Cottage Daze (9 page)

I have always thought of myself as an island person. My wife and family would say that I am frugal. I am self-sufficient, comfortable with solitude, an avid reader, and greedy for small pleasures. Since this is an island that has been in the family since my childhood, the cottage also encourages a powerful nostalgia in me.

It was on the island that I learned to fish and canoe, water-ski, chop wood — it was here that I grew to manhood. I cut a deep, jagged gash in my left pointer finger when the crosscut saw I was using slipped out of the log. 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.

Yes, back then I was just a kid, a mere serf in this domain. Now I am royalty!

The children are at the shore now, climbing out on swim rock, asking what is for lunch. My wife is awake, giving me orders to put the barbecue on for hot dogs.

“Can you take us out water-skiing after lunch?” the kids ask.

“You said you'd take me fishing,” my son reminds me.

“And you were going to fix the dock this afternoon,” suggests my wife.

“Yes, my liege,” says the man who would be king.

Puppy Love

I recently introduced a new family pet to life at the cottage. Boomer is a year-old husky, playful, athletic, good-looking, and a little thick. Technically he is no longer a puppy, though he certainly does act like one.

It was love at first sight for him as far as the cottage goes. And why not? Cottage life is a perfect fit for most dogs. Upon arrival on the three-acre island he is in constant motion. There are so many new sights, smells, and places to explore. As we unpack and get things organized, Boomer and Timba run this way and that. They are just two medium-sized huskies, but sound like a whole herd of elephants as they thunder past.

With my chores complete, I sit down in the rocker on the front porch and open an ice-cold beverage. I'm asked to light the barbecue, so I set down the beer for just a second and step off the porch. When I turn back I see that the darling pup has pierced the tin with his incisors and is lapping up the spraying liquid. I let out a piercing scream, causing Boomer to dart off into the trees with the can of Kilkenny still clenched in his teeth. It's my own fault. Why would I leave an almost full tin of cold, crisp ale unguarded? Who could blame the parched canine, overheated from all the running, for satisfying his thirst.

After dinner I take the kids for a quick ski. Boomer worries greatly about this ritual, people being dragged around the water on a rope, kind of like backwards dog sledding. He paces and whines, and smooches with the children when they return safely to the dock. At one point he leans out too far and tumbles into the lake. He panics and swims under the dock and gets stuck there looking like a drowned rat. I have to get in the water and rescue him.

We take an evening paddle around the island. Boomer follows us on land, dashing around the trail, alighting on different rocky viewpoints on the shore. When we pass that point, he darts back into the bush and reappears at the next rocky precipice. When we return to the dock, he comes bounding down, slips and slides off and into the water. He tries to swim underneath the stringers and gets stuck. I look at Timba and we both shake our heads.

I had a restless sleep in the boathouse bunkie that night, as I tossed and turned and dreamt about being on an African safari with elephants, lions, and hyenas circling my tent. The night is filled with all kinds of weird African noises. In a sleepy, half-dazed, early-morning state I stumble to the cabin to put on some coffee, and almost immediately fall into a huge crater that was dug in the middle of the trail. I yell for help, but neither human nor dog responds, so I scramble out of the hole myself. It appears that the dog had been trying to dig up some kind of rodent, perhaps a vole.

She would welcome the kids back to land — swimming and skiing, were to her, supreme acts of folly.

Awake now, I look at the scene before me, horrified. It looks like a war zone, even worse than the kids' bedrooms at home. Somehow Boomer has opened the door to the utility shed and dragged everything out — tools, nails, gas cans, boat oil, pieces of lumber, paintbrushes, tarps, and rope. Every knick-knack necessary for cottage survival is spread about. He has even pulled out the chainsaw and appears to have tried to start it.

I then find all the cooking utensils that usually hang neatly on the barbecue, scattered about like there has been some wild doggy party. The metal tongs and spatula are dinted and dimpled with teeth marks. The handle of the cleaning brush has been eaten off.

I find bits of clothing that had been left outside. Some of it is still recognizable. The dog grabbed my oldest daughter's bikini bottoms, although I would have thought he would rather sink his teeth into something a little more substantial, and chewed them even smaller, thong size. My comfortable sneakers have been transformed into thongs of a different sort. A bottle of sun block has been squeezed empty, spread over the cottage wall. I'm not sure, but it looks as if he was spelling his name.

I find Boomer sleeping on the deck, with an air of innocence. The truth being, he had nothing left to chew. Timba sits beside him looking mortified. When I throw her a questioning look, she shakes her head and lifts a paw, pointing it at the snoozing pup.

“Boomer!” I yell angrily. He bounds to his feet with tail wagging wildly, jumps up on me and starts licking my face. He seems to be telling me, “I love this place!”

Lost in Translation

Grandma and six-year-old Jenna saw the one-legged duck coming out of the bay. It hopped quite ably up onto the shore and grazed in the long grass that fringed the water. It had learned to lean over to the right, to balance itself and compensate for the loss of the left leg.

How it lost its appendage, we do not know. The children would later guess at a snapping turtle, a pike, or perhaps a crazed boater. Maybe it was a dog. The duck might have lost it as a duckling. He might have been born with only one leg. We can only guess. The reality was that the whole leg was missing, but he had learned to cope. Not just to cope, but to manoeuvre himself around on the grass with a dexterity that was very impressive.

Grandma had not seen this duck before, so she sent Jenna scurrying up to the cottage to fetch Grandpa, to tell him to come down and see.

“Is Grandpa coming?” asked Grandma, when the youngster returned.

“No, he's already seen it,” answered Jenna, sitting herself back down.

“Really? He never told me,” said Grandma, a little miffed.

There's a certain simplicity to life at the cottage.

“He said he saw it yesterday, he saw the leg fall off in the water.”

Jenna was quite matter-of-fact about what Grandpa had seen. Grandma was a little harder to convince. “What? Grandpa said that? He saw the duck's leg fall off?” Jenna smiled and nodded; Grandma looked up towards the cottage in disbelief.

“He said he saw the leg fall right off when the water was high — he knows where he can find it,” stated young Jenna. Grandma envisioned herself packing the thin duck leg in a bag of ice and rushing off with the leg and bird to the nearest hospital to have it sewn back on.

Completely ambivalent that he was at the centre of what might become a domestic dispute, the one-legged duck hopped gamely back down into the water and floated gracefully away, through the reeds and out of sight.

Grandpa came down with a tray, some sandwiches, and drinks. Now, he has been married to Grandma for fifty years and can easily recognize the signs of danger. He was in trouble, but he had no idea why. So he did what brave men everywhere do when faced with the wrath of their spouses: he pleaded innocence even before being accused.

“What? I didn't do anything,” he said — hands out to his sides, palms upward.

“You never told me you saw a one-legged duck,” chastised Grandma. Grandpa looked around the shore and out in the bay. “Well, he's gone now! And why did you tell Jenna you saw its leg drop off?”

“I said no such thing,” harrumphed Grandpa.

“You said that, Grandpa,” accused the innocent young girl, sidling up to Grandma, knowing at a young age that women should stick together. “You said you saw the leg fall right off the duck.”

Grandpa stood open-mouthed, speechless. He looked at Jenna, and then at Grandma — both had their arms crossed and were glaring at him. Then he thought of something, and he smiled; all was becoming clear. This was all about a six-year-old's pronunciation, and the hearing of a grandparent.

“The dock — I saw the pin drop out of the dock.” The ramp from shore to their floating dock sat at a peculiar angle. The water level had risen the day before, lifting the dock and causing the pin to fall off into the shallow waters. “I thought Jenna was telling me about the dock — I saw the leg fall off the dock.”

Grandpa has yet to see the amazing one-legged duck … the little troublemaker.

The Handyman

I'm not a handyman. I admit it. Even my kids recognize this. When a cottage project comes along that requires a little more of a craftsman's touch, they say, “Better get Grandpa.” When I tell them that I think I can do this, they say, “Dad, stick to building fences and docks.” My wife, bless her heart, has a certain confidence in my carpentry skills. Either that, or she loves to see me make a fool of myself.

I know this, because whenever a new issue of the magazine Cottage Life arrives, I have to try to be the one to retrieve the mail. This way I can flip through the magazine and tear out any puttering, inventive, handyman projects that might catch her fancy. She'll say, “We seem to be missing pages 94 to 102.”

To which I'll shake my head and respond, “You really don't know how magazines work, do you? They always keep a few pages in reserve in case a late, great story is submitted.”

Unfortunately, there are those times when I have to work and cannot hang around the mailbox all day. I get home and there she will be, leafing through the pages of the latest issue. “Oh,” she says, “you should come and see this. Think we [meaning you] can build it?”

So I try to build a bar trolley to wheel down to the dock. The wheels fall off on its first mission, and we lose half of our cocktail supply. Who knew you couldn't just nail the wheels on? Then I build the fancy, floating dumb waiter to get drinks and lunch out to the swim raft. It sinks.

In the latest “Special Anniversary” August 2007 issue, there is a six-and-a-half-page spread, complete with photography and illustrations, describing the building of a two-seater wooden Muskoka loveseat that doubles, mysteriously, as a canoe rack. Not only a canoe rack, but also a canoe lift — it helps you hoist your canoe out of the water. I notice that my wife has dog-eared the page. What a dumb idea. Whatever happened to the days when you would canoe to the dock, reach down, grab the gunnel, hoist the canoe over your head, and carry it to the canoe rack on shore?

“We [meaning you] should build one of these.” She sees it as a romantic loveseat — that it is also a canoe hoist is of no consequence.

“But you could only sit in the chair if I was out paddling the canoe,” I whine.

“Exactly!”

I imagine myself paddling the canoe around the island, around the bay, pleading with her to let me dock for lunch. “Just a few more minutes,” she will say, “I just want to finish this chapter.”

Worse, I envision her sitting and flirting in the loveseat with Hunk Hankinson, the real handyman on the lake, who lives in the fancy, overbuilt, over-organized cottage on shore. I would be out paddling, and paddling some more, waiting for permission from my controller to begin my approach and land. Meanwhile, he would be pointing out all the flaws in my creation, telling her how he would have done it better, and they would both be giggling. I might be allowed brief docking privileges if their drinks were to run dry.

All this for a silly loveseat that transforms itself into a canoe hoist and rack. I see myself sidling up to the dock in my canoe, hopping out, tying off, going around and flipping the hinged seat over and into the canoe, and then going back to the canoe to line it up with the overturned seat and to attach the chair armrests to the canoe thwarts. Then, getting back on the dock, I would untie the canoe from the dock cleats, before going around and pulling on the hoisting ropes to flip both the chair and canoe over and onto the dock. The half-hour process complete, my wife would wander down with her book and a sandwich and say, “Hey, I was just about to sit in that chair!”