Summer In Muskoka: Memoir Of The Potts Family Cottage From 1962-1992 1s3g3p

Copyright © 2013 by Maureen Potts, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012920872 ISBN: Hardcover Softcover Ebook

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Rev. date: 6/05/2013

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Family Tree

1 Beginnings

2 Badgerow/White Wave

3 Muskoka Kids

4 The Cabin

5 Dangers in Muskoka

6 Work and Play

7 Amah and Papa

8 Final Years

Appendix

To Our Mother

MADELEINE JELLICO ROBERTS POTTS

1918 – 2003

With Love

FOREWORD

The stylized pine tree that makes its appearance throughout this book is a tribute to my mother and her eye for the obvious. The tree was situated on the tip of our island and was permanently bent into an arch by the prevailing winds. The wayward pine seed that found its way to the rocks of Badgerow somehow germinated in the scant soil between the rocks that marked the end of land and the beginning of water. Had we let nature take its course, the tree would have grown to a minimal height and then died a natural death. But my mother saw the beauty in this stunted pine tree and its graceful arch. She called it the dancing tree and nourished it to health over the years. She would cover the roots with soil from the back of the cottage, fertilize it and water it with great care. The dancing tree grew to an undeserved height, its roots snaking across the rocks in an attempt to find nourishment in the crevasses. The tree is a wonderful representation of the life that went on at Badgerow Island, indeed it encapsulates all of Muskoka in one graceful brush stroke. Every once in a while, the poet hits a stunning metaphor that strikes at the very essence of what he wants to say. The dancing tree is such a metaphor.

FAMILY TREE

John and Madeleine Potts 1. John Michael Potts Stephen Potts Geoffrey Potts Matthew Potts

(m. 1939) (m) Jane Calvert Potts (m) Heather Potts

(m) Marilyn Potts Allison Potts (m) Lynda Boyko Ariel Potts 2. Maureen Potts Thompson 3. Murray Potts Laura Potts Deborah Potts Adam Potts 4. Nancy Potts Moore Jennifer Claremont Jason Claremont Christian Claremont Kelley Claremont Daniel Claremont

5. Christopher Potts

(m) James Thompson (m) Agnes Ugolini Potts

(m) Frank Claremont

(m) James Moore Jason Moore Amanda Moore (Mandy) (m) Eileen Stuart Potts Ian Potts (m) Deborah McMahon Potts J.R.Potts

I have included only the first three generations of family, as these were the people who knew

CHAPTER ONE BEGINNINGS

T he District Municipality of Muskoka, Ontario, Canada is located just two hours north of the city of Toronto, Canada’s financial center, and encomes some 2,500 square miles of rugged natural beauty. It is really only a small portion of that once deeply forested land that stretches from the NE United States into Ontario and Quebec, Canada. From the windswept shores of Georgian Bay in the west to the wilderness of Algonquin Park far to the east, Muskoka’s beauty is unmatched anywhere in the world. Known for its hundreds of crystal blue lakes, Muskoka has become, over the years, a wonderland for the summer vacationer. In addition to its attractions as a playground, its natural landscaping of pine, birch and maple trees is a thing of beauty and wonder. The current district of Muskoka is comprised of six municipalities: Georgian Bay, The Muskoka Lakes, and the towns of Huntsville, Gravenhurst, Beaumaris and Haliburton. Of the over 1,000 lakes that dot the area, the three largest are Lake Muskoka, Lake Rosseau and Lake Joseph. The lakes were named after their surveyor, a man by the name of Joseph Rosseau. The lakes run in a string along the western edge of Georgian Bay stretching some 50 kilometers from Parry Sound in the north to Gravenhurst at its southern edge. Lake Muskoka is the southernmost lake and is connected to its northern neighbor, Lake Rosseau, by a small lock system which controls the levels of water in the two lakes. Lake Joseph flows freely into Lake Rosseau to its south. The three lakes are self- contained in that they are the biggest, and they are connected to each other but not to the larger Trent system that leads to Lake Ontario. Historically occupied by Indian tribes, specifically the Algonquins and the Iroquois, the demographics of Muskoka began to change in the mid 1800’s. The Ontario government began granting blocks of 100-200 acres to all takers, hoping to encourage them to settle and work the land. Until now, little had gone on except trapping. The government wanted to expand the use of the land beyond this single industry and to encourage farming. They promised these plots

of land, some as large as 200 acres, to potential farmers as long as they cultivated 15 acres. But no one told the farmers about the condition of the land they were about to cultivate. Muskoka was, and still is, covered with a dense forest of pine and maple and birch. The root systems were heavily entangled and it took a gargantuan effort to dig them out. Once the trees were felled and the Medusa-like roots removed, the farmers discovered huge rocks that had to be dug and then wedged out of the thin layers of dirt and clay underneath. The farmers quickly realized the clay dirt was totally unsuitable for growing crops, rocks or no rocks, and despite a valiant effort, the harshness of the winters together with the almost impossible task of removing those huge boulders to get at the thin layer of dirt on top of granite bedrock was just too much. The landscape is still riddled with piles of rocks left behind by the woebegone farmers. In the meantime, the logging industry had begun. The riches of the Canadian forests were there for the asking. All the beginning lumber industry needed was transportation. It came to them when Lord Alexander Cockburn introduced the steamship to the sawmills at Lake Muskoka in the 1860’s. It was now possible for the newly founded lumber companies to ship their lumber throughout Lake Muskoka, specifically to Gravenhurst. Then, as the logging people brought tourists with them, the farmers instantly had an opportunity dumped in their laps. These tourists needed a place to stay, so many of the disappointed farmers converted their homes to boarding houses and hotels. The wealthier wanted something better, which gave rise to the era of the luxurious tourist lodges: Rosseau, The Royal Muskoka, Windemere, Beaumaris, and Cleveland House. They were all built near the logging industry which they depended on for supplies and construction labor. The more independently wealthy summer residents built huge rambling houses near these lodges, large enough for servants and complete with a boat house or two. They had few amenities, usually no central heat or running water, but they had a distinctive charm of their own. These original old Muskoka cottages can still be seen, along with the nearby lodges, scattered along the shores of all three Muskoka lakes. At first the summer cottagers used only rowboats and canoes on the lakes, but with the coming of powered engines, they had the means to travel some distance

from the lumber industry, and even out to the islands that dot the three lakes. Some of the early personal motor boats were made of polished mahogany, sported gold fixtures, and were long and unseaworthy—beautiful but totally unsuitable for boating in the Muskoka lakes. In the early part of the 1900’s, another and more compelling use of the land began to emerge as the recreational hunter and fisherman found a nirvana in Muskoka’s wilderness. They could be found in the more remote areas of Muskoka, where wild game was still abundant. Many built themselves small cabins as roughshod shelters against the elements while they hunted in the fall season, Then, finally, starting in the mid- twentieth century, Muskoka witnessed another significant turn in demographics as the ordinary citizen from the Toronto Metropolitan area discovered Muskoka, along with the Districts of Haliburton, Simcoe, and Georgian Bay, and began buying up lakefront property for their modest summer cottages. With the growing affordability of the car and the demand for better roads, a cottage in Muskoka was now within the reach of the middle classes. The invention of fiberglas also made boats affordable and opened up summer leisure activities to the same group of summer residents. Boats were a necessity if you bought land on an island, a common phenomenon on the Muskoka lakes. These second homes, vacation residences if you will, were primitive at first with no plumbing, electricity or running water. They were not insulated and often the only source of heat was a wooden or propane stove that did little more than take off the chill. They were summer residences only. Their occupants expected to rough it at the cabin, or the camp. They enjoyed a lifestyle not at all that far removed from actual outdoor camping, even pioneer life. From the very beginning, these Muskoka cottagers were fiercely loyal to their settlements and to the lakes where they spent their summers. The Muskoka Lakes Association was formed early on to protect the lakes and the land from abuse. This group has been a powerful watchdog on matters such as lake pollution, the size and placement of septic tanks, the kinds of boats allowed on the lakes, the burning of fires. But times change. In recent years, the wealthy real estate denizens in Southern

Ontario have turned Muskoka into something of a wealthy man’s playground. Some of the new summer homes are huge and lavish, some tasteful, some less so. The major difference between now and then is the price tag. If you want to buy one of these dark brown cottages of yesteryear, and they still exist, you are looking at a million dollars or more. In 1963, my father’s “White Wave” cost him $5,000 and about the same for the land. He sold it in 1991 for $700,000.00. Recently, various other commercial enterprises have attempted to open up the Muskoka Lakes by dredging the Moon River between Georgian Bay and Bala on Lake Muskoka. This dredging would bring larger cruisers into the lakes with their resulting pollution. It would also allow zebra mussels into the lakes, a disaster which so far has not yet happened. Up until now, The Muskoka Lakes Association has been successful in stopping the dredging of the Moon River, but the fight is not over yet.* One year, someone began hiring out house boats, which brought the people of Muskoka together in a herculean fight. The renters not only partied all night, they also dumped their grey water into the lakes. All of the marinas banded together and refused to sell them gas. They quickly pulled their boats to another location the following year. One of the great advantages of living in the Toronto area is the closeness to this glorious vacationland. Most of the lakes are within a two to three hour drive from the city of Toronto; consequently, just about everyone heads north on Friday evening during the summer. The proximity of this wonderful vacationland to a major metropolitan city is unique in North America, if not the world, and the citizens of the Toronto area were only recently discovering this treasure just to the north of them. My mother and father were in the forefront of this annual summertime exodus of the middle classes from Toronto to the cottage country. Starting in the early 1950’s, they owned a succession of cottages in each of the above named districts north of Toronto, in addition to their Toronto home. My childhood memories are filled with the details of our weekend migrations to the cottage. We faced anywhere from a two to a four hour drive, heavy traffic, and roads that diminished in quality the closer we got. We started out on freeways as we left Toronto, which fairly soon gave way to two lane asphalt, to gravel and finally to a mud lane with two tire ruts and grass in the middle.

We packed the car to the top of the windows with groceries, and bags, and my three siblings (a fourth was to come along later), along with a cat or two, a budgie bird in its cage, and often my Grandmother who smoked in the back seat and drove my father nuts. In the spring and fall we went up for weekends, but in July and August we stayed for two glorious months. Apart from his two weeks of vacation, my father commuted every weekend. I well those car rides. The car had only four side windows, and since two of them were in the front seat where my mother and father had adult rights, and my baby sister usually rode with mother, that left the two back windows for three of us, my two brothers and me. My brother Murray got car sick, so that usually got him a window. I thought he was making it up but didn’t want to test my hypothesis and make him sit in the middle where he could throw up all over the three of us. So that left Michael and I sharing the last window. We would play all sorts of games, naming animals we saw in the farmlands near Toronto, naming the makes of cars coming in the opposite direction, I Spy, anything to make the long boring drive more endurable. My father had a restless streak in him. He could never settle in one home for longer than a couple of years, and the same was true of his cottages. I cottages on Lake Simcoe, just north of Toronto, where we had a one room cabin, and one on Lake St.George, in the Orillia area, which was a step above the Lake Simcoe cabin, but not by much. The Cottage on Lake St.George had no electricity or running water. We cooked on an old iron wood stove, and had to get our water from a hand pump about a quarter of a mile down the road. We (my older brother and I) had to haul it back, a bucket at a time. I learned about slop pails and outdoor privies, and how to catch and clean sunfish at Lake St. George. But we were only renting this cottage, so my father began looking north and east, to Haliburton country, more specifically, to Lake Haliburton. It was a long drive from Toronto, four hours, which often turned into a 6 hour drive on long weekends when the traffic backed up. The cottages were new, and had indoor facilities, but were still primitive by city standards. As beautiful as Haliburton country was, the long four hour drive began to wear. So my father sold this cottage in the very early 1960’s and began a two year search for another, closer to the city. They had decided to buy a boat and cruise the many lakes and lake systems

around the Toronto area until they found where they wanted to spend their summers. They bought an 18 foot Grew named Burma, powered by a 75 hp outboard motor. It had a wooden hull, finished wood trim and interiors, and a bright blue canvas top. But the boat’s neutral gear did not work. Boats do not have brakes. You stop them by throttling down, coasting in neutral, and then pushing quickly into reverse as you nudge into the dock, then into neutral again. Since Burma did not have a neutral gear, you had to stop the boat by turning off the engine and then maneuvering the boat into docking position. Once you were in the right position, you quickly had to start the engine again, and push the gears into reverse which was supposed to stop the forward momentum of the boat. All of these actions demanded skill and an exquisite sense of timing. You also needed a good dock crew. We smashed into many a dock before we finally sold that ornery boat. It was my brother, Michael, who discovered Muskoka. In the fall of 1962, still a carefree bachelor, he played in a small band with several other single young men around the Toronto area during his off work hours. He happened to book a gig at a Lodge on Lake Rosseau in late August. After the gig, the band was taken to a cottage further up the Lake where they spent the night. Michael was overwhelmed by the richness of the world of boating at night and the daytime cottage life in Muskoka. He told Mom and Dad they needed to check it out, which they did, a few weeks later. It was mid - October, Indian summer, and the weather was beautiful. The warm lazy days were typical of fall weather in southern Ontario. They belied the harsh winter that was just around the corner. The fall colors were at their best so Mother and Dad decided to drive up to this Muskoka that Michael had so raved about, and to check it out. They hooked the boat up to the car and drove up Highway 400 then Highway 69 looking for the government dock in Foot’s Bay on Lake Joseph. They headed for Lake Joseph because Foot’s Bay had a good launching ramp, it was convenient to the highway, and was well maintained, so said my father’s Guide to Government Services. They needed a ramp to get the boat in the water. Foot’s Bay was a small outpost, little more than a way station for cottagers. You turned off Highway 69 and took the dirt road immediately to the left, down a steep hill and there was the Foot’s Bay settlement, on the edge of the waters of Lake Joseph. It consisted of two fairly large concrete docks, a boat ramp, a

grocery store, several privately owned wooden docks, and a gas pump, a Post Office, storage sheds, and some parking spaces. The cottagers who lived on islands parked their boats and cars at the Foot’s Bay facilities. The entire show was run by Earl and Frank McKnight who lived in the area, including the government docks and the Post Office. The McKnights’s also did hauling for the cottagers and contracting work, such as building docks and Tom, Earl’s son, sold real estate on the lakes in the area. Once on the water, Mother and Dad took their time exploring the lake and its magnificent scenery and many islands. Lake Joseph is about 10 miles long, and 4-5 miles wide. It is dotted with islands, the legacy of the ancient glacier’s work centuries ago. The depth of the water varies, from one to two feet in areas between islands, to 308 feet at the north end of the lake, its maximum depth. One has to be careful about shoals that suddenly loom up just below the surface of the water. They are carefully marked, as are the channels between islands, but serious accidents have, and still can, happen. In those days, Lake Joseph was thinly populated; Mother and Dad did not come across any other boats on the water or any sign of a human being in the few scattered cottages they could see behind the trees. They were enraptured by the utter beauty of the fall colors against the harsh rocky cliffs along the shoreline and the warm day, and the silence. They took their time exploring. When they reached the top of Lake Joseph, they reluctantly turned to head back to Foot’s Bay. It was getting late, close to sundown, and the weather had turned cold. Black clouds were accumulating, and the air smelled of snow, so they had to hustle. Then they saw it. An island, that looked like a ship, oval shaped with a high ridge in the center, loomed about a mile in the distance. It was about a mile and a half long, about a half a mile wide, and appeared mostly uninhabited, except for a boathouse/bunkhouse combination at the far end, and another small cottage in a bay close to it. The front end was completely uninhabited, and offered the most exquisite view of the north end of Lake Joseph. They slowed down and cruised by the northern tip of the island several times, looking for a place to pull in the boat. They finally found a small bay to their left. My father pulled in as far as he dared, then turned off the engine and used the paddle to pole themselves in to the shallow water.

They got out, secured the boat to the branch of a pine tree that hung over the lake, climbed up the rocks that lined the shore and walked along the two sides of the point, most of which was sheer granite rock. A shallow layer of dirt appeared several hundred feet back from the water’s edge and ran for another several hundred feet before stopping abruptly at a rock wall. Standing on the tip of that island, facing north, was like standing on the front deck of an ocean liner, the water slipping by on both sides. After a few minutes spent in awestruck wonder at the beauty of their surroundings, Mother and Dad got back into the boat and drove to the other end of the island, to the two dwellings they had seen earlier. They pulled up at the dock attached to the boathouse at the water’s edge. There was a light in a building further up a long path behind the boathouse, so they walked up the path to the building. Spike Kearns answered their knock. Spike was a garrulous person, in his early 50’s, open and hospitable. My father announced that he was interested in the north end of the island, whereupon Spike immediately invited them in. It turned out that his wife owned most of the island, but Spike made all the decisions. He said yes, there were lots for sale, including the tip of the island that Mother and Dad had so fallen for. Apparently, the “Crown” had deeded the entire island to Lord Badgerow in the mid 1800’s who subsequently had sold parts of it to the Kearns family. The island was named Badgerow. It was located about 2 miles off shore from the government dock at Foot’s Bay, and the only way to access the island was obviously by boat. I am not sure if the full ramifications of that simple fact occurred to Mother and Dad at the time, or if it did, whether they considered it an adventure or a hindrance. Anyway, by the end of the week, they had written up an offer of $5,000 for the lot at the north end of Badgerow, with optional rights at $5000 on the second lot adjacent to it, good for five years. The deal went through, and so began our life at The Cottage. Mother and Dad never did exercise their option rights. When they became due, Dad did not have the money to buy it and had to let it go back to Spike Kearns. He gave the land to his son, Barry Kearns, who built on it some years later. Mother and Dad came up to the island for the first time that spring and discovered the new Kearns cottage just south of them on the west side. They

were devastated, but were helpless to stop the building. Spike Kearns’ wife was most unhappy that her husband sold the north tip of the island to the Potts family. She loved that piece of land and dreamed of building on it someday herself. But she was crippled by a stroke and in a wheelchair, helpless to do anything about the situation. She died one day, not long after, sitting on her front porch in a deck chair gazing out over her beloved Muskoka. We named the cottage White Wave. The name came from my sister Nancy’s daughter, Jennifer. She was born with multiple birth defects and could not speak well. She was fascinated by the water at Lake Joseph and one windy day pointed to the whitecaps and called out, “White Wave.” The name, however, did not stick. No matter how hard my mother tried. We referred to the cottage as simply The Cottage, The Island or Badgerow.

* My thanks to the Muskoka TouristAssociation for much of the above information found on their website.

CHAPTER TWO BADGEROW/WHITE WAVE

M y father was born in Montreal, Quebec, and could never settle in one place for long. His parents died when he was still a child, and, as was customary at the time, he was sent to an orphanage run by the Grey Sisters of Quebec. After his time in the orphanage was up, he went to a boy’s home for a couple of years where he studied business skills, mainly typing. There, he took a job as an office boy with McGee and Company, an insurance business and then became a clerk in the marine division. He moved to Toronto, Ontario in the late 1930’s and with a combination of innate business know how and extraordinary intelligence, he rose through the ranks until one day he became President and CEO of the largest marine insurance company in the United States: Marine Office of America or MOAC. He married my mother in 1939. My mother was a gentler person, loving and gracious. Although she was brought up in an age when women were socialized to love honor and obey, she eagerly embraced the women’s movement of the 1970’s. She never could, however, go completely against my father’s wishes. As my mother and father set about raising a family (see family tree in foreword), they produced five children, two girls and three boys. Michael, the eldest, was just beginning his career as an engineer. I was second in line and was finishing a Master’s degree in English Literature. I ultimately earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Rhetoric and Discourse Theory, and then moved to El Paso where I taught for close to 30 years at The University of Texas at El Paso. Murray, the third child, opened an insurance agency in Toronto and built his career around this business. Nancy, the fourth sibling worked in sales for most of her business life, and Christopher, the youngest (I was 17 when he was born) ultimately found his niche in office management. When we were all growing up in Toronto, we lived in a succession of houses, moving every two or three years, to a new suburb, a new house, something different and better. Once he found Muskoka, however, my Father stayed there and spent as much time as he could

in a place that was fast becoming the cornerstone of our lives, the cottage. In his business career he moved all over the United States, and once retired he moved back and forth between Florida and Ontario. But his love for Muskoka was always the center of his life. Taking our cue from our father, all five of us siblings arranged our lives so that we could get to the cottage for some time every summer, no matter where we lived. The forward direction of our lives took us along very different paths and at times thousands of miles apart, but we still remained faithful to that one thing that kept us together, the cottage. We returned every summer, certainly because of the beauty of the place, but more important because it was family and home. As long as we could still go there, it kept us in touch with our youth and each other. The cottage years coincide with my father’s advance through the ranks of the insurance business, from his position in the Toronto office of MOAC, to San Francisco, to Dallas, to Wall Street, NYC. My mother moved along with him, distressed at packing up and leaving yet another home, but always loyal. That first year on Badgerow was a modest one. Mother and Dad had agreed that for the first few years, they would simply hold on to the land and picnic on it from time to time. After all, it was an island and they needed to get used to the mechanics of getting to and from their plot of land. But during all that winter, my father read every article he could find about summer cottages, went to every cottage show that came within 50 miles of the City of Toronto, and devoured information on septic systems and gas appliances My mother watched all this activity with grim resignation. She knew their pact of simply holding on to the land and picnicking from time to time was ashes. Not being able to afford real estate had never held my father back in the past and would not do so in the present situation. Now that he owned the land he was determined to live on it, not just picnic. In the Spring of 1963, as soon as the ice went out, Dad arranged for a team of workers to come and construct a cedar prefab he had bought over the winter. He wanted it on the north tip, facing up the length of rocks. It was a beautiful location with a magnificent view, but when we chose the site on a calm sunny spring day, we did not anticipate the whipping a Muskoka storm could unleash. We were very vulnerable sitting perched on those rocks and I often had

nightmares of being blown into the lake. Before they could do much building, however, the workers needed a dock to tie up their barge and a place to unload their materials. So Dad commissioned Frank McKnight from Foot’s Bay to build a dock on the east side of the point. The dock was about 15 feet long and 3 feet wide, flush against the shore where the first shallow bay offered some shelter. This small dock was fine for the job at hand, but totally inadequate for our future needs. It was too small, it was on the wrong side of the island, and it was flush against the shore. We should have built it perpendicular to the shore, facing out towards the north where it could confront the blast of the storms from the north head on. Once the dock was built, and supplies unloaded, the workers turned their attention to the cottage. First came the footings. They cleaned out the debris from the building site and moved rocks and cut down trees, then measured out places for the individual footings, spaced at regular inervals. They drilled holes in the rocks, put reinforcing rods in the holes, built a form around the rods, then poured concrete into the hole. Then they laid the flooring on that first day before they quit and went back to Foot’s Bay. Mother and Dad were on their heels. As soon as the workers left, Mother and Dad, Nancy, Chris and I did indeed “picnic.” We ate our lunch spread out on a blanket on the floor of the cottage that was to be. Michael also had a picnic on the undeveloped land. He took his bride to be, Jane Calvert, and another young couple over to the island several weeks before the workers appeared, and they baptized Badgerow island with sandwiches and Molsons beer. Murray arrived the same week as the builders with a friend. By this time, the builders had pitched tents for the week it would take them to finish putting up the building. While they worked, Murray and his friend barbequed steaks over an open fire. By the end of May, Mother and Dad had their dream cottage. It was basically a cedar prefab, 30’ x 30’, and consisted of three small bedrooms along the back of the building, a large, open living, dining, and kitchen area across the front of the structure, with wall to wall windows facing the lake and a six mile view to the north.

The cottage was built on the point of the island, the back end on stilts, the front end on the rocks where they began to slope down to the lake. On the outside front, they had a large deck built as an extension to the inside living area, a space that proved the best feature of the entire structure. At first the deck had no railing, but we worried about inebriated guests falling off and into the rocks below, so over one weekend, Michael, his friend Bill Milne, and Dad designed and constructed the railing. In the floor plan pictured in the appendix, you can see the three bedrooms across the back. The one on the far left later was made into a bunkroom with an additional bed laid crossways about 4 feet above the two existing beds. A crib was later permanently installed at the bottom of the bed on the right side. The grandchildren loved jumping from the top bunk onto the beds below, until Amah caught them. They reduced many a mattress to a lumpy mass. The kitchen is on the left side of the building. The front and right side of the building was surrounded by a large deck. We later added a screened-in porch/sunroom on the left side, outside the kitchen. The front and right sides of the building were covered with floor to ceiling windows. The construction was not all that professional. The builders did not put in enough footings, or make those they did install big enough. The cottage shook when heavy men walked over the floor and really trembled in thunderstorms. We would later have to shore it up with braces under the flooring. And the roof leaked that very first year, badly enough to stain the inside of the ceiling and walls of that lovely cedar wood. We had a work weekend years later and sanded off the stains, then sealed the wood with urethane. We also had to replace the roofing to stop the leaks and to provide us with some kind of insulation. Also, over the years, we gradually replaced most of the very thin glass in the various windows when it was broken for one reason or another. One winter some animal charged through the glass of one of the large panes of the front window; it shattered leaving shards of glass everywhere in the living room. The animal apparently could not find its way out for a long time because it had broken vases, tipped over chairs, left droppings everywhere. Murray broke another one of the smaller panes of glass in the front window after he had one too many margaritas, did a pirouette and sent his foot flying through the glass.

Gradually, the furniture arrived. Mother and Dad purchased two single beds for each of the two end bedrooms and a set of pine bedsteads that they found in a local furniture shop for the middle, or so-called guest bedroom. They also bought a round pine table, finished to a high gloss, and six chairs in the same shop. That pine set found a permanent place by the huge front window that looked out over that magnificent view, and was still there when they locked up the cottage for the last time 30 years later. In order to furnish the cottage, at first we brought up things that would do. The living room couch is a case in point. It was constructed of redwood, with two seats on either end, the center portion covered over with wood and serving as a permanent side table. Removable plastic cushions, covered with yellow and red flowers, filled in the seating area. The center table section had a round hole in the center, obviously meant for an umbrella. In other words, the piece was meant for the patio, but had become a couch on the cheap, a fact that we continuously pointed out to my father. He scoffed at us. The hole, he said, was put there to hold your drink. For years we brought stuff over onto the island and very little off it. Every time someone made a trip from the government dock at Foot’s Bay over to the island, they came with a boatload of sundry items such as mattresses, chairs, tools, until my mother rebelled and told everyone the cottage was not a repository for all their cast off junk. No more castaways and those that had already made it would be thrown in the garbage dump unless the original owner claimed the item and took it away. The rest of the furniture in the living room came from the city house, maple armchairs and a maple frame couch that took the place of the patio seat in front of the side window, all of which were decent pieces of furniture. She also quickly got rid of mismatched dishes, kitchen cooking utensils, all the stuff that was Toronto left overs. There were many problems with living on an island that we discovered as the days went by that first year, and on top of the list was food. We managed with some odds and ends at the store in Foot’s Bay, but they could only provide so much. We found ourselves doing most of our shopping in the city and the various stores by the highway on the way up. The locals who lived along the northbound highway took full advantage of the cottagers’ weekend migrations by providing roadside stands of home baked pies, fresh corn and other fresh produce. Our mainstay was Mactier.

Mactier was a small town of some 200 souls who earned their living from servicing the cottagers who spent their summers on Lake Joseph. As you drove up Highway 69, the turnoff to Mactier was situated about a half a mile south of the turnoff to Lake Joseph at Foot’s Bay. It was the closest town to the cottages on the mainland and to the cottagers who summered on one of the many islands that dotted the lake. There was nothing glamorous or quaint about Mactier. It was, and still is, an ugly little town. One could find in Mactier, however, the basic needs of cottage living. First on the list was the liquor store. In Ontario, liquor could only be sold in a government controlled store creatively called The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, or the LCBO. We had to stock up for the weekend or for however long we planned to stay. Everyone was responsible for his or her own wine or spirits; no being pure of heart on a Friday evening at the LCBO and then begging a gin and tonic by the lake on Saturday afternoon. You had to carefully assess your needs for the time you would be spending at the cottage. It was no mean feat to get to the LCBO in Mactier and back. Then we had to hit the grocery store for those last minute items, or for a complete shopping if you were staying for some time. When mother spent entire summers at the cottage, she did much of her shopping at the grocery store in Mactier with the occasional jaunt to Parry sound, 20 miles up Highway 69. The selection was not great but it had to do. Besides we didn’t care what we ate as long as it was food. All the swimming and fresh air does that to you. We teased Papa for ing around chocolates to our guests before dinner, to kill their appetites. Mother and Dad worked out a system whereby we all knew when we were responsible for a particular weekend’s shopping and food, and it served us well, for many years. We all contributed to setting the table, doing dishes and to light cleaning of the cottage. Besides the grocery store in Mactier, there was the Catholic Church, a wooden frame building, down the road in the opposite direction of the liquor store and the grocery store. In the early days of the cottage we all attended Mass on Sunday. The congregation was a conglomeration of cottagers and their guests, Indians from a nearby village, natives of Mactier and sundry ersby. The priest also serviced two or three other country churches in the area. It was in those days of the Catholic Church when the priest said mass with his back to us, and recited the liturgy in Latin. The sermons were old-fashioned guilt trip

sermons which I am sure we all tuned out. I know I did. We usually got ice cream cones in town before we headed back to the island, which made the trip more palatable. Of far more importance to us, however, was Boyt’s General Store. It was a relatively large wooden building situated at the end of the main street in town. A wide wooden staircase led to a front porch that spread the entire length of the store. Sales goods could often be found on the porch, hung on racks, in cartons, or in barrels. Inside one could find anything from hardware, to kitchen utensils, Coleman lamps, fuses, light bulbs, umbrellas, rubber boots. Most of the wares were stacked on metal shelves or in barrels, placed strategically around the store, some on sale some not. You never knew what was in a given barrel or whether or not it was even on sale. We had great fun digging in the barrel for more appropriate clothes for our citified friends who arrived dressed for a cruise, not for summer cottage life on the Muskoka Lakes. We bought T shirts, sweat shirts, shoes with rubber soles that did not slip on boat surfaces or on the rocks that made up the shoreline, bathing suits, large bath towels, sunscreen, bug spray, mosquito protection, fishing rods, and bait. Also, in the early days without electricity, one could find galvanized washtubs, scrub boards, oil lamps- the kind with wicks in them. We all loved Boyt’s, especially the children. They particularly loved the candy counter with its lineup of jars full of jelly beans, jujubees, licorice, hard candy, jaw breakers, 25 cents for a bag full. While we were ploughing through all this stuff in the barrels, my father would slip off to the hardware section and rummage through the countless trays of things that he needed for cottage maintenance, things made of exotic metals, twisted into all kinds of tortured shapes and just perfect for god knows what project he had in mind for the cottage. On the way back from Mactier, we ed The Ponderosa, a private home just outside town that must hold the title for the worst of the worst of hoarders. Strewn over the yard was every make and part of cars, part way disassembled, old washtubs, washing machines, abandoned boats, refrigerators, engines, children’s toys, tires, chickens running every which way, yard statues, bird feeders, abandoned and rusted out snowmobiles, farm equipment and garbage and dirt everywhere. It was mind blowing. Mother wanted to go in and ask if

anything was for sale, just so we could all rummage through this stuff, but my father would never let us. Once we met some of the other cottagers and became part of the Muskoka Community, we discovered that the Jesuits had a summer home on the north shore of Lake Joseph. They built a small chapel beside the lake and on Sundays, they began to offer several Masses for the Catholic cottagers. This was a distinct move up the social scale. A cute little chapel on the shores of the lake was a much more charming experience than the dusty Church in Mactier. There were lots and lots of Catholics who summered on Lake joseph, and like us, they had tons of kids. Consequently, the little chapel soon became crowded and dock space was at a for the islanders. The good Jesuits expanded the number of masses they offered each Sunday, but we all outgrew even this accommodation. The crowds brought out the worst in us, not just our family, but the entire Catholic community on the lake. AT 8:45a.m., a good fifteen minutes before the nine a.m. service, the boats started zeroing in on the two small docks in front of the chapel. As soon as the cottagers caught sight of each other, they revved up their engines and raced for the docks. All of our Christian ethics about sharing and giving went out the window as we swooped towards the shore and bullied each other out of the way for that one parking space left at the dock. There were no ice cream shops on the way home. Actually, the Jesuits became a large part of our cottage lives for many years. The young seminarians were sent to Lake Joseph for their vacation and they were the ones who serviced the small chapel, for the most part. I say “for the most part” because there were some older, more responsible of the order always present to keep the young Jesuits-to-be in line. But somehow they missed the Potts’ cottage. The younger of the order didn’t. Water skiing by our cottage one day, the one skiing fell off. We invited them in for a beer, and they stayed. The young Jesuits became a permanent fixture on Badgerow, mooching meals from us, playing Scrabble, swimming with the grandchildren, water skiing, just sitting and talking on the front deck. Finally the oldsters caught on and banned the seminarians from boating to the Potts’ cottage. But the father superior did not

say anything about water skiing to the Potts’ cottage. So they often swung by on water skis and stayed as usual. They were already masters of the Jesuit art of equivocation. For the first years of cottage life, we had few amenities. We had a roof over our heads but not much more. We had no electricity, no telephone, but we did have plumbing. It was primitive, but at least it was plumbing. In those days, the lake was still pristine, and testing by the local government water agency declared it 100% safe for drinking. That meant we could use the water directly from the lake for drinking. But we also needed water for cooking, cleaning, laundry, and for basic hygiene. At first, we carried our water in buckets. We had to go down a steeply sloping rock on one side of the point for about one hundred feet, balance on a rocky ledge at the edge of the water, scoop up a bucket of water, and then carry the bucket back up to the cottage. Dad and Michael built a ramp to make the climb easier, but it was still awkward and a chore, especially in the rain. To deal with this problem, my father and brothers installed a hand pump on the deck beside the back door which led directly into the kitchen, and dropped a hose into the lake off the side of the walkway/ramp. We could then bring in water from the front deck directly into the adjacent kitchen. That pump stayed on the front deck, long after it was replaced by gas and then electric pumps, as a reminder of the early days. When they sold the cottage, they gave the pump to Daniel. When he moved to San Francisco, he gave it to Jason. It has been recently installed in Jason’s deck railing at his house on Lake Simcoe. We now had a source of water coming into the cottage; the next project was to deal with the waste water going out. For the first few months, I seem to recollect the waste water got dumped back in the bushes, but it wasn’t long before my father contracted with a local plumber to install a septic system out in back of the cottage. There was not much dirt there, so they had to dynamite a hole big enough to hold the septic tanks. Hot water was a luxury. It had to be heated on the stove and was reserved for the most important tasks, like doing dishes. The whole thing was outrageously expensive and, as mother pointed out, you couldn’t even see it. But there were other plumbing needs, specifically the bathroom. Undaunted by the limitations of setting up house on the tip of a rocky island, my father was

determined no outhouse. We would have a proper bathroom with flushing toilet; and he had the appropriate appliances installed when the cottage was first built, i.e. a flush toilet, a shower and a sink with faucets. He designed the floor plan so that the bathroom was located at the back of the cottage, beside the row of bedrooms. But how to get water to flush? Simple. Bring it in bucket by bucket, from the hand pump on the front deck, as necessary, and dump it in the toilet bowl. The force of the water would make the toilet flush. A bucket was left in the bathroom for this purpose and was always supposed to be left filled. The waste water was plumbed down to the septic system. The first few weeks we were on the island, the facilities were outside which was a pain, and a double pain at night or when it was raining. A collective cheer went up after the septic system was up and running and we heard the first real flush. But think about it. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to flush it with the bucket of water left in the bathroom, but then fill it for the next person. That meant carrying the bucket from the bathroom, across the living room, through the kitchen and out onto the front deck. Then you had to pump the pail full of water, and lug it back through the same route to the bathroom. All was fine if no one was there, but something of a gauntlet if the cottage was full of smart-mouthed brothers and their friends. We thought of all sorts of ways to avoid this humiliation, using only a half a bucket, pleading sprained ankles. Nancy was given a special when she split open her head in a diving accident. However, the only ever officially sanctioned exception was pregnancy. Michael’s new bride, Jane, wrangled that privilege. If you were pregnant, you did not have to haul your own bucket. But that brought up the tricky question of who was going to do it for you. The problem was ultimately solved when we got in a bona fide water pressure system, several years after the official opening. The center of the island was several hundred feet above water level. When the shape of the island was first carved out of the rock a large cliff had emerged just back of the front end. There was enough low lying land on this front end for our cottage and a backyard area where we built the septic system, and where mother strung a clothes line. Then came the cliff at the back of the lot. My father and brothers cleared a path

up to the top of this cliff, dragged a huge 250 gallon water tank up there, and dug a hose line from the tank to the cottage. Then they installed a gasoline powered water pump connected to another hose line running from the lake to the tank. The pump brought water from the lake to the tank and gravity sent it back to the cottage. Voila, running water. We all gave a collective cheer when the bucket system was finally laid to rest. But it was tenuous. We went through a series of pumps over the years as each one wore out, and the next generation was always bigger and more reliable than its forbearer. A day or two of the old bucket system was enough to get my father to commit the funds to a bigger and better pump. At first, laundry was not a problem. We simply took our dirty clothes back to the city and did the laundry there. However, as we began staying longer than a three day weekend, we simply had to wash clothes and sheets. My mother went to the hardware store in Mactier, the closest town on the mainland, and came home with a galvanized scrub tub and a washboard. The washboard consisted of an 8 ½ x 11 wooden board, 1 inch thick, with ridged metal sides and two feet. We took the tub to the water’s edge filled with dirty clothes. There we dumped the clothes on the rocks and filled the tub with buckets of water and laundry soap. The clothes then went into the soapy water and we used wooden spoons to stir them around. We rubbed the clothes hard over the corrugated sides of the washboard to clean the spots. Then we twisted the water out of the soapy clothes and rinsed them in the lake. Someone had to put on a bathing suit and swim with the clothes in the lake to get them well rinsed. We dumped the soapy water on the rocks, rinsed out the tub in the lake, and filled it with the rinsed and twisted clothes. We then carried this tub to the back of the cottage and proceeded to hang the clothes on the clothesline my mother had strung up for this purpose. It was a great deal of work, and very primitive. Clothes often dried hard if we did not get out all the soap, but they smelled clean, a wonderful smell that one never gets from electric dryers. Of course we would never treat our lake that way now, but back then, we did not know any better. Not only did we struggle with the water system, the first few years of cottage life

were also without electricity or a telephone. There were all kinds of ramifications one does not think of in life without a phone or electricity. First of all, heat. My father installed a Franklin fireplace in the living room that was our only source of heat for many, many years. We all have memories of hauling dead trees that had fallen during the previous season to the back of the cottage where we then chopped them up into fireplace size and stacked them into cords. One Mother’s day we chipped in together and gave my mother a small chain saw; she was delighted. We cut down underbrush and stacked it for kindling. Not one scrap of forest that we cleared went to waste. The cottage was a summer place, and was never meant for the cold Canadian Winters. But the summers could often be chilly as well, and the fireplace was a necessity. The first person up in the morning was responsible for starting the fire and getting the heat going, which only encouraged sloth, now that I think of it. We had a fire going practically every morning. Summers were colder than they are now. I can ice on the front deck well into May and we could never swim past mid- August. Muskoka cottagers now swim well into September. Another problem was the kitchen. How does one cook without electricity? My father had already researched that one. He bought a Coleman stove that ran off tanks of gas. All we had to do was replenish the tanks from time to time. With water and gas in the kitchen, we were well on our way to civilized living. Being without electricity also challenged our need for refrigeration. For the first couple of years we had an icebox, yes an icebox, with chunks of ice that we had to buy in Mactier, and haul over in the boat. The local merchants cut the ice from the lake in big blocks during the winter months and stored them in a shaded barn. They covered the ice blocks with sawdust to keep them from melting well into the summer months. We had to drive to Mactier for the ice, wait while a block was cut to our size (my recollection is that they used a handsaw, then in later years, a chainsaw), then carry it to the car with big ice tongs, drive to the marina at Foot’s Bay where the boat was docked, load the ice into the boat, ride across to the island, carry the block of ice from the boat, up the ramp, and into our kitchen. Stopping in Mactier for ice and going to the liquor store were the last two errands my father always made before hitting the dock at Foot’s Bay and getting

the boat out for the trip to the island.Getting ice was obviously not an easy task, so ice was a precious commodity. The children, i.e. Nancy and Chris, were not allowed to chip at it to suck on shards on particularly hot days. Only the adults were allowed to chip pieces for their evening cocktails. It was a struggle to keep the icebox clean and cool, and our food often spoiled after a day or two. The appliance looked something like a small refrigerator, with the block of ice fitting in the top compartment where the freezer is located on modern refrigerators. A series of tubes and runners collected the melting water and directed it to a pan under the bottom of the box. The ice block did not last much longer than two days, or the weekend; if we stayed any longer, we had to make another trip to the ice man. No electricity also meant no hot water and no dishwasher. We heated a bucket of water on the Coleman stove my father installed in the kitchen and did dishes by hand. We often cooked on the outdoor barbeque that my father and a friend of his built out of Muskoka rocks they dragged up from the lake. My father told us years later that he constructed the base of that barbeque out of poured concrete and coat hangers. He defies anyone to get that barbeque out of there. Unfortunately, they built it too close to the front deck and in the way of the prevailing winds, because every time we used it, the slightest breeze off the lake blew all the smoke across the front deck and into the cottage. No electricity also meant no hot showers. Weekend visits were no problem. We just took our dirty selves back to the city. But longer visits were a problem. When the weather was good, we took care of the problem by jumping into the lake. Bathing was a pleasure on nice days, but when it got cold, or rained, or both, a swim was not all that appealing. We substituted with sponge baths in the one bathroom, using water from “the bucket.” We would have to wait until it warmed up for a more complete bath and a hair shampoo in the lake. I cringe when I think of all that soap and shampoo we poured into the crystal clear lake. I am horrified at how cavalier we were about our precious lake and its delicate eco system. One has to this was the mid 1960’s. Sensitivity to the environment and to ecological damage and destruction was years away. It would take another decade for the cottagers to have an observable negative impact on the pristine quality of the water and for local legislators to react. And it took about the same length of time for all of us to learn about pollution and acid rain, and to begin to see signs of the abuse cottagers were heaping on our

beloved lake. Now there are strict laws and controls about types and maintenance of septic tanks, and garbage control, and filters on gasoline boats. But back in those early days, we were blissfully unaware of the harm we were doing. My mother, however, was way ahead of her time. She insisted we use soap, not harsh detergents as they broke down in to natural components more quickly. Misguided as her theories were, at least she had the insight into the fact that we were doing damage. Finally, no electricity meant no electric lights. For the first season we used candles when we absolutely needed light after sunset, and went to bed when it got dark outside. We soon tired of this medieval arrangement, however; my father, undaunted by the problems of living on this island, went to MacTier and bought a couple of kerosene and Coleman lamps. That gave us enough light to cook by so our meals were no longer dictated by sunup and sunset. It also gave us enough light to play cards in the evening, or various board games. We had no radio, no TV, and no computer games, no internet, no source of entertainment, except each other. We became proficient at every board game ever invented before 1970, and learned all kinds of things about each other’s sportsmanship. Such masters did we become at living without electricity that we did not even notice it when a severe summer storm knocked out power to most of the cottages on the lake. We only found out about the outage when we went to get our mail at Foot’s Bay and heard everyone complaining about life with no power. Perhaps the biggest deprivation in these early days, however, was not having a telephone. Living on an island, we had to drive to Foot’s Bay and take the boat over to Badgerow. The initial person or persons who arrived at Foot’s Bay had it made; the boat would be docked, ready and waiting, at one of the side slips that we rented for the season. But the next person to arrive had a problem. The boat, and transportation, was now over at the cottage. These were the days when cell phones were only a device on Star Trek. Everyone was supposed to announce his or her arrival time well in advance, preferably in the city the week before coming up. When the appointed time arrived, Mother and Dad would send Nancy over to the dock at Foot’s Bay to pick up the arrivals and/or wait for

them if necessary. Nancy did not mind. She loved hanging out at the mainland dock and flirting with all the young men who were arriving for the weekend. Arrival times were not as exact as one would wish. They were frustrated by city to cottage weekend traffic, and other variables. Nancy was given instructions to wait for an hour then return to the island. Late comers were on their own. We got real good at begging rides from other boaters as they left the dock, or talking someone into dropping by our dock and sending a message that we were waiting in Foot’s Bay, or finally taking the water taxi when really stuck. The biggest fiasco over the telephone, however, was during Stephen’s birth, Michael’s oldest child, and the first grandchild. He was born at St Joseph’s hospital in Toronto on July 3rd, 1964. He was the first of the new generation, so excitement was rampant. Mother, Dad, Chris and I and Nancy were at the cottage. We knew his birth was imminent; Jane, Michael’s wife, had gone into labor before we left the city. But Stephen took his own good time coming into the world, some 31 hours. It seems to me we boated back and forth between Foot’s Bay and the public telephone on the dock every hour during that 31 hours. We could not stay there and wait as the mosquitoes were of Biblical proportions, and got worse with twilight. We got bitten beyond enduring. They came in dense clouds, so thick you could not see through them. They bit everywhere, our neck, and legs, arms, crawled into our hair, our ears. It was simply awful. We put on all the clothes we could stand, but they still did us in. Finally, the call we had been waiting for came through. Stephen had finally been born and everyone was exhausted. We went back to the cottage, had a drink, and went to bed. The next morning, Dad drove over to the dock to call Michael to see how things were progressing and got a shock. Michael had fallen asleep after the birth and the hospital had tried and tried to him, but he slept through the ringing telephone. Something was wrong with Stephen’s breathing, seriously wrong. Finally Michael heard the telephone, and got the news. He was dressing before going to the hospital when Dad called him from Foot’s Bay. He told Michael to hang on, they were on their way. Both Mother and Dad arrived at St Joseph’s hospital in Toronto two hours later and loaded Stephen, in his incubator, and a nurse, into their station wagon.

Just to be on the safe side, the doctors at St.Joseph’s wanted the baby to go to Sick Children’s Hospital, a world renowned hospital for children in downtown Toronto. Stephen pulled through fine, and several days later came home. Then, ten days after that, he was at the cottage cooing and blissfully happy with his life. Michael rigged up some rope and hung his bassinet up in a tree beside the front deck. I clearly the baby sleeping in the trees. There was something ethereal about it all. It is no wonder Stephen developed a lifetime love for Muskoka. I well some visitors coming early on and having to cope with our primitive facilities. Chris was in the first grade at St. Gregory’s Catholic school located in the suburb of Islington in the west end of Toronto. It was run by the nuns of Our Lady’s Missionaries. This order of nuns was most progressive, according to the standards of the day. They had formed to do missionary work, although for the time being, they were ing themselves by teaching in the Toronto area Catholic schools. The original nuns got their training with the sisters of St. Joseph, an old and respected order of Toronto nuns. Once out on their own, Our Lady’s Missionaries abandoned the strict enclosure rules they had been taught was appropriate for nuns and often went visiting or invited guests into their convent. They also designed their habits to make them more modern, without all the yards and yards of black serge and elaborate headdresses. Their dress looked more like a school uniform than a nun’s habit. Chris, ever talkative and with no inhibitions whatsoever, was telling one of the nuns one day about our new cottage, and when the nun showed interest, he invited them all up for a visit. They readily accepted So one cold, rainy, windy Saturday morning we got a message from Foot’s Bay that four nuns were waiting for a ride over to Badgerow. Michael went over to the dock to pick them up. Mother was ready for them, having heard about the impending visit from Chris, and had scrubbed the cottage from end to end. But she could not control the weather. The wind had stirred up the surface of the lake into huge waves; the boat bucked up and down as it struggled its way forward, spraying the nuns with each lurch. And it was pouring rain. The nuns were soaked through by the time they got across the open water outside of Foot’s Bay and into the relative shelter

of the age way between our island and the one next to us. I heard them coming, laughing and squealing as the boat struggled to make headway through those angry waves. Our island is beautiful on a nice day, and usually we spent our time outdoors, swimming, reading, whatever. But when it rained, the cottage got smaller and smaller by the hour. What to do with four wet nuns in a small cottage in the pouring rain. They were good sports. They went outside even though it was raining, and explored the island; they enjoyed their hamburgers cooked inside, they read and played Scrabble with us, and they cheerfully carried their water buckets to and from the bathroom. I later heard that Our Lady’s Missionaries had disbanded, too liberal for the times, and so victims of the exodus from organized religious groups that the Catholic Church witnessed as the 1960’s progressed. But that day they spent with us was memorable. They were fun, and in high spirits and were really good sports to come in spite of the weather and the rather dubious invitation. Another set of early visitors came for a wedding party my parents threw for my best friend, Nonie Prendergast, later Nonie Wait. We invited some 30 people, which took a great deal of planning. Not only were the logistics of shopping and feeding all these people a huge undertaking, but getting them all from the dock at Foot’s Bay over to Badgerow and then back took some doing. I don’t who was appointed ferry-person but he or she must have gone back and forth between Badgerow Island and Foot’s Bay for the entire day. Another infamous gathering at the Potts’ cottage was an afternoon that has come to be known as The Battle at Potts Island. Michael had invited a big crowd of his friends on a weekend when none of the rest of us could be at the cottage for sundry reasons. He invited friends from work, mainly, including his best friend and frequent guest at the cottage, Bill Milne. Indeed, Bill was one of the instigators of this piece of utter nonsense. They got bored lying around in the sun and someone came up with the bright idea of staging a mock battle for control of the island. They armed themselves with whatever implements they could find, garbage can lids for shields, sticks and barbeque implements, and paddles for bayonets and clubs, goggles from

their snorkeling equipment. They divided themselves into two teams and stood in front of the cottage, facing each other on top of the row of rocks, the dip in the rocks between them. Once they had consumed enough Molson’s Ale to get in the swing of things, they had at it. On the command of “Charge!” Bill Milne, who had assumed the role of Lord of Misrule, led the assault. The two Teams went after each other, running up and down the rocks, down the side of the island, pushing each other into the lake hiding behind trees and ambushing each other with whoops and arms flailing. They continued this wild dance of nonsense until they were exhausted, falling on the rocks to rest or slipping into the cold waters of the lake to shock themselves back to reality. Whether they realized it or not, they were acting out a fundamental need in human nature to throw off the social constraints and rules of daily life in the city, and to escape to the countryside, to the world of nature and its revitalizing effects. It was the pastoral view of life they were acting out, where the normal social divisions and rules of a class society are turned topsy turvey, just for a time, and where chaos reigns supreme and the participants are alowed to let off steam in an unstructured world. The Saturnalia gatherings of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and the Morris Dances of the medieval world are both expressions of this need, as are the ritualized chaos of the modern world’s Spring Break and New Orleans’ Mardi Gras. The leader of this fantastic behavior was named The Lord of Misrule and it was he who led this dance of freedom and gave the others permission to do likewise. This need is perhaps expressed on a wider and more modern scale to explain the weekly migrations of thousands of people from the city of Toronto. The cottage has become a treasured place in our memories. We retreated to our own corner of paradise, reveled in the magnificence of nature and then returned to the work-aday world more vital and whole as a result of the pastoral/country experience. This phenomenon perhaps explains why my immediate family is so close. We got to know each other in close quarters and bonded more closely than other families because of the experience of our cottage and its healing effects. Those early days, so long ago were difficult in many ways, and we were not shy

about complaining. But when we look back, it is the late 60’s and early 70’s that we with the greatest nostalgia. And as time went by the cottage became more than just a building. Indeed, it focused our lives in such a way that we have all built the center of ourselves there, our unique identity as a member of the Potts family.

CHAPTER THREE MUSKOKA KIDS

M ichael, Murray and I were just entering adulthood and scrambling to find our way in the world. The cottage provided a ive haven of retreat when it got too much. Nancy was a teenager and struggling with late adolescence, trying to make the break from parents. Finally there was Chris. He was the only one among us who grew up with Muskoka, and, consequently, is the only one among us who can truly claim the title of “Muskoka Kid.” Chris was still a very small child when we first got the cottage. He was content to stay at home near his mother. But as he grew in age, he became bored with the socially limited opportunities at the cottage. He would badger the rest of us to play cards, and Risk and any other board game he could master. He soon outgrew what we had to offer at the island. We had two cats, and when particularly bored, Chris would tease them by rolling acorns off the diving rock. The cats would chase the acorns and only put on the brakes at the very last second as they realized the rock fell off in a sharp cliff 10 feet straight down into the water. Chris had an unusual position in the family. He was far younger than the rest of us, still a child really, and was not included in adult activities. On the other hand, he was too old to find any companionship among the babies that began appearing a few years after the cottage opened. Dad bought him a small aluminum flat front boat that Chris learned to row and from this simple craft, he learned about water and water safety. He spent much time amusing himself in that boat. He would row or paddle out to the stake just off the island which marked a dangerous shoal, tie up the boat, and fish for hours. The boat blew off the dock one day in a storm and was rendered useless on the rocks. We called it Janey’s boat, after Michael’s wife, why I don’t know. When Chris was about seven or eight years old, Dad replaced the broken boat with a 12 foot aluminum Springbok and a 7 ½ hp Mercury outboard motor. We

named it The Jansey II. It fast became Chris’ boat. Indeed, the day he got that boat with its little motor, he was gone. He took off from the island immediately and did not return for hours. He quickly fell into a kind of pattern. As soon as breakfast was over and we all did the dishes, he would take off in the boat and return at dinner time. Dad set up s at several marinas around the lake for Chris to charge gas and snacks, which he did, to his heart’s content. He met all kinds of friends around the lake on that boat and soon ed the ranks of the social strata known on the Muskoka Lakes as The Muskoka Kids. The Muskoka kid uniform consisted of three pieces of clothing, a bathing suit, jeans, and a sweat shirt. That took care of just about every contingency. Never, never, did they wear shoes. Muskoka kids knew the lakes and their secret treacheries intimately. They knew the shoals, the shallow sections that suddenly loomed up underneath a boat, the open areas of the lake where the wind blew and where they could often get caught in high waves that were not obvious from between the islands. They knew where and when to catch bass, when it was safe to go out on the lake and when it wasn’t. And they knew just about every cottager on all three lakes, if not personally, at least by name. Because so much of the Muskoka cottage country is made up of islands, most of the commerce and socializing takes place by boat. You go by boat to the grocery store, to the post office, to church, to visit friends. Garbage is collected by boat, building materials are loaded on a barge and brought to the cottagers by way of the lake, and the paper boy comes by lake and throws your paper on the dock (I never saw him miss). Cottages are built facing the lake, not the road. A boat with a motor was Chris’ entrance ticket into the social life of the lake, and he thrived on it. He drove that boat to Port Carling, Bala, Bracebridge, and even to Gravenhurst, some 50 miles away. Friendly by nature, Chris came to know all the cottagers. He also learned every square inch of that lake, and the ading Lake Rosseau like it was his own backyard. He could maneuver the pathways between the islands and the shoals in daylight and in the blackest darkness. He learned to take care of that outboard motor, could fix any problem it offered him. The first friends he made were locals, the permanent residents of the Muskoka area, as opposed to the seasonal cottagers. Ben, who lived in the house at the top of the hill in Foot’s Bay, introduced him to the other locals.

He was particularly friendly with a young boy named Billy. Billy’s family owned about 40 acres across highway 169 from the Foot’s Bay Road. They had a barn with pigs and chickens which fascinated the city born and bred Christopher. Apparently, Billy’s grandmother raised him, but no one ever knew what happened to his parents. The two of them would take their pellet rifles and go hunting whatever moved in the woods. To quote Chris directly:

There was another older friend that I made, Peter Leach. Mom liked Peter but was not so sure about Billy. Billy was your typical yokel with bad teeth, long dirty blond hair, and no shoes. Peter was a little more presentable even if his brother was doing federal time for attempted murder of a police officer. Of course, Mom never knew that.

One day Dad appeared on the dock with a jazzy little burnt yellow 15’Cutter boat with a 50 hp Mercury. It was originally intended as a second family boat, to give us some kind of transportation if anything happened to the main boat. It soon became Chris’ boat however, in all but the official title. It looked like a sports car, close to the water, fast, cool. Chris was blissfully happy but he was the only one. That boat became a source of serious tension. Mother was annoyed that Dad bought it without telling her. Further, it was far too extravagant for Chris to have his own boat when nobody else ever had such a privilege. And then there was the question, was he old enough to be responsible for such a small boat with such a powerful engine? He recounts an incident that I am sure had Mother and Dad known about it at the time, he would have been grounded for life, if not for all eternity:

I being in the Indian River one rainy day coming back from Bala. We had just ed the Lady Muskoka, a 50 ton refurbished steam ship that now served as a tour boat. It was full of tourists that morning as we cut in front of her, and immediately ran out of gas. There was no way that this 80 foot long, 50 ton ship could have stopped. I had 2 fuel tanks but had to change by manually

switching the fuel lines at the motor. Then you had to squeeze the ball to refill the carburetor and restart the engine. The Captain of the Lady Muskoka was leaning on the air horns and had her in full reverse. I got the engine refired and got it into gear with 5 or 10 feet to spare.

I think all of us were slightly annoyed over that little boat. Chris did indeed lead a more privileged life than any of us had enjoyed, or so we thought. He was brought up virtually as an only child and in a time of their lives when my parents no longer had to scrimp and save their pennies. He had a huge allowance by our standards, went out to restaurants in the motel by himself when they were traveling, flew to Hawaii with them. In reaction to our grumbling, Chris decided to show us. He went to the hardware store and bought some letter decals that spelled out My Boat, and attached them to the back transom. Then he installed his stereo equipment in that boat and became cool man on the lake. It is amusing now, but at the time, like Queen Victoria, we were not amused. Of all the Potts clan, Chris spent the most time at the cottage. He was very good at finding things to amuse himself, particularly after he began to boat by himself. He made friends all over the three lakes, went fishing with them, took picnics to far away islands, and one day asked to camp overnight on one of the deserted islands with three of his friends. That night the skies lit up with one of the most fantastic displays of Northern Lights any of us had ever seen. Great shards of light shot across the sky, crisscrossing pink and blue, and shimmering silver. We had English guests who were asleep in the cabin, jet lagged from their flight across the ocean. The husband was immigrating to Canada for a job Dad had for him. That day they took a plane to Montreal, then after a long wait in Montreal, they boarded another plane to Toronto. Once in Toronto, they endured a further two and a half hour drive to Muskoka. The final leg was a boat ride to Badgerow. They had gone right to bed. We couldn’t stand it, and went and got them out of bed. They simply had to see this rare display of Nature’s power and magnificence. The next morning, we heard the engine on the small boat (Christopher’s Boat!) at the dock as he returned with his friends. He was wideeyed and in awe as he asked if we had seen the lights that past evening. It was about this time that the moon landing was to occur. Chris and I were alone at the cottage and I desperately wanted Chris to see this historical event. I

wanted to see it as well. We had no television so I took Chris in hand, we climbed in the boat and drove down the island to the Kearns’ cottage. It was a beautiful night, lots of stars, brilliant against the black night sky, all starkly visible at the lake far removed from city lights. I looked up at the moon and marveled that there were actually men up there. It was an eerie feeling, an event that I would not have missed for the whole world. So I knocked on the door, and Spike Kearns answered. He said of course we could watch the event with them. We went in and watched history in the making. When he got older, Chris and his friend Dave Allen, who lived over by the entrance to the Joe River, started a company called Lake Joe’s Student Power. He had just turned 18 and had graduated from High School. They put up ads at every possible dock on the lake. They got a couple of small jobs like cleaning up piles of brush, fixing a few planks on docks, replacing broken screen doors. Then they got a call from the lady who owns Elsinor Island, the one just east of Badgerow. She wanted to have her entire cottage painted. WOW! This was a big job. The cottage was a two story building, and had to be over 4,000 square feet on the main floor. The two boys quoted her $1,400 for labor only. She would supply all materials. Keep in mind this was in 1975. They got the job and hired a few friends to help. The friends, however, were not quite as adept as Dave and Chris. After cleaning up the second can of brown paint that one friend spilled on the white porch, Chris experienced for the first time the thrill of firing an employee, and a friend. This cottage was over flowing with young college girls. The trim on the second floor bedroom windows was so well painted, remarks Chris that it is probably still holding up. In spite of several special challenges, they completed the job in two weeks. The owners of the cottage were very happy and recommended Chris and Dave to many of their friends on the lake. The phone rang off the hook. Chris and Dave made a great deal of money that summer. Almost immediately after the cottage was born, the grandchildren started to arrive. Stephen Geoff and Matthew represent the first wave of grandchildren. Born in the mid to late 1960’s, they pretty much had the cottage to themselves for the first few years. They probably don’t taking a bath in the galvanized washtub in the middle of the living room floor, or the struggle their mother had to keep them fed and clean with none of the amenities of modern life.

Nor do I suspect they the awful racket they made when cooped up in that small cottage. Individually, the boys were a delight. Together they were little hellions. The peace of Badgerow Island was history while they worked their way through childhood. Stephen was born in 1964. We lavished attention on him because he was the first and a wonder. Stephen’s list of cottage memories include the rush of excitement driving there, counting off the miles with familiar landmarks such as leaving the multi- lane highway and driving up the Highway 400 extension, going over the Moon River bridge, seeing the signs for Mactier, and then, finally, Foot’s Bay. He talks about scanning the lake looking for our boat, and his father complaining about not getting a good parking spot, or gloating if he did. It is interesting, the things children . Usually it is a physical item that focuses memory: Stephen recalls vividly the propane lanterns hung around the living room with their greenish-grey tubing supplying gas; the orange lifejackets that weighed a ton if they got wet; Gramma’s rock chair out on the point of the island; the knot hole on the front deck. One kid would lie down looking through the hole and another would go under the cottage to look for the hole and poke a stick up. That is, until Amah caught them. He re what Papa called work weekends where he (Papa) would line up the projects for the weekend. He would keep a list of them on a small piece of paper in his shirt pocket together with a ball point pen. Wood splitting, a constant, was only fun on reflection. The adults got to use the chain saw, while the children were assigned such menial work as gathering up brush and stacking it for kindling. Stephen re waking up in the morning, still lying in bed and hearing the sound of the small waves hitting the shore, or the peculiar sound the light switches made after we got electricity. And of course Gull Rock and the Diving Rock on our property. Gull Rock was a shoal that had emerged out of the lake eons ago to the south of our island. It was about 500 feet long with sparse vegetation. Somewhere in the distant past the gulls took it over as a rookery. We often circled this shoal to watch the babies come out of their nests and then grow into full sized birds over the summer. The grandchildren were particularly fascinated by the baby gulls as they scrambled over the rocks and hid in the crevices to escape our boat. Geoffrey came along in September of 1965. From his infancy on, he threw up at

the drop of a hat. As he grew older, the mere sight of a car made him turn green. Jane called him “the barf kid.” Far from angelic, Geoffrey was curious and demanding. He was physically darker than Stephen, with a more turbulent personality or, at least to those who did not know him well. In actuality, he proved to be creative and sensitive. He turned out to be the reader in the family and as I later discovered, he could write. I can one afternoon years later, after Geoff had signed up for the Canadian army, he showed up at the island with a couple of his buddies. The first thing he showed them when they bounded up the ramp from the dock and hit the deck was the direction of the sunset. We had made a ritual of taking time out from whatever it was we were doing to sit down on the deck and watch the sunset every evening it was possible since the very inception of the cottage. Apparently this family ritual had made an impression on him. I was flabbergasted. I had no idea he took all that in when he was a child. The two older boys came up to the cottage just about every weekend from their birth until they moved with their mother to London, Ontario. As Stephen put it, “I never felt that I was visiting Grandpa and Grandma’s cottage. I always felt that it was every bit mine as it was everyone else’s.” He also re the stone barbeque, the ramp, the sunsets, the picture window, the rocky shores. Stephen was one of the few grandchildren who continued to come up to the cottage once he reached adulthood. He and Jim Moore and Nancy and later Heather spent many happy times together on Badgerow in the later years. So thoroughly did Muskoka become part of Stephen’s blood, that when he reached adulthood he bought a piece of Muskoka property on a small lake near Huntsville and built his house on it. He works mainly from home, now possible with telecommunications. Four years after Geoff came Matthew, in 1969. He looked much like Stephen, blonde and angelic as well, but gentler somehow. He did not spend nearly as much time at the cottage as did his older brothers, mainly because his mother and father separated in 1972 and divorced in 1976. The first few years were dominated by Stephen and Geoff. They started coming to the cottage as infants, with their parents. My memories of the years 1964 to 1970 are full of baby formulas, diapers, screeching babies, and Jane washing diapers in the lake. There was a great deal of togetherness in that small cottage, so when the babies woke up for their 6 a.m. bottles, or cried with colicky

stomachs, everybody else in the cottage also woke up. And the myth soon developed that Jane was the cause of rain; whenever she was there with the boys, it seems that it rained, and rained, and rained. She was a good sport for the most part, but her patience was sorely tried. She was not as enamored of life in the wilderness as were the rest of us, but in time it grew on her. I think she likes the cottage years in retrospect.

CHAPTER FOUR THE CABIN

E ven with the new regulations where everybody had to help with cooking and housework, it—life at the cottage—was getting too much. Things were getting out of hand. There were simply too many of us. That was when Dad decided we needed a small cabin/bunkroom behind the cottage to take care of the overflow and to take some of the pressure off the main cottage. He picked out a site about 50 yards down the side of the island, past the docks and on top of a raised ledge of rock. It was right on the shoreline and had a wonderful view of the channel between our island and the one next to us, and up the long stretch of the open lake to the north. When Dad went to investigate a building permit, he found out that they would have had to pay more taxes if the cabin was considered a sleeping area. But there were no additional taxes if he wanted to build an icehouse. The antiquated law was in place for people to store their own blocks of ice for the summer. We promptly christened the new site, The Ice House, and to make it official, Dad had the name carved out on a piece of polished pine wood at the local gift shop which he hung over the front door. Dad then bought a prefab building about 12’x12’ and had the pieces delivered to the island. Dad, Michael and Murray put it up, with help from Nancy. She had three girlfriends coming up for a week and wanted the cabin to escape from the adults in the main cottage. They also wanted a place to smoke. The original structure consisted of one room only, and was primitive to say the least. It had walls, a roof, and beds in it, period. At first, only the children stayed there, but gradually, over the years, as rooms and amenities were added, the cabin took on a persona of its own and became an adult retreat. From the very beginning of cottage life, my mother dreamed of a bathtub. She loved soaking in the tub at the end of the day, to relax and unwind. Sometimes she even got in at the beginning of the day to get ready for it. We never did find the time or space for her bathtub in the main cottage, but the cabin was another matter. As the family grew and life in the main cottage became more hectic,

Mother and Dad started staying over in the cabin for longer periods of time. This situation necessitated improvements to the structure, and so a series of expansions began. Chris was in charge of deg the bedroom extension. But he made a mistake in his arithmetic somewhere, and the floor boards did not quite meet the studs underneath. They pinched your feet if you were not wearing shoes, and in typical Potts fashion, rather than fix the problem, we just walked around the offending boards. Also the bedrooms were big enough but there was not much room for a bathroom. They had to squeeze it in between the two bedrooms, which made the room long and narrow. There was just room for a toilet and a sink, no bathtub. The front bedroom faced the lake and it was a lovely room. It was indeed pleasant to wake up to the sound of the waves lapping gently on the rocks just outside your window. And it was even more pleasant to slip into the lake for a morning swim when no one else was around. They added a kitchen area at the back of the cabin, a step down from the main living area. Why a step down is beyond me. Jim Moore had ed the family by the time they began to run electric lines and water pipes to the cabin. His expertise was a great help. They had to run an electric line from the main cottage to the cabin and bury it, not an easy job with such a shallow layer of dirt above the rocks. They also thought about running a water pipe at the same time and burying it in the same trench. Jim Moore even asked Mother if she wanted to lay pipes for hot water while they were digging the trench for the electricity. It made sense. But Mother and Dad said no, that they were managing with just cold water, and in the bad weather, when it was too cold to swim, they used the shower at the main cottage. That sounded like Dad talking. The next year, Mother decided that she would indeed like her bathtub, and could they lay the pipes for hot water? It was not a simple matter. The trench had to be dug up again to add the hot water piping, which meant crawling once again under the cabin with all the creepy crawlies that lived there. They had to install a hot water tank, and add a room for the tub. There was no room for it in the original bathroom. The only place where the added room would be feasible was

beside the kitchen, on the other side of the building. Jim suggested they take out the original bathroom and make it into a storage area and build a complete bathroom off the kitchen, but that got too involved. So the cabin ended up with one bathroom with a toilet and sink on one side, and on the opposite end of the cabin, another room with just a bathtub. Stephen re Grandpa installing the pressure balanced tub faucet for the new tub with only the cold water line hooked up and nothing worked. Papa was not happy and gave up. Jim figured out you needed pressure from both sides, but the hot water lines weren’t quite there yet. So Stephen hooked a temporary line into the hot water side and it worked. Grandma, knowing of Papa’s frustration, saw Stephen complete this task and thought Stephen was a genius. He did not tell her that Jim had told him what the problem was. After the long saga of the bathrooms, they turned to other matters in the cabin. First, the floors. They sanded the wooden floors and finished and sealed them with polyurethane. Then they built a deck and railing to match the ones at the main cottage. One of the later additions was a glass patio door to the left side entrance to open up that side of the cabin. Finally they bought some decent furniture for the living room, a couch and a couple of armchairs. It was most pleasant to sit in the cabin reading and watching the lake. These changes did not happen overnight. Building the cabin was a gradual evolution from 1977 onwards, and its progress is frequently mentioned in the log. Mother and Dad spent more and more time in the cabin over the years, gradually turning it into their private sanctuary. Grandchildren were supposed to leave them alone until after 10 a.m., but they never did. It became a privilege to be invited over for morning tea with Amah and Papa, and when they did get to visit, it was a time of personal bonding for each of the grandchildren. They would sneak in private time with Mother when no one else was around. Mother would make them a simple breakfast, and they always, always, would have tea with her. From the cottage you could see Mother, slipping into the lake for her morning swim, or just sitting on the rocks or the deck in front of the cabin contemplating. Dad would be sitting on the deck, doing his crossword puzzle in the morning, or enjoying his cocktail in the evening. When I came up from Texas, I often took over one of the rooms in the cabin. I was not used to

children, so the thinking went, but the sheer exposure to such numbers of children gave me a crash course in kiddie psychology. I was more used to them than given credit for.

CHAPTER FIVE DANGERS IN MUSKOKA

W e learned very early on about the dangers lurking just below the surface of this Eden. One of the first issues we were forced to address was the old one of a well-designed and well-built dock. The situation with the small dock the builders put in flush with the shoreline was far too inadequate for our needs. It was not safe to dock during any kind of wave action, and the boat was constantly in danger of being smashed up sideways against the boards of the dock. It was not long before my father researched the matter and contracted with a local construction company to build a much larger dock for us on the same side as the original one Frank Mcknight built, reaching out from the shoreline some 15 feet from the original planking. Hopefully, the arm of the dock would break the waves as they came in from the north. They first had to build a couple of cribs of stone underwater and then place the timber on top. It was very expensive as we needed specially treated wood to withstand the cold water and the ice of a Canadian winter. And the lumber had to delivered by barge. It was an expense Mother and Dad had not anticipated, the first of many. We soon learned that it is expensive to maintain a cottage in Muskoka This dock did indeed break some of the wave action, but not all of it. We made do with the one arm of the permanent dock for several years, but in the end we had to add a second arm beside it, with a slip for the boat in the middle. The second arm was added in 1967 to the extended base of the original dock about 10 feet over to the east, making a “u” slip. The boat, or later boats, were protected from the lashing waves that came from the east/west direction, but we still had the problem of wave action coming directly down from the north. The waves would bounce the boat around in the slip and if they were particularly bad, would spill over the back transom threatening to sink the entire boat. That did finally happen in 1968. The evening started out with relatively mild weather. Jane and Michael and their

two babies, Stephen and Geoff, were staying at the cottage for some of Michael’s holidays. As it so often seemed to happen whenever Jane came up to the cottage, it had rained for days. She was getting really fed up and was making noises about going back to the city. Mother wanted Michael to stay, so she suggested the two of them get away from the confines of the cottage and go into Port Carling to the theater. She would take care of the two boys. They decided on a movie in Parry Sound. By the time they left it was raining and windy but the lake was flat. They headed for Gordon Bay, at the top of the lake which was further away than Foot’s Bay, because Michael’s car at Foot’s Bay was low on gas. Mother’s car was at Gordon Bay, which meant a longer trip over the lake and straight north, where the bad weather always came from. Michael took Dad’s new com to chart his course in case it was too dark to trace their route back visually. Christopher’s two local friends, Peter and Jim, were at the cottage. They had come home with Christopher around 7:30 p.m. to drop him off. They planned to leave around 8 p.m. However, the lake was too unsettled for them to attempt to cross it to the mainland. Besides their motor was waterlogged and would not start. Mother insisted they stay the night. As the evening wore on, the wind picked up and the windows started rattling; Mother became more and more nervous. By now the waves were crashing over the dock. She kept running down to the water every few minutes to check on the boats, getting thoroughly soaked each time. Our small aluminum boat that Dad bought for Chris was pounding against the dock, so much so that she had to wake up the boys (they were sleeping in the cabin) to solicit their help to pull it out of the lake onto the shore. They were just in time. The boat was half full of water and was close to sinking. They had to dig out old clothes from the bottom of dresser drawers to get dry. Mother lit one of the gas lanterns and put it on a picnic chair on the rocks as a beacon for Michael. She could not put it on the dock as the waves would have washed it over into the lake immediately. The storm was so bad, however, that the waves lifted the entire chair, lantern and all, into the lake within five minutes. Mother had to lift the chair out of the slip, fearful that Michael would crash into it when he tried to dock. Following is a age from a letter Mother wrote to my father who was in California at the time:

When I stood on the picnic table down there the waves hit me. It is so wild and I am so worried about the kids because they won’t realize how bad it is from Gordon Bay. If they telephone I will tell them to stay in a motel overnight but they won’t realize how bad it is until they are out from Yoho (island further down the lake). We must get good life jackets in that boat and keep them there. I don’t know if there are any in it.

I am glad that tree in front is down. It would never have lasted the night— everything is moving. I wonder if the dock will hold—it moves with the waves they are so bad—it shakes. I am glad the boys are here. There is no way they will sleep until Michael and Jane are back.

They finally spotted the light from the boat coming down the lake just after midnight. Mother had had her face glued to the window from 7:30 on— when she had last seen a light on the lake. No one in their right mind would be out in that weather. They seemed to take forever to come down the lake and the light kept disappearing. Mother and the three boys took three lanterns and stood on the dock to guide them in, but they quickly realized it was next to impossible to land a boat in that slip with the waves boiling and churning. It would be crushed on the rocks immediately. They tried to wave Michael off as he lurched out of the dark on the back of a swell, but he made the decision to take a run at the slip. As he gunned the engine the swell lifted the boat up into the air and then threw it down, plop, into the middle of the slip in a brief moment of calm. In a total miracle, he had made it, safely in the slip. Mother, Chris and the two boys grabbed the boat and began lashing it down with ropes. Michael wanted to take the boat back to Gordon Bay as he could see the boat would not last the night in our slip, but Mother refused to let him go out on the lake again. So they cut down the clothes lines and tied the lines through the beams on the dock. Having been nearly washed off the dock and into the lake several times while

they were attempting to secure the boat, they retreated to the cottage and hoped for the best. To again quote Mother:

About 15 minutes later we were having hot toddies and hot chocolates when someone saw the bow line had broken, already! Peter had some exceptionally heavy line on his boat, so he took it off for us and we used his lines. More soakings. Everyone went to bed after more dry clothes were found, but I couldn’t sleep. The waves were lifting the boat high out of the water and throwing it every which way. I was sure the lines wouldn’t hold. The water was pounding over it.

They later told us they had thought of turning it around in the slip, but decided it was physically impossible. Anyway, mother continues:

I checked about 2 a.m. and realized it was sinking. The stern was down on the dockside, way down. I called Michael—we just stood there and could do nothing. The waves were fantastic and the boat was so heavy with water. It was so sad. Jane was weepy. We just watched it while it keeled over on its side and there it is now

I have been afraid to go to sleep, besides being too keyed up because of this wind. But it is settling down now and the lake seems calmer. Jane feels very sure she would like a cottage on the mainland.

They called the Marina in Gordon Bay the next morning. Bruce Hatherly, the owner, came by later in the day, resurrected the boat from the bottom of the lake and towed it up to Gordon Bay Chris has never forgotten that night. He says the waves were so high, he didn’t know how they were going to get Michael and Jane and the boat safely in the

slip. As he describes it, one minute they were about to be smashed into a thousand pieces, the next they were safely in the slip. He said it was a scary feeling looking at the boat upside down in the water. We learned from that experience that we had to turn the boat around, bow facing north, out of the slip, and it would ride out any storm just fine. The trick was to do it before the storm whipped up. We also fashioned a series of ropes to hold it in the middle of the slip and to prevent it from banging against the sides of the dock with the wave action. But even with all these measures, we still had some bad times when another ring dinger of a storm whipped up the lake and threatened to smash everything we owned and send it hurtling into oblivion. To protect against the really bad storms that came from the north, my father finally went to the lumber yard and ordered lumber and supplies for a small floating raft. He built it and anchored it around the point and on the other side of the island which was more sheltered. It soon became a matter of course to take the boat around and anchor it to the raft in the face of any storm. Several years into cottage life, Nancy’s husband decided to build a dock on the same side of the island as the raft. The wave action was not so intense on that side. He worked hard and was immensely proud of that dock, but he built it too high. The boats slipped under the planking and the bobbing wave action caused them to smack their bows against the underside of the dock. The Potts boys immediately saw the problem with the dock and made fun of its construction for years. The dock on the right side of the island became the focal point of our water experience for the next 25 years. We sunned on it, sat on it in deck chairs to read, swam off it, and dove off it, fished off it, anchored boats to it. One of our favorite times was Sunday morning when the weather was warm and the sun was out. We would all go down to the dock for an early morning swim. Then Mother would make us a breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls and fruit and bring it all down to the picnic table on the back of the dock. We have many pictures of just such Sunday mornings. Those first few years we slowly got used to the hardships of life on an island. From sheer experience we matured from naïve city dwellers to saeasoned Muskokaites. The island seemed so benign on a sunny afternoon that it never occurred to us that danger beckoned around every corner. The rocky shoreline

was beautiful to look at but one mistake and even the fit could slip into the water. When the children started coming, they had to be watched constantly, in case one of them toddled down the ramp and into the lake. One of them did fall into the slip one day but thankfully Michael was there and immediately dove in and rescued the little one. The children had to learn how to swim as soon as they possibly could, to save themselves in case of a mishap. And they always wore life jackets in the boat, or at least were supposed to. The water, however, was an obvious danger. There were other dangers. One evening we were enjoying the balmy weather on the front deck when we heard, far off in the distance, the howling of wolves. It was an eerie sound and somewhat disturbing. We put aside any notions of danger. On a lovely Sunday morning with coffee and sweet rolls on the deck and with all the family milling about none of us felt threatened. After all we did live in civilization even though on an island. What could possibly happen? Then one evening Mother was getting ready to leave for the city She had Romp and Chris with her. It was getting dark and it was hard to see. She ed something back in the cottage that she wanted to take to the city and turned to go back up the ramp. Chris was waiting for her in the boat. That was when she heard Romp, who was with her, emit a deep rumbling growl, a sound she had never heard the dog make before. It was not another dog. That was when she saw the animal. It was huge and black, and had just come from the back area of the cottage where we keep our garbage. It was a black bear that had learned how to swim from island to island to raid people’s garbage. Chris was in the boat. Mother ed him in five seconds. She already had the keys in her hands and she got Romp in the boat and the boat started in a flash. They were out of there in a nano second. We often saw wild life in the years after, but never so up close and personal. Scenes like this were happening more often as the wilderness was becoming more populated. The wild animals quickly learned about this new source of food and took full advantage of it. After this incident, we never left the garbage out again. Not for an instant The water and the wildlife we had to learn about. A bigger problem was learning how to live without hurting ourselves. We had a constant run of accidents, probably stemming from our ignorance of the hazards of living that close to the

wilderness. Nancy started the run by diving off the diving rock on the left side of the point of the island and hitting a rock shelf just below the surface. The point of Badgerow was all rock. On the right and front side, the rocks formed a relatively gentle incline down to the water, but the left side dropped off in a 10 foot cliff that went straight down into fairly deep water. We used it for diving. We all knew the shelf was there, and were careful to avoid it when we went swimming on that side. The details of what happened next are sketchy to this day. Those who buy into the story that Nancy dove straight into the rock of her own volition, call the rock “idiot rock.” Others believe she was pushed. She was swimming with several teenaged girlfriends at the time. The force of the blow probably knocked her out for a few seconds because she re nothing about the actual event. She did, however, split her head open, enough that we had to rush her up the highway to the clinic in Parry Sound where it took 15 stitches to sew her head back together again. My mother held her head together while the doctor stitched, and marveled at her fortitude. “After five children, one gets hardened,” she grimly told him. They wanted to shave Nancy’s head in order to get a better view of the wounded area, but Michael’s wedding was imminent, and she was to be bridesmaid. She did not want to walk down the aisle with a shaved head. The doctor agreed and accommodated her wishes. But she still had a problem. Her head had swelled up to twice its size in reaction to the blow, which looked awful. Thankfully, the swelling went down somewhat before the wedding and she looked semirespectable for the ceremony. She insists she looked gorgeous. Sometime in this initial period, my father cut his leg open with the chain saw, a not uncommon event among cottagers, so reported the doctor in Parry Sound. For a city slicker not used to the heavy physical labor that owning a cottage often demanded, a chainsaw was a dangerous tool. We were working on the woodpile when the saw slipped in his hands and the blade fell on his right leg. He was saved from more serious injury by the thick jeans he was wearing. They became entwined in the teeth of the saw which caused it to jam and stop. Even though it was a deep and nasty cut, Dad refused to go to the clinic in Parry Sound. When we finally talked him into going two days later, the doctor was amazed that the wound had not become infected. When we told him that we used Granny’s recipe for a poultice on the wound, the doctor was most interested and pressed us for details as to the ingredients. In the end, JP required some 12 stitches. He was very, very lucky he did not lose his leg.

One day not too long after, my mother was looking for stones in Pretty Stone Bay, the inlet next to the one where we moored the boats. She was picking her way over the slippery rocks when she lost her balance, and fell, hard, into the water. Apparently, she broke her toe, so said the doctor in Parry Sound for Port Carling. Murray was on the ski patrol at the time and used his elementary medical knowledge to fix it by applying extension and slotting it back in place. But to no avail. The doctor told mother that that was exactly the right thing to do, but Murray was hesitant to be forceful enough and fearful of doing more damage. Michael and his friend Bill Milne, who was a constant visitor in those days, made a chair out of their arms and carried her to the dock, put her in the boat and took her to Parry Sound. By now they were on a first name basis with the doctors at the clinic in Parry Sound. A few years later, after the grandchildren began to arrive, Murray burned himself rather badly. It was a cold morning and Jane, Michael’s wife, asked Murray to light the fire before the kids got out of bed. Murray took a short cut and threw a cup of Naphtha gas onto the logs, intending to soak them prior to lighting. He had, foolishly, done this many times before, so he later told us, and now it caught up with him. There must have been a live coal in one of the logs from the night before because it ignited with a whoosh. The flames travelled up the stream of gas to the cup Murray was holding and burned the right side of his face. Bill Milne grabbed Murray and rolled him up in the braided carpet on the floor. He managed to stomp out the fire, but not before Murray was badly burned. We were at the clinic in Parry Sound in 45 minutes. The doctor announced that he had third degree burns on his hands and face. The skin on his face was already peeling off and would result in some rather serious facial scaring. Ultimately, Murray grew a beard to hide the scars. Once the children began coming on the scene, the accidents multiplied. We often built a fire on the rocks beside the lake in those days to burn scrub that we collected in our firewood gathering sessions. During one such event, my father was tending the fire and left it for seconds. That was all it took. Geoffrey ran through the coals in his bare feet, and burned the bottoms rather badly. That child screamed all weekend. Even Jane lost her patience with him. I can’t if we took him to Parry Sound.

Then there was Matthew, Michael’s youngest son. He put his arm through the wringer of the new clothes washer when he was about four. These were in the new electricity days and we finally had a washing machine, the kind you fill with water and put clothes manually through a powered wringer The agitator was also powered. This machine may seem primitive now, but it was a big step forward from the galvanized wash tub and the scrub board. Matthew was helping Grandma wash the clothes on the back deck, and his arm got sucked up into the wringer. He yelled and Michael, who was nearby, rushed over and slammed his fist down on the emergency release. Of course it didn’t work, so Michael had to reverse the wringers and put Matt’s arm once again through the rollers. He gave a little yelp, nothing what he was entitled to, and we bundled him off to Parry Sound. Nothing was injured. The doctor at the clinic suggested Matt was young enough that his bones were malleable, and so he escaped injury. And not to be left out, even the dog, Romp, took a trip to the veterinary clinic at Parry Sound. The rocks along the shoreline had pockets where the water from the wave action collected. Mosquitos deposited their eggs in the standing water and to kill the larvae, my father poured kerosene in them, not realizing the dog often drank from these pockets. The combination of kerosene and dead larvae was lethal. Romp got very, very ill and not only earned a trip to Parry Sound, he also got to stay there for three days. From then on we used a broom to get rid of the stagnant water.

CHAPTER SIX WORK AND PLAY

A bout three or four years into cottage life, we started acquiring some of the amenities of life. First came the telephone. Sometime in 1965, Bell Canada laid a cable on the bottom of the lake and extended service from the mainland to all the islands off Foot’s Bay. At first we had a three or four party line, each customer with an assigned ring. Now, we could phone and ask someone to bring provisions, or lumber, or hardware. We could phone with news; we could call to announce our arrival and beg a ride over to the island. Relatives visiting could announce their presence at Foot’s Bay. The ramifications were enormous. Perhaps the one factor that impacted our lives the most was this telephone and the connection it gave us to the world outside Badgerow. We got electricity in 1967. It cost Dad $150 a pole to have it brought down the island from Spike Kearns’ place, some five or six poles. Having electric lights was a wonderful step forward. It greatly expanded the versatility of our evenings. We could read, and the children got a small TV they could watch on the porch. The adults could play board games or bridge with real honest to goodness light. Equally luxurious was the stove and refrigerator in the kitchen. No more trips to the iceman. For the young mothers, however, in the days before disposable diapers, having electricity offered a real luxury—the electric clothes washer. By the end of the 60’s, we had electric lights, an electric stove, and much farther down the road, the ultimate in luxury, an electric dishwasher. We now think we could not live without these items, but we did back then, for years. There was one problem with electricity in those early days, however. We were at the end of the line, and it often happened during thunderstorms that the electricity would build up along the line and would shoot out of our wall sockets in bursts of flame. The electric company finally came over and installed an End of the Line Resistor to stop the power spikes from shooting out of the

sockets. But not before a particularly severe storm scared the daylights out of Mother, Chris and Nancy. Chris describes the scene as follows:

We were sitting around the big table, eating dinner. It had been raining with thunder crashing and lightening flashing all around us. When the thunder rolled the cottage would shake on its stilts. The storm seemed to be dying down and Mom said, “It looks like it is almost over.” At that very moment a blue flame shot across the floor and the thunder bounced us out of our chairs. We all screamed and huddled in a circle on the floor while the electricity from the lightening danced across the floor and shot out of the wall sockets. Finally, with an ear splitting crash, the lightening hit a huge pine tree about 20 feet from the back corner on the west side of the cottage. When the storm ed, we went outside to make sure a fire had not started from the strike. The 75 foot pine had a spiral path down its full length and it was still smoking

In the early days of the cottage, the days without electricity, we developed many rituals to keep the place running efficiently, rituals that involved everyone regardless of age or gender. We all helped with the dishes, two people clearing the table, two people washing, two people drying, two people putting away. We engaged in much banter and camaraderie during this routine, and as the children grew older, they also participated. The boys did not dare whine that washing dishes was women’s work. They may have grumbled, but they helped. It was not unmanly to do dishes, or unfeminine to wield a chainsaw. At first it was only the adults who were expected to help with dishes. However, the grandchildren ed the dishes scene as soon as they could stand upon their own and wield a dishcloth. The same was true of most of the work that went on outside of the cottage. We all helped with laundry, with working on the woodpile, with painting projects, whatever needed doing. Some of the work, however, did break along gender lines. The men dug up the septic tank while the women tended to the babies, especially when they cried at night. And for the most part, the women cleaned the cottage. But things were slowly changing throughout the 1970’s, as our family became a microcosm for the changes that were occurring in the larger society beyond Badgerow. The men in our family were slowly being dragged

kicking and screaming into the modern liberated world. There were certain duties, however, that were expected of all of us. We were all expected to share in basic housekeeping matters. We were all expected to make our own beds, keep our rooms relatively tidy (something Murray and Agnes never could quite manage), and hang our towels and swimsuits on the back clothes line. Mother was adamant about not hanging our swimsuits on the front deck railing. She insisted it looked like Harlem from the lake with all those wet swimsuits and towels hanging out there for all to see. She would not have her cottage junked up like that. With as many people as we usually had of a weekend, it did not take long before Mother’s beautifully cleaned and tidied cottage descended into chaos. Towels, swim suits, Monopoly money, jigsaw puzzles, snorkel masks, books, cigarette ashtrays (yes in the early days we all smoked), dirty dishes, soon were strewn everywhere. It took time, but Mother educated all of us to clean up after ourselves, to pick up towels and wet swimsuits, to put toys in the toy box, swimming gear in the gear box on the back porch, life jackets in the box on the front deck. From sheer necessity, we learned much in those days. We learned about sharing the work, about being respectful of someone else’s space, and things, and we learned that a sense of humor goes a long way in maintaining harmony with so many people in such a small area. Surviving a weekend at the Potts cottage became something of a rite of age for potential spouses. If they could make it through three days and keep their sense of humor, they could marry into the Potts clan. They got extra points if it rained. Not all of them made it. The sense of total participation continued with the grandchildren. Once they were big enough, they helped to carry the assortment of luggage, grocery boxes, soda drinks, bags from the hardware store, all to the car, from the car to the boat, and from the boat to the cottage. The children also helped pack up and get all the gear down to the dock, into the boat, onto the dock at foot’s Bay, and thence into the car when it came time to go back to the city on a Sunday evening. The cottage was a wonderful learning environment for us all, constantly reinforcing the values of sharing, contributing, and taking up whatever needed doing without being told or asked. Except for garbage. One of the challenges of having a cottage on an island is

garbage. We always had lots of it. So what do you do with it? In the early days we had our garbage picked up by a garbage barge. They only came once a week, so you can imagine the green garbage bags on the end of the dock as the week wore down. The barge was always loaded by the time it got to Badgerow. We could smell it coming, and could see the circle of sea gulls squawking overhead like some infernal halo. The garbage barge only lasted a couple of years so, for roughly 28 years, we had to cart the garbage over to Foot’s Bay or Gordon Bay Marina when we left on Sunday night. The two Marinas kept huge bins where we chucked our garbage and the local garbage company picked it up from there. We did pay local taxes. Whenever any part of the family was headed for home in the city, the boat was always packed with kids, luggage, dive gear, sometimes a dog, certainly children, but always garbage .Dad’s rule was that everyone had to take a bag of garbage along with them, sometimes two. We would try to sneak off and by the garbage ritual, but my father always came stomping down the ramp at the last minute, garbage bags in either hand. The boat stunk something awful on the way over to Foot’s Bay. Sunday evening at the dock at Foot’s Bay was a real scene. Everyone was tired, and not just our family. We had all played ourselves out during the weekend and now, sun burned and cross, we had to battle the Sunday night traffic back to the city. And it seemed the entire world reeked of garbage. Whatever did we do on that small island? Part of the answer is that we worked. We raked, and chopped wood, and did laundry, and cooked, and did dishes, and attended to the septic tank. We got involved in projects like building the cabin, reroofing the cottage; in other words, we attended to all the demands of ordinary living in this challenging environment. There were no handymen we could call to make household repairs. Those few that did exist were outrageously expensive. The odd local would come out to the cottage as did the septic tank people, but for the most part, household repairs were our problem. Dad and Michael did most of the work for the first 10 years. And by watching them, and being instructed by them, the rest of us gradually learned basic house repair skills. We figured out how to replace glass windows, how to operate the pump system, how to use a hammer and saw, how to chop firewood, the basics of painting and electrical work. As Stephen

puts it, he has limited carpenter, plumbing and electrical skills, but those he does possess, he learned at the cottage. He could never make the repairs on his house as he does now without the cottage experience. There was plenty of work to do that involved simply maintaining the status quo. Michael and Dad wired the cottage in preparation for electricity, fixed Coleman Lamps, repaired outboard motors, set up the water pressure system including dragging the water tank to the top of the hill. And if this were not enough, they often embarked on “projects” that were huge undertakings. One such project was the construction of some twenty wooden Muskoka chairs. Dad bought two of the chairs from the local lumber yard for use on the deck. These chairs, also known as Adirondack chairs, were made entirely of wood and beautifully contoured to one’s body. We loved them. However, they did not last very long. Their relatively short life was partly due to the fact that they were everyone’s first choice when sitting on the deck. But mostly they fell apart because of their flimsy construction. Michael needed a project during his annual two week vacation at the cottage. The cabin was wired and plumbed; the septic system was working well. He could only sit and stare at the beautiful scenery for so long. So he looked at the pieces of the once comfortable and popular chairs and decided to build some of them himself. He used the pieces of the original chairs as a pattern. And he changed the design so that it would be sturdier. He also made the arm rest wider to hold a plate or a beer. And because of the popularity of the originals, he decided to make 20 of them. After much preamble, he finally assembled the first of the newly designed chairs just before the final weekend of his vacation. Getting stuff to an island is about four times as difficult as getting stuff to a mainland cottage. On the mainland you simply back your car up to your work area and unload. Not so on an island. You can bring stuff from the store to your car, but then you have to unload onto the dock into the boat, and across the lake out of the boat and up the ramp to the work area. During that first week Michael cut the pieces for twenty chairs, each piece shaped and rounded. And finally, he assembled the first of the newly designed chairs just before the final weekend of his vacation. Weekend guests ired the chairs and soon found themselves part of an assembly line as we all pitched in and helped to put the rest together. Mother took charge of staining the chairs to match the stain we used on the deck.

In subsequent years, these chairs migrated to many spots on our island. Three were placed on the deck of the cabin, and another two on the rock in front of the cabin. Two found a home overlooking the dock on the west side of the island. Another two were set on the diving rock. And the rest we kept on the deck of the main cottage. They were still there when we sold the cottage. Cottage maintenance took a blow when the family began migrating south of the border. I left in 1970 for El Paso, Michael left in 1981 for Clearwater, Florida, Chris in 1988 for the Miami area. The only ones who stayed in Canada for the entire sweep of the cottage era were Nancy and Jim Moore, and Murray. Murray, however, was not particularly gifted in construction and maintenance skills. So once Michael left, that job was left up to Dad, Jim Moore, and later Stephen and Heather. Thank God for Jim Moore. He had an immense store of practical knowledge and having worked in the trades for years, knew everything there was to know about maintenance and repair. It was his knowledge and skill that helped to keep all the various systems in good working order for many years, and who made it possible for the rest of us to enjoy our summers in Muskoka. Jim first started coming up to the cottage in 1979 with Nancy, and was immediately hooked. He fell head over heels in love with Muskoka and willingly did anything that was asked of him to maintain the property. Much to Nancy’s chagrin, he readily cut down trees, fixed broken lamps, installed a new water pump, painted, helped with various additions to the cabin, worked on the septic system, all with an enthusiasm and joy he never displayed at home. Somehow, it was fun at the cottage. He describes the experience of working on the septic system: Whenever I removed the lid of the septic tank, I was instantly transported to some other dimension where everything was exactly the same but I was alone. All cottage goers disappeared; not a sound or glimpse of another human being. While working away I occasionally caught movement in my peripheral vision, but when I turned to look no one was there. When I was finished and the lid went back on, I was instantly back in the world and everyone was there again. It was spooky. Life is good again when the septic system is working right.” I will never forget the day they decided they had to dig up the entire system. Why I never did find out or ask. The men (Jim Moore, Dad, Michael, Murray), all got shovels and dug away, the stench rising in palpable waves around them. The air was ripe with bathroom humor. They thought they were hugely funny,

but we women did not comment as long as they stuck to the task at hand. We poured ourselves a gin and tonic and retreated to the safety of the front deck, away from the prevailing winds and the raunchy jokes. Many of the systems we depended on at the cottage were gerrymandered and thus temperamental. This axiom was particularly true of the water system. It all depended on a tank at the top of the hill behind the cottage and a pump under the cottage. To get any kind of water pressure, we would pump the water from the lake to the tank up the hill and then let gravity take over as the water made its way back down to the cottage level. But pumps are cantankerous. The first persons to arrive had the responsibility of starting up the pump, which was under the cottage. It was a real pain if you arrived in the dark and had to stumble over rocks, and pieces of lumber, and ladders and whatever else found its way under there, along with hordes of mosquitoes and God only knows what other creepy critters. You had to go through an entire sequence of events to get the pump working, including priming the pump with a bucket of water and then running to the breaker for the pump motor and turning it on while there was still water in the line. It didn’t take much for the system to fail, and consequently it took many tries to get it working, Nancy still talks about the cursing that wafted up through the floor boards of the cottage when Jim was trying to start that water pump in the dark, swatting off mosquitoes, and banging his head on the studs under the deck. One weekend, Steve and Jim replaced the entire system with new line, a foot valve, a new tank complete with shutoff ball valve which made the tank keep its prime even when the motor was shut off, and a motor switch mounted beside the tank. Friday startup became a dream. On another occasion, Jim was sauntering around the island and came across the water tank resting in its usual place, up the hill. But it had all kinds of screws and washers as cushions screwed into the sides. As Jim moved around the tank he saw why. He caught sight of a tiny pin hole in the rusty side and a tiny rainbow over the hole. The rainbow indicated a pin prick sized hole in the old and rusty tank. Someone was in the habit of blocking such holes in the tank with a rubber washer and screw whenever they popped out. He/she would tighten it down until the rainbow disappeared.

The tank, says Jim, looked like it had chickenpox; but the problem was solved, at least for the short term. If you think about it, replacing the tank meant getting someone to deliver the beast to the dock at Foot’s Bay, then several of us going over and putting it in the boat, driving across the lake, pulling it out of the boat at our dock and hauling it up the hill. We can hardly be blamed for procrastinating. I will never forget the weekend we decided to put a new roof on the cottage. The original roof was done poorly and needed replacing. It was the hottest day in years, close to 100 degrees, which is unheard of in Muskoka. What made it particularly unbearable was the beer strike that occurred that same weekend. We had to make do with lemonade (some spiced it with vodka) and repeated dives into the lake to cool off. I have heard since that someone made a trip to Buffalo for beer, but it was American beer, certainly second best. We first had to scrape off all the old shingles, then load them into plastic bags, haul the bags down to the dock and put them into the boat. Next was the boat trip over to the dock at Foot’s Bay, more unloading from the boat to the car, then the drive to the dump and the final unloading at the dump. I don’t how the new shingles got over to the island. I hope somebody delivered them. From what I can , we did get the new roof on over that weekend and it did not leak again. Oh wonders. Jim was constantly amazed by the ineptness of the Potts family, and our ignorance of some of the most basic principles of home repair. One day he was walking along the path from the cottage to the cabin and came across an electrical outlet wired to a tree. It was Michael’s brainchild and he thought it a wonderful idea. All sorts of electrical devices could be used between the cottage and the cabin, things like drills, saws, lights, whatever. Jim asked if anyone had thought about the fact that trees grow, and soon the outlet would be out of reach. Eventually, this actually happened and Jim had to disconnect the outlet. Jim also re the time the group of us decided to cut down a very large pine tree by Christopher’s bay. The men, Poppa, Michael, Murray, Chris, Steve and Jim Moore all gathered around the tree and held a powwow, chain saws and axes in one hand and a beer in the other. They discussed such weighty matters as how to fell the tree without hitting the power line, or damaging the dock. They discussed drop angles, cutting techniques, exactly where the tree was to fall and how to accomplish that. The women offered advice and technical insight and

were totally ignored. The tree eventually came down, as I recall, and not where the men had so carefully planned for it to fall. There was much scrambling at the last minute to get out of its way. We certainly spent a great deal of time working at the cottage, but we also played. The main focus of our lives was the lake, in all its pristine beauty. It was crystal clear, so much so that you could see to the bottom in the various bays. We periodically had the water purity checked by the government environment people and the testing always came back clear and clean. So we swam in it, and snorkeled. When the weather was nice we went for an early morning swim, and again at mid-day, and then in the late afternoon. I loved these late afternoon swims. After working all day on some project or another, or after working all week and fighting the traffic up to Muskoka, that late afternoon swim was nirvana. We would pour ourselves a drink, take it to the lakeside, and sip it while we went in and out of the water. Sometimes we even went for after dark-swims, and for the risqué, skinny dips. The children were in the water nonstop, playing in Christopher’s Bay by the docks, from the time they were tiny babies. As if the Grandchildren were not enough – we also had a succession of dogs on the island. The first was Romp, our Golden Retriever/Australian Shepherd mix. His antics made him infamous in the Lake Joe-Foot’s Bay-Badgerow Island— Gordon Bay triangle. Romp came to an unhappy end, however. Murray was deathly allergic to him and could not come up to the cottage when he was there. We had to get rid of him. Murray had such a reaction to Romp that he could not breathe after the shortest exposure. He was so bad that he had to make several trips to the emergency room to help his breathing. Murray felt responsible and took it upon himself to find Romp a home. It was a serious trauma when this actual day came and we had to leave him with his new owners. Mother cried for two days before and mourned him for many months after. Murray would never tell us where Romp was, or how he was doing. I had my own suspicions. Romp was not the first dog to bound over the rocks in Muskoka. I acquired a little male, apricot toy poodle sometime in 1971 and named him Paris. He was a prissy little thing and was deeply attached to me. The grandchildren, particularly Stephen and Geoff scoffed at him. He was not a real dog!! I found him one day,

sopping wet and looking like a drowned rat, full of sand. I had my suspicions but kept them to myself. My doubting instincts were validated one day, not long after, when I was doing dishes at the sink in the main cottage. I turned to look out the window, and there, standing at the far end of the dock, looking out over the water, was little Paris. Geoffrey, in his bathing suit, was creeping slowly up behind him, ready to pounce and throw him in the lake. I shrieked at the top of my lungs, “Geoffrey, don’t you dare!” Geoffrey immediately froze, then turned back, looking sheepish. The only one who truly appreciated that little dog was me. The same year they built the house in King, Mother and Dad acquired another dog, a cream colored standard Poodle we named Troy. We got Troy at Torbec Kennels north of Toronto when he was a baby. He grew up to be a big dog and had an air of regalness about him. But he was also goofy. The house in King backed up on acres and acres of wilderness preserve. Troy ran free, into this wilderness, and got himself into lots of trouble. He tangled with several porcupines and lost every time. He developed a permanent droop to his mouth from all the needles, but he never learned to leave porcupines alone. He did better with raccoons. He was allowed to run free on the island at night until he killed a family of raccoons. He got the adults one night and the babies the next night. After that, he was confined to the cottage laundry room at night. Dogs loved the island. They could run free, as there were no cars or bicycles. The only dangers were the wild animals and the water. We never had an accident with any dog that visited or lived on Badgerow. They seemed to know instinctively to stay away from the water. Except for Romp and his mania for water skiing and swimming with the children, and drinking mosquito larvaelaced water. But Romp was not your usual dog. We bought into the myth that poodles do not carry the allergen that so distresses people. Well, they do. They just do not shed it all over the place. Murray was just as allergic to Troy as he was to Romp. Paris didn’t bother him because there was so little of him. We could no longer keep Troy at the lake so he came to El Paso and lived with Aunt Maureen for the rest of his life. As beautiful as the rocks were that made up the shore line, it was not the best situation for small children to swim. We had very little in the way of beach for the children to play. Most of the water’s edge was composed of sloping rocks and the bottom of the lake was also rocky. During the summer of 1975, the

adults with kids came up with the bright idea of importing sand and dumping it in Christopher’s bay along the east side of the point. Dad ordered the sand and arranged for a barge to deliver it to the island. The sand was going to cost about $75 divided among Michael, Nancy and Murray. Michael groaned and bellyached about this deal, whining that his kids were too big to want to play in the sand. But he went along with it. The day the sand arrived, the barge pulled around into the bay and nudged against the rocks. The men set up a chain of wheel barrows and shovels to unload it. The women, of course, didn’t help. Lugging wheel barrows full of sand was truly men’s work. It took hours to unload the sand, and multiple beers, but it was worth it. The children loved their new sand and began playing in it immediately. The adults relaxed back to the dock with evening cocktails, watching the children enjoy the sand, Michael still complaining. But when we looked over to check on the children, all three of his boys were playing in the sand with trucks, sand pails, and shovels. They were enjoying the sand just as much, if not more so than their younger cousins. That sand was there for years, much longer than we thought it would last. Each spring when the ice went out, more of the sand would be pulled into the water and under the dock. But when the cottage was sold, there was still sand left in Christopher’s bay. We had other ways to amuse ourselves in the water. Dad decided one day to build a small raft and anchor it just offshore. I guess he ed such rafts as a child, and how he played on them in the water. He made the top part out of boards and underneath he fastened four Styrofoam blocks, one to each corner, as flotation devices. We did indeed have a good time swimming out to the raft and back, and pushing each other off, but it did not occur to us at first that the raft was a serious hazard to boaters, especially at night. We had no lights, no reflective tape, nothing to indicate it was there. When we realized what we had done and what a danger that raft was to boaters, it quickly came ashore and we pulled it up on the rocks. The children, being infinitely resourceful, pulled off the Styrofoam blocks and devised all kinds of games to play with them. One they particularly loved involved putting the blocks in the water a few feet off the end of the dock. Then they would run down the length of the dock and jump off the end on the blocks.

There, they would try to stand up as long as possible. Romp would chase them down the dock, but at first he put on the breaks when they came to the water. The more the children ran and jumped, the braver Romp got, until he would jump with them and knock them off as soon as they landed, barking his fool head off the entire time. He was really annoying. The only solution was to put Romp in a block of Styrofoam first, then set him afloat and let the children continue with their game. Romp’s barking was now confined to the parameters of his Styrofoam block. When they were done with their game, the children pushed the blocks up on the rocks and went up to the cottage. Romp was not finished, however. He would push one of the blocks with his nose back into the lake, scramble up on it, and float with the current down the side of the island. Our neighbors down the way would spot him and call us, announcing that Romp had just floated by their cottage. We would then have to get the boat out and go get him. That dog got to be a real pest. When the children were little, they could not water ski, but they fashioned their own version after the adults. They found a board about two feet wide and 4 feet long with a toboggan-like front. They tied a rope through holes in either side of the front to fashion a kind of handle. They also tied a rope through a hole in the middle front that went to the boat. They would use the Jansey II and their ropes to water ski. They even imitated the adults in their commands, yelling “hit it!” when they were ready to be dragged up and down the side of the island. One day, Chris let Romp stand in front of him, on the board, which that crazy dog loved. He would bark himself silly waiting for his turn. He got good at it and soon learned how to do it by himself. A guest of our neighbors saw Romp floating down the lake one morning, on a Styrofoam block. Later on that afternoon, Romp came down the same stretch of lake, surfing behind the small aluminum outboard. The guest put his drink down and went into the cottage, out of the sun. When the adults were water skiing from the big dock, Romp went nuts. He would chase the boat all around the point of the island, barking of course. Then he stepped up his chase to jumping in the water and swimming out after the boat. It got dangerous when he started to chase anybody on water skis even remotely

close to Badgerow. We would have to jump in the boat, take off after him and try to turn him around to swim towards the shore under his own steam. It was no easy task to drag him into the boat. We finally had to put him in the cabin whenever anyone was trying to water ski anywhere near our island. Sometime in the first few years after the grandchildren were old enough to swim on their own, Papa bought a couple of Styrofoam sailboats called Snarks. They were small, and had only rudimentary equipment for sailing. But they were fun to use. The children would turn them upside down and come up underneath, in the air pocket. Romp would swim out and crawl up on the bottom of the boat, trying to figure out where the people were. Deborah re the Snark pieces. By the time she was old enough to play with the boys on the Styrofoam, they had been pretty well beaten up. She does recall one spring before the Snark was completely shattered. There was a bass that was protecting its eggs in Christopher’s Bay. The poor misguided fish had chosen this inlet as a nesting place for its eggs early in the spring before us humans came for the summer. Suddenly the quiet inlet was not so quiet anymore and that poor fish was hard pressed to defend its nest and territory. She bit any toes that dared come near her nest. The adults did not believe the children’s description of the biting fish. Finally Jason and Christian decided to deal with the problem. They got on the partially broken Styrofoam sailboat and tried to attack the fish with paddles. They wanted to kill the fish but were afraid to stick their toes in the water; so they commandeered the beat up Snark. The boys told the girls that they were dealing with a Piranha, not a small rock bass, and they had better watch out. The broken boat was not very steady, especially with two boys leaning over the side trying to smack a woebegone rock bass with a paddle. Jason and Christian eventually fell in the lake and the little fish went for them. They came bounding out of the water, yelling loud enough to scare the younger ones out of the water for quite some time. Years later, Deborah reports she realized the boys weren’t attacked by a piranha, but they had found a way to keep all the young kids out of the water and out of their hair. Eventually the Styrofoam boats got broken up on the rocks. The children, ever resourceful, kept the broken pieces and swam with them, as a kind of flotation device. It was great fun at first, but the protective coating soon wore off. They

got badly burned from the raw Styrofoam and had to wear t-shirts when they went swimming. Perhaps the most fun they had was with inner tubes. Papa arrived one weekend with four tires he had purchased from a used car lot. He used the treads as bumpers on the dock, and gave the inner tubes to the children. They swam with those inner tubes for years, until they could no longer be held together with glue and patches. We also water skied. The first generation began almost immediately and we skied all over the lake. Some of us got good at it, even better than some of the Jesuits. The grandchildren learned to water ski as part of their growing up process. It was always a red letter day when one of them got up on the skis in the water, for the first time, or managed one ski. As the children grew out of babyhood and became real people, they ed through many common experiences that became rites of age. They all learned to swim in Christopher’s bay, beside the dock, and gradually entered the deeper water outside the Bay. The first real swimming venture was graduating to the other side of the point of the island and learning first how to jump, and then dive, off the diving rock. The children absolutely had to learn how to swim. It was far too easy to fall off the dock, or the rocks and into the water. We were surrounded by water, and each and every child had to learn how to cope with it. One day, Adam fell off the dock with his life jacket on and came up under the hull of the big boat in the slip. Murray had to jump in, fully clothed, and haul him out. The next big hurdle, and it was a big one, was learning to jump and dive off the cliff on Big Cliff Island. Big Cliff was about three miles from our island and sported a huge cliff, some 25-40 feet high, of sheer granite rock that plunged straight down into 50-60 feet of water. Michael, a superior swimmer, was the first to dive from this cliff and he guided his own children and then nieces and nephews to this same feat. I the day Deborah and Kelley first tried it. We all piled into the boat, or at least as many of us as could safely fit, and rode over to Big Cliff. The children scrambled up the side that was accessible, climbing up a trail of smaller rocks and vegetation that sloped up to the top. Then they peered over the top of the cliff, assessing the distance to the surface of the water. Kelley looked so small, way, way up there. Stephen and Geoff jumped off first, having done it many times before. Then Michael dove off, one of the few who were ever that brave, or talented. The boys then encouraged Kelley and

Deborah, who both teetered on the edge, then ran back, then came to the edge once again. They were encouraged yet frightened, and finally, yelling, “I am so scared,” Deborah jumped off feet first, hanging on to her nose for dear life, her legs pumping the vacant air. She hit the water with a loud splash, but in a sitting position. She surfaced, squealing, and had a sore bottom for days. Kelley soon followed. Deborah says she has been to Big Cliff in recent years and has no desire whatever to jump again. She did it once, and that is enough for a lifetime, she once declared. The lake during these years was the center of our lives. We lived surrounded by water and everything we did, we had to take it into consideration. Everything we did depended on a boat trip, even simple things like going for sodas, church, picking up some groceries for dinner. Dad and Mother bought all kinds of books on boating, and boat and engine maintenance, and often instructed the grandchildren on such matters. At first we took the lake for granted, not recognizing the hidden peril that lay beneath that benign surface. We soon learned otherwise. The lake could be a very treacherous place and we had to understand it and its many moods if we were to avoid disaster. So we learned about its hot lazy days, it’s sad, drizzly days, its violent days when it whipped the waves up into a churning frenzy, the seriousness of lightening strikes on the water, the deathly cold of the water in the spring just after the ice broke up, and the evil shoals lurking just beneath its surface. Through trial and error, and through classroom learning (Dad studied for, and got, his pilot’s license), we learned a great deal about boats and boating and living so close to all this water. We all learned early on how to start a boat, and how to dock it. We learned safety regulations, the number of required life jackets, the rules of the waterways, how to read a com and marine charts. As soon as the grandchildren were old enough they learned water safety and responsibility, as well as how to physically operate a boat and what to do if one got stuck somewhere with engine failure. One of the fundamentals of life at the island was the weather. We had to consider the weather and the resulting wave action before deciding to boat across to the island or back to the government dock at Foot’s Bay. If there was thunder and lightening in the sky, we hugged the shore or waited for the storm to before venturing out on the lake. And if it was foggy, we had to drop anchor and wait. Murray spent the night once in the boat, wrapped up in the canvas hood. The fog was so thick he could not make out any land. Rather than hitting a shoal, or land,

or another boat, he dropped anchor and went to sleep, only to wake up in the morning after the fog had lifted and found out that he was right beside Badgerow. Navigating those lakes at night was a skill few possessed. In our family, Chris was the expert. He knew those lakes intimately and could find his way whatever the circumstances. He had explored every nook and cranny of all three lakes in his youth, and never forgot what he learned. But we all had to learn how to read the landmarks in the dark. There were, and would still be those times when we arrived at Foot’s Bay when it was dark. We had to get to the cottage. There was no choice. Until you had done it a few times, it was amazing how all the islands and landmarks looked alike in the dark. If it was a clear night, there was no problem. The challenge came when the weather was overcast, or rainy, or worst of all, foggy. You had to know where the channel markers were, and the shoals, and you had to know the shape of every island out there, and how far apart they were, and the depth of the water between them. We made every blunder in the book in the early years, getting lost in fog, going out at night without a com, not having a piercing light in the boat at all times, trying to find our way in a strange place we had never been, at night. But we gradually became highly skilled boaters. Fortunately, none of us ever had a serious boating mishap. We came close. One night, we were pulling away from the dock at Badgerow and it was inky black. We had not gone 50 feet away from the dock when the motor and back end of another boat suddenly appeared about a foot off our back end. We did not crash, but that is as close as it gets. Another time, in the late autumn, Michael and I decided to take the boat down to Lake Muskoka to visit some friends. We had no trouble navigating Lake Joseph and Lake Rosseau, but we had a problem when we came to the narrows leading to Lake Muskoka. It was very late in the season and no one was in the control room operating the locks. They were open when we went down the lake, so no problem, but they were closed when we were on our way back. We floated around the control house and the large wooden gates thinking. Finally, we tied up to one side of the cement narrows and Michael and I went into the control house, which was open. We went in, scouted out the situation and realized there was nothing much to operating the locks. There was a big

wooden lever in front of the window looking over the locks. All you did was pull it one way or the other to fill or empty the central portion of the locks. I went back to the boat, untied it, nosed up to the front gates and waited for Michael to close the gate behind me. I was in the lower part of the locks. Michael was to let the water in slowly until it was even with the water level in Lake Rosseau. Then he was to open the gates in front of me and I would ease the boat out of the locks and into the Lake proper. I hung onto the cement side of the empty lock and waited. Michael pulled the lever all the way in one swift motion and the water gushed in. I twirled like a top inside the inner box of the locks and The Four Winns (our current boat) and I shot up like a cork. It took my breath away. So much for sophisticated boating experience. Thankfully, no one was around to witness our stupidity. Another night, about 9 p.m., it was extraordinarily dark, rainy and windy. We were all curled up by the fire reading, or playing table games, when someone said they thought they heard a noise coming from our dock. We took the large light and went to investigate. Four very upset people were sitting in a boat, hanging on to the rubber bumpers on our dock. They had become lost trying to find their way home, which was way at the North end of Lake Rosseau. They had been going around in circles for hours, getting more and more desperate. We invited them in, warmed them up with hot chocolate and then piled them into our boat. One of the women did not want to go. She never wanted to get in a boat again. We assured her we knew what we were doing, and that we would get her home safely. We drove over to Foot’s Bay, then took them in the car around the two lakes to their cottage. One weekend, Michael had a group of his fellow workers from Wainbee at the cottage. It was a beautiful day and three of the guests took the Sea Snark out for a sail. They were about 500 yards off the point of the island when the boat tipped them all into the water. Michael jumped into The Four Winns with the husband of one of the boaters and the two of them quickly drove out to the disaster site. They immediately plucked all three out of the lake, and that was that. A routine occurrence for us. We have had much practice at rescuing people over the years. We thought nothing of this incident. Nobody was hurt, and nobody panicked. Michael and his friend returned to the dock with the rescued sailors, their boat in tow. One of the guests was a fireman and he was impressed. He said

before he could even think what to do, Michael and Dave Armstrong were halfway to the floundering sailors. But not all our experiences were heroic, and wise. Matt was driving the pontoon boat one day and the water police came our way. They wanted to know how many people and how many life jackets we had in the boat. We did not have enough jackets to go around, of course, and Matthew got his first citation. He was kind of proud of it. Grampa asked to see it and that was the last Matthew saw of the citation. We had a succession of boats over the years, and unlike our counterparts with cottages on the mainland, they were not a luxury. The first one was the 16 foot Grew, white and mahogany, with a blue canvas top that fastened to the open part of the boat with snaps. This was the infamous boat with no neutral. We were notorious around the lake because of that boat. Whenever we got stuck, and someone was sent to rescue us, that ornery boat pulled some kind of antic. I one time when the engine jammed and the Burma roared around and around, in ever widening circles. Michael had to work feverishly on the engine to get it to stop. Another time Nancy had trouble starting the engine. A gentleman friend of hers reached over from his boat to start the engine and completely ignored Nancy when she tried to tell him to cease and desist; the boat had no neutral. “Nonsense,” he declared and pulled the starter cord. That darned boat, took off on its own, headed for the north end of the lake, did a wide turn, did several loop de loops, then turned and headed straight for us. I swear it was grinning at us as it charged straight ahead. It only came to a stop when it crashed into Spike Kearn’s dock. We finally got rid of that boat and Dad showed up with its replacement, a big Muskoka tub of a boat named The Stag, an 18’ inboard Grew. It was long and slender, not very seaworthy, and drank gas like it was addicted. It was slow and chugged along like a fat cigar. It was an old man’s boat, not very interesting for the boys, similar to the one portrayed in On Golden Pond that the youngsters at the gas pumps ridiculed behind Norman’s back. Our next boat was a fiberglass bow rider, with seats in the front and back and a 75 hp outboard motor. This is the one Michael and Mother watched sink in the slip at the dock. We had that boat for a number of years, and it saw us through many a storm. The last one I was white and turquoise, an 85 hp inboard/outboard, named Four Winns. It was a pretty boat, fiberglass, and saw us

through the final years at the cottage. When the grandchildren were very little, they liked nothing better than to play in the boat at the dock on Badgerow and to pretend to be driving it. This practice entertained them for hours, which their mothers’ loved, but angered Papa because they got their sticky hands on his steering wheel, broke his com, and left the key turned on which drained his battery. He sent them packing whenever he caught them playing in his boat. I one day Daniel and Adam were at the cottage together and were bored. That was always bad news, and a harbinger of trouble. Gramma let them take the Jansey II over to the government dock to pick up the mail and asked them to bring home some groceries from the general store. As soon as they were around the corner of Badgerow and closer to the government dock, they started acting up, doing tight circles, sharp turns, and whatever move they could think of that would make the little Jansey II look cool. Dad and Mother happened on them when they drove into the bay with the big boat, and pulled alongside them. The boys got a good scolding about showing off in a boat and water safety, and were ordered back home. Somewhat chastened, they turned and headed back to Badgerow. As soon as they were out of sight around the corner of Johnson Island, however, they began their nonsense once again, this time for the benefit of the girls sunning on the dock. Only they took one of the corners too sharply and overturned the boat. They were not far from our dock and managed to get themselves and the boat and motor, all thoroughly soaked, back on dry land. Amah and Papa were not happy. But they did not have to say much to the two truants. They felt bad enough on their own. I think they learned a lesson that day, about how important their elders took water safety.

CHAPTER SEVEN AMAH AND PAPA

W hile the original five siblings moved in and out of the cottage experience, Mother and Dad never did desert it. They continued to migrate to their beloved Muskoka every summer, no matter what it took for them to do so. Indeed, it was their presence and their personalities that defined the experience for everyone else. Once she became a grandmother, my mother came into her own. She was an outstanding mother, but an even more outstanding grandmother. After the birth of her grandchildren it was almost as if any reservations she had as a mother about childrearing disappeared, and she now relied on her instincts and the freedom of a grandmother to love unconditionally, She had an uncanny knack for making each grandchild feel loved and special, and good about himself or herself. She ed birthdays, Christmas, graduation, made sure each child received cards, presents, some kind of recognition on a special day. She was the one who started the the very early days and encouraged us all to write in it. We did, as often as we could. She participated constantly filling in historical details, making the connections from year to year, commenting on events, both within and outside the family, all to ground our story in the real world. She made sure she ed for and celebrated significant hallmarks in each of our lives as the years ed, and recorded them for us in the log. Following are some of her entries that capture the essence of our cottage lives.

July 4, 1983

Bad lightning and thunder late afternoon after a hot, humid, tiresome day. At

6:10 it is still raining, but fresher.

Saturday August 28, 1983

In midst of a thunderstorm. One heavy crash so far. JAP, Murray and Jim under house tinkering in the tool room. Daniel, Adam, Deb, Laura, Jason playing cards, coloring, and working on jig saws, Agnes, me and Nancy keeping the peace.

Sept 11 Sunday

JP and I have been here alone since Murray and family left. Perfect, perfect weather. The lake is settling into that Autumn stillness which is so lovely. The sunsets have been spectacular. Last night we drifted— clear light and lavenders and apricot. Most cottages were darkened out and there are no boats about.

September 21, 1981

Michael, Marilyn and Allison spent a cold, rainy Friday night and Saturday with us. We had been in Toronto and met them at Gordon Bay last night. We all came down the lake at 9 p.m.in inky blackness and rain. A light we had left on the railing had shorted. So JP spent yesterday installing a beam. We can set it before we leave the island. The dock lights are too far back and don’t show soon enough. At this time of year there are no cottage lights and it becomes difficult to find one’s way in the dark.

Rainy days and children do not mix, and often sorely tried our patience and ingenuity. Mother always managed to come up with some truly insightful ways to amuse the grandchildren. She was adept at creating games for them to play when they were bored. One rainy day, Deborah and Kelley were making a total nuisance of themselves, so mother got out a large bowl, placed it in the middle of the living room floor and divided up a set of poker chips among the children who were there. They amused themselves for hours trying to flip the poker chips into the bowl from where they were sitting around the periphery of the room. When the children were babies, my Mother would drag out wooden spoons and baking pans and let them play on them like drums. She read to them. She made up stories where they were all heroes and heroines. On sunny days, she went with them to collect blueberries around the island and made the most wonderful blueberry pies. Her trademark was the wishing chair formed out of the rocks at the point of the island. She told them a fairy had made the chair and had told Amah that if she wished for something while sitting in that chair, she would get what she wished for. She took each grandchild to her special place at one time or another, when they were sad, or frustrated, or lonely, or just needed attention. Deborah says the last thing she did before she left Badgerow was to sit in the wishing chair, and it is the one thing she would like to do again, to sit there and feel Amah near her one more time. Amah left her mark everywhere, by naming things and infusing them with unique value. The bay where we docked the boats and where the children swam was called “Christopher’s Bay.” Chris was the first child to swim there, before the others were even born. The bay next to it was shallow and covered with pebbles. She called it Pretty Stone Bay and often took grandchildren there to hunt for pretty stones. The cliff off the left tip of the island was called “The Diving Rock, although I think that was a collective naming. She was the main cook, although the rest of us helped. It always amazed me how she could shop for a weekend with 15-20 people arriving, plan all the meals, divvy up the labor, plan out where each person was going to sleep, make sure that each person had clean sheets and a pillow.

She cooked chocolate cakes for the grandchildren, muffins for everyone, in addition to the regular meals. She watched her children and grandchildren and noticed if anyone was withdrawn, or seemed ill, or angry. She was also aware of Papa’s moods and could always sense when he needed a break from grandchildren and children. They would go off in the boat for an hour or so, by themselves, to breathe free of their progeny, for just a time. Mother had a canoe that she loved to take out on the lake by herself, especially in the early mornings when all was quiet except for the warbling and yodeling of a pair of loons to each other, and the lake was misty and in a deep calm. She lived her life surrounded by so many people that she seemed to crave some quiet time to regroup Agnes was also creative in finding things for the children to do. One rainy weekend she got them to put on the play “Peter Pan.” I was not at the cottage that weekend I don’t know all the finer details, but from what I heard they did a remarkably good job. They enacted the story on the rocks in front of the cottage, and the audience sat on the deck to watch. Laura was the alligator. She had to lay half in and half out of the water and used her arms to imitate the opening and shutting of the alligator’s jaws. Agnes also insisted on the children writing in the log, at least one page. Adam wrote his name big enough to fill the page. Papa was not nearly so tuned in to the children’s world. For example, one time he was assigned to baby sit Geoff and Stephen. There was only the three of them at the island. Papa put the two boys in the Jansey II and towed them out to the stake, really a channel marker that warned boaters of the shoal underneath. He tied the boat up to the stake, gave them some fishing poles and worms and then went back to the dock. Once there, he settled into a deck chair and was soon absorbed in his crossword puzzle. When the cottage got too full of people and noise and was rocking on its hinges from all the grandchildren, it was not unusual to find Papa in the boat, 50 yards offshore, reading his newspaper. One day he lost his glasses. He was really annoyed at all of us because he lost his glasses. Someone MUST have moved them, or put them away somewhere

because he could not find them. Somebody suggested he look at the bottom of the lake around the dock where he was swimming earlier. He dismissed that suggestion as absurd, but sure enough, that is where they were found. I don’t who found them, one of us, or if he dove in and searched himself. I do his missing glasses were never mentioned again. One day when he was in a “difficult” mood, Allie, who had fewer inhibitions about confronting him than the rest of us did, asked if he had ever seen the movie, Grumpy Old Men. I barely stopped myself from hooting out loud. Another day he couldn’t find his comb. He ranted at everyone about not touching his stuff. He turned around in the kitchen so his back was to us and there was the comb, in his hair. He had gotten distracted and forgot he left it there. He was not amused and went over the rules of privacy again. Papa could also be a great deal of fun. He had many rituals he developed over the years with the grandchildren, rituals that they loved. When we first went up to the cottage each year, it was weeks before the water was warm enough for us to swim in it, Papa enticed the youngsters with a $5.00 reward to be the first one in the lake each spring. They would put on their bathing suits, stick their toes in the water, yipe at the shocking cold and dance around the edge of the water lusting for the money. It was usually Deborah or Kelley who won, probably Kelley who won the most. One year, Papa was taunting them and he tripped and fell into the water off the end of the dock. He insisted on keeping the reward money. Kelley quickly dipped in and out before you could take a single breath, and earned the money yet again. Inflation raised the ante to $10.00. In another ritual, he scorned those of us who went swimming in that cold water and gently eased in inch by inch. He would call on one of the boys; they would line up along the back of the dock and at his signal would run screaming down the length of the dock and sail off it, feet first, into the water. The loud vocalizing continued when they surfaced, sputtering and gasping from the cold. Papa kept a wine rack in the shape of a ship’s wheel on the top of the bar in one corner of the living room. Whenever anybody took a bottle out and consumed it, he/she was supposed to replace it. Dad always complained in the log that his wine rack was empty each spring when he first arrived. While Papa could be cantankerous and demanding, he was the creative energy

behind the entire family. He was always searching for something new, exploring beyond the immediate horizon. We all led rich and varied lives because of his influence. It was his restlessness that led him to the cottage in the first place. Our family would not be what it is today were it not for his foresight in buying the land and building the cottage. One of my most vivid memories of Papa is really a collective one: the many trips I took with him from Toronto to Muskoka after he had picked me up at the Toronto airport. I lived in El Paso, Texas and came to Muskoka every summer for a couple of weeks vacation and to catch up with my family. Mostly, my father and I spent the evening I arrived in Toronto together, and then drove to the cottage the next day. Things would start out pleasantly enough. He would pick me up around nine a.m. at wherever I was staying, usually at my sister’s house. As we headed for Highway 401, the main freeway across the north part of Toronto, he mentioned, by the way, that he had a couple of errands to run before we headed north. The first one was Canadian Tire where we picked up all kinds of disparate things, hardware, a new set of tools, kitchen glasses, small paper bags of things with exotic names. Canadian Tire is like a disease with my father. Every time he goes there, he explores every inch of that store, every time. He goes down aisles containing bins of twisted metal, bushes, glue, paint, kitchen appliances, whatever. He would take one of this and four of that. On a good day, Canadian Tire takes about an hour. When we got out of there, it was 10:30 a.m. The next stop, according to the list he kept in his shirt pocket, was the grocery store. He had another list for this store, this one dictated by my mother. We got the staples of bread, meat, milk, butter, sugar, sodas, and so on. But we did not get any produce. I was suspicious and sure enough, produce was at another store further up the highway. It was fresher, straight out of the farmer’s fields. But at least the produce store was up highway 400, heading north, towards the cottage. When we left with bags of lettuce, tomatoes, vegetables, and so on, it was close to noon. We would manage a clean run from the city up highway 400 until we branched off at highway 69, the road to Muskoka. The town of Barrie was at this juncture, and often involved several stops, for things we forgot at Canadian Tire and the produce store. We were both hungry by this time, and there is this fabulous hamburger place just as you leave the 400 extension and head onto Highway 69. So we stopped there and had lunch. We left around 2p.m.. There wasn’t much of interest along Highway 69, except a good stand that sold fresh corn that was not

only off the highway, but a mile or so down a dirt road. Of course we stopped there. We pulled back onto the highway, the back seat filled with Canadian Tire Bags, bags of produce, and now corn. I made the mistake of thinking we had only 3/ 4 of an hour or so to go, that we would arrive in time for a late afternoon drink and a swim while it was still warm outside. Ha! There is this lumber and cottage supply store just before you turn off at the marina where mother would pick us up in the boat. I one such stop. He had phoned ahead and had ordered a two weeks’ supply of lumber and assorted “stuff” for the various projects he had planned for his vacation. This stop involved much measuring and figure calculating which he did on the back of one of the pieces of lumber. Thank God he was having the lumber delivered to the dock at Foot’s Bay the next morning where he could take care of it all. Then he fairly lept into the car, savoring the idea of those pieces of lumber. I was trying to be a good sport but….. We were less than a mile from the dock at Foot’s Bay. It was now close to 5 p.m. But there was still the liquor store which meant a 2 mile run down the dirt road beside the lumber store into Mactier. I didn’t know how we were going to put all the liquor in the car, what with the hardware and other items we had accumulated during the day. But we did. We landed on the government dock at the Foot’s Bay at 6 p.m., telephoned Mother, who promptly drove the boat over and picked us up at the dock. It took us another hour to unload all this stuff out of the car and into the boat, then ride across the channel and onto our dock. It was now 7p.m. It took us 9 hours to make a 2 hour trip. Happened every year. You think I would have learned and hitched a ride with one of my brothers, but I never did. Every year I longed for a leisurely lunch and afternoon at the cottage, and wound up spending the entire day leapfrogging from store to store all the way up Highway 400 and 69. And the most infuriating part was his unflappable good humor. He actually enjoyed this trip. Many of our log entries read like weather reports. It is not that we were obsessed with the weather. The weather played a very important role in our summer lives. We were surrounded by the raw elements of nature—water, wind, temperature and it very much mattered to us what they were doing. Every minute of our days and nights were dictated by weather patterns and contributed significantly to the quality of what we did with our days, how we amused ourselves, even whether

we came to the cottage or not. In another note, in the log entry from June 6, 1983, Mother talks about the “Blue Hour” that evening, or twilight being exceptionally beautiful:

Lovely misty mountain blues and glowing silver with touches of amber and an afterglow. It was a beautiful day, 67 degrees and bright sunshine with a stimulating freshness.

Then again on June 11, 1983, she talks about Allison:

Good weather all weekend. Allison in her plastic pool. She climbed in with shoes and a complete outfit. At 21 months she is charming and most intelligent, talking in sentences. Her first knowledge of the lake and she was agog when she first saw it from Foot’s Bay.

The Canadian summer is short, extending from mid- May to mid- September. We seldom go in the water until late in June. Then we have to hang up our bathing suits over Labor Day. We had about 9-10 weeks of summer to enjoy; consequently, every day was precious. If the weather was nice, the days spent at the cottage were glorious, full of summer fun. If the weather turned sour the days could be tedious, even dangerous. You never knew in the morning how the day would turn out. A beautiful day could turn into cold and stormy weather in hours, and a weekend that was forecast sunny often was not. With the cottage perched as it was on the tip of the island, surrounded on three sides by water we were completely exposed to whatever weather nature could throw at us. The really bad storms came in from the north and were awesome. The waves built up to amazing heights, and the thunder and lightning at times swept over the top of Badgerow in a boiling frenzy. We could do nothing but wait it out. Escape to the mainland was out of the question.

I can a bad fog experience. Roberta Walker, a friend of mine from El Paso, had been visiting and the four of us, me, Roberta, Mother and Dad were getting ready to leave for the city for the drive back to Connecticut. Mother and Dad owned a condo there for a time in the late 1970’s. We awoke to a dense fog, but had to leave anyway. As we pulled out of the dock, my father who was driving the boat and has a very poor sense of direction, headed off to the right. He should have veered off to the left, towards Gordon Bay. I started to protest and Mother waved me off, to be quiet. I still to this day do not know why. I was right. We were quickly swallowed up by the fog and could see nothing. We continued at a snail’s pace until the land was suddenly directly in front of us. We were a few feet from our own dock, right back where we started. We turned around and tried again. This time he headed in the right direction, and we were soon out of the fog and on our way. We usually kept going north to the cottage well into September, but Canadian Thanksgiving (the first Monday in October) was the end of the season. It was too cold after that, and once the ice set in, we had no way of getting over there from the mainland. In the depths of winter, January and February, it was possible to walk across the ice but even on a sunny day it was not worth the effort. We could start the fire in the Franklin stove but it was not much good unless you kept it going constantly. I once spilling a glass of liquid on the counter top and it froze immediately. We had to wait until next spring, when the ice went out, before we could return. In Northern Canada, that meant May. Dad would watch the papers for the weather and ice reports and was usually the first one every spring to head once again to Baderow. Life at the cottage, in the early days, did not include computers, stereo equipment, video games, Game Boys, even TV. We had to amuse ourselves or each other. The children played games sitting on the floor of the living room, especially when it was raining outside, They played Monopoly, Risk, Cheat, simple card games. But the classic was Concentration. You had to where all the cards were that you placed face down on the floor. Stephen, who was about 8 years old at the time, was really good at it. Murray wanted to take him to some professional gambling casino and place bets on him. Even though their games were not nearly as sophisticated as they are for today’s children, I can’t help but think our children at the cottage learned more about each other and formed closer bonds than they would have otherwise.

On rainy days, and in the evenings the adults would open several bottles of Michael’s home made wine, complaining about the sour taste and the way it made your teeth turn purple, and would pull out the board games. Scrabble was a favorite. Agnes was a whiz and won just about every game. Michael cheated. He would turn the tiles upside down to make them into blanks. Trivial Pursuit was also a favorite when it came out. We were not kind or gentle with each other playing these games but the Potts understood the bantering language and did not take offense. The spouses had to be initiated into this particular dialect and it often took time, I Debbie McMahon’s first exposure. We were carrying on as usual, cheating and insulting the daylights out of each other when she suddenly burst into tears and told us we were all nasty people, every last one of us. We were floored. What in heaven’s name did we do? The second wave of grandchildren was now coming on the scene, which added 9 more grandchildren to our family. They included Christopher’s, Nancy’s and Murray’s offspring. When Nancy and her husband separated and divorced, the husband, now exhusband, bought his own cottage further down the lake. As a result, we saw a great deal of Nancy’s children as they were growing up. Chris’ family were, for the most part, post cottage. Only Ian spent any significant amount of time at the cottage. All of the above children were born, spent their infancy and childhood, and graduated in to their teen years during the life of the cottage. They were mostly blonde, tousle-haired, and looked very much alike, or at least the boys did. This explosion of children was something like the larger demographics of the baby boomers, our own bubble of population that affected the family as they moved through the first part of their lives. It was not very often that all of them got together but when they did it was usually for the August Regatta. The start of the cottage season was the 24th of May long weekend. The 24th of May was Queen Victoria’s birthday and a national holiday in Canada. It was really an archaic throwback from the colonial days. We didn’t care. As young Canadian school children, we disrespectfully chanted the English rhyme: “The 24th of May, the Queen’s birthday, if we don’t get a holiday we’ll all run away.”

We could have cared less about Queen Victoria, but we did care about the holiday. It marked the beginning of the summer season and was often reflected in the horrendous traffic jams on Friday evening heading north to the cottage country. There was a time when we lit fireworks on the 24th of May, but that cultural festivity was moved to July 1, Confederation Day, also a holiday. The end of the summer was marked by the Labor Day weekend. That left the August 1st weekend, so Canada added a Summer Holiday to the first weekend in August to give us a long weekend mid-summer. The Saturday of that weekend was the day of the Regatta over at Foot’s Bay. It was organized by The Muskoka Cottagers Association and dominated by the Potts and the Deacons. Everybody tried to arrange their summers so they could bring their families to the cottage on the August 1st weekend for the festivities. They held power boat races, canoe races, a triathlon (running, swimming, canoeing) swimming races and contests, diving events, water skiing, canoeing. There were Potts children (and some adults!) in every event. The children practiced for a week or so before the big event, not nearly enough. Mother planned for weeks for the Regatta weekend, arranging a menu, and buying and transporting all that food. She divided up the shopping so every family that arrived on the dock brought some groceries as well as their own overnight case. Each person was responsible for his or her own liquor which usually meant a last minute rush into Mactier. Mother and Dad often went into Parry Sound and shopped there, returning to the cottage with so many bags of groceries there was barely enough room in the boat to bring them over to the cottage in one trip. Mother also worked up a duty roster and posted it on the wall in the kitchen beside the stove. Duties included preparing a specific meal, cleaning up after the various meals, preparing and packing picnic lunches, periodically cleaning up the mess that had accumulated. You were in deep trouble if you tried to shirk your duty or forgot about it. The actual Regatta was held on Saturday at Foot’s Bay and was organized and moderated by the Muskoka Lakes Association. But the activity over at the cottage had begun the day before. Various family groups had begun arriving

mid-afternoon. It was quite a scene to take care of everyone’s needs in a small three bedroom cottage. Mother had to draw a diagram to work out where everyone would sleep. Some were in tents outside behind the cottage, some were on the various couches, others were in sleeping bags on the floor, and a lucky few, a very lucky few had a bed in a bedroom. I usually slept in the cabin, but not that weekend of 1983. That time I shared the bunkroom with four Claremonts. Jason and Christian were in the top bunk, Daniel was in the crib, which he did not paicularly like, I was in one of the real beds and Nancy and Kelley shared the other one. Jason had to go to the bathroom the minute we all settled down. Then Daniel began singing Happy Birthday, which annoyed Kelley. The Grandchildren still complain about never getting to sleep in a proper bed. Early in the morning of the festivities, Mother and whoever was assigned to help her, packed a picnic box (a basket was too small) full of sandwiches, and fruit and cookies, and the cooler with ice and drinks. She also loaded up with towels and folding chairs, and sunscreen and a first aid kit. It took forever to load all this stuff into the boat. Some of the events started early, so despite the rain on that weekend, the first boatload went over to Foot’s Bay around 7:30 in the morning to be ready for the first of the races, beginning at 8 in the morning. They also took the canoe over, sometimes laid across the bow of the power boat,sometimes someone would paddle across to the government dock. The rest went over in groups of five and six . Once the last load of people and supplies arrived at Foot’s Bay, their problem was to find a place to park the boat and unload all the stuff we brought with us. Usually, by this time all the dock spaces were taken and cottagers were parking their boats out in the bay. But you couldn’t see from out there so we tied the boat up to a boat up to another boat, sometimes four boats deep, and climbed our way over to the cement dock. You had to be limber to do all this, loaded down with supplies. The days’ events were announced by the Master of Ceremonies, sometimes by Earl McKnight, sometimes by one of the Tompkins boys, the son of one of our neighbors down the island from us.

The swimming races were held in the water between the two cement docks a distance of about 300 feet, and were divided into age groups. Christian always won his group and Deborah always won hers as well. Laura tried mightily, but not being athletic, always came in last. However, she was a good sport about it all. One of the main attractions was a half mile race from the Dyer’s dock across Foot’s Bay to the dock in front of the store. I Stephen entering that one and how winded he was at the end. He huffed and panted for a good half an hour. Michael and Stephen entered a parent/child canoe race, and didn’t win. The power boat races lasted only one year. A few good crashes put an end to that event. Mandy entered the diving one year, for the first time. The diving board was placed on the far end of the second dock and a volunteer backed his car up until one wheel was on one end of the board, making for a sound diving board. Mandy marched up to the board, carefully made her way to the end, grabbed her nose and jumped off, feet first. She won her class as she was the only one entered. Canoe Jousting was a favorite event for participants and spectators alike. Chris entered one year with his friend Peter Leach (of the boat sinking episode) who was a big youngster. They used Mom’s canoe which was of heavy wood and fiberglass construction. In the joust, one person sits in the canoe and steers, the other stands with a joust stick, a pole padded at the end, and tries to knock off any opposing team into the lake. Peter got knocked down and fell hard into the canoe, breaking one of the seats. They won that day but paid for it when Mother found out what they did to her canoe. Chris entered the trick waterskiing and could do tricks like skiing on a paddle, skiing backwards, even skiing barefoot one year. He says it was 50 feet of bare feet followed by a variety of cartwheels and other painful gyrations. We would all head back to the cottage at the end of the day, full of Tom McKnight’s hot dogs and chips, hanging on to our winner’s ribbons and awards. Christian usually got the Potts award for the most ribbons and Deborah often came second. So they did on this weekend. At the end of the awards ceremony,

everyone raced for their boat at the same time, crawled over whatever boat was in the way and headed out of Foot’s Bay with twice the legal capacity of engers, canoes slung over the bows, sailboats dragging behind, trying to negotiate the wakes thrown out by all the power boats. That evening there was a spectacular display of fireworks that most of us watched from our boats on the lake. It was utterly beautiful, the shower of lights shimmering a reflection in the water. .

CHAPTER EIGHT FINAL YEARS

M other and Dad’s 40 th wedding anniversary ed with a celebration at Murray and Agnes’s house in 1979, then their 50 th seemed to come right after in 1989 with a gathering on T he Seguin . As we toured through the lakes on the steamship, it struck me how much Muskoka had changed in the years we had been living there. First of all, it was getting crowded. Miles and miles of uninhabited shoreline was a thing of the past. The wealthier segment of Toronto’s upper classes were feeling the financial depression of the 1980’s and could no longer afford extravagant vacations in Europe. Many of them started looking northward, in their own back yards, for summer vacations. It was now cool to own land in cottage country and as available lots were snapped up, they became more and more expensive. The cost of land accelerated, until it was no longer within the reach of the middle classes. The buildings they erected were no longer simple cottages, but huge monsters, grossly extravagant, far too much for the culture of Muskoka. They changed the entire tone of life in Muskoka. For those not interested in the upkeep of a second home, many of the more exclusive hotel chains began building lodges, similar to the early tourist era in the 1800’s. This new class of people moving into Muskoka not only were extravagant in their living quarters, but they also bought very expensive and very large boats, with lots and lots of power. One did not need a driver’s license to get behind the wheel of one of these behemoths, so you had young kids recklessly tearing around the lakes at incredible speeds. We witnessed many terrible accidents. One particularly bad one involved a boat full of youngsters. They came screeching around a point at full tilt and suddenly found themselves face to face with a pontoon boat. They hit it hard, cutting it in

half. Several of the engers on the pontoon boat died. The boats were also noisy, as were the jet skis that became popular with the younger set in the 1980’s and 1990’s. We opted for the sedate. One of the last investments we made at the cottage was in a pontoon boat which revolutionized our boating as a family. The initial investors in the pontoon boat were Chris/Eileen, Jim/Nancy, Grandma/Grandpa, Stephen/Heather. As Stephen puts it, not knowing what they wanted or needed, they went economy all the way. Their main interest was to use the pontoon boat as a basis for their SCUBA diving. The first weekend our family had the pontoon boat, they hauled up to the lake a menagerie of old and mismatched folding chairs from everybody’s backyard in the city, and kicked off the first of many sunset liquor cruises. We looked like a family from Mactier. The beauty of it was that it could hold so many people, and the ride was so much smoother. It had no seats, no cover, a simple outside rail, a small 25 hp engine and smaller diameter pontoons. They would load it up with scuba equipment and once they got four people on board, their pontoons were submerged. Not only was it dangerously overweight, it was incredibly slow, mainly because the engine was trying to push the pontoons through the water, instead of gliding over it. Stephen re one trip to the south part of Lake Muskoka with three divers and three others for a salvage mission. Chris had started this scuba salvage service and people would enlist him to get stuff that had fallen overboard. Stephen re once getting a full mainsail from a sailboat. One time they went to Lake Muskoka to get a 9.8 outboard motor that had fallen off an aluminum boat. It took them about three hours to get there. They threw the anchor to find they were on top of sixty feet of water. It wasn’t until they got down close to the bottom that they discovered the bottom 10 feet was all silt. They never found the engine; they tried for about an hour but it was hopeless. All they did was stir up the silt into clouds of dirt obscuring their vision. Then it took them another three hours to plow back. That was a long day. Even before the summer was over, Jim gathered all the brochures he could find on pontoon boats and from his reseach he determined what changes we needed. It was not even two years before the big upgrade. Stephen re Nancy in

the showroom of Gordon Bay saying to the salesman, “What is the biggest engine we can put on it? Is that all…? Can’t we go bigger?” After crunching the numbers, Nancy and Jim got the loan and everyone paid them each month. In their eyes, they went from a VW Beetle to a Cadillac Escalade. It had comfy seats built all around the side with lots of built in storage, a longer deck, a bigger engine, windshield, sun cover, and bigger pontoons. The bigger pontoons made all the difference as we could pile tons of weight on the boat and it could manage quite easily. Jim built all kinds of custom add-ons such as a swim ladder, extra headlights that could light up a darkened dock on approach. The rest of the family wanted to us on this boat, says Stephen, even though they were not official partners. That was fine with us, he says. We were so proud of that boat that the more the merrier. Stephen says he never felt any resentment to others using it. He knows Jim and Nancy were fine with it as well, so long as no one did any damage. Chris and Eileen had moved on, so they gave up their partnership. Originally, the pontoon boat was to be the on-water base for the SCUBA divers and was to provide transportation for them. Jim and Nancy, Michael, Steve and Heather and others, I am sure, simply wanted a boat that could carry them and all their gear without half sinking. Dad wanted the boat in order to haul people and things back and forth between the government dock and the cottage, something like a minivan. No more of this two and three trips to get everyone and their luggage back to their cars on Sunday evening for the trip back to the city. Soon, other uses emerged. We could use it for cruising; only now we could take everybody and a picnic lunch. We particularly loved cruising after dinner with an after dinner liquor, a pastime long established at the cottage, and which was particularly awkward in the Four Winns. Mother writes in the Cottage Log about these leisurely after dinner cruises on the pontoon boat. They were immensely relaxing and pleasurable. We could now go to Port Carling, or to Port Sanfield for ice cream cones and everyone could be included. Going to Port Carling became a normal event where they sold Frozen Yogurt in a homemade waffle cone. Frozen Yogurt was a new invention at the time. The yogurt shop was a little shack of a place, a short walk from the dock. They

carried frozen vanilla yogurt and a multitude of fruit toppings, and chocolate chips and candy sprinkle toppings that could be blended into the yogurt or sprinkled on top. Mother commented that one day she wandered into the yogurt shop and counted eight Potts’ bottoms leaning over the railing in front of bins of frozen yogurt. Everyone loved those trips. Along the way we would stop and let the kids swim off the pontoon boat, in the middle of the lake. If it was terribly hot the adults would jump in too. The pontoon boat was also of great help in trips to Big Cliff and for taking the children for swimming jaunts in the middle of the lake. For some reason it was more fun to swim out there than in our bay. I one trip with Nancy, mother and Eileen and Deborah. We packed the pontoon boat with a picnic lunch, munchies, and drinks and ice. We took off for a remote part of Lake Joseph that had many cliffs and interesting rock formations both below and above the surface of the water. There were no cottages in this area of the lake so it was peaceful and isolated. We anchored the pontoon boat to a branch that was over hanging the water. Nancy had her Scuba Gear so she went diving to search out what the rocks had to offer far below the surface. I was a very good swimmer at the time and swam all around the cliffs, and then out into deeper water. After an hour or so we came back to the pontoon boat and had our lunch. We sunned awhile, then went swimming again. The beauty of that day and the peace and joy of our activities is the single most precious memory I have of the cottage. I don’t think I have ever been at such peace as I was on that day either before or since. This is truly what Muskoka is all about. But it was not to last. Innocently, Mother writes in the log:

John A and I are here alone…We stand on the deck—breathe deeply, connect with all our inner forces to this place and are healed and vow never to leave it.

How lovely – clouds in silver and grey and white/boiling. Suddenly the sun

breaks through on some lucky island – a spot of gold, then a solid bank of rain moves down from Round Island; we brace for it. Suddenly it fades and the sun breaks through again. The mists sweep clear and the view up there is clear, clean and blue and lovely.

Stephen and Hearther married in 1987. They continued coming up to the cottage for a time, then realized it was time for them to find a place of their own. Stephen loved Muskoka and wanted to live there permanently. But there was his job in Toronto. He arranged with the higher ups for him to work mainly from home and to come into the office in Toronto every couple of weeks, now made possible with telecommuting. He found a nice piece of land bordering on a small lake (Mary Lake) near Huntsville, Ontario, in the north western part of Muskoka. They bought it and built their house on it, not just a cottage, but a real permanent house, and moved in late 1987. It was a big decision but they have been very happy with their choice. Stephen gave us a blow by blow description of the construction of his driveway, which was, in reality, a very difficult job. But he belabored the point and brought out the mischievous in the rest of us. We teased him mercilessly for months. Geoffrey ed the Canadian army; Matt married and eventually moved to the US. The other grandchildren also began to scatter to begin their own lives. It was like one morning we woke up and there were no more children. Deborah had graduated from college and was working in IT placements. It was not long before she could afford her own place in Muskoka. There was no question in her mind that she would continue the tradition and buy in Muskoka. She loved it as much as the rest of us. Her place is on Lake Muskoka, near Beaumaris. She enjoys her summers at her cottage with her husband Jared and children Emily and Madeleine. Jason Claremont bought on Lake Simcoe, not Muskoka but certainly cottage country. His house is not just a summer cottage but a permanent homestead. It was built over a boat slip. The main floor is basement and leads out to his boats. The 2nd and 3rd floors are the living quarters with a huge wrap around deck overlooking the water.

Back at Lake Joseph, our cottage was looking dowdy, so Mother organized one last supreme effort to revive it and paint the entire building. Mother chose the colors, a harmony of various shades of white and grey. Everyone participated over several weekends. It looked lovely when finished. But it really was a last hurrah. Mother and Dad were spending more and more time alone at the cottage, and it was getting too much for them. They could not keep up with the repairs, for one thing. One has to be young and vigorous to live on an island in Muskoka and cope with all the boating and hauling that such a lifestyle entails. It is hard work dragging supplies over to the island and fighting bad weather coming down the lake from Gordon Bay at midnight. It was time for them to find a place on the mainland. It broke my mother’s heart to leave Badgerow. In midsummer of 1991 they packed up the cottage, loaded the last of the boxes of personal items into the boat and drove away. Mother looked back at the cottage as it slowly faded from her view. It broke our hearts to watch her. She lived for another ten years, but they were declining years. She seemed to give up when she lost the island. In her final days, before she surrendered to the more complete emptiness of Alzheimer’s, she became philosophical. She told me one day that she had had a good life, blessed with many joys, more than most. We were not to mourn her ing, but to rejoice that she had experienced such richness and such happiness. Not many people get to live such a life.. But her Alzheimer’s was relentless. She told me on another occasion, “There is nothing behind my eyes.” She was trying to articulate the emptiness in her head as the Alzheimer’s began to destroy her brain. She left us long before her body died. That happened in September of 2003. We had her body cremated and her ashes interred in her father’s grave, in her hometown of Merrickville, Ontario, Canada. My father followed her in death on May 25, 2012, at the age of 94. In the end, my mother was right. She did live a rich and full life, and her legacy lives on in the love her children and grandchildren still feel for her. I hope in some way this memoir has captured her life and her spirit, has preserved her memory and her essence along with that of White Wave, since they were really one.

APPENDIX

Sketch of Cottage

The Cottage

Diving Rock

The Author, Maureen Potts and Amah loving a grandchild

Pontoon Boat

Dancing Tree, Michael, and Christopher

Jansey Two

Michael, Mother, and Papa

March 1984