The Wolf at the Door

 

Next fall, it will be 30 years that Brad and I and our two infant and toddler daughters moved to a rough, un-insulated cabin in the Muskoka woods, outside Dorset. We had quit our professions in Guelph and were starting all over, cold turkey. Those first decades were really tough. We barely managed to keep the wolf from the door.

We have tried our hand at several business endeavours. Some failed, like the water-treatment business, but others have thrived.   Today, life is a lot easier.   Our years of very hard work paid off this week when we put down the final payment of our bank mortgage. We invited friends over for dinner to help us celebrate and we burned the mortgage in the fireplace with great joy and ceremony. Now the wolf (bank) cannot seize our assets.

For a special treat, I made nutty chocolate clusters and set the pan outside on the screened in porch to cool quickly. (They are absolutely delicious and usually we wolf them down within minutes of the chocolate being hardened.) I went about washing dishes.

Then Brad and I heard it – a cat-like yip and yap at first. Then, when I opened the door to the porch, it howled a wild sound that unzipped me from head to toe. The wolf was right there in the darkness, outside the porch door!   I snatched up my clusters and ran into the house and shut the door.

It’s kind of funny that the day we pay down the mortgage the wolf comes to our door.

 

 

 

 

 

Camping In January in Algonquin Park

This weekend, I felt like I had fallen into a Group of Seven painting, not unlike the way C.S. Lewis’ and Madeleine L’Engle’s characters get to jump around into past and future eras. When I placed the heavy leather tumpline of a loaded toboggan across my chest, and leaned into the blowing snow, I got sucked into another era, one long before the combustion engine, tourists and Mountain Equipment Coop.

Leaning into the past

I’m just warning you, in case you decide to go winter camping with Craig and Doris MacDonald in Algonquin Park in the middle of January. No slick synthetics, and no  lightweight titanium snowshoes or tents on this trip. Nope. Lash on the old-fashioned babiche and wooden snowshoes with a few feet of lamp wick and follow the ancient trail that the first white man recorded in 1827 near the park’s East Gate, beyond the gargantuan virgin pines. It leads to Sunday Lake where you’ll find Craig, master winter camper and expert on Algonquin Park and on the old ways of the Natives and the traders. He comes from generations of northern postal carriers that were more comfortable in snowshoes battling a blizzard than you and I are in our slippers sitting by a fireplace sipping a latte.

We are eight people camping together in the snow. No slackers allowed. It’s a race against a setting sun. A rough, six foot chisel and two metal pails are handed to my son who heads for the lake. “Don’t forget to pile snow on the top of the filled pails so the water won’t slosh all over your legs. And don’t lose the chisel in the lake!” Doris yells out. Someone searches for firewood and bark. My husband and other son stagger out of the forest and into the campsite after retrieving caber-size poles that Craig lashes together to make a structure to which we tie the locally made Egyptian cotton tent. Before my dazzled eyes, the exact shape of the tent in Tom Thomson’s painting The Tent begins to take shape. It’s cream coloured, spacious and gracefully proportioned.

Doris is showing us how to weave a soft fragrant carpet of balsam boughs, the way the Native people do. Craig and Wayne, who still wears the traditional voyageur garb, hook up the stove whose skinny chimney pipe angles up through a metal square in the gable end of the tent. A fire is crackling and, in no time, the tent is heating up. A toboggan, placed in the centre of the tent, becomes our table. Wooden stakes that hold candles are driven into the ground. Soon, we are sitting in our T-shirts, eating home baked bread and chili and swapping stories of adventure and travel, especially tales of Craig’s interactions with the Natives in years gone by. Before I climb into my sleeping bag, I slip outside. The tent is glowing like an old-fashioned Aladdin lantern turned down low. The snow is hard and crisp and the temperature is dropping as the night darkens. It is dead silent and perfectly still.

So, this is how those Canadian painters did it a hundred years ago. Well, Tom Thomson, there’s still one painter who is thrilled to be camping,  your style, in 2014.

A Good Cure for Restlessness

It always happens every year, that irksome restlessness that comes after a period of too much stimulation. It seems to take me forever to calm down after all the excitement of Christmas when the house bulged with guests and rocked with music and merriment, and our bellies protruded with too much gourmet food.

The inner turmoil goes something like this.  “I really need to thoroughly clean the house now that everyone has left.  I’ve got to get working on my spring show of 101 small watercolours.  Maybe I should participate in the summer Muskoka Arts and Crafts show with my cards, after all.  That means painting at least six cards a days.  I’d like to start blogging again.  And, oh, Sarah left her cello here.  Should I take cello lessons?”

So, I end up doing nothing.  I am suspended like a hummingbird before a feeder, wildly whirling my wings but going nowhere, then, erratically sipping at this feeder and dashing off to that flower.  No matter how many firm talks I give myself about focus and self-discipline, and no matter how many noble quotes I read about success, I just can’t seem to get very far on any project.

Matters came to a climax this afternoon when I found myself rarely alone for a few hours on a Sunday. It was the perfect time to start blogging again.  A full pot of hot rooibos tea before me, and a blank Microsoft page open, I waited eagerly for the gates to creativity to swing open.   But, they didn’t.   I hadn’t a clue what to write about, just like I haven’t had a clue, since Christmas, what to paint on the enormous stack of blank canvasses in the corner of my studio.  With each passing minute, the anxiety increased.   It was time to take a walk.

My quiet country road weaves through the forest and traces the rugged contours of the Algonquin Highlands.   I couldn’t help noticing that a raccoon, a grouse, a mouse and a fox had, each, gone for a walk not long before me. Why, even a car had made a new tread pattern in the snow part way up the road before the driver lost his nerve and turned around. The top, wispy branches of the naked maples were gently sweeping the clouds to the side so I could enjoy glimpses of the startling blue sky.   A playful breeze pinched my cheeks and rattled the dry beech leaves clustered tenuously on saplings.  Nervous nuthatches fluttered noiselessly in the branches while a hairy woodpecker hammered relentlessly at a tree trunk until it offered up a bug.

I noticed, when I sat down again to my cold tea and computer, that the gates to creativity had mysteriously opened in my absence.  Ideas and words flowed easily and I was able to write.

For me, a brisk walk in nature is the best cure for just about anything.

A Cultural Event

I was a starry-eyed bride when I first moved to the boonies with my groom. It was late fall and all the summer people had left long ago.  No one else lived within a radius of three kilometers and beyond that was a hermit.  The two big social events of the week were the long snowshoe into town to get mail and supplies and to warm up by the pot-bellied stove at Robinson’s General Store, and again, to go to church on Sunday .

Back then, a special cultural event was to have people over for dinner.  It was a big operation to get them in our roller-coaster road in winter.  Once they were there, the guests could never fully relax, either because they were so anxious about getting out again, especially if it was snowing, or because our cabin was uninsulated and the temperatures outside fluctuated between -30 and -40 C.   The poor souls rarely took their coats off throughout the meal or afterward.  In any case, besides entertaining, a cultural event was also a day-long snowshoe, a bonfire and  picnic in the snow, or stargazing on our backs in the middle of the frozen lake while the wolves howled around us.

Now, thirty years later, I am attending the 9’th annual wine and cheese cultural event of our hamlet.  My, how things have changed in Dorset since the 80’s. While we sip our fruit wine, and look at original art of local artists (Yes, I am here with my paintings.), local saxophone musicians, singers, poets, and writers entertain us.  It’s all so smooth and urbane.  I close my eyes to see if I can fool myself into thinking that I am really in downtown Toronto.  It actually works for a few seconds.  When I pop my eyes open again, I am happy to find myself sitting in the same old Dorset Rec Centre gym, beside Joanne again.  Only now she’s all dressed up. Quite a transformation from this morning when we were here in our sweats doing downward dog side by side in the same spot.

I like the overlap.  There’s something  real, and homey about bumping into each other over and over again in different contexts.   Joanne’s also in my book club, my tai chi class, and my church.  We can never become too proud or sophisticated or cultured because we have all seen each other in the undignified happy baby yoga pose and we know each others problems and have prayed together over them in church.

While I still love the old cultural events that connect me to the land and to a simpler way of life in the bush, I enjoy the new, too, especially in my own little hamlet.  I learn a lot.  I am reminded that Joe, who works with me in the community garden, is one fantastic saxophone musician.  Tina, whom I only ever see pushing the grocery cart around our general store, can write splendid poetry.   I never noticed before what a great speaking voice Mary has until I listen to her as the MC of the whole cultural evening.  She’s always quietly selling tickets for the Concert Association of Huntsville.

It’s an manageable drive to Toronto to see the Picasso art exhibit,   or to hear Yo Yo Ma play cello or Margaret Atwood speak whenever the need to see the greats presses. We’re not missing out on much.  Up on the Canadian shield we give the everyday artists the stage.  We cheer them on and watch them evolve.  They are real people.  Such a tiny hamlet has a lot of artistic talent and we get to have an evening of fun and discover a bit more about our community members at our annual Evening of Wine, Words, Music and Art. 

My CIGARette Boat : poetic musings on a faithful old canoe

On the last day of March, my oldest son and I launched the canoe – an old, patched up discard that my husband and I bought from a canoe rental in Guelph, 30 years ago.   The $400.00 we paid for it seemed like an astronomical amount, especially since what we got was a sun-bleached canoe with cigarette burns all over it.

Rich cottagers on the Muskoka Lakes may have their antique cigar boats, but I have my rickety cigarette canoe and, believe me, it’s no less precious. So far, we’ve enjoyed 30 splendid years of canoeing in that faithful  vessel and she’s still plying these northern waters, still tracking straight and true, despite the extra bit of duct tape patchwork.   Never once has she dumped us, even with all those restless toddlers who would suddenly lurch over her gunnels to drag their curious, little fingers in the water.

As we slide the decrepit canoe  into the newly thawed lake, and gingerly lower ourselves onto the flimsy, wicker seats, we are extra careful not to put any weight on the paper thin floor. We don’t want to go through.  There are still chunks of ice floating around in the lake.  Did she survive another winter, we wonder?  Any sign of a leak spouting out from under the duct tape?   We watch anxiously for a few seconds, but, she holds together and soon we are swinging the bow around the end of the dock and heading exuberantly past the ice and out into the open water.

How can I describe to you the thrill of those very first moments of canoeing each spring?  To grip the smooth, wooden end of the paddle in your cupped hand once again; to feel both the weight of the water against the paddle and the familiar strain in your muscles; to hear the water gurgle as the moving paddle forms little eddies and ruffles around the paddle and canoe; to glide and bob gracefully and freely, like an equestrian under full gallop, over the surface of the water; all that makes me almost burst with joy.  In those first few minutes, I want to canoe until the next freeze up.  (Just  toss my easel in, too.)

I think of all the pristine lakes and serpentine rivers of Muskoka, Haliburton  and Algonquin Park, over which our canoe has safely carried the family, to secluded places of astounding beauty, and of ear-pulsing silence.  Those are the magical  hideaways where the sky pierces through the dense, golden green foliage in little blobs of bright blue;  where undisturbed, fallen leaves paint the forest floor gold, red and rust, and the soaring purple-blue  rocks wear wigs and vests of lime-green moss. .

Is it any wonder that I ended up being a painter?  I am so grateful to my humble, cigarette canoe that has taken me to see the remote, secret colours of our grand, Canadian wilderness.  How can I not paint them?