![]() On the chilly fall night I looked up to see the aurora borealis performing a ghostly dance of green veils across the northern sky, I knew I was a goner.įor five years we negotiated a crossborder relationship, centred on that acreage of rock, some of the oldest on the planet. The flare of purple from the tiny, brave wild irises that sprang from mossy puddles to greet us each May, and the sunsets, each more glorious than the last, all demanding a ritual evening toast. In the end, it was the beauty that won me over. Sometimes, strolling warily across the mottled rock, I longed for the blithe greenery of Algonquin Park. My future husband swore nobody had seen a massasauga rattler on the island for years, a reassurance undercut by the two snakeskins that his late father had mounted by the living room door. Georgian Bay terrified me-its topography so stark and unforgiving, its fabled storms sweeping in on a dime, toppling lordly pines and whipping up ocean-worthy breakers that obliterated deadlines for the boat trip back to the marina.Īnd then there were the snakes. That also meant being wedded to the place where he felt the deepest roots-an airy grey cottage that his maternal grandfather had erected in the 1930s just south of Go Home Bay-but this second capitulation was not quite as swift. Somewhere between the soaring fjords of Killarney and the veins of pink quartz swirling across his ancestral chunk of rock, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this man. ![]() I was running out of time to pack for the States, where I felt my career lay, and, besides, what was the point? Our romance had been over for years.īut, as it turned out, I was wrong on both counts. Years later, long after the cottage had been reclaimed by its owners, I was about to take a new job in Washington when a one-time boyfriend asked me to join him on a boat trip from the North Channel of Georgian Bay to his family’s island on the southeastern shore. For that and many summers to come, Loon’s Retreat was one of the ties that bound me to Canada. One weekend so many guests showed up that we converted the verandah’s sagging Ping-Pong table into dining space for 20, the latest gossip served up with the stuffed salmon. Its two storeys of chintz-decked bedrooms slept a dozen and, over those two weeks, became a hub for the network of family and friends I barely had time to see on visits back to Toronto. Dubbed Loon’s Retreat, that cottage seemed to me the very essence of the country I’d left behind. Barely a kilometre from our front dock, the body of the painter Tom Thomson had been found, inexplicably trussed in fishing twine. The ancient green house with its swooping screened porch sat on Gilmour Island at the southern end of a lake rife with history. To me, it was a destination as exotic as any assignment in Jerusalem or Tehran. One of my closest friends asked if I wanted to co-rent a cottage with her for two weeks on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park. It would be years and a posting to Washington, D.C., before I got the chance to put that longing to the test. “The rocks and trees,” I found myself saying, to even my own astonishment. She asked what I was missing, expecting a litany of family ties or old flames. “I think I’m homesick,” I ventured to a friend. It wasn’t until decades later, as a foreign correspondent in Paris, staring out the window of my first-arrondissement walk-up on a listless July afternoon, that I realized I was starved for something beyond that unrelenting cityscape. Even as a teenaged camper, then as a counsellor, I preferred to think of myself as a thwarted urbanite who was merely putting in time until I was allowed to hit the big city, where I would lead an impossibly romantic intellectual life. Later, at a girls’ camp on Lake of Bays, the wilderness tattooed itself onto my psyche, but I did my best to ignore it. Not just for a summer escape, but as a passport to belonging, firmly beyond the reach of a bookish girl from a fractured family growing up amid the orchards flanking Lake Ontario. You can listen to all of the episodes here.Īs a kid, I understood early: cottages were something other people had. Then, we listen to an essay that reflects on cottage life at the time of Canada’s 150th anniversary that will take you right to your piece of paradise. In season 4, episode 2 of the Cottage Life Podcast, we explore how cottage communities are adapting to the influx of both part-time and full-time cottagers.
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