Cottage Daze (15 page)

I borrowed his Swiss Army knife — for the corkscrew, of course. After all, some gadgets are simply invaluable.

Splitting Wood

I sit on the front porch and sharpen the axe with a stone and the chainsaw with a file. Fall is the best time for bucking up logs and splitting wood. The air is fresh and cool, the ground is clean and blanketed with a crunchy carpet of colourful leaves, and there are no blackflies or mosquitoes pestering you as you work. The frustration that is born from getting nipped behind the ears by small flies that buzz around your head while you are holding an axe in your hand can be a very dangerous thing.

After some time sitting working at the laptop, I love heading out and taking out my frustrations by whacking some maple logs with my splitting maul. I take down a standing dead birch and then buck it up into twelve-inch logs that will fit in the wood-burning stove. We don't have much hardwood on the island: a little bit of maple, some birch, lots of pine, and some cedar that makes the best kindling.

I grab the splitting maul and set the logs on the chopping block. I take a quick look to find the sweet spot and to avoid the knots. Feet shoulder width apart, the lower hand at the end of the handle, the upper one starting halfway up and then sliding down easily as the arc of the axe falls. At the precise moment the axe strikes comes a flick of the wrist to halve the log like it was fastened by a spring.

My energetic wife often offers to help, but I hold up my hand. “This, my dear, is men's work — are there no dishes to be done or floors to mop?” Now, before any of you skillful female foresters go running for your keyboard to send a letter off to my editor, let me say that I'm kidding, of course. Just trying to outpoint my darling wife in the daily tennis match of barbs. Besides, there seems to be a dwindling number of tasks where a man can feel like a man. Such tasks as felling trees, splitting firewood, backing up boat and trailer, and cooking steaks on the barbecue. The truth is, after I've finished making a mess splitting, I welcome my wife's help picking up and piling the firewood.

Today, I put in a few hours filling up the woodbox and splitting wood into a huge hill that surrounds my chopping block. “You'd better get cleaned up,” says my wife. “We have company coming for dinner. We can pile the rest of the wood tomorrow.” I think about our invited guests and whack a few more logs.

I grab a cold beer from the fridge to wash away the sawdust, then head down to the boathouse to fill the washbasin for a quick clean-up. I wipe away the sweat and dirt and then soap and rinse my hair, grab a towel, and sneak out back to swim rock for a quick dip in the refreshing lake. I hear our guests arriving in their boat, so I towel off, put on my cleanest dirty shirt, and make a half-hearted attempt to comb my hair. I wander back up to the cottage to find our island neighbours admiring my dear wife as she stands amongst the recently split logs and hatchets a couple pieces of cedar into kindling.

“Girl,” says the visiting wife, “you just never stop, do you? I smell supper on the stove, the place looks lickety clean, and here you are chopping wood to keep the place cozy and warm to boot.”

“Where's your husband, anyway?” asks her husband. “Off having a nap in the hammock?”

“Oh, here's Jamie now,” says my sinister spouse. The invited guests turn my way. They see me with a beer in hand, looking fresh and clean. He admires me with reverence. His wife greets me with a scowl. I can't help but notice a little smirk on my wife's face: she has gotten me back for my crack about the dishes and floor. I give her a wink, conceding the point.

I enjoy getting out on a colourful autumn afternoon to buck and split wood for the fireplace. It is especially rewarding when the smell of burning wood and the sight of wispy smoke hanging above the cottage chimney greets the senses on a cool September morning, or when we are able to relax in front of the cabin fire in the evening with a dram and a good book. We feel a certain sense of cottage comfort — warm, cozy, and satisfied.

Season's Change

As I am writing this, the sun is shining brightly in the late-afternoon sky, making me squint to view the screen of my laptop. I am sitting at the large pine table in the cottage, looking out at the lake. The autumn sun is still powerful enough for the solar panel to keep my computer batteries fully charged, and the freshness of this season inspires me. I have the barbecue on outside and have been entrusted with minding the hamburgers.

It is nearing the end of September, and I am ruminating about all the things I love in this beautiful season. We are enjoying a fantastic fall on the heels of a superb summer. Autumn is perhaps my favourite time of year, or do I only feel that way because it is here now? The spring and summer bugs — mosquitoes, deer flies, and blackflies — are long gone.

The colours are spectacular. The leaves of the maple, birch, and aspen gradually turn golden, red, or orange as the nightly temperatures drop. They fall from the trees and leave a beautiful carpet along the walking trails. It feels spongy underneath hiking boots, so footsteps make little sound. The heavy green summer foliage shrinks back and opens up new views and vistas.

The lake is no longer a pleasant temperature for a swim, but the water holds enough warmth for what we call a refreshing dip. It takes a little longer to work up the courage to take the plunge — I stand on the rock staring down at the water. I make up my mind to dive in and ready myself, and then find some excuse to put it off for a while longer. Finally, the heckling of the kids becomes unbearable, and in I go. Scrambling back out and towelling off, one feels clean, refreshed, and invigorated.

In the dawn, an eerie mist shrouds the lake, settling in the bays and rocky inlets. Smoke from the chimney hangs still in the chilly morning air. I love to rise early, to paddle around the island and feel the cool mist lick my face, when the day still smells of dawn. Sometimes we sit with our coffees on the dock and watch the mist rising from the water, swirling there in macabre patterns.

The cool, crisp autumn air seems more conducive for outside work than the hot, humid, oppressive days of summer. I love to buck and split firewood, stacking it in the lean-to shelter. We do the little things to get the cottage ready for winter. We work at renovating the cottage porch, stopping to watch the geese fly by overhead in graceful formation — a portent of approaching snow.

A love of the water.

We are not the only ones who are busy: squirrels bustle about, gathering and storing, laying berries and seeds out on old stump-tops to dry in the autumn sun, and tossing cones down from the towering conifers. They chitter noisily at our pesky dog, who has upset their autumn routine.

The days are shorter now and the nights are cool; the starry sky seems all the more brilliant. I stay up late reading or working under the lantern light, listening to the light snaps and hisses of wood in the stove. The fire dies to coals. I pull the wool sweater over my head and crawl beneath the down quilt where my wife sleeps. There is still a slight smell of kerosene in the air from blowing out the lamp. The autumn silence is profound; only rarely do sounds permeate the night.

I am reminded that some places do not have a winter, summer, spring, or fall; just sunny days and rainy days, bright days and bleak days, warm days and hot days. As for me, I love the seasons. I love autumn all the more because of summer, and spring because we have endured a winter … but I must go now, the late September sky has suddenly blackened, as smoke billows from the barbecue.

Three Men on a Dock

I read somewhere that men, on average, use three thousand words a day. I would imagine that most are smaller words, and many are used more than once. The report had women, comparatively, using twenty thousand words per day (or was that per hour, I can't quite recall). I have trouble envisioning how they work out these numbers. Does some scientist follow a select group of people around all day, putting a little tick on a paper each time they open their mouths? I find the number a little high, quite frankly … for the men, I mean.

I have met some talkative sorts, a few men on steady transmit, but my experience is that a good many live by the same adage as I do: “Why use up any of your daily word quota if a simple grunt will do?” We are able to sit in a group through the full three periods of a local hockey game and not utter one syllable, other than to interrupt the chatter of our wives, from time to time, to inform them that their son or daughter has just scored. We never even come close to using up the purchased minutes of our cellphone account, even though the number of times the phone is used can be high. In fact, I'm sure if some outsider tapped into our phone conversations, it would be quite painful.

Three guys had gotten together to remove some trees that leaned dangerously over the rooftop of a riverfront cottage. Three arms of a stout maple tree listed badly over the home's Muskoka room, looking like a strong breeze would send them crashing through the roof. The owners of the quaint cottage were worried. They also happened to be away at the time.

The expert at tree-felling, aptly nicknamed Woody — undoubtedly because of his experience in forestry — was the boss and leader on this day. He went about his business with an understated precision, while uttering a few brief instructions to his two helpers from time to time.

The trees dropped where he wanted them, and we worked away in silence, limbing, bucking up the timber, stacking it, and cleaning the debris. Many times we considered quitting for the night, but no one would volunteer to be the first to stop, so we soldiered on until the task was complete. The warm summer evening had us wet with sweat, and the sawdust had us dry, so we retired to the dock to cool ourselves with a few frosty beverages.

Sitting there looking out over the peaceful water, we began to talk. We talked about toys, trucks, tools, and fancy new gizmos that made it easier to drop a tree. We remembered famous old characters around the lake, now departed. We discussed our cottage plans and the projects we would undertake someday soon, and promised to help each other out in these endeavours. We spoke about sports, of course, about hockey, both pro and our boys in the local minor league. We talked about the Olympics, just past, how amazing a swimmer named Phelps was, how fast a Jamaican called Bolt could run, and what a cool name that was for a sprinter.

At times we talked seriously, at times we tried to be witty and funny, and we shared some good laughs. We considered putting a couple of the branches and treetops of the fallen timber over the peak of the roof, spreading some glass fragments around in the driveway, and fastening some plywood over the big glass windows of the Muskoka room. The dangerous trees were at the back of the cabin, and the laneway came in from the front, so we thought this lark might bring on a funny reaction upon the owners' return. Then again, we thought we might never be forgiven, and we knew the lady of the house would get even, so we scrapped the idea.

The sky darkened, and we babbled on about the stars and how magnificent they appeared at the cottage. We mentioned how the nights were getting cooler now, and how nice it would be to build a sauna here by the lake. We discussed sauna designs and deliberated on how to best distribute the heat, described how so-and-so had ingeniously constructed theirs.

We schemed about going on a gentlemen's ski trip out west together next winter, taking our sons with us. We debated on how best to broach the subject with our wives.

We yarned on about the crazy jobs we had when we were young, the adventures and the silliness. One had been a hockey player, one a cowboy, and the third a firefighter. We realized we hadn't known a lot about one another. Now we were settled down with more mature jobs, families, and commitments. We were just three friends, three cottagers, sitting on a dock in the evening with our chores done for the day.

I think we may have used up a whole week's quota of words before we decided to call it a night and wander home. I'm sure it will even out, though, when we see each other over the next few days and offer a brief grunt as a greeting.

Autumn's Spell

I drive along one of the pretty, meandering back roads of cottage country through the warm enchantment of a sunny afternoon, passing through rock cuts of pink granite, dipping down through valley bottoms, and moving alongside leaden lakes now quiet after the summer rush. The road flings itself around the shoulders of hills, dips, and rises and carries on through a quiet forest. I drive in solitude, thinking that here, in autumn, I have this roadway all to myself.

The road crosses a bridge, climbs a small hill, and then straightens along the side of an open valley. I am surprised to see a tour bus pulled over where the shoulder widens, a group of people standing gaping off across the vale. They have their cameras out and arrange themselves in small groups taking photos, with the far hillside as a backdrop. At first I wonder what they see, and slow to look for a moose or bear. I see nothing but a valley and distant knoll.