didn’t come up. The first time he phoned the Lodge; there had been a bad accident on Highway 11, traffic was backed up for more than twenty miles, he’d been stopped for two hours and then given up and turned back. I was the one who got the message but as I was finally allowed to go to the teen dances at the Lodge, I didn’t deliver it to Mum until after all the slow songs were over. When I paddled home to tell her that Dad wasn’t coming, she sighed. Not angry or sad, as I’d expected, but disappointed, resigned. It was the first time I thought of my parents as a couple in the way I was starting to think of Stephen and I as a couple.
One of those perfect summer evenings. It must have been a Saturday; Dad was there, he’d arrived with rib eyes for the barbecue, and it must have been late August - no mosquitoes and already a hint of fall in the air. We ate down on the dock, plates perched on our laps, steak with potatoes baked in the coals of the barbecue and Mum’s famous Cobb salad with blue cheese dressing. My favourite meal, the one I requested every November for my birthday though it never tasted as good back home. Dad had bought a fancy bottle of red wine too - “Get used to extravagant gifts,” he whispered to Mum, “there may as well be some perks to this new job.” I remember wondering if this had been the cause of the rift between Dick James and Dad - the sudden difference in their salaries?
We had blueberry pie for dessert, also on the dock, then Peter suggested we play Charades, a game we hadn’t played in years. We acted out book titles, movies, sayings; at some point Stephen paddled by to see what I was up to and he joined in. Then he taught us a hilarious Mexican game where the trick was to come second. Winners were the losers, based on some Mayan tradition of sacrificing winners to the gods by throwing them into a cenote; I don’t remember the details but our laughter must have carried across the lake. I suppose it only feels as if that was our last happy evening as a family because it was such a good one.
We’d planned to go up Thanksgiving weekend, like we did every year, but Pete had started hockey training and had a tournament. Mum stayed behind with him and Dad and I went up just for Friday and Saturday, so we’d be back in time to watch two of the games and for the turkey dinner on Monday. I had hoped Stephen would be up; turned out he wasn’t one for writing letters and I’d not seen him since Labour Day weekend. He wasn’t there. No one was, apart from the Jameses. The Lodge was still open - its final weekend of the season - but there were only old people, no kids. When Dad and I had finished all the end-of-season chores on Saturday morning I took a book down to the dock, but it was too cold to sit and read. I thought about taking the canoe out for one final paddle of the season but couldn’t be bothered, so I walked around the island path and picked a few mushrooms. When I got back I needed to use the outhouse so I guess Dad didn’t know I was there, didn’t know I could hear them when he and Betty James met up. The conversation, the kissing, the plans for what - I understood, clearly - was a regular lunchtime rendezvous at the Inn on the Park.
The whole drive back home I kept my face to the window, my eyes closed. I practiced confronting him, telling Mum, finding the James’ Toronto address and telling Betty, no- telling Dick, no-telling her and Dick. In the end, I didn’t tell anyone anything. At the cottage I could have spoken to Peter. Not in the city.
Late March and spring had come early so we went up to the cottage for Easter. Stephen was there with a new girlfriend. I watched them paddle by, refusing to wave or in any way acknowledge their presence. Betty and Dick James were up, too, and invited us for roast lamb on Sunday. Mum was cooking a chicken for Saturday’s lunch and wanted us out of the too-small kitchen so shooed us off into the canoe.
“D’you think Dad’s acting a bit weird?” My brother asked me as we went towards the landing.
“He and Betty James are having an affair.” It was the first time I’d said the word out loud. “I’m pretty sure Mum and Dick both know about it, too.” I wanted him to ask me what was going to happen, if our parents were going to get a divorce, but instead he made a big J-stroke, swinging the canoe towards the portage.
“Let’s go to The Jumping Rock,” he said. We carried the canoe through the late winter woods - still snow, but a few patches of left-over autumn leaves and maybe the suggestion of trailing arbutus - crossed the water, pulled the canoe up onto the shore, and climbed up to the platform on top of the grey boulder. I guess I knew, had known as soon as he’d turned us away from the landing, what Peter was going to do. He stripped off to his swimsui
t and sat down again.
“It’s gonna be freezing cold,” I warned him. Then, “are you sure it’s safe?”
“It’s safe,” he said. “How many times have we watched all the others jump?”
I had to concede, but told him he better not expect me to follow him in. Then we spent a while trying to remember the name of the kid who originally found it. Something pretty geeky, we agreed. Stanley? Franklin? Amos? My brother stood.
I’d watched dozens of kids make the leap, dozens of times, but this time I held my breath. He went over, yelling out, his arms flailing. It wasn’t graceful; he was lopsided and decided to cannonball at the last moment but didn’t quite tuck in fast enough. His feet and butt must have landed in the water at about the same time, and then he disappeared. I leaned closer to the edge, still holding my breath until he surfaced. He was gasping. “Fuck, it’s cold, fuck, it’s cold, fuck, it’s cold.” I’d never heard him swear before, and that shocked me as much as watching him try to move towards the shore with jerky, un-coordinated movements, barely able to hold his head above the surface.
I grabbed his clothes and quickly made my way back down to the water, ready to dive in and haul him out. But he’d managed to reach the edge and all I had to do was pull him from the water. When I passed him his shirt he reached for it, then dropped it, his fingers too cold to work. Crouched, huddled in a ball, his teeth chattering. I touched his back - the temperature of his skin startled me and I took off my fleecy, rubbed him down just as I had when he was a baby, I undressed him, ripping off his swimsuit and manoeuvring him into his clothes. Then I rubbed his back again, and his arms, until his teeth stopped clacking against each other.
“Hey,” I said then. “How was it?”
He turned to me and grinned with blue lips. “Awesome. Frickin’ awesome.”
“And you’re the youngest ever to have jumped.” Now that he was safe I was ridiculously proud of him. “Gonna do it again?” I was joking and we both knew it.