choose one depending on where in Canada you reside)). At least that is what beer commercials and other guides as to how-life-should-be-lived tell us. A place that is all BBQs, beach volleyball, lounging on the dock and perhaps some cavorting on a Jet Ski. With, every so often, a bro with some sort of six-pack – alcoholic, abdominal, both – getting pushed into the drink by a squealing cutie.
It seemed as if my brothers and I were related to everyone in our inlet, our summer universe, even if it was true of only about half the cottagers. It had started with the sister of my great-grandmother who, about 120 years ago, having concluded that the Kawarthas just didn’t have it and that Muskoka was already too overrun, met a surveyor from Barrie. He told her of a beautiful stretch of Georgian Bay coastline he’d visited.
When the uncles saw us coming, however, they saw free labour. Uncle Tom and Uncle Bob would quickly find us a pile of brush to clear or a boat to move. Or they would get us hauling stones, whether for a path, a patio or the crib for a dock. But stonework was perilous for them as well as us. A toe or a finger would inevitably get crushed, and if the injury was bad enough, the uncle in question would have to take us to the nursing station in the Pointe.
You’ll note I say we became our uncles and not our father. It wasn’t as if he was dead or absent or in the hammock with a G&T and a Le Carré novel as of 11 a.m. He was just English – private-boarding-school, punting-with-Pimm’s English – and despite his best efforts remained a peripheral. His word, not ours. No better at the requisite skills of Georgian Bay than he ever got at skating on the Canal. Our uncles, on the other hand, came by it naturally.
There was, however, an element of prefab to both undertakings: We bought squared timbers with lovely dovetail-joint corners from craftsmen who actually knew what they were doing and barged them, carefully numbered, out to the island. We just had to assemble the cabins like Lincoln Logs, put a roof on, a floor down, and windows and doors in. Even then, rebuilding the honeymoon cabin took us so long – about seven summers, if you must know – that cousin Peter still makes fun of us for it.
In the mid-1970s, we had tried insulating it under the illusion we might comfortably spend winter weeks there and not done a very good job. It was never occupied by any of us for more than a few frigid days in a row. Our work, however, seemed to have been appreciated by a family of raccoons who one winter climbed down the chimney and trashed the place.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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