It is only when my absent-minded relation states, “It must be getting late. I’m kind of hungry — I wonder what the ladies have planned for lunch,” that we both look at each other and run for the boat.
Now, the end of this story is somewhat predictable. My father-in-law and I are not fully able to enjoy the fresh wild blueberry pie at supper, and I’m thinking of investing in those custom-made earplugs, the same kind that my wife’s father surreptitiously slips into his ears as we pull into Blueberry Island to retrieve the angry berry pickers.
Cottage Prepping
It always seems in early spring that my wife and I get restless. It is the drawback of the island cottage — there is a period of forced absence. We have to wait until the lake ice melts away before we can open up the place. It is during that forbidden time, usually from late March to mid-April, when the ice becomes unsafe. We can only stare from the mainland out to the island.
We will usually take advantage of this sabbatical by doing some cottage prepping at the Spring Cottage Life Show, to see all that is new and fanciful for cottage living. This year, however, we decided to do something a little different, so we trekked down to the big city a weekend earlier and took in the Wine and Cheese Show. It represented a virtual round-the-world taste test to find that ultimate wine to sip on the dock in the late afternoon after a busy, fun, and productive cottage day, or that full-bodied red to compliment the thick steaks that I would have cooking on the barbecue.
We started at the show wandering up and down each aisle, savouring the best vintages the world had to offer. While some of those standing around us would swish around the tastings in their mouths, gurgle it like mouthwash, and then, and what’s the sense in this, spit it out into some stainless steel spittoon, we would take a sip, close our eyes, and imagine ourselves laid out in loungers on the cottage deck with the sun warming our faces, or sitting around the big pine kitchen table enjoying a fine meal. While others would talk about their wine exhibiting the beautiful sweet nose of spring flowers and a taste of such richness that it massages the palate with the flavours of chocolate, gooseberries, and leather oxfords, we would ask which offerings might best repel blackflies. There is nothing worse than swallowing a drowned insect in one’s robust merlot.
We sipped Italian Chianti and decided it would complement a cottage comfort meal of spaghetti and meatballs. We tasted an Argentinian Malbec and muttered, “mmm — steaks on the barbecue.” We swirled around a Pinot Noir from New Zealand, a Californian Cabernet, and something unpronounceable from Great Wines of China. China? — really. It wasn’t bad ... we decided it would go nicely with Chinese. The great wine regions of Ontario were well represented, Strewn from Niagara and Crew from Erie — great for the cottage we decided.
We sipped our way through most of the afternoon, and for most of the day our romantic city escape and cottage prepping plan seemed well founded. Then, two things happened. First, we started to realize the value of using the spittoons. No matter, we had wisely booked into a local hotel and had taken a shuttle to the show. Still, the wonderful wines had probably clouded my judgement a bit and had made my wife less tolerant. Wandering down one of the last aisles I came across a wine tasting seminar being advertised. “Get Naked With Wines,” it was called. I stared in at the young, nubile speaker and immediately signed us up.
When the pretty vintner swirled around wine in her glass and said things like “you have to check the legs, the lighter the wine the faster they run, the fuller, the slower,” or “a slight hint of melons and the essence of candy,” or “this is likely a little more body than you’re used to,” I thought she was speaking directly to me. Worse than that, my darling spouse thought that I was thinking that she was speaking directly to me.
Cottage prepping! We have some newly discovered wines we want to savour dockside. I can swirl a rich, robust wine around in my glass, look over at my wife and proclaim, “beautiful legs.” Perhaps that will get me back in the good books. Or, maybe, such tasting theatrics are redundant; a good bottle of red sipped at our favourite place on earth will suffice.
The Chair
I have my favourite chair at the cottage. It sits on the western side of our porch. I think it was my father’s favourite before me. Sometimes I have to kick one of my kids out of it so I can sit down. Sometimes I give it up quietly and without complaint to a guest. I hover around, feeding them light beer until they have to excuse themselves, then I sit and refuse to budge for the rest of their visit.
My favoured seat is not the Muskoka chair, though we do have a collection of these on our dock. I will sit there for a morning coffee, for lunch, or when we gather for a late afternoon drink. They are comfortable enough. These chairs have become representative of cottage country, of life at the lake, as popular a cottage icon as the loon and moose. I have felt, perhaps, that the Muskoka chair has become an overused brand.
Still, I can’t say I’m above its exploitation; I used one on the front cover of my recent Cottage Daze book. The front cover photo of an empty red chair at the end of the dock seemed to represent an invitation to sit down, look out on the lake, and ruminate about cottage life — exactly what I wanted to convey. That is also what we often like to do at the cottage. Sure, we like a high level of energetic cottage activity as well, but at other times we simply love to sit and relax. This place is our escape, after all.
Now, it is not my intention here to get into the great Muskoka chair versus Adirondack chair debate. Yes, this now iconic chair was originally constructed in 1903 by a man named Thomas Lee, who was simply looking to have better seating for his Adirondack Mountain cottage. The simple design featuring eleven pieces of wood cut from a single board, with its slanted back and low-level seat, quickly became a preferred summer chair in many places.
Sensibly enough, as Muskokan cottagers, we stole the plans and made the chair our own. Our Muskoka chair is truly a statement in cottage style and one of the traditional accoutrements of the cottage experience. There are all sorts of adaptations, in vibrant colours, constructed from traditional hemlock, to cedar, teak, resin, engineered woods, and recycled plastics.
On our cottage porch we have a couple of rough-hewn log rocking chairs that were introduced to the place in 1974. They are fine chairs if you like to move while you talk, or move when someone else is gabbing. It is the third chair on the porch that is my personal throne, a big, roomy, high-backed chair. It has a straight back built out of one piece of solid pine and wide, level arm rests perfect for setting your book on or for holding a cold drink on a hot afternoon. The chair came with the cottage, and in its thirty-eight years. I’ve always remembered it being on the same side of the porch. Switch its position with the rockers and things just wouldn’t be right. It is well-weathered and comfortable, sporting the gouges, scratches, and marks from years of use.
Originally it was known as the Wiser’s Club chair, simply because it was part of a set that was constructed for a “Gentleman’s Club” of sorts. In the 1960s, cottagers would gather weekly at a lakeside lodge, the only place on the lake that had a record player, and then gentlemen got into the routine of bringing along a bottle of Wiser’s to enjoy. I’m told a camp boy designed and built the chairs. Over time, almost all have disappeared — we ended up with perhaps the last of this unique design. Now, not a drinker of rye, I prefer to refer to the Wiser’s chair simply as “my” chair, the perfect fit, a place I love to seat myself to look out on the lake and to contemplate how lucky I am to be here.
Tools of the Trade
I remember standing on the rickety wooden porch and staring through the big picture window, my hands cupped on the glass to shade the reflection. What I saw was a fascinating treasure chest — a museum-like collection of the macabre. On the log walls of the big, open one-room interior was hung a variety of metal tools — instruments of torture, an array of Inquisition-like implements that I would be able to put to proper use on my younger sister. There were chains and hooks and some kind of shackles for sec
uring the prisoner. There was a double-sided broad axe, obviously for finishing the job when the prisoner finally relented, confessed, and mercy was bestowed. There was a double-handled cross-cut saw, in case mercy was not the way and I was forced to saw my sibling in two.
I gawked through the windowpane, fascinated by what I saw. This was August of 1974, and my parents had just put an offer in on this island cottage. They had gone out in a canoe one afternoon from our campsite on the mainland with no intention or expectation. They returned excited by a treasure they had stumbled upon. The prize was a quaint and charming log cabin on a three-acre island. It was meant to be. We kids had paddled over from our lakeside camp spot to see the place. “Look at the beautiful wood furniture inside,” my parents had told us. “It looks so cosy and comfortable — and, there is a loft! A ladder leads up to a sleeping loft at the back.”
I hadn’t immediately noticed the fine furnishings, the bedrooms, the wood stove, or the polished beauty of the place. It was the instruments of torture that caught my young eye. In truth, the wall decorations were actually all the logging implements used to build the log cabin back in 1928. While this didn’t impress me at the time (in fact it kind of thwarted my sadistic intentions), I would later have to admit that the tools were conversation pieces of interest to most mature and well-adjusted adults. And I’m sure they still could be put to use in some fiendish way if the need arose.
On the walls of the sitting room, hung by wooden pegs, were a single pole axe, a broad axe, a double-bitted broad axe, and an adze. There was a felling saw, a double-handled cross-cut saw, and an antique buck/bow two-man saw. There was a long-handled peavey, to pick and clasp and turn the downed timber, and a block and tackle, heavy gauge chain, lug hooks, timber carriers, swamp hooks, grab hooks, and grapple hooks for manoeuvring and moving the logs on the ground.
There was a big set of skidding tongs that I felt should be moved to the barbecue for handling huge steaks, and a heavy maul perfect for tenderizing them. Sitting on a bookshelf like a huge paperweight was a log stamp, with the number twenty-two on it, the same number that is imprinted on the end of each log used in the cottage’s construction.
It is like a well-organized museum display, a virtual construction history of our cottage. Every instrument needed, from the antique axes and cross-cut saws used for felling the trees to the broad axes and adzes used for the squaring of the timber. Once down, the logs were stamped and then floated to the island, where the block and tackle, chains, hooks, grapples, tongs, and peavey were used to manhandle each enormous timber into place.
We now use a lot of the heavy steel hooks and chain to hang oil lamps from the ceilings. We used some logging chain to suspend a solid piece of timber over the kitchen island, a water-polished piece of wood that came from the old dam at the northeast end of the lake. On it are hung pots and cast-iron pans. Chain and spikes are also used for a beautiful hanging shelf by the main bedroom.
The collection of logging implements and artifacts has been kept together, and remains displayed on the sitting room wall. The logging tools and the large log construction of the place hearkens back to an earlier time, when the old-growth pine grew stout and tall and logging was the economic background of our lake country. The building of our log cabin was beautiful work, and hanging the implements used on the wall paid homage to the cottage’s creation.
Muskoka Time
I consider myself one of those lucky people. Not only do I have a beautiful cottage retreat, a nice little hideaway on a little island in the middle of a lake, I also have a home in Muskoka and live here year-round. What a great place to raise a family!
I had my first lesson on the abstract concept of “Muskoka Time” shortly after we moved here permanently in the summer of 2005. To procure home insurance, our agent insisted that we have our chimney cleaned by a professional. To that end, I took out the directory and looked under chimney sweeps, called, and made an appointment for one Tuesday morning at ten.
I spent that Tuesday peering out at our empty laneway, watching intently for any approaching car or truck, expecting, I suppose, some soot-covered version of Dick Van Dyke to walk down carrying his big brush. Nobody came. Wednesday it was more of the same. I tried phoning. His secretary/wife could only tell me that I was indeed on the list and he should arrive at any time. Any further information was classified as Top Secret. I waited another day. On the Thursday I had work and chores to do, and tried to slip out quickly in the morning. I arrived back home to find the tardy sweeper standing beside his pickup tapping his foot.
“I was supposed to clean a chimney here,” he complained. “But I get here, and nobody has the decency to be home. I’m a busy man.”
Shocked as I was by his demeanour, I tried to patiently explain that he was supposed to be here Tuesday, a time when I sat home waiting. With a slight know-all smile, the kind fellow informed me that if I wanted to live here, I might as well get used to Muskoka Time.
Lessons followed lessons, and I learned about Muskoka Time from the best — contractors, electricians, repair persons, waiters, and waitresses. I was shocked when my parents broke their ceramic glass stovetop at their Muskoka River cottage. It happened when a pot came tumbling out of an overhead cupboard and smashed the surface beyond use. They phoned for service and were told a new top would take about a week. This was on a fine spring day in early June. They spent the summer cooking on their outside barbecue. When I expressed anger over the service, they calmly put it down to living in Muskoka. Their patience only began to wane as the crisp days of autumn arrived, tugging winter close behind. Finally the stove was repaired just ahead of winter, allowing them to store the barbecue. I would have been outraged; my mother called the repair person a nice young man — about my age — with kids. It was as if we were living somewhere on Baffin Island, but really it was just Muskoka Time.
I dabbled in Muskoka Time myself on a few occasions, purposely showing up five minutes late for a meeting or three minutes late for an appointment. Still, I was ashamed and embarrassed, and often felt I should apologize for my lack of punctuality, and I would have if anybody else had been there yet to listen. I guess I am simply slow to adapt to the concept. Not so my children, who display a definite knack for Muskoka Time — especially when prodded to clean their room, come in for dinner, or get up in the morning and out to the school bus.
The fairer sex, too, seems to adapt more readily. When my wife leaves me at home with the challenge of minding the fort and surviving the kids, promising to return from her shopping by noon, she often reappears just as the sun sinks below the trees to the west. When she goes out for a dinner with business associates saying she will see me in an hour, she will return in the wee hours of the morning. With a sweet smile she explains it all with Muskoka Time.
Today is a beautiful late summer’s day. The morning sky is a brilliant blue and the rising sun feels pleasant on my face and arms. I sit comfortably on the deck, enjoying a morning coffee. The kids are off to school and it is wonderfully peaceful. My courteous wife, in cleanup mode, drops a to-do list in my lap. She is a firm believer that the less thinking I have to do about what needs to be done, the more work I will accomplish in the end.
I eye the list, I survey my kingdom and see all that needs attention. Then something glorious happens, something wonderful, something best put down to the warm enchantment of a beautiful day in cottage country. I feel suddenly enlightened and overwhelmed by the spirit of Muskoka. I pocket my list and, smiling, I sink back in my chair and close my eyes. I will get to these household chores, all in my own, good Muskoka Time.
Sounds of the Cottage
In a recent poll listing the top ten things people love about life at the cottage, surprisingly the slamming of the cottage screen door came in at number one. Obviously the sound of the tight spring squeaking and stretching, and then pulling the door shut with a slam had imprinted itself in the psyche of a good many cottage dwellers.
Unfortunately, we do not have a scre
en door on our log cottage, much to my wife’s chagrin. I know that my mother had nagged my father to add a screen door for many years, but it never happened. I’m not sure they were necessarily after the sound, but rather the fresh breeze that would circulate in the cabin through the open screen. What I do know is that if I can somehow engineer that screen door into the cabin’s design, I will be treated like a conquering hero (and I will eliminate the sound of whining).
We always long to escape to what we like to call “the peace and quiet” of our cottage. The truth, however, is that there are many sounds that fill our cottage environment — the sounds of water, weather, and wildlife, all sensory touchstones for cottage memories.
No one who has heard the call of the loon, the mournful wails and crazy laughter that can haunt a still, dark summer’s night, will ever forget it or fail to associate it with the cottage on the lake. It is because of this distinct sound that the loon has become a symbol of wilderness and a vital component of it. I am often sitting by the campfire entranced, light from the flames dancing across the white rock, when the silence of the night is pierced by the loon’s cry, the wail of the insane. It is a call that is impossible to describe.
Other sounds interrupt the silence of the twilight hours, and seem more acute, rich, and distinct when offered in the dark of night over the still, black water. There is the hiss and crackle of the fire, and the song and chatter of people. Often my dad has pulled out his harmonica to entertain. I remember during a canoe trip on the distant Bowron Lakes chain of British Columbia, a fellow camper pulled out his harmonica and started playing. I immediately thought of our cottage and longed to be there.
Still in a Daze at the Cottage Page 11
