The Cottage

My parents built a cottage on Rancourt Lake, just outside of Cochrane. Some of my earliest memories are there. I imagine it quite large in memory, but I’ve seen it since growing up and it’s quite small in reality. My first memories of it were from before we moved to Timmins, so, I was very young, then. I remember being bathed by my mother in the lake, rainy days spent indoors, my parents playing card with my Uncle Jerry and Aunt Hazel at what seemed at the time an enormous oak table, the TV displaying more snow than picture, yet issuing what might as well have been a radio play for all we could see.

We returned often those first years after moving. We invariably visited my uncle and aunt there. I recall playing with Keith along the shore. The Owens two cottages down. Their kids Darryl and Ronnie. My parents spent a lot of time with the Owens, so Karen and I spent a lot of time with Darryl and Robbie.

I remember one day at the Owens’ cottage quite well, or should I say I remember a particular incident quite well: I was lounging in an inner tube out on the water, not too far from shore. My mother was on shore with Mrs. Owen, talking, having a drink, maybe. I slipped through the hole, becoming all but stuck. Yes, I almost drowned. The water was not deep, no more than a couple feet deep, but my circumstances weren’t ideal. I could not, for the life of me, get out of the inner tube hole and back on top of it. I’d try to drag myself up and out, but I kept falling back in and below the waterline until I could slip no more, fully stuck, the water lapping at my mouth and nose. But while I was still struggling to release myself, I saw a progression with each crest of my struggle: my mother in the lawn chair, my mother leaping out of the chair, my mother running, my mother sailing into the water, and finally hauling me out of the inner tube and carrying me back to shore where I was no longer allowed near the water, definitely nowhere near an inner tube, in or out of the water. I can’t say I wanted to, not then anyway, not for about ten minutes, anyway. I felt like I was being punished after that.