Deep In Cottage Country

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.

A Lazy Day On The Lake

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

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.

From Our Friends The Birds

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.

Small Town Hassles And Scandals

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Tourist Invasion

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.

Being Spontaneous

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.

Eenie Meenie Miney Moe

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.

The Inflatables

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

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

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!

Before The Stars Come Out

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

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

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.

Where The Locals Gossip

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.