Cottage Daze. James Ross
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“I’ll let him go outside,” I said.
“He’ll get back in.”
“I’ll take him to the other side of the island.”
“He has discovered easy food. He will find his way back.”
“Do I have to drown him?”
Hey, I was a sensitive kid. I paddled the one-mile stretch of water to the mainland in my canoe, a white garbage bucket in the bow. I set the mouse free. Perhaps a hawk or garter snake found him, but I felt quite pleased with myself. My dad teased me, not being able to face the facts of nature. “Outside, they are left alone,” he would say. “But once our space has been invaded, they have to go.”
It is with great trepidation that we head to the cabin each spring, to open the cottage for another season. What mouse treats will be left behind? What wanton acts of vandalism or destruction? What careless mistakes did we make when closing the cottage last fall?
One year a box of spaghetti had been left behind, and the mice had broken each individual noodle into tidy one-inch pieces. These they stored in various caches throughout the cabin, including inside the oven mitts that hung on the side of the stove. Another year it was a bar of soap, left by the sink, that was chewed and shaved into a thousand slivers, leaving us with the freshest smelling rodents on the lake.
This year, Grandma is annoyed that someone has stolen the laces out of her old, comfortable camp shoes — though nobody will admit to needing a piece of string. We find the thieves when we separate the box spring and mattress in the back bedroom. The laces are there, still in one piece, wound gently around the lip of a downy mouse nest, like garland around a Christmas wreath. Mouse mom and mouse babies stare up in innocence. The children find them cute — our youngest asks to keep one, wanting to name him Stuart Little. The war is at a truce.
With the grandchildren and Grandma keeping a stern watch, and I, for my part, grinning a silly smile that hinges on a thirty-some-year-old cottage memory, off goes Grandpa in the boat to shore, with a family of mice gently stowed with their nest in a bucket at the bow.
Hello, World!
My dad would wander out on the front porch of the cottage and shout out, “Hello, world!” at the top of his lungs. The bellow would break the silence of a summer’s evening and echo across the still lake waters. I am not sure if anyone across on shore ever heard him, but they certainly didn’t bother to holler back with, “Hello, Mr. Ross.” Maybe they just heard it and muttered amongst themselves, “There’s that lunatic again.”
We would have just finished up our dinner when he’d get up and step outside to let go with his familiar salutation. Or we might be playing a family board game on the big pine harvest table in the evening when he would head out to the loo, pausing on the porch to shout.
Sometimes we kids would have settled in for the night in the boathouse bunkie. We would be telling ghost stories or shining our flashlights around on the ceiling like spotlights. We would be giggling and talking and, sometimes, we would be getting yelled at to “be quiet and get to sleep and quit wasting the batteries in the flashlights!” — much the same things we chastise our kids for now. When we had settled down and were drifting off to a sweet sleep, lulled by the sounds of waves lapping on shore, the wind in the trees, or the distant call of a loon, comforted even by the sounds of adult voices and laughter coming from the cottage — suddenly the front door of the cabin would swing open and we would hear the familiar refrain, “Hello, world!”
When we were young we would giggle at his antics. What a silly thing for a dad to be doing. In our teenage years we would roll our eyes and think, “How geeky!” As we grew older and visited the cottage with our friends, we would wince every time he stepped outside, and then let out a sigh of relief if nothing happened. Then, there it was, the shout. He seemed curiously incapable of being embarrassed, which was all right because I felt enough for both of us. Red-faced, I would cast an eye at my comrades for their reactions.
In retrospect, though I might have thought his antics embarrassed me in front of my good friends, I don’t think his inane shouting from the cottage’s front porch elicited any such response from them. Perhaps their own fathers had similar unusual traits. Perhaps they had become hardened to such behaviour over time.
When I started visiting the cottage with my own family, Grandpa would still wander out to the front porch and shout his greeting. The kids would giggle; what a funny thing for a grandpa to be doing. I was all right with it by then, too. In fact, his shouted greeting had become a part of the place, a part of what I felt at home and comfortable with and what made the cottage such a familiar and fun place to visit.
Feel as if you can fly.
We bought the cottage from my folks, and a funny thing happened. I would step outside in the evening, and I’d have this overpowering desire to shout to the world. At first I’d send out the familiar phrase in a hoarse whisper. Sometimes I’d yell it a little louder, much to my children’s chagrin and my wife’s displeasure. She’d give me that look: “See, you’re turning into your dad, you’re picking up all his silly habits. Do you want me to start acting like my mom?” Well, no, but that’s another whole column.
We opened up the cottage on a beautiful weekend in April this year. We had made our way through the opening checklist, completed our chores, and then sat down for a nice steak dinner. We cleaned up afterwards, together, and then I stepped out on the porch, stretched, and couldn’t resist the urge … “Hello, world!” I shouted.
My wife stepped out behind me, but rather than giving me heck, she gave me a little hug and said, “Yes, it’s great to be back here.”
Looking back, I realize that my dad’s greeting, offered out to the lake, was simply a statement to anyone who was listening and to nobody in particular. My dad was saying, “I’m happy to be here!” Or perhaps, “I love this place!” After all, he never did it anywhere else. It was something only for the cottage. “Hello, world!”
The Rescue
First of all, before I begin this little story, I want to let it be known that I do not suffer from arachnophobia. I might prefer a snake slithering across my path, a leech stuck to my midsection, or even tripping over a hornets’ nest to having a big, hairy, creepy-crawling spider spinning me into a death cocoon, but, in general, spiders are all right.
The Hobbses are good friends of ours. Even though they live over a mile away, they are our cottage neighbours. They have the small island called Blueberry to the northeast. If we ever need a hand, or advice, Harvey Hobbs is always willing.
This April the lake ice took away the dock on Blueberry Island, making it extremely difficult for the Hobbses to land on their steep rock shoreline. The dock had simply disappeared, another victim of the destructive power of spring breakup. Here, then, was an opportunity for us to pay back the Hobbses for their unerring helpfulness. We set out on a morning mission in our boat to find the missing dock and return it to its rightful place. After some searching, we spied an intact, sixteen-foot section of the dock on an uninhabited stretch of the north shore.
The dock was wedged high on the boulder-strewn beach. My wife and I struggled to get it afloat, using twelve-foot rails as pry bars. My father, skippering the boat, attached a line to the stringers and pulled. We gradually worked the heavy thing loose and got it floating. My wife jumped into the bow of the runabout to help guide us through the many shoals. I stayed on the dock-turned-raft.
Off we went, towing the dock across the calm lake with me balancing on the deck boards. If I moved towards the bow, the front of the dock dipped below the water. If I moved to the port or starboard, I found I could help manoeuvre the clumsy barge to the left or right. Only the back middle third of the dock stayed high and dry.
Imagine my consternation when, as I stood regally on the raft with the wind blowing through my hair, I looked down and saw an enormous spider standing beside me. He looked like my pet dog sitting primly there