Barefoot at the Lake

by Bruce Fogle

  ‘I got them from Canadian Tire,’ he answered.

  After lunch, my father went to the front of the cottage, facing the lake, and as he had done in the vegetable patch he removed the turf and turned over the soil on the gentle decline from the cottage door to the front lawn. He asked me to get the wheel-barrow and together we collected rocks from the shoreline, mostly from in front of our new neighbour in the big red brick house, and carried them back to the gentle slope where we placed them throughout the black soil.

  ‘This will be a rock terrace,’ he explained.

  That evening he laid out all his plants and seed packets on the living-room floor, right where he counted the worms he caught on dewy summer nights, and moved them this way and that.

  ‘Always have a plan, Bruce,’ he said. ‘A garden should look natural like it’s not planned.’

  My father called that ‘studied carelessness’.

  The next day’s sunrise dazzled the soft earth in the vegetable patch and warmed me and my father.

  ‘This land is so rich you don’t need fertiliser. Anything grows here,’ he explained to me.

  He showed me how to use my forefinger to make a line of holes in the earth, each one four inches apart, and when I had made one row he followed, enlarging them with his forefinger then placing carrot seeds in each one. In another row he planted cucumber seeds then several rows of potatoes he’d cut into quarters. He planted a row of dill to use for dill pickling in the summer.

  After he finished, he collected the little seaweed there was from the shore and lay it in lines above the seeds.

  ‘I thought they didn’t need fertiliser?’ I queried.

  ‘That’s for warmth,’ Dad explained.

  That may be, but in early summer my father would always bring wheelbarrows full of seaweed and cover the vegetable patch with it.

  Dad went to his tool house and I visited the point, but all the cottages were still in hibernation. I walked up the track from Long Point to the county road. The crab apple, poplar, birch and maples were in leaf now. By the highway, lilacs on both sides were in flower and their scent was exhilarating to me. Along the roadside the first bursts of spring colour had appeared, yellow dandelions, buttercups and toadflax, rosy purple little fleabane and selfheal, early blue violets, white anemones and tinier white flowers of wild strawberries. Mr Everett’s flax field was already a shimmering wave of light blue.

  How can these flowers take care of themselves, I thought, but the ones my father was planting couldn’t? Why are some plants dumber than others? Why do we have to make their decisions for them? I knew my father couldn’t answer these questions so I didn’t ask him.

  When I returned from my walk down the point my father was planting a row of poplar saplings along the side of our property where Mrs Nichols’ cows grazed last summer and where there was now the big brick house.

  ‘By the end of summer we won’t have to look at that house.’

  For the very first time, I realised that although my dad didn’t say much, he felt about the land just like I felt.

  NOISE ON

  THE POINT

  I was in Grace’s bunkhouse when I first heard the commotion. It sounded like a train was coming down the point. I didn’t tell Grace but I felt an excitement and a dread all at the same time.

  There was never any noise on the point during the week. There weren’t many cars; the fathers took most of them back to work early on Monday mornings and Grace’s mother seldom used hers. Besides, a car never made a noise like that, even if its muffler had holes in it. Milk and bread delivery men arrived each day: they were the best way to send written messages to cottagers further up the lake, but everyone knew the throaty sounds of their wagons. Motorboat engines were completely different. Grace and I were so familiar with boat sounds we could tell if a boat approaching had a Johnson or an Evinrude motor or was a Shepherd or Chris-Craft inboard. This was different. It was loud, whining and relentless.

  Although the cottagers came from both Peterborough and Toronto, we were a tight-knit group. Organic. Self-assured. Everyone knew what the rules were, how to behave during the summer. I thought that if anyone was going to do something that made that much noise they’d surely tell their neighbours first.

  The summer people employed local people to cater to our needs, to build our docks, remove our garbage, store our boats for the winter, install massive television aerials that I thought were big enough to communicate with aliens. We summer people fulfilled our dreams at our summer cottages. We escaped the heat and humidity of the city. We turned to a more natural way of life, simple and languid and still. We caught our own fish and grew our own tomatoes. We planted flowers and made our homes pretty and warm and cosy because cottage life was the reserve of women and children.

  With the light painted walls in our cottage, my mother ensured that the sun always shone into our lives. Most of the other cottages were quite dim inside – their dark wooden walls were varnished, not painted. There were gingham tablecloths on the tables and crocheted doilies on the fabric-covered wooden sofas and chairs, all lit by the glow of lamps with milky glass shades. If there was one thing that united the interiors of all the other cottages of the summer people it was Quebec woodcarvings. Sometimes they were of moose or bears but more often they were of people, poor people, bent over, almost broken, all looking forlorn, wrinkled, with pursed hands and hanging clothes on their hunched bodies. They stood in each cottage, like lost souls forever separated from each other. I wondered whether they were there to remind the summer people how their grandparents lived.

  Bunkhouses were for kids and visitors, bunk beds and a chair or two, but not much more. Grace and I were in her bunkhouse not doing much when we heard the commotion and went down the point to see what it was.

  ‘Mary mother of God!’ Grace exclaimed when we got to the track leading up to the county road. It looked like a tornado had run down its length, destroying everything in its path.

  I was dumbstruck.

  ‘Where did you learn to say that?’ I said, staring into Grace’s eyes but she had no time for me.

  ‘Jesus, almighty Christ, what are you doing to my woods!’ she thundered at the man driving the tractor, bulldozing the trees.

  Above the roaring noise of the tractor’s diesel engine there was a terrible splintering sound as another tree cracked and gave way to the mechanised onslaught. From where the tractor was, all the way up to the county road, what the day before had been a shaded green tunnel through overhanging branches of twenty-foot-high trees was now open to sunlight, littered with saplings and trees all with broken backs. At the top of the hill, the lilacs were ripped from the earth, motionless on the ground. Pushed to the sides were moss-covered boulders that had not budged a foot since the last ice age.

  Grace was in a rage, trembling with an anger and a frustration I had never seen before. I tried to soothe her.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ I said.

  ‘Will it? Will it? He’s killed my trees. Where are my snakes?’

  All the girls were frightened of snakes but Grace wasn’t. In the narrow shaded woods that lined the track up the hill she had once seen a ball of garter snakes plaited together so firmly it seemed to her they would never unravel. That was on a visit in the spring and now in the summer she returned every single day. At first she caught snakes and took them back to her bunkhouse to play with, then back to the woods to release. Then she decided that wasn’t fair to them – to get caught – so now she visited just to watch them. Only two days before she had seen a tiny garter snake and decided one of the bigger ones had just had babies.

  Relentlessly the tractor continued to push its way through the trees. With her lips pursed and her hands on her hips Grace marched to the front of the machine and the driver brought it to an abrupt halt.

  ‘You trying to kill yourself?’

  It was Mr Everett, the farmer. I had heard my parents talk recently about Mr Everett. They called him a bigot and I’d asked Uncle Reub
what that meant.

  ‘You’re killing my trees!’ Grace shouted at him. ‘I’m getting my father – right now.’

  ‘Go on then, just keep out of my way. Your father’s paying me to do this.’

  ‘You’re a bloody liar,’ Grace replied.

  I remained quiet. I was frightened of Mr Everett and I thought Grace was getting herself into trouble but I didn’t say so.

  ‘Your father’s paid me to widen your damn road. Now stay away,’ the farmer shouted at Grace and he returned to his tractor.

  ‘Scram!’ he barked at us. He waved his arms at us. ‘Scram!’

  ‘We’d better go,’ I implored Grace, and taking her arm I led her off the track onto the road behind our cottages. We sat down and for the first time ever I saw tears in Grace’s eyes.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ she said, picking up gravel and throwing it hard against the ground. ‘Why do they have to change things?’

  ‘They just do,’ I answered.

  Holding her hand, kicking the gravel with my bare feet, we walked back down the road to Grace’s cottage. The horrible noise continued all morning and Grace never saw snakes by that road ever again.

  FISHING FOR

  MUSKIES

  Weekends were extra special. They didn’t just feel different, they looked different too. During the week the gravelled road behind the cottages was almost empty. On weekends there was a car behind every cottage sometimes two, even more – Monarchs, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles and Mr Fitzpatrick’s fiery red Cadillac convertible that he was always washing and polishing. The mothers looked different too, especially mine. During the week they dressed any old how. Grace’s mother did her gardening or hung out her laundry or just lay there on her lawn chair browning herself in the sun in her bra and shorts. During the week my mum only mentioned our dad when we misbehaved. ‘If you do that again you’ll have to answer to your father,’ she’d shout at us. On weekends the mothers looked prettier. Anyways, that’s what I thought. Each Friday morning my mother washed her hair. Sometimes in the bath or, if it was a sunny, hot day, in the lake where she washed ours. She spent the rest of the morning in curlers then after lunch she put on her makeup and did her hair. On Fridays she changed the bed linen and in the afternoon ironed the dress she put on for my dad’s arrival. Sometimes he left work early and got to the cottage by late afternoon. He usually arrived later at night and I saw him the next morning.

  One weekend, all the fathers gathered at Grace’s cottage. They were going on a whole day fishing trip, up past Kelly’s Island, past Mud Lake Reserve into Lake Buckhorn where Grace’s father said he’d heard bass were biting. I knew I shouldn’t even ask if I could go with them. I knew why they’d say no. This was a man’s trip and I wasn’t yet a man. I wondered whether they’d ever think I was. They didn’t invite Uncle Reub either, and I wondered whether they thought he too wasn’t a man.

  Friday had been stormy but on Saturday morning the lake was shimmering and soft with just a little chop as dawn broke. You could tell it would stay like that all day. It was on tranquil days like that, after turbulent weather, that big fish bit. That’s what grown-ups told me.

  My father always set bait traps on Friday night when he got to the cottage but in case he didn’t catch large-enough minnows he had stopped at a large house with a wraparound veranda just outside Peterborough on the road to Bridgenorth, a house with a hand-painted sign ‘BAIT’ on its front lawn, and had bought a bucket of five-inch-long sucker minnows.

  I wanted to catch a muskie too and my father had let me take three of those minnows. I put them in a bucket of water in the shade under the cedars and at breakfast asked my uncle if he’d like to go muskie fishing with me.

  Mum made a packed lunch for us, a peanut butter and banana sandwich for me, a tinned salmon and tomato sandwich for her older brother and a thermos of Kool-Aid for us both. She got out a black umbrella.

  ‘Reub, take this to keep the sun off your head.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I demanded.

  By the time we were ready to go, the fathers were long gone.

  I put my life jacket on, put the bucket in the rowboat, helped my uncle get in and rowed out onto the lake towards Kelly’s Island, to exactly where I knew there were muskies because I’d seen them there when I flew over the lake in one of my flying dreams.

  That night, in bed, I had listened to the mournful wail of two loons. Of course I knew they were loons. All the summer people knew the sound they made at night. To me that was the very best sound of summer on the lake – that pair calling each other, the first plaintively asking, ‘Where aaaaaare you?’ and its mate, out in the dark calling back, ‘I’m over heeeere.’ Even though I knew it was loons making those calls I still thought no animal could possibly produce such a movingly beautiful sound. Maybe it’s really lost Indian spirits calling each other, I thought.

  Only a few hundred yards off shore, my uncle whispered, ‘Stop. Over your shoulder. Loons.’

  As I turned around, first one dived then the other.

  ‘Let’s wait,’ Uncle said.

  It was two or three minutes before both birds reappeared, one almost a hundred yards away, the other close to the silent rowboat. It sat low in the water but it was so close I could see its piggy little orange eyes and the pure white feathers on its chest.

  ‘Those two are mates. It doesn’t matter what happens, they will always be there for each other, forever,’ Uncle explained.

  ‘Then what happens when one of them dies?’ I asked. I didn’t like that word ‘forever’. My mother was always saying, ‘Nothing is forever.’

  ‘Do you mean does it go to heaven?’ my uncle asked.

  ‘No, I mean if one dies. Then they can’t be together forever,’ I said, proud that I was being so logical.

  ‘You’re right, everything dies eventually. What I mean is when one loon dies, the survivor remains faithful to it forever. It never goes off with another mate. It never breeds again. It lives out its life alone. Animals are honest and pure.’

  ‘Does that mean they’re better than we are? When Mrs Fitzpatrick died, Mr Fitzpatrick got married again and had more children.’

  My uncle avoided a reply.

  Instead I asked, ‘Should I kill the minnow before I put it on the hook? I don’t like putting a hook through its face if it’s still alive.’

  ‘Are we at the fishing hole?’ he responded.

  ‘Not yet,’ and I resumed rowing for a while longer until we were close to Kelly’s Island, where I stopped and gently lowered an anchor I had brought along into the water.

  Uncle Reub looked into the minnow pail, at the minnows, all staying perfectly still because they had no place to hide and now he answered my question.

  ‘How do you think you’d feel if someone big and powerful put a hook through your mouth and nose?’ Before I could answer he continued. ‘I bet you’d wriggle and try to escape.’

  ‘But I want to catch a muskie before Dad does and he says muskie lures don’t work and you need big minnows.’

  ‘Do you want a muskie so bad you’d be cruel to the minnow?’ my uncle continued.

  ‘It’s the same as catching a muskie. They get caught on hooks but it doesn’t hurt them. Anyways, minnows wriggle and squirm because they’re out of water,’ I replied.

  My uncle smiled. ‘But what if, just what if it really does hurt, that you hurt the minnow or hurt the muskie when you hook them? Are you happy to do that?’

  ‘Dad’s not cruel and he hooks his minnows through their mouths,’ I replied.

  My uncle said nothing. He looked out over the lake, back to the Long Point shoreline with its cottages nestled in the trees. He was silent for over a minute then he said, ‘Bruce, fish suffer just as much as people do, they just can’t tell you about their suffering.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I wished I hadn’t brought my uncle with me in the first place but rather than say that, I grabbed a minnow from the bucket, held it tight in one hand, pushed the hook through
its face and dropped it over the side of the boat. I said nothing. Nor did my uncle. The minnow stayed for a few seconds then ever so slowly it started to swim away and as it did I let out my line.

  The day had become hotter. I saw sweat on my uncle’s head and handed the umbrella to him. ‘Use this,’ I said, with a command in my voice and my uncle did.

  There we sat for a while, together but separate, until Uncle Reub said, ‘Brucie, when I was a medical student I learned that as we develop in our mothers’ wombs we evolve through all the stages that ever existed in all of evolution. It’s hard to believe but when you were developing in your mother’s tummy, before you developed lungs, you had gills, just like a fish. The nerves you have, the ones you feel pain through, fish have them too. Everything we have had its beginnings in animals more primitive than we are. Pain is there to protect us, or fish, otherwise we’d always be damaging ourselves and we wouldn’t know it. It has to hurt the fish when something sharp is pushed into its body. It’s just common medical sense that when that hook gets into it, it hurts. Didn’t Angus feel pain when the porcupine shot its quills into him?’

  I didn’t want to hear that.

  ‘How do you know?’ I spat out.

  ‘Bruce, you’re a sensible young man. Tell me, what do you think? Do you really think that a fish won’t feel it when you put a hook through its face, or that the crayfish you use won’t feel anything either?’

  My shoulders dropped but I said nothing. I’d thought about that before, when the bigger boys at the fort stuck pine needles in frogs’ eyes or hung up snakes and left them to die. I wanted to say something to them but worried they’d think I was a sissy. I’d thought I might be hurting minnows and crayfish too when I put them on hooks but I didn’t want to say so. I didn’t even want to think about that because I loved fishing. It was one of my most favourite things to do, so all I could say was, ‘I don’t want to go fishing today.’

  ‘Why don’t we stay out here and have our sandwiches and look for the loons,’ Uncle Reub suggested.