Still in a Daze at the Cottage

by Ross, James 1744-1827;

  We needn’t worry. They are fine at the cottage still. They have good friends who watch out for them. More importantly they have each other. Years of cottage experience more than make up for aging muscles. There is something to be said for true love, old age, and the cottage.

  My Friend Danny

  We were never quite sure whether Danny could swim. He had lived in the Falkland Islands for some forty years, where swimming in the frigid South Atlantic was probably not a priority.

  “Danny, can you swim?” we would ask him, to which he would never really give us a straight answer.

  “I’ve lived around water all my life,” he would reply. “I’ve lived on and off the sea. When I was but eighteen, I jumped a boat from Wales to the Falklands.” And, as if to settle it once-and-for-all, “I used to go to the pool when I was a kid.”

  I took Danny up to our island cottage for the first time in May; he was going to help me open up the place. We carried a big hundred-pound propane tank down to the dock to load it into the boat. Danny took a step backwards when he should really have taken a step sideways. My swimming question was quickly answered when he sank like a stone. I heard the splash, and then saw his cap floating on the lake surface.

  I darted over to the edge of the dock and looked in the clear water. I saw Danny’s shiny noggin, now bare, some twelve feet down. He was thrashing about on the bottom of the lake. I thought for a minute or two about jumping in to help, but hesitated from being heroic, knowing that the ice had only recently left the lake and the May waters would be quite frigid.

  Finally, he bobbed up to the surface with a huge exhalation of breath, “Haaaaaaaa!” I grabbed his soggy coat by the shoulders and flung him onto the dock. Danny loves his tea, usually consuming some sixteen cups a day. He needed one then — that, and a seat by the wood stove.

  Danny is, what you would call, a colourful character. Give him his cup of tea, and sit him by the wood stove at the cottage, and he will keep you entertained for hours, spinning yarns of his days on the Falkland sheep stations, sheering, gathering, and riding the barren, rocky, desolate landscape. He has an uncanny memory for people and events, and a wonderful way of making the ordinary seem quite extraordinary. The children also love his tales, especially when he tells his Falkland ghost stories around the evening bonfire. These tales of the macabre are all the more spooky and sinister because Danny believes them to be true.

  I met Danny shortly after I was married. I guided him on a horse trip through the Canadian Rockies. We became friends, and he has returned many times since, first to our British Columbia ranch, and now to our Muskoka home and cottage. He is like the hero of an old Western novel or movie, a lonesome cowboy, riding into town, helping around the homestead, and then riding off into the sunset when his good deeds are done.

  We worked side by side, bucking, splitting, and stacking wood for the cottage stove. He demonstrated his English touch in the garden, coaxing the impossible to grow in the rocky soil. We replaced some dock boards and shingled the porch roof. We worked ourselves into a grimy sweat, and then took a break, sitting back on the steep pitch, he with his tea and me with a cold beer. Ink-black clouds loomed over the lake, and the wind was whipping the water up. It reminded Danny of a story, a sudden deranged squalor that he had faced while riding the range in the Falklands, a storm that had him sheltering at a haunted old ocean-side shanty. Everything seems to remind Danny of a story.

  Danny left Muskoka recently, flying off to Australia in search of new adventures, new stories to tell, and a new audience. It is a little quieter, and a little less interesting with him absent. He is a colourful eccentric who, through happenstance, has threaded his life into ours. He has visited the cottage, and his early spring dip has granted him an important place in our cottage lore. And I know he will put a much different spin on his swim when he tells the tale during his travels.

  Another cottage guest who will no doubt return ... my friend Danny.

  The Dock

  When we bought our family cottage from my parents five years ago, fixing the dock was the first project. One of the large stringers had broken in the middle, so the planked surface sagged and fell away into the lake.

  I invited my brother and brothers-in-law and their families up for a relaxing weekend visit, and then surprised them with a sling of lumber. We pulled off the old, rotten boards, cut away the stringers, and fixed up the three cribs. The cribbing had actually stood up quite well, considering that the original dock had been built at the same time as the log cabin, in 1927.

  We spent hours wading around in the waist-deep water in shorts and old sneakers, spiking logs together, sawing, levelling, and lugging big rocks to refill the cribs. We cut and fit three long stringers, on to which we nailed new five-foot deck boards.

  In a stroke of genius (I think it was my idea), we built a large platform at the base of the new dock, starting on land and stretching out over the shallow waters along the shore. Into this was set a tall, straight peeled pine — our flagpole. Whenever we arrive at the cottage, one of our first chores is to raise the Canadian flag, telling anybody who cares that we are here. On the deck we set our Muskoka chairs, some loungers, and a couple of small hewn-log end tables.

  The dock has become the hub of social activity at the cottage, where morning coffee is enjoyed. If you are up early enough, you can have a cup while watching the sun rise and the mist lift and swirl off the water. It’s a great place to greet the new day, and to enjoy a hot breakfast or a bowl of fresh fruit.

  Our cottage is at the peaceful end of a quiet lake. Few boaters buzz through, save for the occasional person fishing who raises a hand and trolls on. We see loons, mergansers, and ducks; sometimes in early summer, large broods trail behind. If you look more closely, you realize that a whole ecosystem lives around the pilings of the dock. Water bugs flit here and there, their shadows on the clear lake bottom make them look enormous. Minnows dart in and out of the daylight, and crayfish crawl across the pebbly lake bottom. Sitting on the dock and looking out over, or into, the water is as mesmerizing as staring into the embers of the evening bonfire.

  The children arrive, and suddenly the dock becomes a hub of activity, as tubes and water skis are laid out, and the boat goes to work. Lunch is set out. The kids, refreshed and satisfied, disappear again to play. We gather on the dock for a late afternoon cocktail hour. Nibbling on appetizers, we talk about new cottage projects. We talk about life and we talk about our kids.

  At night we often lie out on the dock and stare up at the stars. It is so dark at the island that the canopy of stars is acute and magnificent. So brilliant was a recent display of the northern lights that I brought down a bedroll, and my wife and I slept out, falling asleep while watching a shimmering light show and listening to the gentle curl of waves on the rocky shore.

  It has been said by many that technology marked the death of conversation. First, television was introduced to the Canadian household in the 1950s, and the living room quickly became more important than the dining room. Then came computers, the Internet, email, computer games, and television play stations. True, technology is not totally to blame — busy lives and children who are always on the go make it difficult to sit and talk. Cottage life allows this, whether around the large kitchen table in the cabin, gathered at a bonfire on the point, or on the dock.

  Cuts and Bruises

  We treasure the remoteness of our recreation paradise. It is our place to get away from it all, our escape from the rigours of daily living. There are times when the privacy of the cottage can turn on us, however, and make us feel isolated and a little vulnerable. It is a fair distance to town and to the hospital.

  It is a sound that a parent fears most of all while at the cottage, when the silence of a peaceful cottage day is broken by the piercing wail of a child — a yelp that has you immediately springing into action, long before it trails off into a sobbing cry. It makes one’s hair stand upright on the neck, and turns one immediately into a sprinter
of Olympic proportions.

  My son stumbled on a wasp nest the other day. He was out playing with the rest of the children, having a water fight on a hot summer’s afternoon. He had found a great hiding place off the corner of the front porch when he crouched over a hidden nest. Suddenly the wasps were swarming, and he was running and screeching. Actually, he was quite lucky, only getting nailed eight or nine times. Most of the assault was to his forearm, which swelled up like Popeye’s after spinach. Some antihistamine tablets did the trick, but we worry what might have been if he had not been so quick to escape the attack.

  Often it is when these injuries and nasty cuts happen that we realize that the remoteness of the cottage, which makes the place so attractive, can also be a detriment. There do not seem to be many vacations that go by without a few cuts and bruises. The children usually finish up a day of play, of running through the forest chasing one another like madmen, with legs that look like they have been dragged through raspberry canes. They are cut, scratched, and bleeding. These are only wounds of the superficial variety. Some can be much worse.

  While swimming at his cottage, a friend’s son recently cut his ankle badly on a sharp clamp that had worked its way loose from the dock. He sliced into his ankle bone and it took a great many stitches to close the cut. Being an active kid, he never did allow the wound time to heal. Now, with summer vacation over, the slice is still sore, too painful to participate in hockey tryouts, where the skate rubs the ankle raw.

  When I was young and foolish, I cut a deep, jagged gash in my left pointer finger. The cross-cut saw I was using slipped out of the log. Thank goodness we did not have a chainsaw yet. I hid by the water on a rock ledge surrounded by cedars, not wanting to admit my careless mistake — holding a blood-soaked cloth over a wound that needed stitches. Unembarrassed now, I show the scar to my children, like an old veteran showing off his war wounds.

  My brother-in-law cut open his hand when shingling the cottage bunkie. He slipped and slid, his hand at first being sandpapered by the shingles and then running across a protruding nail. His palm was sliced open. He phoned us in town where we were getting supplies and asked if we would mind picking up a few extra bandages.

  I also have a five-inch scar that runs diagonally up my left shin, just below the knee. I got it as a teenager, dashing from the sauna at a friend’s cottage to the lake, in the darkness tumbling over the jagged metal post of a horseshoe pit en route. I limped on to the water, and only noticed the gash on my leg when I was towelling off later. Of course my legs were never much to look at anyway — half chicken and half stick man, and slightly bowed from too many miles on a horse.

  My oldest daughter’s legs are a little more shapely, long and sleek. She scarred her own shin when she was about ten years old, running through the boulder-strewn shallows of our bay. She tripped over one rock and slashed her leg on another stone’s jagged edge. In her inevitable fashion she did not utter a peep, just the understated assessment, “Dad, I think I cut my leg.”

  Setting down my book I calmly replied, “Really? Come, let me have a look.”

  White sinew and muscle tissue spilled out of a ragged gash that was deep to the bone. “Go see your grandma,” I said in a panic, knowing grandma had been a nurse. Off to the hospital she went for stitches. The doctor tied it all together, with orders to stay still for a week and out of the water. This, of course, was an impossible directive. We are at the cottage in the summer, after all. There are games to be played and water to frolic in.

  She kept it still for about half a day at best, and soon the stitches were pulled apart. I bemoan the scar that remains on her leg, a tiny blemish on her beauty. It doesn’t bother her, nor does it her grandmother. “If ever a little scar turned off a potential suitor,” she says sternly, “well, then that fellow is not nearly good enough for my granddaughter.”

  Yes, the scars of the cottage are neither blemishes nor flaws, they are simply the marks of experience, the tattoos of adventure and memories of good times. The scars may last, but they fade over time. Not so the stories that they relate, tales which get bigger and better with each telling. Have fun at the cottage, but be careful, and be prepared with a well-stocked first aid kit, antihistamine pills, and lots and lots of bandages.

  Grandmothers

  It is my mother’s birthday today. I won’t tell you how young she is, but suffice it to say my kids have a spunky grandmother. Every year my eldest daughter has tried to beat Grandma into the lake, and every year she has failed. At the beginning of each cottage season the youngster has tried to devise a plan that will allow her the bragging rights of being first in the water, and every summer she has been outfoxed.

  Of course, the contest that has evolved between Grandmother and Granddaughter only counts when they both gather at the cottage together. And, it is my daughter’s pride that would never have her attempt to jump in the lake unless Grandmother is watching. This summer she thought she had won. After supper, on the cool night of our arrival, the devious young lady snuck down to the dock with her bathing suit on. She called for Grandma, knowing she was visiting at the kitchen table. Grandma still was dressed, she reasoned. This would be easy.

  She stood at the end of the dock ready for the plunge and smiled slyly as Grandmother feigned shock. What the youngster did not realize was that her older competitor had readied herself, with a bathing suit on underneath her clothes. The granddaughter also failed because she tried to make the most of the moment. Revelling in her impending first victory, she smiled a confident smile all around, and turned to contemplate her gentle entry into the lake. Though we allow diving into the deeper waters off swim rock, we do not allow the kids to dive in off the dock. In a flash, Grandma was in her suit and dashing down the dock. Hearing the footsteps the startled youngster spun around, just in time to see her grandma gracefully dive headlong off the end of the dock.

  “Grandma broke all the rules,” was all the shocked granddaughter could say, as dejectedly she grabbed her towel, skipping her dip. I think secretly she loves it when Grandma wins, for if it didn’t work out that way, this annual ritual she has grown so fond of might end.

  Grandmothers — what a special relationship they have with the grandchildren, mostly because they take the time. They teach them games, play cards with them, bake them cakes and cookies, and have the patience to let them help.

  My wife’s folks recently spent ten days with us at our cottage. It was the first time they had been there. We had invited them many times, honestly, but they live on the West Coast and always have had other things on the go. I think they also subconsciously blame the cottage for our move back from British Columbia to Ontario three years ago, and rightfully so. When we purchased the family cottage it started the wheels in motion for us to relocate. So the island has been a little bit of a sore point for them.

  I must admit that I was worried that they would find everything wrong with the place. I had steeled myself to defend our lovely cabin against their ridicule. I had badly misjudged them, and had also not given enough credit to the charm of our place. I think it won them over in an instant.

  My mother-in-law taught my second daughter to weave with cedar and birch bark. If she had told me she wanted to take basket weaving at school, I might have been less than impressed, but here at the cottage, Grandma and Granddaughter spent hours at the dock working away making bracelets and baskets. They peeled the bark off the birch logs that were split for the fireplace, and the trees that were down along the trail. They soaked it and cut it into thin strips, before weaving it carefully together into beautiful and sturdy designs.

  I had to cut some cedar rails for the porch, and then take the draw knife to shave off the bark like a banana peel. Grandma weaves her magic, so soon we are all wearing woven bracelets like surfers, and baskets cover the kitchens shelves.

  We had a wonderful time during their visit, but perhaps nothing so wonderful as during the first days of their stay, when my parents were also at the cottage. I thought
, how fortunate our children are to have all four grandparents gathered together at this family place. It is a special relationship that the kids have with them all.

  Grandfathers? Well, they will have to wait for a future story. Then we will talk about the patience they have in teaching the children about nature and wildlife, about canoeing and woodwork. We will mention the bravery shown in teaching the kids about boating and in taking them fishing.

  Grandparents, it is great to have them join us at the cottage.

  The Return of Inspector Gadget

  Our friends from Switzerland, Alain and Nicole, returned for a cottage visit this spring. Their first visit to Muskoka had been during the brilliant colours of autumn. This time I invite them here in June, with the promise of sparkling clear lakes, buds blooming on the trees, the smell of wildflowers, and warm, sunny days. I do not mention that the sweet gifts of nature in spring have a decidedly nasty side, the blackflies that the region is famous for.

  We call Alain “Inspector Gadget,” and he does bring with him his usual array of technological gizmos. Packing up the truck for the trip to our cottage, he pulls out a multi-tray mini tackle box that opens in various ways and contains every type of lure known to mankind and every form of fly ever tied. He also has a small tube that holds his fishing rod, a fancy design that can transform itself from casting rod to fly rod with one flick of the wrist.