Annals of Travel: Canada Cottage Aesthetics

Written in July 2016 at Turtle Island Cottage, Sand Bay, Ontario

After flying in from California, I had a nice evening visiting friends in Toronto, who made a lovely dinner for me and two others. The next morning I rented a car nearby and drove to the island after stopping in Barrie, a big city north of Toronto, to buy food so I could skip Parry Sound and come straight here.

So far it’s been interesting. It was very breezy, and now a little cold –apparently it was very hot for the last few weeks. Now it’s not, and the water is very high, which has turned my one-acre island into one of about 2/3 acre, and eliminated what was more or less a beach for wading into the very shallow water. The sunsets aren’t so great because everything is a little gray. But this is only my second evening, and it’s my hope that everything will perk up tomorrow. I suspect, though, that the spectacular sunsets I have photographed will appear only later in the season, just as in California the winter skies are the most colorful. And in September, past Labour Day, I once was here and photographed mist rising early in the morning –something to do with the difference in temperature between the night water and the emerging sun hitting it. Maybe I have come at the wrong time of year. Next time, late August and early September.

The island –a very small one, about one acre--was purchased by Aunt Mattie and Carmen, her daughter, my father’s first cousin, in 1948 or 1949.  It had a tiny fishing shack, and initially they slept in it, but eventually, in the 1950’s, Carmen built the cottage. It’s only a few hundred feet from the shore, so Carmen had a causeway built to make transporting the building materials easier. (This makes access very handy. My mother used to call it “our drive-up island.” Beavers constantly undermine it, and blackberries grow along its sides, scratching your rental car if you don’t have them kept in check.) Aunt Mattie stayed in the main house, and Carmen slept in the fishing shack. Carmen, a high school Phys Ed teacher, had summers free, and Mattie’s husband Jim had died, so every summer for many years they packed a station wagon with many things and drove up from Louisiana early enough for Aunt Mattie to make a kitchen garden, and they spent the entire summer here. My family used to visit every few years, not just to see Aunt Mattie and Carmen but to see Aunt Sis, married to Uncle David (a Canadian whose various brothers also had cottages on the Bay), and eat barbequed chicken, elaborately marinated by Aunt Sis in a sauce that had at least twenty ingredients, then burned to a blackened crisp by Uncle David, who didn’t like his chicken underdone. The guys all went out fishin’ for bass with an ample supply of IPA Canadian Pale Ale. In 1967 Carmen sold the island to my parents, and now it has become mine. 

I’ve been thinking about cottage aesthetics. The main cottage is a big rectangle, about a quarter of it occupied by the kitchen—plywood pine cabinets and drawers of the simplest possible design, a sink, a free-standing electric stove which is extremely old, speckled white formica countertops in an L-shape, forming an eating counter with stools whose backs are to what I call the Great Room, and which occupies at least half the square footage. A tiny full bathroom (shower, no tub, and a freestanding bookcase (filled with paper supplies and cleaning materials) disguising the water heater tucked in the corner, sharing the wall with the shower) and a fully but flimsily enclosed “master bedroom” barely bigger than the full-size (double) bed-- share the half of the cottage occupied by the kitchen. Sitting on the top of the hand-made shallow kitchen cupboard and on top of the refrigerator are turquoise plastic containers of different sizes helpfully but now inaccurately labeled “Sugar,” “Flour,” “Salt,” and so on, although a few have strayed into the Great Room bookcases and have been commandeered to hold crayons and puzzle pieces. A plastic white and red electric clock in the shape of a bottle cap announces that it is Time for Dr. Pepper. And there are also precious and fully functioning cast iron skillets, a covered saucepan, and I think a cast iron muffin tin somewhere under the sink, all from Aunt Mattie, who cooked in nothing else. I have no doubt that these things are Worth Money, but fortunately Canadians don’t steal things from cottages.

In the other half, the Great Room half, are strewn a variety of chairs, tables, an ancient couch that unfolds to a queen-size bed in a pinch, a chest of drawers carefully organized by me in 2011 or so (BBQ tools in one drawer, children’s art supplies in another, stray hardware and tape measures in another, empty boxes to lost or non-functioning small appliances in another, . . . .); and of course several bookcases with interesting and not-so-interesting books that people bring to and leave in summer houses, along with ancient pamphlets advertising the Island Queen boat tour—a must for visitors!, leaving from Parry Sound Harbor—or explaining how to identify rattlesnakes and how to care for septic tanks. Its floor is speckled white and brown linoleum tile, no doubt chosen by Carmen to not show dirt, which it succeeds in brilliantly since it already looks dirty. Stains where some sort of carpet tiles once were glued to it still persist, although I recall one summer scraping it vigorously, with help, to some avail. In one bookcase and on a couple of wall shelves are stacked piles of boxes of puzzles and games, plastic cups with collected pebbles and feathers and other treasures; a carefully-built glow-in-the-dark greenish plastic 3-D eagle puzzle perches on its own box and currently guards the end of one large IKEA table, but that is not a permanent feature. Carol and Jim Glen, the caretakers for at least 15 years, spent one winter doing all the jigsaw puzzles and games and reported that not one of them was complete. A mid-century coffee table (you can tell by its spindly legs) is topped with white and brown home-done mosaic – I somehow think that Carmen made it. The walls are a toasty Philippine mahogany no longer available. It makes it a little dark, but it is pleasant. Anyway, on one side are glass sliding doors leading to a deck and Muskoka chairs (known as Adirondack chairs in the U.S.) overlooking the lagoon formed by the presence of the causeway plus its resident blue heron, and on the other a giant picture window with opening side windows I had put in, so there’s plenty of light. 

The two big black and white photographs with wood frames in the main cottage we think were done by Carol Glen’s father and my Uncle David’s father, Frank. One is of the top of a pine tree, bent in the wind, against a cloudless sky. The other is of a lighthouse, still there on Red Rock, which is at the entrance of Sand Bay, which is off Georgian Bay, which is off Lake Huron. That’s the third lighthouse built there. The first was built by Carol’s great grandfather, but it and the next one were swept away in storms. Now no lighthouse-keepers live there –it is automated—but many lighthouse-keepers and visitors have carved their names in the rock. I know that because Jim took me and others out on a motorboat. It was too rough to get out of the boat, but we could easily observe the carved names and graffiti. The navigation map to the right of the chest of drawers has been hanging here as long as I can remember; it’s dated 1956 and is a first edition by a Canadian government agency.

Over by the chest of drawers and the big Turtle Island picture painted by a child on wood  hang two photographs of scenery at the cottage that I took a few years ago. Photographing the water, plants, rocks, sunsets, and views is one of the pleasures of coming here. A picture of rocks and trees done in pastels was made by my mother, my guess is in the early 1980’s; I found it cleaning out a drawer and had it framed in 2012. 

Moving on to the other side of the French doors, a charming picture, generously left by the artists, now hangs in a floating frame; it was made jointly by visitors ages 7 and 2, and it shows the island and its secret paths, swimming beaches, and landmarks. To its left is the Museum of Antique Gadgets and Paraphernalia, which I created a few years ago by placing all strange and ancient kitchen utensils on a small bookcase and then made a booklet to accompany it called What’s This Gadget For? for the amusement and edification of visiting children and their elders. I photographed each one with my iPad on the IKEA table, a nice neutral background. I asked above each picture “what’s this gadget for?,” then gave an answer and often a didactic explanation when you turn the page. Hanging above the couch is a small fluffy rug around 20”x30” made of alpaca or llama wool depicting a moose, made by highland craftspeople in Peru, probably near Cuzco. I found it in a shop in Muskoka, and since I study professionally indigenous art, folk art, and crafts and their entry into the global marketplace, I couldn’t resist getting it and using it as décor. In the same shop I passed up a magnificent chandelier made entirely of the horns of bucks, or maybe they were plastic horns, I didn’t inspect carefully. 

Cottage country is changing. Fishing shacks were long ago replaced by summer cottages, and these are now being replaced by winterized second homes for the Toronto-Barrie-Hamilton families who cannot afford Muskoka area and are spilling over to this part of cottage country, remodeling and replacing, and building decks from whence to see the sunsets while enjoying margaritas, and subscribing to magazines called Cottage Living. 

Should I alter the cottage? Part of me wants it to be far spiffier. The Bunkie is now awesome. Around the year 2000, Bettes, my friend who managed the cottage while I was totally out of the loop, had the brilliant idea of replacing the fishing shack while it was still standing –thus getting a legitimate building permit because it was an existing building—and making a “Bunkie” of two bedrooms, joined by a half-bath and a folding door, and, the genius part, attaching it to the main cottage with a screened breezeway where we can eat and read and sometimes sleep on an air mattress, on a beautiful summer night with the full moon reflected on the water and the loons and whippoorwills doing their thing. It really makes the cottage something special and different and delightful. I’ve already made the cottage comfortable –got down pillows and good mattresses, replaced various ancient and broken appliances. I’m thinking of going through the cupboards and broom closets and bookcases and actually sifting non-functioning things out. 

There’s a serious argument for keeping things as they are: cottages ought to be dog and child-friendly, and chipped mismatched dishes and bent aluminum pans are certainly that. We don’t want people to think they need to wear resort wear. At the same time, one hankers after some gracious living oneself, and I don’t know if I need to honor Carmen by keeping her mosaic coffee table.