Dispatch from Ontario, Canada - The Art of Cottaging

I am lucky. Growing up, my family always had a cottage to go to on weekends and for vacation. 

The first one was a cabin that my folks built next to a creek on some brush land. My dad cut cedar logs and my mom, my sister, and I (and whoever my parents could conscript for the weekend) chinked cement between them (well, truth be told, I didn't do much of that but there is a photo of me doing it at least once). The cabin was pretty simple but it and the land around it were idyllic. 

What an awesome place for a young kid. My sister and I had a tire swing, a log teeter totter, and a tree house. We'd explore the land and the creek (when it wasn't dried up). We didn't need toys to be entertained. There was always something new to explore. Buried under rocks in a field, we even found old household items from a farm many years ago - rusty buckets and tools (good thing my folks kept up our tetanus shots) and pieces of colored glass. Our archaeological dig took several days, but once done, we pieced together an old perfume atomizer. We even found the metal top. We glued it all together and my sister kept it in her room for many years, until it met its second demise due to a dusting debacle.

This past winter when I was home for the holidays, my dad, my nephew, and I snowshoed into the old cabin. It's still standing after all these years (a testament to my Dad's building prowess - he's not an architect but he is an engineer and he loves to clap a right angle), and while the trees look a lot bigger now and the area around the cabin has grown in, the place instantly brought back great memories of family times there.

When I was a bit older, my family sold the cabin and bought an A-frame cottage with 175 acres of forested land on a beautiful lake. They still have the place. The cottage had been closed up for many years with the contents left to stew, so we had to gut the place and start from scratch. But soon enough, my mom, who has a knack for decorating, turned it into a cozy place and we had great family times there in all seasons. We still do.

The cottage was accessible only by water. When we first went to look at the place, it was winter and we had to walk across the frozen lake to see it. When we stopped on the road across the lake from the cottage, one of the locals came out and asked if he could help. When my parents told him what we were doing, he said that we could park at his place and come into his home to warm up and use the washroom. Can you believe that? We were complete strangers to this man yet he was so kind. It turns out he and his wife foreshadowed the many great people we would meet and befriend at the lake...well, except for this one dodgy guy...but let's not go there.

Our first summers at the lake were during my formative tween and teen years - I call them "The Times I Grew Into My Face". You see, when puberty hit, my nose and ears grew substantially before the rest of me did. Eventually, overcoming the Dumbo Effect, I grew into them and looked (somewhat) normal again.

Summers were spent swimming, windsurfing, water skiing, and hiking. Winters were spent shoeshoeing and snowmobiling.

My sister and I each had our own bunkhouse, which was like having our own place - pretty cool.

Sometimes, it was stressful to pack things up on a Friday evening and tackle the traffic to drive out of the city and head for the cottage. But once you got into the country and got your first glimpse of the lake, all that melted away.

The cottage has evolved during the many years my family has owned it. Despite locals saying it was impossible to build a road to the cottage, my resourceful pop surveyed one and had it made. My folks also have added on to the cottage to make it more comfortable and to accommodate extended family. But the original A-frame remains.

This year, even cell-phone service is coming to the cottage. Before that our only means of communication was a cb radio or walkie-talkies to friends across the lake. If I needed to make a cell phone call, I had to drive an ATV out our road into the deep woods, up a washed out trail to the top of a hill (the highest point in the area), and stand on the ATV in a clearing to get a cell signal. One time when I was up there talking to someone, I looked over and saw a huge buck standing at the tree line staring at me. He must have been thinking, "What is that nut job doing? Humans are c-r-a-z-y!".


These days, I don't get to the cottage as much as I'd like. But I try to spend a week there each summer. I load up on good food, good wine, and good books, and settle in for some top-drawer R&R. 

Each day typically starts with coffee and breakfast on the front deck, maybe followed by a kayak ride. Next on the agenda is dock set up for a day 

of reading and listening to tunes, interspersed with a dip in the lake, and maybe some windsurfing or a paddle in the canoe. After lunch, a nap in the hammock is usually in order. In the late afternoon, the bar opens during dinner prep. Dinner usually includes something on the barbecue and a good wine is de rigueur. After dinner, it's time for a camp fire on the rocks in front of the cottage at the edge of the lake. You lean back and, without the light and air pollution of the city, see more stars than you ever thought could exist. At night when your head hits the pillow, you fall into a deep sleep - the silence is intense, broken only by an occasional loon call.

This is indeed a big, beautiful world and I've been privileged to see so much of it. But the cottage remains one of my favorite places. Good cottaging is an art form and Canadians are masters at it.