by Chris Cowland –
I must admit that I complained just like everyone else about being inundated with snow for the last four weeks, but then I thought back to the five years I spent in Winnipeg when I first came to Canada in 1980. A colleague had forewarned me that Winnipeg was “the place where God would visit if He wished to administer an enema unto the world,” but that was actually a slight exaggeration. Despite having snow for six months of the year, blackflies the size of sparrows and mosquitos that could blanket you in seconds, the wonderful part about the city is its proximity to Lake Country.
There are so many choices within a couple of hours’ drive: west to Gimli and Lake Manitoba, north to Lake Winnipeg or east to Falcon Lake, and, just over the Ontario border, that piece of paradise called Lake of the Woods where my in-laws had a cottage on a small island. It is not well known, but it extends 110 kilometres in length and breadth, and contains 14,552 islands.
In those days you could buy vacation property quite cheaply, especially in remote locations. We fell in love with a tumbledown cabin built in 1925, located on Corkscrew Island near Ptarmigan Bay. It was about a 30-minute boat ride away from the mainland and the in-laws. It had no running water, a dodgy diesel generator that had not run for years, and a luxurious two-seater outhouse a short walk away. Judging by the empty cans and bottles that littered the floor, it had been abandoned many years before and used as Party Central. But what a view. It was a two-acre peninsula facing west, and was surrounded on three sides by gorgeous clear water, with Garry oaks, cedars and fir trees.
We had many great memories there, but some of the near disasters were quite comical in retrospect. Our maiden voyage in a boat I had just bought was probably the scariest.
We had arrived late, as packing for a baby and a two year old takes forever, and it looked like a storm was rolling in from the east. We quickly loaded the boat with tools and supplies, noticed that it was sitting somewhat low in the water, but concluded that at full plane it would be just fine. 15 minutes later we were heading away from the relatively populous mainland into the back woods, and the engine suddenly stopped dead. The wind was picking up, the flashes of lightning were getting closer, and it was quickly getting dark. I fiddled with the motor and it sputtered into life, but only for a few minutes. I realized that we were quickly taking on water at the stern, so everyone moved to the front of the boat and I started throwing stuff overboard. We were being swept out into the main channel, but my Amazon of a wife leaped overboard, grabbed the bow rope, and started pulling us back to shore as I paddled from the side.
We spent the night in the rocking boat, tied to a tree, as the storm crashed all around us. Nobody got much sleep, but the positive side of the story was that it was so wet and windy that not one mosquito was able to fly.
