Through the Eye of Alan Gillis

A Craft Beer Getaway

2009-07-20T08:02:00.000-07:00

Summer. When the weather is off or on any day if local craft brewed beer is your thing, drop by one of the small breweries in cottage country. Tours and tastings are free and you can buy a case or two of British-style ale or a great lager to enjoy back at your cottage or resort. It's a good way to meet the locals and get some tips on what to see and do in your neighborhood. You'll also pick up the basics of brewing you might try out at home.

For a long time the old regional breweries were being bought up by the big labels to churn out more industrial lagers while eliminating the competition. Since the 1980's there's been a renewed interest in what was almost a lost tradition. New craft breweries have sprung up all over southern Ontario and the Great Lakes.

If you'd like the easy tour all in one place, go to Bracebridge August 29, 2009 for the First Annual Muskoka Beer Festival. Hosted by The Griffin Gastro Pub downtown, about 24 craft breweries from Ontario will be participating at nearby Annie Williams Park with non-stop beer and bands. Check out The Griffin anytime for a memorable pint, a good chat with friendly locals and the great food. It's a bit of old Bracebridge down Chancery Lane, cozy, intimate and casual. Live music Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons. The outdoor deck out back has a touch of grunge, but you can smoke at least.

For a map to most of Ontario's cottage brewers and some essential beer lore see OntarioCraftBrewers. If you're driving out from Toronto, try stopping by one en route. Once in Muskoka, the nearest craft brewery is Lakes of Muskoka Cottage Brewery in Bracebridge, with tours and tastings on select Saturdays all summer through September 15th. Their Muskoka Honey Brown is no more expensive and way better than the big commercial lagers. In Ontario some of The Beer Store(s) carry it and their full line including their excellent Muskoka Cream Ale.

My beer adventure started recently while out west on a trip to Grey County near Durham. Charlie MacLean of MacLean's Ales in Normanby showed me around his new micro brewery you can visit at his hobby farm. Built last year and only open since January, The Battleaxe Brewery is producing a half-dozen traditional British beers. Local demand is so strong just on word of mouth that Charlie's already planning to expand. It's a testimonial to his many years as a brewmaster, not beginner's luck in case you'd like to try your hand at commercial brewing. He got his start in craft brewing in England back in 1979 with the Real Ale Movement. Brits even in Britain were grumbling over their beer, most of it mass produced not only off the shelf in bottles and cans, but even the keg beers at the pubs. An insipid pint of bitter had invaded the colourful local pubs as more and more and more of them were bought up by the big brewers as well as their smaller suppliers. The industry wanted economies of scale and big profits, more bland lager everywhere for the younger less discriminating crowd of Euro imbibers.

The subtle satisfying flavour of bitter from an unrefrigerated keg, pumped up by hand from the cool cellar below, with its modest but sticky head, was transformed into a lifeless flat and warm poor thing in a glass better suited for washing the mud off your boots. Or gassed to death with carbon dioxide for a pump and miles of foam like some ne'er do well Guinness bastard. Dreadful to see grown men weeping. But progress and profits did spawn a generation of Punks, Punk Rock and Wine Bars.

Back in Canada Charlie continued brewing. British-style pubs were making a comeback, now imported lock, stock and barrel with pressed tin ceilings, Pig and Whistles and all, into big Canadian towns. New breweries for British beers were starting to make inroads. Charlie wrote a beginner's guide to home brewing he couldn't get published. Publishers/Agents apply to charles.maclean(at)sympatico(dot)ca

Perseverance paid off, and after 12 years as Brewmaster of the F&M Brewery in Guelph, another craft brewery you can visit, Charlie started his own MacLean's Ales in Grey County. Talking to Charlie it all sounds simple enough. For ale you cook your local select barley and 90% of your hops in a copper kettle, then cool that down and filter, before you transfer it to the stainless steel fermenter and add brewer's yeast and the rest of your hops for more flavour. Keeping the temperature rather warm at 22 C you watch the fermenting for 3 or 4 days and then filter again before cold conditioning and then the bottling. About 2 weeks work for a batch. The result: about the best beer you can remember. Try MacLean's Farmhouse Ale for a country smile. If you want a lager, it's a slower cool fermentation that makes it happen, but not at MacLean's Ales.

In case you think stainless steel is cheating, fermenting in wood barrels was a tricky thing to do, often marring flavours and adding nasty bacteria. Even in the old days brewers used pitch to line their barrels, says Charlie. Did it taste pitchy? No says Charlie, the barrels left to cure a bit before use. So a modern craft beer is near to what your English ancestors were drinking if you have any, though their beer was cloudy with all the yeast still in the beer. Charlie does brew some keg conditioned beer without filtering, if you like your beer cloudy. No one thought of filtering beer in England until cheaper industrial glass replaced ceramic mugs, he told me. Seeing how cloudy it was in a clear glass changed our habits. Now we admire its translucent beauty, though the stouts are as dark as ever.

Today you need to insure your craft beer is not only good, but free of contaminants, meeting government standards during brewing and lab tests. Craft brewing means first class sterile equipment and bottling, and a lot of care, not what you can get away with in home brewing. That way too unlike the commercial beers, you avoid Pasteurization and wrecking a lively beer. To make it work you need some passion for the art as well as methodical patience. Of course the real secrets are the ingredients and the formulas, how to tweak them to get the kind of beer you want. Charlie has the experience and is very particular about his ingredients, preferring local barley and even growing some of his own hops.

But it's also fun and satisfying to be your own brewmaster. Having a perfect pint is a close second. If you're thinking this could be your new hobby, it's easy enough to start with all the brew your own beer stores that supply the equipment, their premises, and the know-how.

Going for your own brewery as Charlie found out, is a bigger deal than you might think, even if you're a brewmaster. Before starting to build make sure you can build. It's not only zoning laws that could stop you, it's also the quirks of old laws on the books that can make it illegal to build a brewery near a school or church. In Grey County your brewery has to be at least 2 kilometers away from either. If you're stuck with a church close by you might be able to get their permission to go ahead. Other permissions might apply too. If you have commercial zoning, are you sure that includes retail so you can sell your beer on site? Behind every pint there's a story.

If you're in the Durham area, Charlie MacLean will be glad to show you around or sell you some of his brews by appointment via his email above, or in a pinch if you're nearby you can call him at 519-369-5061. He still does consulting for F&M in Guelph and the new Highlander Brew Co in South River, Ontario, so you could sample some of his beers that way too.

If you're not close enough to get in on the Ontario brewing action, try Quebec or around the Great Lakes in this free guide by Great Lakes Brewing News.

Still too far away? Brewing News regional guides cover most of the beer frontier in the U.S. and Canada.

Cheers!

Dragon Boats And A Great Steel Band

2009-06-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

Summer. Summer's back again in Muskoka. A bit late getting here and on the heels of the most dismal Spring we've had since oldtimers can remember. The good news: cold days and frosty nights knocked the blackflies and noseeums from a 6 week vacation down to about a week about 2 weeks ago when we had a warm spell.

Cottagers still came early, but it didn't help their humor much. Too blasted cold to do anything but complain. A disaster too for gardeners who planted early and found their flower beds burned by regular and nasty cold snaps.

Now you'd never know. People are smiling, flowers replanted, kids out of school and the cottagers back in action on their seadoos and power boats. A close shave though for the Annual Parry Sound Dragon Boat Festival which looked like it would have been a bust just the day before with thunderstorms brewing that never showed.

Turned out to be a great weekend, well better say an okiedokie Friday for the first day of the Festival and a really great Saturday for the races. Beach weather and ice cream, plus hundreds of folks showed up from the town and as many from out of town, and a few Dragon Boat Diehards from Toronto.

Up until this year it seemed it would have been just a local thing. Suddenly it's the big thing with more boats, more teams and more races. Can't say there was a lot of excitement because you had to be rowing for that, knowing whose time you had to beat. Not a conventional race, but boats going out and circling and coming back and teams changing at the dock and the new teams heading out in the same boats. Best time wins. And various races for various classes, from high school kids racing each other to corporate races for the big box stores and local larger stores and businesses, the newspaper, the radio station, the big drug store. But you couldn't tell who was going out and who was leading, unless you were at the dock asking questions or following the action with binoculars and some guy at your elbow telling you what's happening. Though there were was a big network of pro equipment PA boxes barking out the action, that didn't seem to help. A printed program would have been an idea and maybe somebody had one but you couldn't find anything except the big board for the races that looked Mesopotamian.

No one cared anyway. It was the local color that counted. Being out on a great day at a big event with a lot of people where you could get something to eat for a change at Waubuno Beach, wow, even get a $5 beer at the beer tent and listen to some free live music.

That was the other big thing going on, a gigantic steel band from Sprucedale, the Northern Lights Steel Orchestra. Boggling after seeing little enough live music anywhere. Fiddlers at the Canadian Legion Hall or a rock band at a pub for under 25ers. Suddenly there's 60 guys playing on fancy chromed steel drums from batteries of giant bass drums to small snare steel drums with congas and a drum kit for the beat.

A tinkling and rather mellow Sunday Concert In The Park experience. None of the hi jinks and whistles from the steel bands you might have seen in Jamaica or Trinidad. More like Broadway Show music and old faves translated for a giant steel band. La Bamba was about as far south as we got, but it was still mesmerizing.

With so many drums and so many musicians it cut across expectations and the people at the adjoining beer tent were having fun. Those in the band were concentrating eyes closed, playing without sheet music, so they had to be in on the vibe or they'd get lost, especially when there wasn't a band leader with a baton to wake you up. Yet they put out a professional sound and nobody got lost and nobody wandered from the melody. Kind of inspirational, with a wide cross-section of people from a few youngsters to old folks and everybody in between, few of them with any steel band experience except for the few black guys playing, and most with no musical background either.

So how did they do it? Well they learned on the job. About 10 years ago Mervyn Jordan in Sprucedale started up the Northern Lights Steel Orchestra. With a place to play, some steel drums and free classes on how to play, it grew from there. Not commercial, not subsidized by government, not a charity either as it's a real charity where everyone kicks in their own time and money to make it work. A few private sponsors do the rest. The Northern Lights Steel Orchestra plays for free too. If you want to have them over for a public or private event in Ontario they'll come if you cover their travel expenses and renting a truck. The Orchestra supplies their own tent and equipment.

I should have told Larry Shepard who runs the show that they ought to record and sell CDs. They're that good. I did say though I thought they should expand their repertoire towards the calypso and reggae scene,

but then he shrugged saying it would be a big departure from what they've been doing and it seems that most of their musicians aren't into that sort of rhythm being from white Anglo easy listening backgrounds where you don't build up a sweat if you can help it.

They've been invited every year to play Toronto's Caribbean carnival, Caribana. So far they've declined. Not what you would call a strictly family event, with the music loud and raw, and the crowds at a hot million partygoers, sometimes raunchy and rough. A flashy and electric spectacle, to catch every summer if you don't stick out like whitey's sore thumb and make a habit of treading on toes.

What makes the Northern Lights a formidable experience is you can join. Members come from across Canada and the U.S with some from the Carribean. If you showed up at your local symphony without a horn and no musical experience, how far would you get? You can check out their website www.nlso.ca on how to join and drop Larry an email at info@nlso.ca Sponsors, private and corporate are welcome. Check the NLSO website for a bit of 'steel pan' history and scheduled concerts happening about every week throughout Ontario during the summer and into fall.

What you need to join the Northern Lights is just the time you want to invest in taking free classes at Sprucedale, Ontario which run year 'round and when you're good enough you can play with the Northern Lights as they travel around Ontario during the summer through October. All you do is cover your own expenses, meals and accommodations. It's
like a music camp that goes on tour.

The Tall Ship Playfair

2008-08-15T11:13:00.001-07:00

Summer. The Brigantine Playfair at Parry Sound. Cap'n Weed, if you please, har harr. If'n the Black Pearl be lost at sea, there's a berth or twenty down below, for the likes of your wee teens, wantin' adventure on Georgian Bay. It's the real deal. Toronto Brigantine runs two training ships for high school kids, who'd rather pass on the video arcades and shopping malls for a week or two. For about a $100 a day, all inclusive, you might talk your kids into a working vacation, where they can learn to rig and sail a Brigantine, cook in the cubbyhole galley, and barbecue on a deserted island beach. And meet some other kids. It's character building says our Captain Weed, seconded by his First Mate, Jojo, and it works. It's turned around bored and troubled kids, and polished the rest with a sense of accomplishment, fostering in some a life long passion for sailing. The professional crew of nine, are all alumni of the program, regulars that kept coming back for years, and now training a new batch of kids, 16 on this 11 day leg out from Parry Sound to Midland. The Playfair is a happy ship. Rare for any kid to go home unhappy, even if he or she (it's co-ed) didn't really want to go in the first place. As a registered charity, Toronto Brigantine is doing this for love, not money. Costs are further kept down by sponsors, alumni and volunteers who donate equipment, supplies, and time for maintenance, when their ships winter over in Toronto. Bursaries for some students, are available too. And what's it like? I wandered around on deck and below, talking to the kids and crew. No complaints. But it is so cramped below deck, sardines might be more
comfortable in a can. The mess is really on deck. The galley would fit into your hall closet, berths stacked 3 high, upholstered but hard and narrow. The Playfair was built in 1972, In Kingston, Ontario. It's a Brigantine, a pirate ship in miniature, designed to be maneuvered by a young crew, with a sleek hull, sleeker than than her older cousins, and steel, for easier maintenance and without the timbers creaking and leaking. There's a diesel engine, not much used, but available for dead calms and tricky navigation through narrow or shallow channels and locks. Georgian Bay is mostly where she sails. It's the 30,000 Islands and the rugged coastline that makes her feel at home. Though she sails to and from Georgian Bay, via Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, occasionally venturing to join other tall ships at the festival in Halifax. She might go out more on the high seas, but there are maintenance issues with salt water. Strolling on the big dock to stretch his legs, the Captain pauses by one of the big yachts berthed nearby, wondering what all the fuss is all about. A quarter million dollars for a car on water, with baby buggy plastic canopies. "Usually poorly constructed. You wonder why
they're doing this? The Playfair is overbuilt, so we can push her hard." Of course if you're retired and you've got the dough, you can't push yourself that hard either, though there are plenty of small sailboats that would give you the feel of sailing without the hard work, and the need for deckhands, say your grown-up kids who probably wouldn't show up unless the destination was some Club Med in the Caribbean. But if you feel the urge for more than an adventure out of a DVD box, sailing is still one of the things you can do, even on a budget. It's making a comeback if you read the yachting magazines.
There's skill, of course, even with all the modern navigational aids. And any trip can have an unpredictable factor, usually the weather, that can catch you off guard, like in Lake Erie, a hassle for weekend boaters who have to be at work Monday. Last year Labour Day, says Captain Weed, she was going through the west channel of Lake Erie, very shallow, only 12 feet deep. With shallow water, waves can get whipped up high, and there was a whopping storm. We were stranded for 3 or 4 days. When the coast guard came to check on us, you know these fully enclosed rescue craft, they radioed back, they were turning back. Not going out in that gale, since we didn't really need them. Of course they would have risked it, if we were in trouble. Otherwise the sailing is great,
the best there is in inland waters right around here, all through Georgian Bay. Might be a half million islands. Depends what you call an island. We get a chance to explore some with our students. We've got two big dories for that, plus inflatable lifeboats packed in big drums, if we have to abandon ship. Overcapacity too, it's safety first. Though we let the kids do just about anything you can do onboard, including handling the wheel. Mind you the crew supervises everything closely, so they don't make mistakes or get into trouble. Most of the time we're on the water, only going into port for supplies. So the kids share in the watches 24 hours a day. We hug the shore or sail right across the bay. On this leg we'll be going up to Manitoulin Island, before heading south for Midland. It's a great experience for everyone, the crew and the kids. If you're not a kid anymore, Brigantine does allow for charters and alumni sailings, so you could join them. See http://www.tallshipadventures.on.ca/

2010 Update

For more great pictures of the Playfair sailing, see Yvonne Berg's Tall Ship Adventure.

Climb aboard the Playfair and the Pathfinder in Toronto for the Toronto Waterfront Festival, June 30-July 4, 2010. Sail training 4 hour cruises for groups up to 20 will be available for charter during the Festival from Toronto Brigantine, a not for profit registered charity.

Playfair and Pathfinder 2010 Summer Schedule. Book your kids (13-18) a berth on one to two week sailings through the Great Lakes, part of the Great Lakes United Tall Ships Challenge.

Follow Toronto Brigantine's Playfair and Pathfinder Tall Ship Adventures on Facebook.

Become a Member of Toronto Brigantine and help support 48 years of service to kids.

Rosseau Antiques Fair

2008-08-05T06:22:00.001-07:00

Summer. Rosseau Antiques Fair. On weekends local dealers set up their tables around the big antiques barn on the main drag, the 141. It could have more pizazz. It looks more like a flea market, but you won't find DVDs or T shirts. The antiques are the rummage sale variety, in a case you're looking for a Van Gogh cheap. More the nick-nacks you might find in your garage, but among the stencilled dinner plates from the 1950s, the carpenters' tools, the folding rules, the glass and pots, the box of paperbacks, the rusty egg beaters, the old luggage, the wagon wheels, the bits and pieces from an old house, you'll find something you could use at the cottage, or if you get lucky there might be a valuable broach in a glass case of costume jewellery. With me it's been a habit to wander through the tables of bric-a-brac from garage sales to church bazaars or these outdoor fairs, though I'd say a real find over the years is more and more a rare thing. The good stuff winds up in the pricey antiques shops, because the dealers skim through their stock more carefully. Seems too, there's less available even in country antique galleries, with their best pieces going up for auction in the big city. Probably it's the Antiques Roadshow effect. There's also more of a mania for anything old, because it's collectible and a better deal or
investment than something new everybody has. The mania for anything new that started in the 1950s, only survives in electronics. People tend to hang on to what they've got. So the best places for an exciting bargain are the estate sales where most of the dealers go to find their odds and ends, while looking for the best pieces they can turnover fast. So prices are up, way way up. The glut in antiques that also started in the 1950s dried up by the early 70s. The best deals and in enormous variety came from Cuba, with Cubans and foreigners fleeing the Revolution.

A heady time for anybody in the antiques business. The quality of real European antiques was exceptional and the prices were ridiculous, an enormous amount of furniture you think no one would have the time to pack, showing up in gigantic dealer warehouses in New York, and from there everywhere else. You could get a Steinway Grand for a grand, a Majolica pot too rare for an orange tree for $30, an inlaid Boulle desk, maybe by Boulle himself, for $500. For 3 or 4 years it was buyer pandemonium. Dealers buying all this stuff by the truckload, mortgaging themselves to the hilt, couldn't imagine it would end. But to fuel the buying, one thing was missing: Prices didn't go up. Many dealers found themselves stuck with huge inventories, their buyers saturated. With no profits,
buyers lost interest and the bubble burst. Banks foreclosed on cash-starved dealers. The sad thing was that these were mostly the old school connoisseurs, who really loved what was fine and beautiful, and were in the antique business, not really for profit, but to preserve and pass on this legacy to their clients. Their precious finds in the hands of the banks, were knocked down at bankruptcy auctions for next to nothing, a desperate slash and grab by their own business partners, these once friendly bankers. It was a betrayal that's now familiar in these tough times of foreclosures. By the mid 80's there was a recovery of sorts in the antique market, new people in the business and a new breed of collectors and speculators willing to buy paintings by the yard for their bank vaults.

Austin Clarke's Bajan Birthday BBQ

2008-07-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Summer. Leacock Summer Festival, Orillia. The writer himself, Austin Chesterfield Clarke. Earlier in the day at Bala, I had something of a literary relapse. It started with one of the cottage summer weeklies you find in bright boxes on the street. The Bala Triathlon had come and gone by eleven o'clock, as I read the one line event over a rare and excellent double espresso at Olivers almost in the laundromat. Archers on bicycles fording a river? I'll never know. Nothing much else, the Wet T Shirt Night at The Kee, tomorrow or Roller Skating Monday, Ball Hockey Tuesday, Bala Lions Dance Saturday, and the oddest news and features in the paper, like "Inflationary trend dominates bond market future" or "Bracebridge firm fined $1,500 for aggregate pit operating without licence". One piece of real cottage news: "All I can say about this summer so far is that it has been buggy and wet. . ." writes Peter Sutherland elsewhere in the Muskoka Treasury. At least it was hot and dry, rain only threatening on the patio. Looking through the tabloid for what else I missed, of course, the Leacock Summer Festival, about a half hour down the overcrowded, way too fast and nasty narrow and harrowing Hwy 11, the trucker's favorite. Watch out for deer and bikers and the OPP. The wind nearly tottered my cardboard coffee cup. I suppose I should have stayed safely at home, or on the beach with the dogs frisking about, in contravention of beach rules posted, but then dogs aren't noted for any sort of literary sense. Nearby on the patio cement, I noted another from the clan of canines to confirm my uneasy thoughts. In-ev-ita--boo-ull, this big mutt might have wined, but well enough leashed to restrain any idea of a fortuitous double-pawed leap into my lap. About to roam further into Bala, I caught myself in time. One more go through the where was it article in dreary past tense. Opened Tuesday, and it's Sunday, a 6 day event. Which Tuesday? Is it too much ink spilled, is it overly verbose to add some Arabic numerals? MT published when? July 24, no year, no page numbers, and what blasted day was that, in 2008 wasn't it? I needed a calendar to calm me down, something solid and familiar I could trust. It always happens with a strange juxtaposition of events. Prickly heat in combination with a lack of journalistic common sense bordering on journalistic misdemeanors. I made the calculations, on my fingers, going backwards and forwards to double check them. Maybe I was in luck. Perhaps this spell of missed and misspent opportunities that seemed to dog me every weekend for years, was finally about to break? A closing gala barbecue, what, afternoon? Evening? Lunch? With whom besides Mr Clarke, but of course the Giller Prize Winner, so readable enough, writers often more interesting than their work, quite opposite to actors. All ego or not enough loose change in their conversation to talk about anything other than other VIPs, like name-dropping asides to their entourage in tow. An exception though for Film Festivals, the crowds, the glamour and film fanatics who know how to gush or be cerebral. Not exactly like that at literary readings. Subdued, humming at best. But for a writer, absolutely an exciting prospect, literary people, a bar and BBQ. Though would any be there after the Hwy 11 ordeal and other delays, like where exactly was this BBQ? Orillia, a vast metropolis to the uninitiated. The MT was sure to get a snappy Letter to the Editor, even if they no longer published any. I would see to that at least, especially after I arrived and no one was to be found except myself. Or in the other noteworthy case, an unhappily misfiring literary boondoggle, which should not have been newsworthy of even a Page Zero. Perhaps it was all part of a premonition I was having? Something seemed to be transforming about me, a subtle alteration of consciousness perhaps, like a chameleon changing colors, though that no doubt was due to the empty tube of SPF-30 still in the glove compartment. Finally, it struck me. I was having a literary relapse. I had to go to Orillia or else.

An uneventful arrival, except for 3 conflicting versions of what had happened, or might happen and where Austin's Birthday BBQ might be, if it hadn't happened, from friendly natives of Orillia who all agreed that I had missed the Leacock Sidewalk Sale yesterday. Down a long winding path along the lake, more the smooth asphalt bicycle or rollerblading variety, to Old Brewery Bay, maybe a 15 minute walk from the dock and past entire Chinese families 3 generations strong, fishing excitedly along a promising stretch of 18 inch sandy beach. To Museum Road, though no one mentioned it, the obvious dirction to Leacock House and Leacock Museum past Leacock Point Estates, barely estatical, and the Job Fair yesterday at the giant long-term care facility, and on and down to the lake again after being mislead by a sign pointing left, away from Museum Rd, now more the half hour walk with misdirections. But worthwhile with the sky clearing and a friendly bit of sunshine sparkling off the water. Though you could drive and get lost too, but not in any sort of charming way.

In luck at last. A tent extending to near Old Brewery Bay from the visitors' center and restaurant, was overflowing with literary personages. A stately columned mansion across the drive, Leacock's splendid home he'd had built 80 years ago. People weren't eating yet, a good sign I was in time. The excitement mounted. In the back of my mind I thought I might run into Patrick Crean, the distinguished Publisher and Editor of Thomas Allen & Son, where I had recently submitted my novel, Up On Seven Dollars. Hadn't heard back yet, but it was still early. The wheels were turning, but would they engage? Wasn't that Jane Urquhart in white? But having had to go through the preliminaries, like purchasing a ticket and staking out the last possible desirable seat under the tent instead of the stuffier main dining room, she was gone. But I'd found a friendly long table and the good humor was contagious. Dinner ready, a long line formed instantly for the buffet, presided over by our chef and host, Austin Clarke in dreadlocks. I nodded appreciatively, plenty of jerk chicken and roasted pork tenderloin, plus the earlier rum punch. A mellow evening on the way. After the food and a warm official welcoming from the Stephen Leacock Museum people and the Barbados Tourism Board, partners in the event, Austin took charge. If his wordless manner was engaging, the long stride in his words and pauses awoke a magical sense of time past, of the days of storytellers and balladeers, the accents Bajan, from his island of Barbados. Though he had been away a long long time from his ancient roots and the tropical sun, he might have arrived only the other day to tell us a bit about drawing breath and living life in a gentler way.

Leacock Summer Festival, http://www.leacockmuseum.com/
Orillia, Ontario, Canada, http://www.city.orillia.on.ca/

Art In The Park

2008-07-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

Summer, Harper Pottery, Parry Sound. This is the potter himself, Jonathan Harper. Every summer, about 50 artists and artisans descend on Market Square, by the old firehall and the new library, to show us their stuff. Fairs like Art in the Park, in some of the bigger towns throughout cottage country, are about the best place for something special to hang on the living room wall or put on your table. There are some remarkable finds like Harper Pottery, really stiking, moving and beautiful. A lot though is crafts and knick-knacks granny and the kids might like, a garage sale of new junk, or better hand-made, sometimes quite special, geegaws. Sunday painters also show up with a mixed collection of the good, bad and the ugly. But there's plenty of solid work you'd be happy to find. Since the higher end arts and crafts are mostly sold by art galleries and pricey shops, the show and sale prices at these events tend to be a bargain. And with the economy stagnant for years now, prices haven't gone up much either. Jonathan says that what's hurting is cheap and recently better quality pottery from China, aimed at his clientele and even copying the designs of artisanal pottery, knockoffs like of Gucci, now swamping the artisans too. Next time you're thinking of crockery, look for the real thing from your local potters. The quality, esthetic and collectable value only costs a few dollars more. Contact Jonathan at Harper Pottery in Waterdown, Ontario at (905) 690-0049.

Ivan Trotter works in Toronto, but tours the fairs in summer. Painting professionally for the last 15 years, he now concentrates on French and Italian motifs, which sell better than Spanish or Greek scenes, with Canadian and American too familiar over here to be sought after much. That light and color he sees in the lush landscapes of Europe, also suits water-based acrylics he uses now instead of oils and turps, a health hazard endured by many old painters. It always surprises me in modern art how much an artist's work can vary from picture to picture, never mind from year to year. Many don't seem to find a groove or a style which could make them popular and collectable. Contact Ivan Trotter at http://www.artbyivan.com/

Stoney Creek Woodturning. For John Van Kessel, a hobby became a second carreer after he retired from education in London, Ontario. He has the knack of a true professional, whose work speaks fondly of the woods he uses. You might think he wanderers the forests, but through connections in his town, he manages to find most of his wood from trees that have been cleared from city streets. Since he was a high school principal, I couldn't resist asking him what he's seen happening over the years with kids themselves. "Worst than they've ever been and better than they've ever been. More mature and socially conscious or completely out of control." No surprises, more or less what I thought. Contact John at Stoney Creek Woodturning, in London, Ontario at cvkessel@sympatico.ca

Brigitte Nowak works in Toronto. But she's had solid connections with Parry Sound for 50 years, coming up every summer to her family's cottage. She's seen the big transitions in country life, lately she comments, "Like the BMW's and their high-profile people who like to spend their money." Meaning further south especially around Port Carling, where her work sells well at an art gallery. Here it's still mostly pickups and SUVs, but she does agree, "Parry Sound is special, a Frontier Town mentality," she says, (Gateway to the North-- you get that in tourist brochures) "with much the same feeling as Yellowknife." That's about as far north as you ever want to go. Brigitte wasn't kidding. She knows Yellowknife. I do sort of, after several hours of Margaritas in Mexico with this hard-drinking gal from Yellowknife. ¡Viva México! By the way, I'd like to say hi to all my friends in Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara and San Miguel. ¡No perderéis Guanajuato! And to thousands more new friends over there who read this blog, I was pleasantly surprised to find out recently. ¡Hola muchachos y gracias, todos! Anyway Brigitte's work has a wide range beyond country landscapes which she didn't bring along. Contact Brigitte or see more on her website http://www.brigittenowak.com/index.html

The Art Of Cottaging

2008-06-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

Summer. A bower of flowers, off a dirt road, Magnetawan. Wannabee cottagers hope for a backyard like this and a lake out front. They're not disappointed if the money works out. They'll overlook a lot of other things too when the weather's good. Like filling up their cruisers at the local marina at $170.00 a pop. Country life isn't exactly cheap, not if you want the glossy magazine version. With boats though, you should be able to get a good deal, used. Always more for sale, and you don't wait months for delivery. For the first big splurge, do your research and you could be grinning on a budget. Careful, the used ones have their secret histories like cars. Cottagers are forever trading up, or trading down when the wife files for divorce. Be brave and remember winching in and out of boat launches, the trailer usually parked outside your garage, boat tarped over in case of rain or mice, might qualify as that thing outside we never use from the soon to be ex-wife and why don't you rent a berth? The $20,000 adventure could be Boat For Sale, by fall, especially when the kids go to college. Cottages too, crest the same waves, but the glamor and high prices don't fade. It might be a sweet deal if you're part of a big city clan rolling in for the weekends. Otherwise you might be surprised at what a big and expensive deal it is to run your dream hideaway. But new cottagers show up all the time to take up the slack. With a little cottage fever and visions of barbecues and beer by the dock, the boating and swimming, the easy life of a Muskoka summer, they keep on retreading the cottage experience at least for their kids. It gets out of hand when the cottage turns into a long distance suburban chalet sprawl out of a cookie-cutter kit catalog like your neighbor's giant A frame over the living room, with the big triangle windows that look way better from the inside. Some days it's all worth it. Great weekends eventually do happen when everything's just right. Before the flies in spring while you're still hassling with the overwintering dust and must or maybe late summer when the bugs have been burned out by the hot sun, and everybody's favorite people do show up together, and no one forgets to smile or shrug.

Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary

2008-04-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

Spring for a change, from a visit today to the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, near Rosseau, with Audrey Tournay. You don't necessarily plan on these things. Life happens when you're thinking of other things, an echo from John Lennon. Audrey was a schoolteacher in St Catherines when in the mid '60's someone gave her two orphaned skunks. "They're almost as nice as beavers, and funny too." Now it's 400 skunks later, and only skunked 8 times. It took a few more years and buying an abandoned farm to set her on her way. A vet from Parry Sound kept dropping over with various adorable wild animals he'd doctored, but not yet strong enough or old enough to get back to the wild. No one, Audrey found, not the government nor any other agency would care for them. So she wound up doing the job herself on her 800 acre farm. All sorts of animals, mostly local, some exotic like a lion she has now from BC, that grew too big for a pet. Animals with hard luck stories, the majority not injured like you might expect, but young and orphaned, parents killed by cars, but mostly by hunters. Bears for instance, about 90 today in a woodland pen, black and brown, really the same species, even born together in the same litter, are common guests. At about 18 months they go back to the wild. Documentary film crews have showed up for the emotional moment. Deer, wolves still, though with so few now, they're mating with coyotes who've moved north, even with dogs. Audrey's is part coyote, as it happens. Like her other friends, from around 200 in the spring to a thousand by fall, her dog found her too. And just about any other wild animal in these parts, from raccoons, to deer and owls. Audrey never turns a wild animal away.

Beavers are Audrey's favorites. Any current resident would make himself at home in your lap, and do in hers when pint-sized, feeding and nuzzling. Since they're to return to the wild, close human contact is kept to a minimum. They're as wonderful as Grey Owl says they are, the one who used to be a trapper and lived around Parry Sound. His cabin was loaded with them, very sociable and unstoppable. Can't sit still for a minute unless they're sleeping in your bed. If you're a cottager, they could wind up gnawing your furniture. See the Aspen Valley website on how to deal with furry and feathered visitors, in a kindly way. There's a downloadable pdf, Living with Wildlife. Animals should be respected and protected. With a little understanding, they'll mind their own business, even bears.

Deer are still a delightful sight, prancing across roads and highways, so always be prepared to stop in cottage country. At Aspen Valley, unlike many zoos, they're happy here. For one thing, they're in the country, and penned in very large woodland enclosures, and that only for a time, so they can go back into the wild when they're big and strong enough. The Sanctuary is open to the public from Victoria Day through Canadian Thanksgiving, admission by donation. It's a great outing for kids and not a commercial venture. Bring a picnic lunch and roam around. Visit some animal friends. It's amazing to be able to get close to them. Over the years, as more wild animals have descended, still with no other place to go, Audrey's had to expand. Fortunately through donations and sponsors, but still no money from the government, she's been able to hire a small staff and enlist some volunteers. They're an enthusiastic lot, usually a half-dozen students from Germany, Switzerland and England, some returning year after year. It's the enchantment of the wild and wide open spaces and of course the animals. If you're a cottager, staying for the summer, check out the Sanctuary's nature study courses for your kids. Drop in and see Audrey, a great and gracious lady. She's an artist and storyteller too, inspired by her bears and beavers.

Deep In Cottage Country

2008-03-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

Near Tait's Landing on Lake Manitouwabing where you can rent one of these pontoon golf carts. A fun way to spend the day, away from people again. Wish there were more of Stephen Leacock's small towns. They've disappeared and Orillia has sadly lost its Sunshine Sketches, now a big, but still charming and attractive place. The Rathskeller has been bulldozed by the huge Chinese buffet. Still you do get some sentimental incidents that ping back from the old days. Fussy old ladies getting their hair done at jam packed beauty salons doused in stinging peroxide. People jumping out at you thinking they know you. Kids and dogs and picnics. Wet frisky dogs on the beach. The trip to the bank, an ordeal of a different sort. Book ahead, like at the beauty parlour, but they don't answer the phone or you can call an 800 number in Calcutta. Don't fret about polishing your shoes and the cravat knotted right. The guy behind the desk isn't the manager or the assistant manager or even the loans officer, but a customer service rep who types into his keyboard. It's the financial software and his printout that gives you the final, absolutely final, bad news about your loan application. Cubbyhole bars and bars tucked into restaurants can be social stomping grounds. The bigger places are just noisy or empty. Smokers don't like them anymore. You might find a few chewing emergency nicotine gum. Suspicious characters are still rare, but now you find them talking into their cellphones on street corners. Watch for the cop on his beat in his squad car at the only traffic light in town. Could cost you plenty. Weddings and funerals, the big social occasions right up there with church basement Jackpot Bingo. The strangers in town, the still contagious city slickers whether loud tourists or LL Bean catalog cottagers, and the occasional drifter who wants directions for somewhere else. Bibles on your doorstep from a half-dozen evangelical outfits and always a pair of Mormons somewhere. Hassles at the liquor store, a pint of whisky or an armload of beer, cut off by bourbon stuffed buggies hustling for the door and the double parked Mercedes. Or the revenge of the locals: Waiting at the Beer Store while pickups unload 300 cases of empties and cash them in. The rumor mill and the grapevine from the old Rathskeller now at the Tim Hortons. Ask a nosy question. Somebody has the answer, spell it for ya forwards and backwards.

Sentimental Places

2008-03-06T15:04:00.000-08:00

Summer. Dillon, near Killbear. Cottage vacations always remind me of other cottage vacations. When I was growing up it was either that or playing ball during the long hot city summers. The rich kids flew somewhere with their parents. Getting in the car a few hours out of town was a big enough adventure. The air was sweeter. It made you eat a lot or sleep a lot or play a lot of cards at night on the porch. We didn't have our own cottage, so we rented this and that. Every day was great when it wasn't a drag or raining and boring. Odd things left behind in the cupboards, a Playboy Magazine found under the mattress, no hot water or no running water, just a kitchen hand pump and the outhouse outside. Poison ivy, mosquitoes and ticks. A local general store in the nearest small town or at the gas station for something to do, some still surviving like this one, nothing trendy and expensive, dropping in for a Coke, some candy and other junk for kids, plastic rafts that took dad a half hour to blow up, board games and jigsaw puzzles and comic books. Lazing on the beach with a transistor radio. Sunburn and Noxzema, and sand between your toes.

A Lazy Day On The Lake

2008-02-18T17:07:00.000-08:00

Summer. On the big arm of the Magnetawan near Lake Cecebe. Once we're in the city, we can get back to the country in comfort, some of us with the money. That's driven prices sky high in Muskoka and many other nice spots, near or far from the city. It's not fair to the locals who have to adjust to this city economy. Used to be they could save for something they could build on a lot somewhere, a cottage or a new home. Lots are just as juicy as cottages, when speculators find them and hang onto them long enough. Now the locals are mostly stuck in low-end housing in scruffy towns that cottagers wonder about. Why do these people live like this in the country? As if country people are rather stupid and want to live in a ramshackle bungalow on a postage stamp lot by the railroad tracks. If there is any real basis for resentment, locals for city slickers, this has to be it.

Nature Calls

2007-12-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

Summer. Georgian Bay. In the country you have a better relationship with trees. Cities crowd them out or dwarf them with big buildings and concrete. Here they confer a feeling of peace and shelter. The painters of the Age of Romance liked to parachute them into the midst of ruins or over the heads of lovers. Nature settling back into place after people built and smashed their cities. Now it looks like big cities are here to stay, though given our history, I'm inclined to doubt it. The country always lures us back to a simpler life. People get dissatisfied and exhausted with a complicated world that robs them of their individuality and their tranquility. Suddenly they're ready to burn their prison camps and there's another war or revolution. If cities were more on the human scale they might have weathered these storms. Some old ones have. Though there's a new war-like mania in dealing with cities that don't suit us. They rot in places and then the developers come in, forever tinkering with them, to the point where it all gets out of hand and the city becomes a mish-mash of contrary impulses. The better parts that survive get knocked down to modernize everything, like the old buildings are out of place, or more like a reminder of how people used to live. As though no one should live like this anymore, knock these dissenters down to be democratic. No more privileged buildings or people, no more Old World. The war in the Middle East is about these things too, a clash of Ancient and Modern. And the West's longstanding intolerance of what is old and out of fashion has erupted from the smoldering Twin Towers to rain fire and punish these Medieval Arabs so they can have what we want for them, democracy, money instead of family, and religion on the back burner. The Arabs started it, but the West has been busy eroding their lives and culture for a century. Perhaps a rebalancing is going on between these two extremes, but it's a bloody one and could ultimately wipe out both civilizations. Back to the Stone Age. Hopefully the trees will still be waiting for us.

A Rock Is Always A Rock

2007-12-03T22:25:00.000-08:00

Summer. I won't tell you where this rock is in case some idiot tries to steal it. It's a grandaddy granite rock from way way back, friendly and wise. Tumbled a bit, roughly smoothed and polished. Always happier than these broken or dynamited rocks. Indians used to talk to them and they still do. We're the idiots for thinking this stupid or pagan or unscientific. If you're wise and good as some Indians say, you might turn into a rock one day. OK, part of you, the part that goes to work everyday. Here in the Muskokas, rocks do mean something, even to us modern people. They go out everyday collecting small ones and big ones for their gardens or the kids skip some back into the waters. Remember the Pet Rock craze of the late 60's? Not a bad idea.

Girls Out For A Swim

2007-11-30T09:11:00.000-08:00

Summer. Lake Rosseau. Boys gone fishing. The ducks and the water remind us of a permanent time. Like in Europe for centuries when life was steady for most people and the past was like the present. A better example, the so-called primitive cultures who had respect for their environment, the indigenous people around here, the Indians. Were they stupid about progress or wiser than us, knowing in their shamanistic way that a future based on the domination of the planet by man, spells death for the planet. Their culture was unchanged as was their land for perhaps 60,000 years. At the current speed of Science and Technology we could wreck our planet in 150 to 300 years. At least they'll be no more troublesome people. If we're lucky, it's back to the Stone Age, The Sequel. Get that in movies a lot, the doomsday scenarios. For all the troubles of the past we can say maybe people were better off than we are and certainly better off than they thought. For our ancestors, a relief, in hindsight, not having to live with this constant hankering for the past, this feeling of loss that engulfs the modern world. Or with a fear of the future if they'd known what we're doing today. For us, life always, a bittersweet memory. And the future clouded and uncertain. We go back there to the natural world of the Muskokas, as long as it lasts, to shed some of this angst, cottagers and locals, and tourists from all over. At least it gives us a chance to think and breathe the fresh air of the past.

Kids And Boats And Steamships

2007-11-30T07:53:00.000-08:00

Summer. Lake Rosseau. Could be the old days, except for the boat and clothes, when there were more families. In back, an original boat works of which there were a lot. Muskoka was famous for canoes and launches. You should check out an exceptional boating museum in Gravenhurst, Grace and Speed, the Muskoka Boat & Heritage Centre, down at the newly redeveloped wharf, a pretty classy affair. Loads of perfectly preserved boats and canoes, some in water, a 6 million dollar jaw dropping experience. Also commemorates the old steamships and grand hotels in Muskoka. While in Gravenhurst, a bustling metropolis in comparison to most other Muskoka towns, like they say on game shows, you've just won a fabulous boat trip on a real STEAMSHIP! Check out the RMS Segwun from 1887. Sail to delightful Port Carling and Millionaires Row. And you can, for real.

From Our Friends The Birds

2007-11-29T22:17:00.000-08:00

Summer. In Parry Sound. Even if there aren't any celebrities, we can make do. The birds have the right idea and they still raise big families. If you look at modern people, strip away the technology, what is it that makes us so lonely and miserable? Small and even single parent families are the biggest difference of all, between us and our ancestors. Now about as common in the country as in the city. But the Media are nagging us about Carbon Footprints and the flavor of the day, like overpriced iPhones and Terrorists. Fine but what about western societies burning to make a buck? So they can afford to have children. Imagine birds building a nest in a tree after a forest fire. Maybe we should turn back the clock or the planet will. Politicians and businessmen won't do it. There's some vague hope that scientists will. But aren't they the ones who pushed us over the brink? Remember the world a hundred years ago? An appalling lack of scientists. Now we're making up for lost time and saturating the place with them. Once they goof up big time, that could change the contract between them and us. Better not to wait for that. Add up all their clever goofs to date, thousands of them. Those fires are still burning. Why people come to the smoke-free Muskokas, to get away from it all and watch the birds.

Bird On A Wire

2007-11-29T21:50:00.000-08:00

Summer. Magnetawan. Only because Goldie Hawn lives a stone's throw away. If you listen closely you can hear a $5,000 wine cork popping. Celebrity watching is more meaningful when you find them live and not just on TV. Though why we bother at all is another modern mystery. Scholars and Social Scientists would say that glamour and pageantry go way back before Elvis. It's a proven social need to see Kings And Queens among us. Since we knocked them on the head to make way for rather dull democracies and even more lackluster politicians, we've had to reinvent them as folkloric heroes, Captain Ron, a scallywag who makes good. Or Kurt the knight in shining armor rescuing the damsel Goldie even if his faithful charger, the Mighty Dakota, breaks down and his trusty cell phone is rusty without a brazen tower in sight. It's their movie personas larger than life on the big screen that blaze somewhere in our imagination. If you bumped into them before Laugh-In, or if you'd left the TV off since then, would they stand out in a restaurant? Not unless Goldie dropped every plate in the house. In real life the breakables would have been soberly added to their bill in the best case scenario. Funny, we can't seem to have any fun in public. Seems we pay other people to have fun for us and laugh in anonymity in a darkened theater or in our private living room world. Or pay them to be glamorous for us. Locals like anyone, love these Real People from Hollywood a heartbeat away, but they can easily tough it out on Hockey Stars alone. And we've got 'em. Check out the 8X10 b&w glossies at the bars, autographed.

Small Town Hassles And Scandals

2007-11-28T00:17:00.000-08:00

Spring. Parry Sound, Coast Guard Station. A modern statement, rather at odds with the old town and the beaches. Trees were planted on the Waubuno Beach side, but they're still not big enough to screen an architect's lack of imagination. Here at least there was a need for a modern facility and it serves Georgian Bay and its ships and boats well. But functionalism can get out of hand. One aesthetic mistake leads to another. Like in the New York subways where the stations and trains, never pretty, were vandalized by graffiti artists and remarkably the more damage the more crime. It took an astute commissioner of the Transit Authority to figure out the connection based on an academic paper on a new theory of urban decay. Vandals plant seeds of lawlessness, when they deface an environment, the Broken Window Theory. If you don't fix it, that signals no one cares and it's alright to break another one and another. Whole neighborhoods go up in flames thanks to neglect, but first because they're often an eyesore to begin with and an easy target for distressed people. Quick cleaning and repainting, replacing even cracked windows in the subway system actually reduced crime considerably. But it's an uphill battle. Same goes for our big and small towns. What happened to them anyway? These charming towns we remember. Was there a war? Concrete parking lots covering nasty craters from all the shelling? A nice neighborhood crushed by a Seniors Rec Center and concrete condos. Condos in the country? A giant ugly hospital sold for a song to a big city developer who turns it into a slightly uglier retread for a condo complex. This make any sense? Sure. We needed the rec center, depressing though it is, and we need more condos because there's a housing shortage and prices are high and I suppose this will keep them high. A lot of prime land available too, and nothing gets done. The only place for kids to go, the ones who throw rocks, is the hockey rink and church bingo. So they get into trouble or leave town, just like in the movies. Is there some sort of anything goes business and politics in bed together, or in a small town, a game of Monopoly where a few high rollers call the shots? Looks like it anyway.

Spring. Parry Sound, Seguin Bridge and Tower Hill. Why not a charming bridge over an idyllic river? Everyone can draw up a long list of eyesores and missed opportunities for any town. In a small town you can't miss them. They're everywhere. Not much discussion or input on anything in most of them, just like in big city alienation. With big city thinking applied to small towns, from malls to strip malls, to dumb ugly buildings, people get the idea that's all you're going to get. The reminders are everywhere. A minor hassle like no real downtown which big city visitors love and the locals now miss. There was one until the malls came. Shopping, apart from the basics, is an exercise in futility. Try to find any shoe that fits at any price. One shoe store in town and plastic leather everywhere else. A nice friendly coffee shop? Closest thing open is at the mall food court or the Drive Thru. The old town newspapers used to be concerned. Not so much now. They've been bought up, imagine, by media giants. Their local flavor is the local advertising. What they splash on page one is Council Agrees To Hike Parking and Water Main On South Street Needs Repairs. Inside on page 3, some harmless gossip everybody knows anyway masquerading as human interest stories, and sensational articles like Fall Is The Time For Canning. Anyway, who do you know who does canning? In Parry Sound it's Crofter's, the jam factory. Good jam too, organic. Even mango. It's not that warm here, if you're looking for a mango tree. Globalization, from California. Though, what the local rags are good at is flooding the towns with flyers and free guides and magazines that give you 5th graders' reports on all the fun tourists and locals can have, with hardly a word of useful or honest information, but plenty of wall-to-wall paid advertising. No wonder that cottage lakeside life in the Muskokas is the big thing and many small towns are treading water or slowly going under.

The Cottage Town Establishment

2007-11-27T22:22:00.000-08:00

Summer. Parry Sound, the Fitness Trail. Locals and cottagers, locals claim, are elbow to elbow in the summer. Only at the A&P I'd say. Generally they don't mix much, with cottagers being city people and in a hurry to shop and get back to their monstrously expensive cottages. Cottagers are friendly as they are supposed to be having a good time. With locals it depends. There are all sorts of things going on, under the placid surface of any town. People are cogs on various wheels. Some are strictly family people and that's all they want. Some are family, old school friends, maybe buddies at work and neighborhood people. In most neighborhoods you would connect eventually even if you're a dreaded foreigner from the big city. Business people naturally make an effort to be more expansive. Real Estate and Insurance Agents which make up half a cottage town's business are ubiquitous. Any event, function, restaurant, club, golf course, junior league hockey hockey game, they're there, supporting the community and drumming up more business. The other professional class, the only one you'll find in dusty history books, is the lawyers, mostly real estate and estate lawyers, but somewhat scarcer in public as they already have a lot of work in retirement towns. Some of them are straight out of Dickens, with musty old files stacked to the rafters. The bankers' boxes full, not in the basements because nobody has basements in bedrock, but in storerooms and cupboards that would would require an archaeological dig to recover a missing file. Computers, bah humbug. Cottages change hands like Russian revolvers playing Russian Roulette. The aging cottagers and locals and the widows about, make for a lot of office rummaging in estate work. Going down the main street you'll see their shingles, so many you might think you've stepped into a Litigious Twilight Zone where lawsuits and juvenile crime must be really big. Lawsuits are always big, even in small towns. But most juveniles have already left town with or without a high school diploma to work in the big city. Then there's quite another class in each town, the Old Establishment.

Summer. Parry Sound, near the town dock. The Old Establishment who own most everything and who are largely invisible, the Five or Ten big families. They came first. They built the first hotel, or sawmill, or warehouse. And they bought all the land and they've been doing it for generations, even though many of their siblings only touch base at the family manor, before they're off again to Florida. Florida's popular. Respected by some. You might need to buy gas at their gas station or see their lawyer or rent an apartment or house from them. Sometimes liked well as benefactors to the community, sometimes idolized as the families who made it, and sometimes despised. Even despised for generations because of some swindle or other touching wounded families still living in town generations later. No feuds and brawls that you'd notice, but a certain coolness and distance, a certain resentment you might not fathom in the city, where of course you don't really know the transient population around you, or the big shots who pull the strings. This bears on how friendly everybody is in a small town. Places with a better history are obviously happier. Places where there's a strong middle class, where there is a general prosperity. Perhaps the people who are the most disliked aren't any of the above, not even rich bastard cottagers or noisy tootin' tourists. It's outsiders living in the town, especially big city outsiders working at the best jobs in town, the professional level government jobs the disadvantaged locals don't have the qualifications for. You want to work at the hospital and they want a diploma from a community college in Hospital Reception Clerk or they get a used, but experienced, Hospital Reception Clerk from Toronto or Barrie or Hamilton.

Living In A Small Town

2007-11-27T19:34:00.000-08:00

Summer. Walking the dog, Fitness Trail, Parry Sound. Besides born and raised in, or back home to retire, who else chooses a small town and a bungalow when you could have a real country place or a cottage? Retired cottagers sometimes. If you look out your window everyday from November to March and all you see is snow, you might get tired of it, or at least tired of shovelling it. Besides, you're unlikely to lose your dog. If you see a stray, ask anyone nearby and they'll say oh, that's Caruther's dog. He's finding his way home, more or less. And you're close to the hospital just in case. And getting to the mall is easy. And they plough the streets same day. And if there's nothing to do, you can shop or get a doughnut and coffee. See a friend down the street. City types would say, after watching a nasty movie, well the spoiled and rich get paranoid every time their magazine cottage life creaks at night, or you know how dangerous it is in the country when everybody knows you've got a new F150 in your driveway, a home theater with plasma, and you're so alone and isolated you can't even get a pizza delivered. Nah, that's not it. Come to think about it, maybe that's why city people come to the country nowadays, not for a rest or for the fresh air, the water, the beaches, the boating, but to get away from edgy paranoid city lives. Though not after they've seen, say Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath. Fortunately most of the crime movies and crime TV are set in the big city. But like dummies in the city, cottagers and locals rent the same DVDs. I guess we're all bored everywhere.

Bala, The Magic Of Small Town Muskoka

2007-11-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

Summer. Bala, next to The Kee. You might wonder why there aren't more photos of towns on this blog. Problem is they're rarely picturesque. Blame it on history. After the fur trade boom and bust, the loggers moved in and cut down millions of trees. So trading posts turned into sawmill towns and nothing much was built to last. Fires burned the rest of the old growth forests and fires also claimed the early cabins and houses. A few brick buildings like a courthouse and jail, a post office or church, survive. After the money was made and no more to be made, these towns dwindled and some even turned into ghost towns like the barren landscape around them. In the 1800's settlers were brought in from Germany with the promise of cheap land, farmland they thought. Forest scrub looked rich and easy to clear and more fires burned. When it finally came down to ploughing, the soil was pitifully thin with solid rock below. Their farms failed and the winters did them in. What kept some towns alive were the steamers and then the railroad. But they never found another vocation until big city people slowly pushed north to get away from it all, and built cottages on every piece of lakefront they could find. Small towns didn't interest them either. Is was the magic of the wilderness they wanted.

Cooling Off In The Creek At Bala

2007-11-12T20:36:00.000-08:00

Summer. Bala, kids swimming in the creek at the height of summer. This is the real Muskoka pulled out like a weed from the resorts. Bala always has been the heart of cottage country with its graceful Victorian charm. You can't do better for a vacation. You could get your bearings in a day or two at one of the B&B's or if they're full, the Bala Bay Inn, the right place for lunch on their big patio. Don't miss The Kee To Bala, a Big Band dance hall from 1942 and still authentic. All the greats have played The Kee, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, The Dorsey Brothers, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, The Glen Miller Orchestra and Louis Armstrong. Since the 60's it's Rock and Roll with a great patio on the water and first class rock bands on the weekends, like The Tea Party. A 2007-8 New Year's Bash with Colin James. Nearby there's a funky bar and a coffee house. Walk around. It's still a small town of 500 permanent residents, not trendy like Port Carling, nor burgerized and stripmalled. If you have time you could look for a cottage to rent or buy. $2,000 a week or $500,000 and up for something memorable.

Shoehorned Into A Tourist Brochure

2007-11-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

Summer. The Muskoka Resort Experience. It's one way to smooth down those big city jitters, shoehorned into a tourist brochure. Ahh, the good life. The satisfaction rating is 90%. I know from friends who work in the industry. The other 10% gripe all the time about everything, usually to get an upgrade, a discount or a freebie. Mind you an oasis of grass in the woods, does depend on its own infrastructure, and is subject to things like storms that knock out power, so no TV, no Internet, even cell phones can go dead. Water can start to gurgle out of your tap and go rusty brown, cold and brown and trickle to a stop. Toilets don't flush. The local fauna can also intrude. A strange animal in the night scratching your window, a creepy nerve wracking growl, a friendly mouse scurrying over your bed, and especially in spring, wasps, mosquitoes, blackflys and noseeums can find their way in. Even with all that, spring is as busy as summer, and if you don't have a reservation, you could spend all night and all day looking for another place. Accommodations vary greatly. In keeping with the cottage theme, you can get bungalows masquerading as double cottages, or strips of motel units dolled up like the royal stables, or in the better spots a real cottage of your own, or at the lower end a corner of a 4-plex cottage or maybe a cottage suite with Muskoka room they didn't explain, wasn't cottagey, except for the Muskoka room, and not in the woods but in the reception center, the actual hotel part. All this can be forgiven once you're there, especially if they give you an upgrade, a discount (very rare, so don't make a scene) or a freebie. Another thing that can knock your socks off is the high end pricing for everything extra, whether it's orange juice and a bag of chips at the tuck shop, or of course the restaurant, where you can't say no thanks to the prices. Beware the ruinous game of golf at their club, usually somewhat discounted since you're a guest. And there are rules. If you've rented a powerboat, your resort might not let you dock it. They're noisy after all. If you're thinking of dropping in on another resort down on the same lake say, well their guests come first, so wait in line or don't bother because they're very exclusive. Even with blazer and captain's cap and your yacht in tow many won't let you dock for lunch. If you're driving it's not going to help unless you squeeze a reservation out of them on the phone first. The smart thing to do is, if you're in the lurch, tip big. The fun thing I'd say would be to hang out at two resorts and golf courses, so split your party and put your friends in the other one so you can pull off the guest of a (temporary) member.

Getting Lucky At Snug Harbour

2007-11-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

Summer. Meandering through Georgian Bay, sometimes there is only one place to go. In Snug Harbour you'll get lucky at Gilly's. The town's no bigger than a boat launch, some cottages for rent, and a few locals who shoot ducks in the fall. Spooky hearing gunshots over the water, but then by that time Gilly's isn't open. Not much is in cottage country after Labor Day. The towns amble on while about half the cottagers who've winterized and retired, hang on until the New Year when many skedaddle down south. Here you get fish and chips, the local pickerel when they haven't run out. Occasionally you'll spot celebrities just about anywhere. There's a Hollywood contingent around Lakes Muskoka, Joseph and Rosseau. Snug Harbour is in the sticks, but there she was, Demi Moore. And then she came over after I gawked at her. Are you ready to order? So there are extra perks in avoiding the fast food corporations. Of course they have muscled in and there are fewer spots like Gilly's and the Magnetawan Inn, and more burgers in the ones left. Before you plunge for one of those, take the time to explore some real Muskoka charm so there'll be some left for your kids.

Lots Of Coffee And No Rush To Go

2007-11-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

Summer. If you've found the right place to eat driving the long and winding roads of Muskoka, it can make your day. There aren't a whole lot of really great places, but a fair number that you'd feel good about. American, German and Italian restaurants are about what you find, some Chinese in the bigger towns. Count on lunch for the most variety when a lot of them are actually open. Tea rooms and delis vanish at 4:30 and 3:00 on Sundays. Family Restaurants are the mainstays, meaning respectable, no boozers and bikers, rather than kids throwing their food on the floor. Don't pass them up. Something more flashy or appealing is going to be hard to find. Besides, most of them deliver a square meal and the ambiance can be better than the steakhouse scene. But get there early, 8:00 at the latest. The best places are like this one, the Magnetawan Inn, been around a long time, homemade pies, lots of coffee, no rush to go.

The Tourist Invasion

2007-11-09T12:37:00.000-08:00

Summer. Fairs and Events and how to find them. Look for a lot of parked cars. Community Centres usually doubling as ice rinks are worth a detour just to see what's posted or maybe you'll get lucky and run into a dance or show. This one in Bancroft, hosts Canada's biggest Rock and Mineral Show, the Gemboree, a must for rock hounds who drive in from all over the continent. Tourist Info booths will load you up with brochures and booklets. When you wade through all the advertising, you'll often find something where the blasted date is missing, with no contact information. Or a number that doesn't answer. Talk to a live guide if there is one. Locals will oblige with approximations, like their street and road directions. Local newspapers are usually the best source for events and any large town's Chamber of Commerce. Better still, talk to the hotel or resort desk before you reserve and see how helpful and professional they are. In the country you're not going to find much, maybe roadside stands for berries and corn, and the occasional auction and artist's studio. High quality handmade pottery right from the potters themselves, with some interesting technical information on how your piece was made, will give you years of pleasure, as a genuine souvenir of Muskoka. Painters are even more numerous, but the emphasis is on fairly routine landscapes. Finding something great is the adventure. Consider yourself a treasure hunter and you will find one or at least some memories to take home. Good luck.

Little Daredevils

2007-11-07T18:20:00.000-08:00

Summer. TugFest, Parry Sound. Tugboats from all over Georgian Bay, and that's as big as Lake Erie, chug into harbor to hang around and show their stuff. Retired now like most of their skippers who rescued them from the scrapyard, now carefully restored and freshly painted, they're back in action as little daredevils who can go just about anywhere. Friendly too. Climb aboard for your own personal tour. The Mink Isle is Parry Sound's own, the most photographed and painted. A score of amateurs retired from city and town, even cottagers retired from cottaging, have found a new life as artists, painting her and Ontario's longest train bridge, the one in back.

The Not So Wild Wilderness

2007-11-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

Summer. Kids from camp, Bala Beach. Now that I think about it, the kids were only tired. I remember a camp like that where if you weren't huffing and puffing up the trail or you didn't get your lean-to up before dark, well, you weren't having any fun.

Bored or Exhausted

2007-11-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

Summer. Kids from camp, Bala Beach. If you're a parent, then you know about all these weekend events for visitors, from family lunches and golf at the posh camps, to pork and beans and potato sack races. There's a score of camps and summer schools, and with water all around, the regatta is the big thing. Camps on a budget, it's two or three canoes and qualifying rounds. Here it's neither. A wilderness field trip in Muskoka, kids bored, not even parents around to make them embarrassed.

The Cardboard Canoe Race

2007-11-07T15:58:00.000-08:00

Spring. White Squall Paddling Centre Open House, near Carling, and not Port Carling. If you're feeling reckless and you're handy with duct tape and cardboard, build your own canoe for the big race. Odds of sinking, about 50%. A fun day and kids welcome, plus coffee, food and a band, from the good people at White Squall Outfitters, Parry Sound. For May 2008 and beyond, it's going to be the big weekend deal, souped up to the Georgian Bay Kayak & Canoe Festival with hands-on workshops. Bring your wetsuit.

Surviving Your Wilderness Adventure

2007-11-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

Spring. White Squall Paddling Centre Open House, near Carling, and not Port Carling. One thing you could do is try out a canoe or kayak at their idyllic paddling school or sign up for a course on surviving your wilderness adventure. It's the best place to buy your gear, small boating or camping, either here or at their store in Parry Sound, a half hour away.

An Ocean Liner Deep In Fresh Water

2007-11-05T20:35:00.000-08:00

Summer. The Columbus at the town dock, Parry Sound. Every year the Germans land, twice in August going out and coming back from the Thirty Thousand Islands. It's impressive especially out of context, an ocean liner deep in fresh water a thousand miles from New York harbor. Would be nice if you could meet the Germans, but a Customs fence keeps them at bay during the 2 hour stopover. Probably it's the same Germans every year.

A Splash Of Color

2007-11-05T19:29:00.000-08:00

Summer. Shriners in full regalia, Parry Sound. A monument dedicated to the Waubuno Shrine Club and members past and present. For a small town of 6500, there are clubs for everyone. The Lions, Rotarians, the Masons, the Optimists, and another half dozen big ones, the Royal Canadian Legion, the Curling Club and a few more purely local Friends Of and Seniors' Clubs, dominate the social scene like hockey does at the BOCC (Bobby Orr Community Centre).

Being Spontaneous

2007-11-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

Summer. Dragon Boat Festival, Parry Sound. It's the spontaneous moments that make us happy. A vacation spot makes it easier. Travelling might be best. If you think back to your last trip and check your photos, you should find plenty to remind you of them. Since we can't travel all the time, though we need those bursts of fun, really we should try to be more spontaneous. In Canada, that's tough. Beyond a smile, nod or wink, maybe Canadians should rehearse or go into therapy, at least Americans tend to think so, but they say whatsamadder with these people? A one way conversation overheard outside a restaurant in front of the menu under glass: They got steak and seafood? Know this place? When was the last time you? Oh, so you're a tourist around here. Where you from? We came down from, where was it? As for packing in more memorable moments into an everyday routine, I've rediscovered taking a compact camera everywhere I go. Looking around for a subject to snap, you wind up finding them. It forces you to pause and think and sometimes meet people and share a little something beyond the weather. Plus you've got the pictures.

A Blue Ford Pickup Is Blocking A Driveway

2007-11-03T11:25:00.000-07:00

Summer. Dragon Boat Festival, Parry Sound, Opening Ceremonies and the Dragons. Usually I tough it out on the bleachers with everybody else. Only chance to see certain notables in sweaty suits or the guy who needs to move his car, and chat under your breath with who's there. You can always check your watch every 5 minutes while the paper dragons are getting ready, kids supplying caterpillar feet for the dance.

Seen It All Before

2007-11-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

Summer. Dragon Boat Festival, Parry Sound. Gifts and souvenirs, the Chinese connection. I remember the good old days, Made in Japan.

The Kids Steal The Show

2007-11-03T11:07:00.000-07:00

Summer. Dragon Boat Festival, Parry Sound. The crowd, the beer tent, and band later. The kids steal the show. Volunteers put everything together. There's such a lot of volunteering going on that there aren't enough paid jobs and 20% of the town's on social assistance and unemployment benefits during the winter off season. A trend happening everywhere. Started with bored seniors and housewives in the '50's and now it's the leading growth industry. I have a feeling low unemployment statistics from Washington to Ottawa factor in working volunteers, inventories and projections nobody could trace. Now, of course, we need and appreciate these volunteers, government quite happy to cut back on social services to make room for them. With festivals it's a different story. Socializing the majority of people has never been a government priority. Perhaps the anti socials they are supporting in jails, on welfare, in therapy, wouldn't be so antisocial if there was a public social life for everyone. Thanks, volunteers.

And No Thai Food

2007-11-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

Summer. Dragon Boat Festival, Parry Sound. The ladies. Oops wrong festival, but top marks for trying. Who cares anyway. If you can mix the Bobby Orr Museum with the Bobby Orr Hockey Hall of Fame (so far so good) at the ahem, Arts Center for Wannabes & Soundalikes, how can you go wrong? Though there is a bona fide music festival early summer at the most 'pensive barn in these parks, as Charlie (Parry Sound's own, like Bobby and all the Orrs including the gang in Orrville) Farquharson would say, scratching his noggin on it. This is the one to fly to from anywhere you are, to hear Anton Kuerti play piano like Mozart, Chopin, Shubert, Beethoven, at The Festival of the Sound, in a splendid, once inside, boutique concert hall, The Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts.

Everybody Loves A Parade

2007-11-03T10:09:00.000-07:00

Summer. Dragon Boat Festival, Parry Sound, the parade, the teams, the Shriners, the Fire Department and friends. This looks great if you remember to go. The local paper will tell you about it afterwards. Even if it is a free event, somebody should pay for advertising.

Two Heads Are Better Tan One

2007-11-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

Summer. Dragon Boat Festival, Parry Sound. An import from Thailand, and perhaps a dumb thing to do, when across the Sound you'll find Parry Island and the Wasauksing First Nation.
Pioneer Days with voyageurs in Indian canoes would be dicey as that's the French to boot. An authentic festival means a whole lot of birch bark and people who make canoes by hand. I suppose we could order them from China after about five years of committee meetings.

Eenie Meenie Miney Moe

2007-10-31T21:12:00.000-07:00

Summer. Things to do. When the best weather arrives in Muskoka, you still have to make things happen. Unlike the city where people feel trapped in the heat and need to let loose at a string of public events, a street concert, a carnival, a book fair, there isn't much doing when everyone's come to get away from it all and relax. Fairs are for the fall, though every town puts on some sort of summer attraction. A charity fundraiser at the community hall, hot dogs, hamburgers and beans for cancer research, a beer tent and band, maybe a carwash for junior league hockey, a horticultural show and sale of houseplants, a nature club slide show, local arts and crafts in stalls and tents, an antiques show. One thing the locals share with the cottagers, they're marching into retirement. Now and again there's a little excitement.

What A Nifty Gift Shop

2007-10-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina, what a nifty gift shop. The big marina too, has such a glossy feel to it, dozens of fabulous yachts and cruisers you could buy or rent. Fell in love right here with this classic beauty. And she's got a sister berthed beside her. Reminds me of the way I used to feel about cars. Reminds me too of the glamorous days of old Muskoka. A lot of the action then was at the grand hotels. Like those left at Cape May, New Jersey. They vanished in fire, one by one, in the lonely off season. If you're up at Pointe au Baril Station, one of the last, the Ojibway Hotel, built by a timber baron in 1906, survives as a cottagers' clubhouse. If the grand hotels disappeared like lovely Victorian ladies in the fog, the big resort operators mushroomed in with their golf courses, spas and pools. Not exactly native ecofriendly tourism, more like vacation theme parks, without the Muskoka flavor. Pools in Muskoka when you've got a thousand lakes? You could be in Beverly Hills, or as the NY Times calls it, Malibu of the North, which is nice enough.

The Inflatables

2007-10-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina, The Boathouse Gift Shop overflow. The Inflatables. They were a lot smaller when I was a kid. One thing you don't see much is kids with so much stuff available for them. That goes equally for cottagers, the 40 somethings and over, and the town folks blasted by winters, who look older. We import them now I suppose. Not Latinos like in the US, but Jamaican girls to clean the rooms at the fancy Muskoka resorts. Downsizing of families even in small towns is a surprise at first. You think maybe it's that unconscious modern culture shaping us again. But you see why soon enough. The small paychecks for small jobs in retail and the seasonal jobs. That's how small families get by.

The Old-Timers

2007-10-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

Summer. Port Sandfield, part of the old marina. When this boathouse was new, there were still a lot of cottagers. At a Jazz Night do at some old community hall I ran into a table of them. Asked these old-timers how they got here. For one thing they didn't look like old money or new. And the cottage and boat talk wasn't about fixing a hole in the roof of a cabin. Still are cottages like that, $120,000. They were old cottage friends, several tables of Canadians and Americans, colorful characters. Basically there were two stories, the Canadian and the American. Most Canadians had family cottages handed down to them. Most Americans bought land when it was cheap. For real cheap you have to go way back, but a couple said their grand uncle left them some Muskoka land as a gift, paying a dollar an acre to the government. It was no good for farming, so they gave it away, millions of acres, whole islands for $200.00. Others built a little more every year, subdivided their lots and built and subdivided. All nodding together, big grins. Never could afford my own place now!

The Cottagers Parade

2007-10-29T16:50:00.000-07:00

Summer. Port Sandfield. That's the thing about cottagers, they're at the cottage. A walk by the boat channel. Town's a tiny place. One general store with ice cream to go, a luxury cottage furniture shop, The Loft, and the fabulous marina, plus cottagers around somewhere of course. Maybe we should parade them out, declare a public holiday. Cottagers parading with fistfuls of asparagus at $7.99 a bunch, cottagers with yacht caps and inflatable rafts, cottagers line dancing with Molson Canadians, cottagers marching smartly with golf bags on their shoulders, cottagers and card tables, cottagers waving from convertibles, c'mon let's have some fun!

Like America But Cleaner

2007-10-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

Summer. Port Sandfield and the boat channel between Lake Joe and Lake Rosseau. You could spend years of happy boating through these huge lakes and Lake Muskoka connected to the south, with well over a hundred islands and a thousand bays. Europeans go agog over this. They can count their lakes on one hand. Americans who are probably a third of all the cottagers in Muskoka, mostly from the North East and with plenty of water too, must be impressed. Of course the waters here are quite clean.

Cottagers For Life

2007-10-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina. If you come for a visit you might wind up buying a boat. Many tourists wind up staying, transformed into cottagers for life. I dunno. It can be boring. It depends how boring your friends and family are. There are always a lot of, pricey in the extreme, dream cottages for sale in Muskoka, but hardly any for rent, booked months in advance. My theory, based on solid barroom research, is it's great if there aren't any hassles, pretty good if the hassles only last a summer, not so good when the pipes freeze and you've got to dig yourself out of the snow to go into town a half hour away for a quart of milk, and beg the guy at the store to fill your jerrycans with water so you can take a bath or do your laundry. If you're a happy camper or boater maybe you should leave it that way, or at least come up for a winter of cross country skiing and snowmobiling, before you buy that dream cottage thinking that's where you're going to retire, when even the birds fly south, and Canadians too.

The Heart Of Muskoka On Peninsula Road 7

2007-10-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

Summer. Port Sandfield on Lake Rosseau. If there's anyplace that has more well-heeled charm in Muskoka it must be some island pleasure dome like the Whistling Pines Beach and Boat Club Resort that hasn't been built yet. But this winding isthmus, oddly on Peninsula Road 7, between Lakes Joseph and Rosseau was breathtaking even before the money came, old and new. You should go. For a day trip, start in Parry Sound and take the scenic and smooth Hwy 141 East. Stop for coffee or breakfast at Bent River's only Minature Golf-Gas Station-General Store-Restaurant. If you can extricate the kids, keep going to the undiscovered Village of Rosseau at the north shore of the lake for antique shops, and lunch at The Crossroads, an excellent upscale cottagers' hangout. For a fine light lunch instead, try Coffeeville. Then head south on the pristine blacktop 2 lane road through the hills and lakes to Minett, Port Sandfield and cool and trendy Port Carling for dinner. If you've still got time, take Hwy 169 South to Bala, where Muskoka begins. Try biking it or on a motorcycle, but be careful. Bikers wipe out even when it's bone dry.

Thunderheads And Lightening

2007-10-28T21:17:00.000-07:00

Summer. On the beach at Parry Sound. A late swim with what looks like a menacing thunderhead. Locals aren't worried. They're common enough. About three weeks ago my neighbour's car was hit by lightening. Not a scratch, but then she wasn't in it. The car's fine.

Before The Stars Come Out

2007-10-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

Summer. On the beach at Ranklin Lake. This is why us city slickers (some locals still call us that out of earshot) keep coming back here or turn the summer cottage into a year round retirement event or at least send the kids to camp.

5 Minutes To Having Some Fun

2007-10-28T20:23:00.000-07:00

Summer. On the beach at McKellar. Country kids still have the advantage. Growing up in a place where you're closer to the basic elements of life, sun and stars, water and sky, woods and animals and friends you know, is a reality-based life instead of a TV show. It's also a safety net city kids don't have. Social workers and therapy, and now drugs from doctors for ADD and XYZ is the dumb city solution. If you get processed enough maybe you'll perform better without the things you need.

Since Elvis

2007-10-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

Summer. On the beach at Parry Sound. Country or city kids? Big schools, even here, and television, the telephone, celebrity cults in movie and pop music culture, have been levelling the difference since Elvis. With the quantum leap to the Internet and especially for kids, their ipods and cell phones, they're in some other reality we don't share.

A Swim In The Sound

2007-10-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

Summer. On the beach at Parry Sound. From mid-April to late September the sands are warm to hot. The water never is anything but glacial. Locals know where the shallows are.

Kick Off Your Shoes

2007-10-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

Summer. On the beach at Parry Sound. If boating is the number one thing everybody wants to do, lazing on the beach is what everyone winds up doing.

Check Your Kids' Pockets

2007-10-28T18:41:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands and getting back. Nintendo Alert.

All Aboard For The UN

2007-10-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands and getting there. The Island Queen V based in Parry Sound. It's like a General Assembly at the UN aboard. For tourists on the go who want to see everything from their car or bus window this is the Ultra Georgian Bay Experience. Mind you just about every one else has a great time, even me.

Fying In And Around

2007-10-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands and getting there. Georgian Bay Airways based in Parry Sound will fly you around the Islands. If you're in a hurry to get out of Toronto, they'll fly you here. Their charter rates are reasonable and it's a first class outfit. Central Helicopters on the edge of town also do deluxe tours and charters.

Where The Locals Gossip

2007-10-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands and getting there. Aboard the Chippewa III based in Parry Sound. About the best way to see the Islands and chat with the locals. They know the best places and best deals. In a coffee shop or bar they're rather tight-lipped. It's their place and they want to keep it that way. If you're from the city it's what you get in any small town. They all seem to have had perfect childhoods, growing up in these backwaters, and they don't want a blessed thing to change.

A Cruise Through The Islands

2007-10-27T22:17:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands and getting there. The skipper and first mate aboard the Chippewa III, based at Parry Sound. A great way to spend a few leisurely hours, as mellow as your favorite daydream. Because she's built to hug a shore, she can dock for lunch at some of the Islands. If you've wondered who the faces are behind the mansions dotting the Islands, you'll see some of them on this cruise, at the marina bars and restaurants, their float planes and yachts parked out front. Before you get too green with envy, remember every stick of furniture and every bag of frozen vegetables has to be boated over. To build a dock or boathouse you'll need a barge. Still green? You're right. It doesn't bother them. Somebody else has to sweat it while the bored of the manor are having their cocktails on the beach.

The Friendly Chippewa III

2007-10-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands and getting there. The friendly Chippewa III based in Parry Sound. A favorite with locals and tourists, she's spent all her days sightseeing, first as a Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls and now around the Islands. If you don't have a boat, or your canoe and kayak skills are iffy in these great waters, you could rent something or climb aboard right here.

The Perfect Cottage Vacation

2007-10-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands. The Craganmor Point Resort on McLaren Island, between Parry Island and The Massasauga Provincial Park and its islands. For the genuine cottage experience, this is it, cozy and quaint. The resort side of it is you will have all you need for your stay, like at the biguns, but at a moderate price, with traditional creaking floorboards and a wonderful private sandy beach. Don't worry, you won't have to chop wood to feed your Elmira Stove, like cottagers used to do. At $650 and up for a small bungalow per week, it's a really good deal for a family vacation. Locals without cottages would like it here. But with money tight in small towns, locals think twice about a summertime splurge. Save for a boat instead or take a last minute package deal down south when the water turns to ice and the place is buried in snow. But cottage colonies like the Craganmor are always full and there are hundreds of them on the lakes and coastal islands of Georgian Bay. You'll never hear about most of them though, no websites, no advertising, no guidebooks to them. Drive or sail or ask around, get lucky with a vacancy or book for next year. It's the next best thing to owning one. If you're thinking of buying a cottage get your feet wet renting a cottage here and there first. Cottage fever can cost you plenty. People at a fantasy resort who'd spend $5 or $10 million for that one across the lake, will get a better idea of what to expect where they are, after their $150 tab for lunch.

History Sinking

2007-10-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands. A Canadian Coast Guard ship on patrol. Classic bent pines of Georgian Bay. In the old days when ships were the only way to go up north, not a few were lost. Sudden squalls in November and unseen rocks ran most of them to the bottom. Search and Rescue by the likes of the Cove Isle and flashing buoys make it safer today, but the lighthouses are largely gone along with a lot of living history. It's hard to imagine what things were like even a hundred years ago, for all the heritage plaques and town museums, which you'd probably enjoy if you were from Mars. Don't know who else goes. I guess they'll be popular in another hundred years when no one will have a clue what we were all about.

The Island Mystery

2007-10-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands. Two flower pots in sight. But if you look closely (left click) there's something mysterious going on, a dock with berths for 6 cruisers, another dock like a bunker and a gazebo big enough for a corporate BBQ. We've been expecting you, Mr Bond.

Pretending To Be Famous

2007-10-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands. Somehow you know you've made it. You get a lot of grins like that from the boating crowd.

Shaken Not Stirred

2007-10-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

Summer. 30,000 Islands. From flower pot size to big enough for a country. These are some of the planet's oldest exposed rock, at about 3 billion years old, gneiss and granite, the sparkle of mica schist, the dark smokey gneiss veined with yellow and white quartzite or pink feldspar granite, mostly layered like cakes and then called banded gneiss. It wasn't until geologists had a good look, that we found out that this archipelago of brooding islands had been stacked a lot higher, into mountains and whole chains of them. The last ice age and a few more besides bulldozed them.

A Boston Fern Escapes

2007-10-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

Summer. Wild Plants by Georgian Bay near Killbear. Refreshing to see houseplants in their native setting. A long time ago, like 300 million years before people started potting them, giant ferns grew like forests in these parts, and conifers too. A Boston fern a long way from home.

A Miniature Garden

2007-10-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

Summer. Wildflowers by Georgian Bay near Killbear. In miniature these plants are a children's dream. Walking through woods, breathing air so clean and pungent with the heady tonic aromas of an ancient earth, is perhaps the best antidote to modern life. You wonder why architects and builders, bankers and businessmen, have turned their backs on all this for concrete and cash. Well, they haven't entirely. A lot of them have 3-4-5-10 million dollar cottages around here, going on their nature walks in ATV's and golf carts.

Pockets Of Light

2007-10-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

Summer. Wildflowers by Georgian Bay near Killbear. Tiny flowers and ferns poke up out of pockets of light in the deep woods. Killbear as a Provincial Park and campground, protects its wildlife. You might see bears or moose, certainly deer, rabbits and other small friends. If the name puts you off, don't worry. It was never about killing bears. An Indian name for the place, rendered phonetically into English, probably not very well.

A Wild Marigold

2007-10-27T14:51:00.000-07:00

Summer. Wildflowers by Georgian Bay in Killbear. If you want the super camping experience, this is it. The peninsula juts out into the bay with rock and beaches on all sides. The rich and eerie forest is what the Huron Indians knew in the days of Samuel de Champlain.

Tickle Me

2007-10-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

Summer. Wildflowers and bug by Georgian Bay in Killbear. The park deserves a special star. It's the only old growth forest in the region, saved from logging and redevelopment by a kind-hearted and dedicated forest ranger who persuaded the Ontario Ministry of Mines and Natural Resources to buy the land. The luxury of a million tons of big old trees. And you can camp there. Book early.

New Arrivals By Georgian Bay

2007-10-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

Summer. The new growth rushes in along the shores of Georgian Bay. Nature's always in a hurry before autumn runs her into the ground. Most trees aren't as young as this, but as you walk around, you can't help noticing the old ones are missing. They'll be back, but what's taking them so long? During winter they aren't doing much, but when they could be at their busiest in summer, the lack of rain and thin dry soils slows them right down.

A Warm Silence In The Woods

2007-10-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

Summer. Forest Floor at Bala. With nature doing all the work, why not parklands linked by trails cutting through our cities? If you think it impractical, go see how it works at the enormous Englischer Garten in Munich, Germany. Bigger than Central Park, New York, it stretches about 5 km overall and includes a lake and 3 islands, plus 8.5 km of streams and 78 km of footpaths.

Friendly Foliage

2007-10-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

Summer. Wildflowers at Bala. Country lanes and trails are the best shopping malls. And you don't have to buy anything.

Lovely Grasses

2007-10-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Summer. Wild Grasses at Bala. The cranberry marsh at Muskoka Lakes Winery. The footpaths along acres of green fields touch on gentle woods and water. One thing we don't see enough of are the great variety and abundance of wild grasses that used to cover the prairies and meadows. To see them now you have to go to a special reserve in the US, Wind Cave National Park, near Hot Springs, South Dakota. The beauty of these grasses is phenomenal. To think that all we've got left are lawns and golf courses and some grass in ditches. The cave gets top billing because it is fabulous too, 300 million years old with amazingly long corridors of rare calcite boxwork stretching over 116 miles, though so compact the cave system occupies an area somewhat over a mile square. You can camp there at Elk Mountain year round.

SUMMER IN COTTAGE COUNTRY

2007-10-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

Wildflowers, ferns and grasses, bushes and berries. Water lilies on the Seguin. This is the real deal. The rest of the year seems one endless packing up and moving, the great unpacking in Spring. Finally Mother Nature takes a rest.

In Muskoka and all through Georgian Bay, the people come out. Mostly in cars going somewhere, to the cottage and back, to another golf course or resort, along a river or lake to fish. For the extreme wilderness experience, going back way before Survivor, there's flying in by float plane into the bush. But what everyone dreams of is the boat on your own lake.

Canoes, kayaks, sailboats are the friendly alternative to getting around. Once you hit the big lakes and the wide open waters of Georgian Bay, it's the scream of the outboards and powerboats. Though they're everywhere, you don't often hear them. Most of the time they're docked at the marinas or in driveways. Basically it's a pain to get these beasts up and running after months of mothballing over the winter. And even if you're all set, the trailer hitched by noon, an hour's drive somewhere to some public boat launch you can't find, the clouds roll in and boom, it rains. If you've got the dough, buy a cottage with a boathouse.

Yacht's do better. Everyone seems to like them, the friendly waves from ship to ship and ship to shore. These are the gypsies of the lakes, the high-end tourists, who with the help of canals and locks, can arrive from Tampa and New York. Even the occasional full blown mega metal cruise ship loaded with Germans, makes it to deep harbor Parry Sound. Most drive-thru tourists take the local cruise ships from Gravenhurst, North Bay, French River, Parry Sound, Orillia, Penatanguishine, or the picnic style canvas-topped floating golf cart class from dozens of marinas. The big draw is the 30,000 Islands in Georgian Bay, a definite must for Japanese families from spring through fall. The endless green and then the reds and golds of autumn astonish the kids.

My favorites though are the tall ships, only a rare sight in summer, but a glimpse of one takes you to some deep place, while the last of the romantics would have to be the tugboats rescued from retirement and rust. A lot enjoy a new life in the hands of would-be old salts, who've done a great comic opera job on them, many strings of flags flying merrily on these bright spots of memory.

Relax and enjoy a summer in the country.

The Last Day Of Spring

2007-10-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

Spring. Thunder Creek on Georgian Bay, near Parry Sound. The nice thing about small towns is the country's never far away. In this case an easy 20 minutes on foot from downtown to the beach and another 20 along the jagged shores of Georgian Bay. You can't drive there either. One day you take your jacket off and before you know it, the fresh cool spring blasts away into the mighty heat of summer.

Country In The City

2007-10-23T20:19:00.000-07:00

Spring. The Fitness Trail, Parry Sound. More the go for a stroll or walk the dog. The kids prefer the skateboard park. Snowmobiles in winter. But it is a great walk and you're still in town with the Sound a stone's throw away, two sandy public beaches ahead and a hike at the far end on the Rough Trail.

The Relief Of Spring

2007-10-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

Spring. At the mouth of the Seguin River in Parry Sound. The firs always keep the country bright and stately, in winter doing double-duty sheltering the other browned-out woodlands in snow. Finally by May the bare branches go ahead again with a dance of sparkling yellow-green. The relief of spring.

Full Throttle

2007-10-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

Spring. The Mag at full throttle. Every time I look through the viewfinder, I try not to settle for a jigsaw puzzle or picture postcard. I couldn't resist this one.

Water and Rock

2007-10-23T18:47:00.000-07:00

Spring. Water comes alive on the Seguin River, a torrent rushing through your ears. Tap water spoils us. Always does the same old familiar routine.

Get Your Feet Wet In The Falls

2007-10-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

Spring. On the Seguin River, the icy waters bubbling with snowmelt in the bright sun and you're wearing one too many sweaters. You could cool off, but it won't be relaxing. With so much water you would expect waterfalls a little bigger than this one, and there are 22 respectable ones around Bracebridge. In May, the only big spring event in cottage country, is the Bracebridge Festival of the Falls, you should definately check out for other good reasons. Bracebridge itself is a pretty nice town built high over a thundering river. A good place to stop and shop, the small-towners say, tired of jeans and T shirts. The action's beside the big dam downtown, a food fair with local arts and crafts, a children's fair, some wild Fire Department guys who let loose about a hundred thousand toy ducks over the falls, and people rowing after them, and bonus voyageurs and lumberjacks performing, and if you can't find the other 21 falls, well they've got free buses to them. I had some good shots but at low res because of a default setting you get after you replace your dead batteries. I'm a film camera kind of guy.

Aren't You Glad

2007-10-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

Spring. Big Sound on Georgian Bay, near Parry Sound. The snow's finally gone.

Down A Cottage Road

2007-10-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

Spring. The waters start to flow. A lake off the Seguin River. In these remote spots, you can get lucky and find some British couple who've built their dream place, a marina, a restaurant, B&B, or a nest of cottages. Follow the signs for their side road destinations, though be prepared for some odd encounters with crusty old locals who might prefer the dilapidated cabin fever style of hospitality. What you'll usually find are cottages and more cottages on both sides of the road. Of course you should have got your coffee back in town. Stopped at that gas station. Now there's no place to stop. You keep driving, hoping for a public beach or at least a boat launch. After a half-dozen of these cottage malls, you realize they don't have any, every foot of lake and riverfront, private property. Locals and cottagers walking along their gravel road visiting each other, will be friendly and puzzled. A what? Oh, well, no, not over here. Try that next town. But keep going and you'll get lucky somewhere.

The Milk Run

2007-10-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

Spring. Canada Geese on the big arm of the Magnetawan River to Lake Cecebe, near the friendly pocketsized town of The Mag. You always see the geese and ducks circling, assembling in the fall. When they return in spring they must sneak in. A few here, a few there, along the Muskoka route home. The express out and the milk run back. The trees always remind me of people.

A Slippery Walk

2007-10-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

Spring. Not a lake, but a lot of snow turned to ice and melting into slabs, in the Magnetawan.

Terra Incognita

2007-10-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

Spring. An anonymous lake in the Magnetawan mellowing in the warm April air. Even the best map you can find won't give you a name or the one lane track to it. There are thousands.

SPRING IN COTTAGE COUNTRY

2007-10-23T15:07:00.000-07:00

The first cold breath of Spring off Lake Rosseau. Not a sign of a cottager yet. Near the dock, a beaver poked his head out an icehole and ducked under a few seconds later.

Animals, the real natives, provide us with the magic of this place.

TERMS OF USE

2007-10-17T17:19:00.000-07:00

TERMS OF USE. All text, the photo gallery and individual photos of Through the Eye of Alan Gillis are copyright (c) 2007-2008 Alan Gillis. Non-commercial, private use is granted, but all other commercial rights are the property of Alan Gillis.

INTRODUCTION

2007-10-16T17:40:00.000-07:00

Travel books and tourist guides and travel magazines wear me out. Rarely do you get a sense of place and what's really going on. It's the fast food approach from people on the rush through fabulous must-see destinations.

Instead of a cluster bomb experience, on this blog you can spend some time absorbing the life of a particular place, Muskoka on Georgian Bay. It's home to many who can't play at the 101 golf courses or lounge around the resorts, the townsfolk who don't have 5 million for a cottage, but who make this place work for everybody else who comes. These pictures are what they see and live.

Others do come in droves, calling Muskoka and the Parry Sound District further north a second home, doubling the local population every summer, the cottagers from Toronto and the American Northeast who've been at it for a century and think to and do retire here. The many more tourists in cars, the fifth wheelers and doggone campers and luxury RVers and busloads from everywhere in Canada and the US, not forgetting the obvious Germans and Japanese nature-lovers. It is one of those must-see destinations, perhaps because it's immense ancient rock, lakes and rivers everywhere, forests pushing up over our heads. After five years here, I'd say it's a friendly place that beckons any traveller to return. That's why after all the mosquitoes, black flies and noseeums (only in spring), the pricey this and that, they're all here. Welcome to Muskoka and Parry Sound.