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We used to vacation with another Toronto couple. For several years we would spend a week together at DinoVino's aunt's cottage in Bowmanville. The cottage was right on Lake Ontario, with a vista that was all horizon, all lake, grey water meeting grey sky, or blue water meeting blue sky.
We have a picture from those days. It shows four Muskoka chairs ranged over the large concrete patio. Each chair faces a different direction. The fourth chair, belonging to the photographer, is empty. The occupants of the other three chairs are reading. No one can see anyone else. There is no interaction. There is just solitary reading by the shore of Lake Ontario.
This is how all four of us loved to vacation. Mealtimes might involve corn-eating contests and so forth, but during non-eating hours, each of us lived in a little globe of beautiful silence by the water.
But we took another vacation together, too, one year. We rented a houseboat and took a trip on the Rideau Canal, through and around Big Rideau Lake.
Imagine two couples in their mid-50s. One couple—we'll call them A and B--has done camping and canoeing in Algonquin Park. The other couple (they will be C and D) has done a lot of reading. One of the men (A) sailed a bit some 30 years ago. The other man (C) can't swim, gets seasick, and cannot sleep when there is any motion at all--including the (to some) soporific rocking of an anchored boat.
So A becomes the de facto skipper of this vessel. B and D, the wives-of, are designated as crew. C does the worrying for the group and performs whatever joe-jobs we assign to him. A knows as much about houseboats as I know about nuclear power plants (there's actually one of those near that Bowmanville cottage). But A is game, persistent, and a good learner, in addition to being a mathematician.
We meander all around Big Rideau Lake. We use the lock system, tying up our old rented houseboat next to zillion-dollar yachts and pretending that we too have just motored up the coast from Florida.
Most of our overnight anchorings are at public docks provided around the lake. You angle your craft in, with a lot of prayers, you tie up front and back (fore and aft?), and you set the hibachi on the dock and grill some veggies for dinner.
One night we decided to tie up at an uninhabited wooded area along the lake shore, but the water was too deep for our anchor to catch. We had horrible thoughts of drifting away from the mooring and crashing into the shore, stoving in the hull and causing us to sink to our deaths in the depths.
Since we couldn't anchor to the bottom of the lake, perhaps we could attach the boat to some of the trees at the edge of the island. But we couldn't get close enough to catch hold of a branch. Pilot A manoeuvred forward and backward, but nothing got us close enough.
There were two solutions. We could abandon the idea and go find another mooring, or we could try to swim the distance to the island with rope in hand, and tie it up that way. A was the best swimmer. He got in the water, put the end of the rope between his teeth, and began a good solid prep-school crawl. It didn't take long to discover that the rope was not long enough to reach the trees.
Obviously, we had to get the boat closer. I will let you imagine the encouragement, the opinions, the suggestions offered to A by the peanut gallery still on the boat. Do this. Try that.
He began swimming again, but much more vigorously. This time, his goal was not just to carry the line to the trees, but, using only the strength of his solid crawl stroke, to haul the enormous houseboat and its three passengers close enough to shore so that he could tie up.
We have a snapshot of him in the water, trying to tow a houseboat.
He never made it. Having no choice but to admit defeat, he came back to the boat. We regrouped, rethought, and decided that what we really wanted was to spend the night at a public dock again. So A started the thumping engines, we got out the maps, and we eventually found a docking for the night.
We gave A an extra ration of brandy after dinner in recognition of his extraordinary attempt to tow a houseboat.
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