Cottage, camp or cabin?

Maybe you’re on your way there now, to your happy place by the lake, on a mountain, beside the ocean or in the middle of nowhere at all that — depending on your geographic roots — you refer to as the cabin, the cottage, the camp, the chalet and, if you happen to be in Cape Breton, the bungalow.

The terms Canadians use for their summer homes are varied, but not estranged. When your colleague from British Columbia speaks about their cabin, you, the cottage-goer from Ontario, know exactly what they are saying without them actually saying it – because you agree: it is better there, than here.

It is more fun, more relaxing, more connected to nature, more disconnected to technology, more tied to family, nostalgia, starry nights, sleep-ins and swims; and more likely to trigger a full-blown sibling war when the question of what’s to become of the family cabin after Mom and Pop pass away gets raised.

I married into a cottage. This was an accident of fate. Long before I met my wife, or she met me, we both fell in love with Georgian Bay: a big hunk of water off Lake Huron rendered in Group of Seven paintings — think: Tom Thomson, Pine Island — where my non-cottage-owning Toronto parents shipped me off to summer camp as a kid, and where my wife’s family rented cottages before building their own.

It is a collection of small cabins (in sum, a cottage) on a small, west-facing island; a place of clear water, rock, west winds, bent pines, big skies, blueberries, canoe rides, wild storms, slow-burning sunsets, skinny dips, percolated coffee and the same edition of the New Yorker magazine I’ve been reading there every August since 2002.

In other words, it is heaven. The experience of being there – at once fleeting (summer always ends), but timeless (summer always comes back) – matters more than anything it might be labelled. As does the promise of return, simmering to mind, say, on a smog-choked, Mumbai-like Toronto day in mid-June, or a sub-Arctic morning in late February, that helps sustain a writer through his darkest, work-is-grinding-me-to-dust/ city-living-is-crushing-mysoul/what-does-it-all-meananyway, moments of doubt.

No, we think, we may not be at the cottage (cabin, camp, chalet, bungalow) yet, but we are going to get there, eventually. And there will be a beer in the fridge, a sunset at which to marvel and a morning swim to which we’ll wake up — at least until Labour Day. It is the common equation of cottage supply (Summer) versus cottage desire (Balance of Year) that provides Canadians with a common, unspoken dialect.

But that’s not to say paradise can’t get complicated.

Remember: I married into a cottage. Meaning it is not my cottage. Meaning my inlaws are kind and generous hosts and, at times, as parents will, parent their youngest daughter no matter her age or how many children she, herself, parents.

But we do get along, mostly. And it is in the crashing together of generations that you find enduring cottage memories: seeing the joy (always tearful) on my fatherin-law’s face when our kids sing him happy birthday; my daughter doing laundry (in a bucket) and hanging it on the line with her Nana, or putting her little hand in mine and counting one-for-themoney-two-for-the-showthree-to-get-ready-and-fourto-go before racing off the end of the dock.

Every so often, a gift: the grandparents watch the kiddies for a few hours so their bedraggled parents can go for a paddle, grab a nap or just float on their backs with arms spread wide. Looking up at the sky and feeling with every breath a diffuse calm, a sense that maybe this crazy life will work out, after all, and the kids will grow up to be happy, healthy, successful, well-adjusted, brilliant humans who aren’t repelled by the thought of spending a weekend at the cottage with their nutty old Mom and Dad.

And that’s the true meaning of cottage (camp, cabin, chalet, bungalow), isn’t it? It is about being around people you love in a place that you love. Somewhere special and far away, not necessarily in actual distance travelled or terminology, but in terms of effect: this is your brain. This is your brain on cottage.

We might not understand each other, always, and we may not even speak the same language — but we all recognize a Canadian summer when we see one — so better pack the car and start driving, since our happiest places (and selves) await.