Mist curls white on tranquil lake,
Clouds grow rosy; birds awake,Cold dew twinkles in rainbow light,
Whip-poor-will ceases his song of the night.
The mist curtain thins on the water still,
The sun peeps over a hazy hill,
A loon laughs loudly to greet the morn,
A breeze stirs the pines - a new day is born.
HCH, 1943
We started going up to Muldrew Lake as a family in 1941, when my uncles could not always leave the city for their cottages. They were happy to have them occupied by appreciative - and responsible - family members.
There was a war on, but in the summer it all seemed very far away. Some of the young women were away in the armed services, and many of the young men, including my cousin Fred. We all looked up to Fred, who left Canada as a sergeant and was rapidly promoted, as much for his own merit as from the death toll among Canadians overseas.
My father took a weekend off from the office, where he normally worked Saturday mornings, to help my mother set up her household in Muskoka. A street car took us from the stop at Davisville and Mt. Pleasant to St. Clair Avenue, and along to the end of the line near one of the foulest-smelling factories in Toronto. (Dad and Uncle Elliott worked there as youths.)
We and our baggage full of clothing, sheets and household supplies toiled as speedily as possible up a long flight of wooden steps to St. Clair station. The train from Union Station had plenty of cars for all of us holidayers heading for waters too numerous to count, once north of the large twin lakes Simcoe and Couchiching.
In Gravenhurst we took a taxi to Indian Landing on Muldrew Lake, where cousin Jim met us with a small motor boat to escort us in the pouring rain to his father’s second cottage on Silver Island. The following summer we spent July at Uncle Jack and Aunt Helen’s place on Pine Island, and August on Silver Island.
Less than five minutes by canoe separates the two islands. No record exists of the time it took twelve-year-old Peter to swim that distance on a dare. Not long, I imagine.
We had no telephones or electricity yet on Muldrew Lake. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I rowed the “Queenie”, the elderly skiff that my mother had patched, to Indian Landing to meet the truck that brought our grocery order, the mail and the newspapers from town.
Gasoline was rationed, but few cottagers ran outboard motors anyway. One enterprising youth delivered groceries with his motorboat “for a slight fee”. The rest of us paddled or rowed to the landing just for the sociability of meeting each other three times a week. Families used this occasion to invite each other to sing songs, picnics and wholesome parties designed for cottagers of all ages.
On Sundays there was always a clergyman or professor or lay person on holiday to lead the church service at Memorial Pines on Middle Lake. Granite cliffs embraced the clearing in the grove on two sides, making a natural amphitheatre. Behind the birchbark lectern, past the pine-needles and the rocky shore, sparkled the waters of the bay.
When the wind died down and the moon came up, groves of slender white birches would gleam out on the island slopes, like the sylphides in my favourite ballet. From the thickets, a whip-poor-will would call, as if saying, "All is well. Time to put out the oil lamp and go to sleep."
Yet the war was not so far away after all. The old hospital on Lake Muskoka had been turned into a prison camp for German officers. We could see the barbed-wire fencing around the beach of this “gilded cage”. Once in a while we met parties of prisoners at roadwork under guard. As far as I recall the solders were unarmed.
The Norwegian Air Force set up a camp nearby at Little Norway, apparently feeling at home among our pines, birches and granite. A few of these Germans and Norwegians returned to Muskoka after the war as immigrants.
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Our train for Toronto at the end of the summer of 1942 was made up in Gravenhurst, so that there was plenty of room when we boarded. Our family of five were able to turn two seats facing each other, while a uniformed man did the same for his smartly tailored wife and bright-eyed little son. From his shoulder flashes, this native Canadian was one of those guarding the German officers at the prisoner-of-war camp.
In Orillia a contingent of nuns wearing the habit of the order of St. Joseph came in, and the Indian family man gave up three of his four places to make room for Sisters.
At Barrie, near Camp Borden, a boisterous crowd of young men and women - probably military personnel on leave - cheerfully filled the aisles. They stood up all the way to Toronto, singing and urging the rest of us to join in. One of their favourite numbers was the saga of a man who went into a restaurant to see “What fifteen cents would do”, since that was all he had:
“The waiter’s call rang down the hall: ‘This here gent wants one fish ball!’” they belted out, and they continued to entertain us all the way to St. Clair Station, where our small family group detrained. All very jolly. I counted more than a dozen passenger cars continuing their merry way down to Toronto Union Station.
Summer, 1944
We still had plenty of teen-agers under military age at Muldrew Lake for the annual regatta that remains freshest in my memory. We had mainly canoe races, no sailing events, and only one rowboat race.
I liked best the gunwale race. Balancing with one foot on each side of the canoe takes a certain skill, and practice, whether you paddle or simply bend your knees to send the canoe forward in rabbity leaps. I practiced, when I thought nobody was looking, for a whole week before the regatta, which was held on a Saturday afternoon in Middle Muldrew Lake.
On the Friday before the regatta, all the young people from Middle Lake crossed the Middle Portage to the north side of the Peninsula to help ferry all available craft from North Lake around the end of the Peninsula and back east again to the site of the regatta on Middle Lake.
We made the rounding of the peninsula into a day-long expedition with a picnic halfway along. People from North Lake crossed the portage homeward well after dark.
On Saturday, Uncle Jack and Mr. Dickson ran the regatta, and awarded inscribed paddles to the junior and senior boy and girl who had racked up the most points in all the races. After the evening picnic at Memorial Pines, no one felt like going right home.
The young people, still full of energy, crossed the portage to North Lake and poured ourselves into the few craft left there - the emergency rowboats and the leakiest canoes. At Indian Landing we piled into a couple of cars and drove the three and a half miles into town to see what was on at the movies in Gravenhurst.
Nothing was on! The manager had closed his theatre, exceptionally, because of a close family bereavement. The streets were thronged with tourists, cottagers and Norwegian airmen at loose ends. Men in blue-grey were draped here and there on the lawn in front of the Opera House, which also served as City Hall in those days. Music coming from open windows on the second floor prompted some of our more enterprising crowd to crash the local dance.
No such shenanigans for me at my young age, or for older cousins Jean and Jane, who felt responsible for me. After kindly Jane wiped our table at the Chinese restaurant for the wilting elderly waiter, we ordered milk shakes to fortify us for the walk back to the lake under the stars. The rest of our crowd merely sampled the dance, then returned to the lake for a midnight marshmallow roast on the top of the Peak.
At 2.00 a.m. they had to put out their bonfire and hurry down to take John, bleeding copiously from a scalp wound, to the doctor’s cottage on the western end of Pine Island. An over-enthusiastic hewer of wood had dropped a sizeable dead tree trunk on my cousin’s head. He appeared the following day neatly stitched and bandaged, ate a good lunch and crossed Middle Portage in time for church.
After the service and a swim from the high cliffs nearby, we ferried back the North Lake boats, stopping to picnic just before sunset. More jumping from even higher cliffs on the wilder south side near the western end of the Peninsula.
Roosting on sloping rock, we sang a few current hits like “Sentimental Journey” and “Chattanooga Choo-choo”, both about trains, come to think of it. Someone pointed out a gull on the calm sunset water, calling out, “Look at the sun shining on its stern!” The gull remained placid, unaware that it had set off a burst of laughter.
We set out on our journey east along North Lake as the sky took on that special green glow above the horizon. In the Swiss mountains it is known as Le Rayon Vert (the Green Ray). I call it “a Muskoka sky” and look for it in summer.
