Tag: sailing

Opening the Cottage

May 24, 2024

When I started walking to the boat, the president of the cottagers’ association stood at the edge of the marina parking lot with his huge dog, a malamut. He said they missed us at the pancake breakfast the day before. Instead of saying we never intended to attend, I said we were busy. He and the association have been advocating for a revised constitution, a subject with no interest to me but likely to be brought up during breakfast. The president is an earnest fellow working hard at being president, and I did not want to hurt his feelings. It takes a lot of work to revise a constitution. Preparing a pancake breakfast is also an ambitious undertaking for a group, giving him credit.

When the president’s boat arrived to return him to his cottage on the island, we went to our boat. The starting engine sputtered for a while, warming up. The battery in the boat usually runs down in a few weeks unless it starts up every few days, and our boat must have been in the water for weeks without running. The ride to the cottage was relaxing on the quiet water, allowing us to reacquaint ourselves with the cottages and the small islands along the way.

Arriving at the cottage dock, I did a quick double-take, seeing the floating dock paralleling the shoreline instead of being perpendicular to it. Docks are usually positioned like fingers reaching out into the lake, where the water is deeper than at the shore. There was no question in my mind that the dock floated sideways, moved by some storm, losing its anchors at the deep end. I knew then that my first task would be to fix the dock after landing.

 But surprises never come in single doses; inside the cottage, we came upon stacks of mice poo in the kitchen and storage areas where we leave cans and dry goods over the winter. We do not usually get mice over the winter at our cottage; we leave mice poison in the Fall. But one year out of ten, we get a mouse invasion.

Cleaning up mice poo called for a hand-held vacuum. Although we had one, we remembered that it died last year. So instead of sweeping the poo off the counters, we decided to wait until the next time we came out with a new vacuum. This is an example of the disadvantages of island property; one has to boat back to the mainland for items missing on an island.

While Kathy took the covers off the beds and chairs, I put on my bathing suit and goggles and went down to fix the dock. I paid a local handyman to take the floating dock to a quiet bay for the winter and return it in the spring. Whoever brought the dock back this time tied it up with one concrete block at the deep end, which did not have enough weight in our lake, protecting against the three-foot waves rolling against the shoreline in stormy weather.

 I dove into the fresh but bearable water to look for the tires that I filled with concrete to serve as weights, but I had no success. I’ll have to look again next time; there is no way the current would have pushed the two-hundred-pound weights far away. In the meantime, I pulled the single concrete block out to the deeper water, hoping no storm would materialize for a week, pushing the dock back to the shore.

After my swim fixing the dock, I joined Kathy at the cottage, and beyond the mice invasion, the cottage was clean. It was time to relax and eat or drink something, but there was nothing for lunch since we had just come up for a day to do some reconnaissance. Then I remembered the alcoholic beverages that we left there for the winter. Our American neighbor from New Jersey left me his special edition bourbon he made in Kentucky with his friends in 2022. It is a bottle of Maker’s Mark, Private Selection, called “Bobby’s Garage.” The name is from his garage, where he and his friends exercise every morning. It was the best ounce of bourbon I had ever tasted, especially after diving into the lake and fixing the dock.

While enjoying the drink, I called my neighbor two lots away to find out how the pancake breakfast went; I knew they had attended. Instead of answering me, she invited us for a glass of wine. An offer too good to pass up, but before visiting, I decided to sweep the decks clear of leaves and take the covers off the Adirondack chairs outside.

While I worked outside, Kathy grilled some chicken for a light dinner later. By five o’clock, we were ready to see our neighbors. They said perhaps fifteen people attended the breakfast; I thought that represented less than ten cottages out of the one hundred on the island. I felt sorry for the organizers for doing so much work for so few people.

It was time to leave, and armed with a list of items to bring back next time, we started the boat, and it sputtered again. I made a mental note to call the marina next week and ask if something is wrong with the fuel line.

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now

August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?