Lobstick Island
One of my favourite places on earth growing up was Lobstick Island. It was my grandfather Deane's dream to have a cottage on the lake but he never realized the dream. However, my grandmother Alice was able to complete the dream for him with the help of her son Arleigh. Gramma built a log cabin on Lobstick Island "on the point" and their daughters Elaine and Vivian and husbands built right next door. I'm not really sure about who acquired their property first. My dad told me he bought his property for $1000 after his first NHL season (1948) and I believe he owned it jointly with brother-in-law Fred Carter. They built 3 cabins and a flat-roofed building closer to the dock that we called "the store". Fred was an excellent carpenter and built the cabinets and furniture for the cabins and built-in beds that you always seemed to whack your shins on when you jumped into bed. You can still see the cabins across the bay from the 7-mile bridge in Ft. Frances Ontario. In the photo below, it looks like they're just getting ready to build the docks. It makes sense that brother-in-law Herman Morphet, who was an excellent builder, would be recruited to help.
They also built an outhouse and a two-stall solar shower that was basically a huge metal horse-watering tank covered with black tarpaper up on the roof of a shed. We pumped water from the lake up the hill to the shower and cabins for running water. But usually we'd just take a bar of soap down to the lake. The kids fished for perch off the dock and caught baby frogs in the weeds. We always got a big roll of paper from the mill before we went up the lake and on rainy days my mother would draw paper dolls and all their clothes for us. I loved the colourful Fiestaware dishes we had at the lake and the enamelled cooking pots we used for picking blueberries. I'm a Latte addict and I'm sure that's because Uncle Freddie used to make me "bunny coffee" which was mostly milk with a bit of coffee in it. He rolled his own cigarettes and used to light a wood kitchen match, blow it out, wrap a cigarette paper around it, and let us pretend we were smoking. Mokies. It's a wonder I'm not a nicotine addict too.
When we first spent time at "The Island", the road wasn't there--only the railroad. Everything used to build the cabins and all the propane appliances were brought in by boat. We used to load up our skiff at the 5-mile dock and travel to the island with a very slow motor and very little free-board as I recall. A few times we walked the track from the 5-mile to the 7-mile. Sometimes my dad and I would walk from the 7-mile to the 9-mile to fish for huge northerns. After the road was built we could park near the bridge and wade across the bay to the island but it was never quite the same.
Even when we lived in Colorado, we spent our summers "up the Lake". My dad, whom everybody called "Sonny" or "Cousin Ed" would sometimes guide on the houseboats on Rainy Lake. He was famous for building ridiculously large bonfires and teaching many of my cousins how to swim. At his funeral my cousin Sharon fondly remembered his "Liar's Club". Meetings of the Liar's Club were generally called on days we had been blueberry picking. My mother would bake a blueberry pie and set it on the window-sill to cool. We'd steal the pie and abscond to the far side of the island to watch the waves and eat the pie. Except you weren't allowed to have a piece (actually a handful) of pie until you'd told a fish story. And I mean a real whopper. Years later I published several collections of flyfishing fiction and I'm sure it was a result my early training in the Liar's Club. I can't remember my rank. I was definitely not Chief Liar or Peewee Liar but I might have been Liar-in-Training.
My grandmother didn't visit her cabin too often but when she did I'd go over to have Toad-in-the-hole or just to watch her make toast in the morning. She'd remove one of the lids from her cast-iron wood-stove and hold a piece of bread skewered on a fork over the open fire to toast it. My sister and I remember spending a night at grandma's cabin in the middle of a horrific windstorm that felled huge trees all around the cabin. My aunt and cousins were there, too, so maybe the women moved us all to gramma's solid log cabin because they thought we'd be safer there or maybe so we could all just be together. We should have been terrified with trees crashing down all around us in the dark but we were laughing too hard to be scared. There was a bat in the cabin that mom and auntie were convinced was going to get tangled up in their hair and give them rabies. They wrapped dishtowels around their heads and spent half the night leaping from bed to bed trying to kill the poor bat with brooms.
There was an old fellow named Willie Calder who also had a place on the island. On hot summer days we'd sneak into Willie's icehouse and lie on the cool sawdust. A friend of my parents, Bill "Willie" Fontanna, who toured in Sportsmen shows with his log-rolling dogs, lived on an island nearby and we used to visit him. We called him Uncle Willie but he wasn't our uncle. We'd practice our own log-rolling on the training stations he'd set up and come home with scraped knees. The flyfisher Joan Wulff used to travel with the Sportmen's shows as well, demonstrating her amazing casting ability. Once I asked her if she'd every heard of Willie Fontanna and his log-rolling dogs and I'll never forget the expression on her face. Not only had she heard of him, he'd actually lived with her family as a very young man and she had toured in the same show. Small world.
When we first spent time at "The Island", the road wasn't there--only the railroad. Everything used to build the cabins and all the propane appliances were brought in by boat. We used to load up our skiff at the 5-mile dock and travel to the island with a very slow motor and very little free-board as I recall. A few times we walked the track from the 5-mile to the 7-mile. Sometimes my dad and I would walk from the 7-mile to the 9-mile to fish for huge northerns. After the road was built we could park near the bridge and wade across the bay to the island but it was never quite the same.
Even when we lived in Colorado, we spent our summers "up the Lake". My dad, whom everybody called "Sonny" or "Cousin Ed" would sometimes guide on the houseboats on Rainy Lake. He was famous for building ridiculously large bonfires and teaching many of my cousins how to swim. At his funeral my cousin Sharon fondly remembered his "Liar's Club". Meetings of the Liar's Club were generally called on days we had been blueberry picking. My mother would bake a blueberry pie and set it on the window-sill to cool. We'd steal the pie and abscond to the far side of the island to watch the waves and eat the pie. Except you weren't allowed to have a piece (actually a handful) of pie until you'd told a fish story. And I mean a real whopper. Years later I published several collections of flyfishing fiction and I'm sure it was a result my early training in the Liar's Club. I can't remember my rank. I was definitely not Chief Liar or Peewee Liar but I might have been Liar-in-Training.
My grandmother didn't visit her cabin too often but when she did I'd go over to have Toad-in-the-hole or just to watch her make toast in the morning. She'd remove one of the lids from her cast-iron wood-stove and hold a piece of bread skewered on a fork over the open fire to toast it. My sister and I remember spending a night at grandma's cabin in the middle of a horrific windstorm that felled huge trees all around the cabin. My aunt and cousins were there, too, so maybe the women moved us all to gramma's solid log cabin because they thought we'd be safer there or maybe so we could all just be together. We should have been terrified with trees crashing down all around us in the dark but we were laughing too hard to be scared. There was a bat in the cabin that mom and auntie were convinced was going to get tangled up in their hair and give them rabies. They wrapped dishtowels around their heads and spent half the night leaping from bed to bed trying to kill the poor bat with brooms.
There was an old fellow named Willie Calder who also had a place on the island. On hot summer days we'd sneak into Willie's icehouse and lie on the cool sawdust. A friend of my parents, Bill "Willie" Fontanna, who toured in Sportsmen shows with his log-rolling dogs, lived on an island nearby and we used to visit him. We called him Uncle Willie but he wasn't our uncle. We'd practice our own log-rolling on the training stations he'd set up and come home with scraped knees. The flyfisher Joan Wulff used to travel with the Sportmen's shows as well, demonstrating her amazing casting ability. Once I asked her if she'd every heard of Willie Fontanna and his log-rolling dogs and I'll never forget the expression on her face. Not only had she heard of him, he'd actually lived with her family as a very young man and she had toured in the same show. Small world.