Canada Day on the Atlantic
How Michael Peterman’s dream of owning a cottage took a 2,000-km detour
I grew up in the west end of Toronto — the Kingsway, to be exact. Thinking back to my younger days I can’t remember when I didn’t dream about going to the cottage each summer.The fact was that my parents had no cottage; they rather overextended themselves each year by sending my brother and me to camp each July. But the idea of having a family cottage to go to each summer weekend ran deep in my boyhood imagination, even though there was little hope of that dream being realized.
This was in the 1950s. We Petermans were certainly not hard done by, but my brother and I felt the absence of that special summer opportunity — to have our own cottage, our own bedroom in the woods, our own fireplace for cold evenings, our own beach for swimming, our own dock for boating, and overall a place for the endless sorts of play that we imagined other young people our age were enjoying.
Now, more than 60 years later, I finally have that “cottage,” but it is not in Ontario where summer leisure property abounds. We chose against all logic to buy an old fisherman’s “cape,” built in the 1840s on a hill in Nova Scotia across the bay from the beautiful town of Lunenburg. Why? you might ask. The possibilities available to us in the Peterborough region and other nearby cottage areas in eastern Ontario were numerous. On a larger scale, Canada has been busy for decades advertising the country’s many wonders on television and promoting opportunities designed to appeal to the traveler in all of us. In addition, travel by car or plane or train is much easier in this century and is still relatively inexpensive.
But why choose Nova Scotia? For one thing, real estate prices are much lower on the east coast. There is also the appeal of the cool ocean breezes and the sea’s changeable beauty, its power and its capriciousness. Then there are the friendly Bluenosers themselves: they insist on a warm smile of hello and a “canI-help-you?” when they meet you. Indeed, there is a whole other way of life here; it is often hardscrabble and certainly not luxurious, but it awakens you to special, deep-seated realities. It is a fresh and quiet world. But, for me, hidden behind all the practicalities of day-to-day living is the sheer romance of difference, of doing the unanticipated thing and doing it in the best way you can manage.
I think as I got older the enormous appeal of cottage life in Ontario became slightly less attractive. Places I imagined so rosily as a boy had become a little too stratified, too overcrowded, too much a part of the weekly rush to escape the city. I wanted something a little unusual and our experiences visiting towns near the Atlantic Ocean gave me a glimmer of what that might be. When friends moved from Alexandria, Ontario to Lunenburg and when our daughter decided, quite on her own accord, to attend King’s College in Halifax (located on a corner of the Dalhousie campus), we began to entertain maritime possibilities.
In the background there were friends like Alan and Bud ge Wilson( of Trent’s Canadian Studies Program) who delighted in their summers at Northwest Cove near Halifax. As well, I can never forget my literary love affair with an American writer, Willa Cather, who bought a small cottage at Whale Cove on Grand Manan Island (the only property she ever owned!); there each summer in the 1920’s and 1930’ sshewouldw rite her stories and novels.
Living by the sea began to seem more and more possible to us. For several years we vacationed on Grand Manan and on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, renting cottages and cabins by the week but scarce ly imagining that we might somehow come to spend our future summers 2,000 kilometres from Peterborough. But in 2001, we made that very decision and began an adventure which charms and excites us still.
From my study where I am writing this column, I gaze out across sloping lawns and stands of trees toward the blue waters where Lunenburg Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. As I do so, I feel blessed to be a part of rural Atlantic Canada, as well as eastern Ontario, in this year of our country’s sesquicentennial. It makes my pride in being Canadian so much the richer. We will celebrate Canada Day 150 here in our usual smallscale way with a parade (maybe six to eight floats but carefully prepared by keen local participants) through the only street in the village of Riverport. Back in the day this village was much more flourishing — it was an active fishing port, an offcentre for privateering, and finally, during Prohibition, a hub in the rumrunning trade. Now it is a very quiet place, indeed a shadow of its former busyness. At the Riverport Firehall we will indulge in a noon-time fishfry (your choice of fried scallops and haddock—or both, with a not-to-bemissed strawberry shortcake finale). Here, as at most public events, the locals and Come-From-Aways (like us) delight in mixing together, sharing greetings, stories, and memories. Then there will be a party or two on our peninsular road along the ocean front with flags flying and hamburgers on the grill. Black rum or Keith’s beer are very popular, filling many a neighbour’s glass as the darkness comes down the peninsula.
Canada Day is the official beginning of summer here. June usually offers unpredictable and coolish weather — lots of rain and fog and too little sun — but over the following months the days grow warmer and sunnier, culminating in what is usually the beautiful month of September. However, one would be remiss not to mention that hurricanes occasionally blow up the eastern coast of the United States in August, leaving their incredibly windy mark on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. But those days can be exciting and memorable as well.
The year 2017 is particularly remarkable, here as elsewhere. There is so much music to enjoy in the churches, private homes, barns, and auditoriums of Lunenburg, Riverport and Mahone Bay. It ranges from classical and opera to folk and rock. We begin with a concert performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto this weekend and carry on through many events and performances to the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival which this year is being held in the same August week that the tall ships gather in the harbour. We are lucky down our way as we have the Old Confidence Lodge, now much revived as a recording studio and stage in Riverport, and the Ol’ Miners Diner at the Ovens Park. The latter is owned by Steve Chapin who nightly sings at his piano either alone or with some of his musical friends. Steve is the younger brother of Harry Chapin and was his musical director until Harry’s death in 1981. The Harry Chapin legacy lives on during summer nights at the Ovens.
There’s nowhere else in Canada I’d rather be in this our country’s special summer than here in Nova Scotia. Each year offers us a reunion with old acquaintances, many from cities in the United States, in addition to our local friends who have welcomed us so warmly since we bought our home in 2001. We have the sea nearby, we have many beaches, we have the fresh ocean air and its bracing winds, we have the special blend of communities hereabouts, we have the rich resources of Maritime culture and music, and, above all, we have a home that we made for ourselves, quite against convenience and logic. I have my summer cottage at last, though at a considerable distance from Peterborough; in that sense it is my dream made palpable, my dream come true.