Up in Ontario

Winter at the Lake: Part II

If you missed Part I, see Winter at the Lake: Part I for this to make sense.

Dad and I followed a road along the creek to the locks. We passed over some rail tracks and the road dead ended on a rise looking out over the Winnipeg River. Sometime in the past few years the locks had been closed and filled in. A hand railing slanted down into the snow where the locks used to be, where you used to be able to wait along side your boat as the water level changed. Off to one side a boat launch sloped down to the water, and snowmobile tracks led down it out onto the ice. We parked the truck at the top of the launch and got out to look around. The wind whipped across the ice at us, stinging our faces with particles of snow. There was nothing to see but the frozen river and the cabins and homes on the far shore, trails of smoke rising from their chimneys into the crisp air. The locks were gone.

We climbed back into the truck and returned across the railroad tracks to town. Dad pointed out the house my great grandparents had lived in before they moved into their apartment nearer the end of their lives. Then he turned down some residential streets into a part of Kenora that I had never seen. We went up and over a few stunted hills to where a row of about a dozen identical small houses fronted a street that ended at a rock face. Dad stopped the truck in front of one them and told me that it was the house he grew up in. I looked out and could imagine Pa there in the driveway, a smoker at the time, and my grandmother with her blond hair and my dad, Jimmy, playing on the lawn. It felt as if the past was pressing right up against the window.

We pulled into the driveway and the windows were frosted and no one was home. We backed out and returned to the highway, passed through Kenora and followed Storm Bay Road to Smith Camps, a fishing camp of nine cabins on the east side of Heenan Point.

We ate lunch with Al and Joanie Smith in the restaurant area of their main lodge. After lunch, Al showed us the old wooden gun boat he had put up on the wall, filled with worn out fishing rods and rusted lures. Hanging all around us were the fish and game of hunting and fishing trips of the past: a fisher with a mink in its mouth, a rack of whitetail antlers, a bull moose head, jackfish and pickerel and bass.

Al poured coffee and told us about going down to his butcher shop a few days earlier, opening the door and flipping on the light and seeing a young black bear crawling in the window opposite him. He had left the window open for the night to clear a smell and the scent had proven irresistable to the bear. The bear let out a woof, backed out through the window as quick as it could, fell to the snow and high-tailed in into the bush. It was one lucky bear. Most bears that come around Smith’s and break into the buildings don’t get a chance to learn their lesson.

As my dad and I wheeled out of the Smith Camps yard, Al headed out to clear the snow from the rink at the end of the docks. I remembered skating on that rink when I was still young enough to need help tying my laces tight enough. We used to stay out until we couldn’t feel our toes and then we'd gathered around the fire and drink hot chocolate until the feeling of pins and needles stopped.

Dad and I backtracked along Storm Bay Road to the main junction, and then headed away from the highway toward our cabin. There were no other cars on the road. Just past the dispatch garage of the Storm Bay Volunteer Fire Department we turned down a single-lane track, down a slope and out onto the ice road. Frozen cattails bent under the truck at the shore. We started out onto the ice and there was a funny moment where Dad and I looked at each other and took off our seatbelts. My dad cracked his window open a few inches and we emerged onto the open ice.

The weather had warmed. Only about a foot of snow covered the ice. The truck ran smooth and quiet over the ice and we picked up speed. In front of us stretched a great expanse of snow under brilliant sunshine, bordered in the distance by a thin line of spruce. Then there we were, driving over the water, where last I had travelled in a boat. Ridges ran in straight lines out from the road where the ice buckled under the pressure of the moving water.

It felt as if we were emerging from the past, picking up speed into the future. Everything around us gleamed. We went faster out onto the expanse of whiteness. The truck began to roll on the ice in a porpoising motion, as if we were crossing frozen waves, as if we were bumping along outside of time.

We arrived at a fork in the road and stopped. One branch headed south over Hay Island to residents in Moore Bay and beyond, the other headed east to Blindfold Lake and Rushing River. My dad and I stepped out of the truck onto the ice. I crouched down and cleared off a spot and looked into it, down at the bits of algae and a small branch trapped in its hold, at the dark water below. After a minute we climbed back into the truck and retraced our path to the shore, where we buckled our seatbelts and rolled up the window again.

We checked out the cabin to make sure it was wintering alright. Dad told me about his plans to build a new boathouse in the spring, one with a bunkhouse on top and a sink and table to clean fish at. I had heard about the boathouse before. We climbed up off the ice onto the dock and I listened to Dad tell me again about what he saw in the future.