Celebrating the rhythms of a Canadian summer
For days, the fires of Temagami flared. On the evening we arrived, under a slanting, molten sun, the place was otherworldly.
It had not rained hard for weeks. The forest was a tinderbox. There was a smell of smoke in the air and a curtain of haze but no flames, which were far away.
That was Tuesday. On Sunday, just two days before, our neighbours on Outlet Bay reported that the smoke and ash was too hard on the eyes and lungs; at 8 p.m., they fled.
Another friend, Jack Goodman, said he could not recall five consecutive days over 90 F (32.2 C). He has spent more than 70 summers here, and he feels the changes in the natural world. Now he had decamped, too. We would not meet him at the “cut,” where we tie up our boat, traverse a narrow isthmus through the trees, and motor down to his place on the lake’s southwest arm.
For 25 years, we have shared roast lamb and lively conversation there. By statute, Jack and I disagree with Dennis, Jack’s older brother. Our annual afternoon with the Goodmans this year would be a minor casualty of global warming.
With fires burning around Highway 11 and threatening the town, many left by order or choice. Firefighters saved Temagami and its marina, this time, but the fear is that these fires will become the new reality.
In truth, though, there are few new realities on Lake Temagami. Year after year, the talk is the same among cottagers: when the ice went out — early or late — in the spring; how high or warm the water; how fierce the flies.
From the water, the place looks the same as it did when I first came here 30 years ago. I still marvel at the immensity of the lake (some 50 kilometres north to south) and the variety of its 1,259 rock-bound islands; the brooding pines, lowering skies and water so tempestuous that I feel safer kayaking amid islands 20 kilometres off the coast of Maine.
I marvel at the hidden shoals — the teeth of Temagami — and how boaters know to avoid them; misfortune to those who don’t. I marvel at how my wife unfailingly navigates the lake’s shallows and narrows, repeating the same hoary tales from her youth of the pike at Slide Rock or the turtle of Baldwin Bay, which she insists is still alive.
Temagami is not Muskoka or Haliburton, where cottages have become castles and nature slips into suburbia. Temagami remains what it is, which is in large measure what it was.
For me, a July sojourn to Outlet Bay is a tonic. Aunt Jane and Laura’s cottage — a classic cedar Pan-Abode — is cosy and elegant. Their taste is pitch perfect. The interior is adorned with family photographs, snowshoes mounted on the wall, lake charts and stylish rustic chairs, sensible woollen blankets. No electricity or running water; a hand-pump, a propane fridge and a woodstove for chilly nights. A telescope to see the stars. Magazines, books and games. A concession to 2018: a rechargeable solar battery.
Temagami is not Muskoka or Haliburton, where cottages have become castles and nature slips into suburbia.
Evenings call for a classic redand-white checked flannel cotton shirt and a Bird’s Eye Maple Sagamore paddle to guide the canoe up to the beaver dam nearby. Shirt and paddle are made by Burnt Point Lodge, the purveyor of fine things evoking a sense of place, even loss and longing.
The days are unlimited here. Reading, writing, berry-picking, canoeing, fishing, swimming. Ah, the rhythms of the Canadian summer.
Life on the lake recalls a time when woodsmen went into the bush and caught fish to eat. They carried little more than a skillet, a coffee pot and a blanket. Dinner was fish and bacon from the rucksack, and it was enough.
That life is gone; urbanites could not imagine the woods without a tent, mosquito netting and artisanal freeze-dried scampi — if they imagine them at all.
Still, Lake Temagami has heroically resisted most — though not all — of the contrivances of modernity. Mercifully, this is something not even the fires can consume.