Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Fagan's lake
Oh bliss! I have survived another holiday season. The cottage is closed and I am back in the city.
I am just not a woodsy gal. I’m the indoors type.
The trouble with our remote hideaway is that there’s nobody there. I like company, and there’s no company to be had in the bush. I have thought about importing Montreal friends, but then I might be expected to be nice to them - amuse them, cook for them, accompany them on hikes and rambles. Forget it. I go only with my children who have no such hopes of me.
I like to read; in fact, that’s one of the few things I do like and while there’s lots of light by day, it’s black as your hat at night. When the light goes, we sit around making lists - that’s another thing I like to do. We plan teeny decorating projects. This year we painted the rocking chair red, a modest achievement by city standards where homeowners go crazy and/or broke redoing their kitchens, but an artistic breakthrough in a context of beaverboard and shabby lino. We reeled around for days, overwhelmed by the beauty we had wrought.
I have a limited tolerance for trees. I haven’t anything against them, but they rarely move me to rhapsodic utterance. I do look out of the window now and again but, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan (with whom I have nothing else in common), when you’ve seen one cedar, you’ve seen them all. I refer, of course, to our cedars - skinny survivors of the Darwinian struggle.
I like the animals that strive to share our cabin with us. A family of chipmunks lived in our kettle this summer. We had to rescue the last baby with a can opener; he had eaten himself beyond all hope of escaping through the spout from which his slimmer siblings had exited upon our arrival. When we opened the kettle up, he waddled away from his bed of Uncle Ben’s provided out of our stores by his exhausted mother who must have been very relieved to be able to suspend her maternal duties and begin provisioning herself against the winter - or am I (mother of many, not all of whom have moved out) projecting?
The outside beasties I rather like too. We are, to the raccoons and chipmunks, objects of veneration, I believe. If animals can be said to have religion, our critters belong to a cargo cult, and, after a season of prayer and meditation and, certainly, fasting, there is a rumbling on the hill and the Great Furless Deities arrive in their noisy machine, laden with ketchup, corn on the cob, Oreo cookies and all manner of marvellous treats.
Last month I saw a grouse tiptoe cautiously across the road. I stopped the car, of course, to let her go. We spotted another one, lurking in the weeds by the verge and he too ventured forth and proceeded across with careful steps. And then another. They seemed to have a rule about moving slowly. They reminded me of a formal wedding party pacing up the aisle - dignified and self-conscious, somehow amateurish, looking neither to left or right. The fourth set off for the other side, hesitantly and diffidently; halfway across he started to run, but some maternal signal or belated memory of Discipline brought him up short and then he stood there, lost in thought, maybe, or perhaps trying vaguely to remember which foot goes next. His sibling was dancing with impatience waiting for his turn. Unable to stand it, he started out and passed his bemused brother still mooning there. In all, there were eight of them, and if that is how they take their constitutionals, how in the world do they survive in fox country?
I worry about the loons - symbol of the Canadian wilderness. I used to feel sort of sentimental about them. Every summer we have a pair on the lake, with a brace of loonlets in tow. I am told that they are not birds who like to share, and I wonder where the leftover loons go when the lakes are occupied. Why isn’t the air filled with homeless loons, looking for a safe place to light? I spent years worrying and wondering about the poor creatures until this summer, when I learned another loon fact - one that I suspect the wildlife people are keeping to themselves. Let me tell you this bit of loon lore, so that you can be upset too.
Our symbol of the Northland, being as I have said before, unwilling to share his patch of fish) has a very nasty habit. Our little lake is devoid of ducks, though it is just the sort of water that one might expect ducks to find attractive. Well, guess what! Any luckless duck that lands in loon territory is in for a big surprise. The loon dives under him and impales him on his pointed beak. I am given to understand that he doesn’t just goose the duck in friendly warning - he stabs it, quite lethally. That is a piece of information that I wish I didn’t have.
My kids love The Land, as we call it. (We call it that because it took us 15 years to decide to put a house on it.) They constantly urge me to do Land Things - they wish I would have some fun, they say.
My idea of fun is going into town. I love shopping in Perth. I understand that Montreal boasts all kinds of Dollar Stores. the equivalent of Stedman’s and Giant Tiger, and I am sure that if I searched diligently I could find them. What little towns have that Montreal lacks is a place to park. So Perth is where I buy my underwear: decent, serviceable knickers - what my mother used to call Doctor pants.
And then there is the plumbing: bathing in an ice-cold, pitch-black lake, teeming with unknown but possibly dangerous creatures fills me with dread. I have found that my standards of hygiene suffer a serious setback in the country; indeed, I become quite Elizabethan in my ways.
But I made it, folks. I am back in my flat where the flick of a switch or a twist of the tap will light my way or fill my bath again. I am safe for another year.
I am just not a woodsy gal. I’m the indoors type.
The trouble with our remote hideaway is that there’s nobody there. I like company, and there’s no company to be had in the bush. I have thought about importing Montreal friends, but then I might be expected to be nice to them - amuse them, cook for them, accompany them on hikes and rambles. Forget it. I go only with my children who have no such hopes of me.
I like to read; in fact, that’s one of the few things I do like and while there’s lots of light by day, it’s black as your hat at night. When the light goes, we sit around making lists - that’s another thing I like to do. We plan teeny decorating projects. This year we painted the rocking chair red, a modest achievement by city standards where homeowners go crazy and/or broke redoing their kitchens, but an artistic breakthrough in a context of beaverboard and shabby lino. We reeled around for days, overwhelmed by the beauty we had wrought.
I have a limited tolerance for trees. I haven’t anything against them, but they rarely move me to rhapsodic utterance. I do look out of the window now and again but, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan (with whom I have nothing else in common), when you’ve seen one cedar, you’ve seen them all. I refer, of course, to our cedars - skinny survivors of the Darwinian struggle.
I like the animals that strive to share our cabin with us. A family of chipmunks lived in our kettle this summer. We had to rescue the last baby with a can opener; he had eaten himself beyond all hope of escaping through the spout from which his slimmer siblings had exited upon our arrival. When we opened the kettle up, he waddled away from his bed of Uncle Ben’s provided out of our stores by his exhausted mother who must have been very relieved to be able to suspend her maternal duties and begin provisioning herself against the winter - or am I (mother of many, not all of whom have moved out) projecting?
The outside beasties I rather like too. We are, to the raccoons and chipmunks, objects of veneration, I believe. If animals can be said to have religion, our critters belong to a cargo cult, and, after a season of prayer and meditation and, certainly, fasting, there is a rumbling on the hill and the Great Furless Deities arrive in their noisy machine, laden with ketchup, corn on the cob, Oreo cookies and all manner of marvellous treats.
Last month I saw a grouse tiptoe cautiously across the road. I stopped the car, of course, to let her go. We spotted another one, lurking in the weeds by the verge and he too ventured forth and proceeded across with careful steps. And then another. They seemed to have a rule about moving slowly. They reminded me of a formal wedding party pacing up the aisle - dignified and self-conscious, somehow amateurish, looking neither to left or right. The fourth set off for the other side, hesitantly and diffidently; halfway across he started to run, but some maternal signal or belated memory of Discipline brought him up short and then he stood there, lost in thought, maybe, or perhaps trying vaguely to remember which foot goes next. His sibling was dancing with impatience waiting for his turn. Unable to stand it, he started out and passed his bemused brother still mooning there. In all, there were eight of them, and if that is how they take their constitutionals, how in the world do they survive in fox country?
I worry about the loons - symbol of the Canadian wilderness. I used to feel sort of sentimental about them. Every summer we have a pair on the lake, with a brace of loonlets in tow. I am told that they are not birds who like to share, and I wonder where the leftover loons go when the lakes are occupied. Why isn’t the air filled with homeless loons, looking for a safe place to light? I spent years worrying and wondering about the poor creatures until this summer, when I learned another loon fact - one that I suspect the wildlife people are keeping to themselves. Let me tell you this bit of loon lore, so that you can be upset too.
Our symbol of the Northland, being as I have said before, unwilling to share his patch of fish) has a very nasty habit. Our little lake is devoid of ducks, though it is just the sort of water that one might expect ducks to find attractive. Well, guess what! Any luckless duck that lands in loon territory is in for a big surprise. The loon dives under him and impales him on his pointed beak. I am given to understand that he doesn’t just goose the duck in friendly warning - he stabs it, quite lethally. That is a piece of information that I wish I didn’t have.
My kids love The Land, as we call it. (We call it that because it took us 15 years to decide to put a house on it.) They constantly urge me to do Land Things - they wish I would have some fun, they say.
My idea of fun is going into town. I love shopping in Perth. I understand that Montreal boasts all kinds of Dollar Stores. the equivalent of Stedman’s and Giant Tiger, and I am sure that if I searched diligently I could find them. What little towns have that Montreal lacks is a place to park. So Perth is where I buy my underwear: decent, serviceable knickers - what my mother used to call Doctor pants.
And then there is the plumbing: bathing in an ice-cold, pitch-black lake, teeming with unknown but possibly dangerous creatures fills me with dread. I have found that my standards of hygiene suffer a serious setback in the country; indeed, I become quite Elizabethan in my ways.
But I made it, folks. I am back in my flat where the flick of a switch or a twist of the tap will light my way or fill my bath again. I am safe for another year.
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