The next morning Dad and I went again in pursuit of rumoured swimming hole - this time, a beach we'd seen distant and white across the lake the day before, rumoured to be "west, just beyond the Lyndhurst cemetery." We both wanted to see the cemetery, and also the Nearly New Shop at St. Luke's Anglican Church, so we followed Oakel Street east into Camp Hyanto.
Camp Hyanto is everything you would expect a small Anglican church camp to be: painted bunkhouses, fire pit with a a large cross planted firmly into the nearby earth, and the occasional cheerful youth with a guitar bustling around in preparation for campers to arrive the following week.
Within moments we were through the camp and entering the cemetery. A long hill of deciduous trees with open spaces between them rose on our left, to the north; to the south, the cemetery sloped down towards a treeline and then the lake.
I was suddenly overcome by a most wonderful feeling of home. Maybe it was because it was the first time I'd been close to a significant number of trees - a woods - since I arrived. Maybe it was because the trees and the hill reminded me so much of the rolling and steep hills of Southern Ontario, rather than Canadian Shield. Maybe it is because I spend a lot of time in Mount Hope Cemetery in Waterloo and this cemetery was reminding me of that. Wherever their source, the feelings I often experience in my beloved home parks unfolded themselves on the land around me. Peace, stillness, presence, a subtle magic - with a feeling of familiarity now made novel by being so far from home.What a gift, to be in a strange place and find my home again, and know I could return whenever I wanted.
Dad, meanwhile, was going on fairly enthusiastically about how this place reminded him of a Steven King story where people enter a small town and then later are eaten at a BBQ. I was semi-ignoring him so I'm still pretty unclear about how his brain had made that connection.
Near the end of the road through the cemetery, a tall monument rose from a circle of hostas. Beyond this was a long, thick, high hedge, marking the end of the cemetery on the east. The path continued through a high, arched tunnel carved into the hedge, and I could see a sunny, grassy field though the opening at the end. We stopped so I could take a picture of the monument, and then turned to enter the tunnel through the hedge, since surely this was the way to the beach. How idyllic it all was!
Quite suddenly, something bit me on the upper arm. I jumped, and looked at my arm in surprise and dismay.
"Something BIT me!" I remarked to Dad.
"Oh yeah," he said, glumly, "A horsefly."
I recalled a vague memory from childhood travels, as well as stories from friends who camp. Yes. Right. Bugs with teeth (or or pokers - or stingers - or stabbers - or chompers - I don't know exactly how the mechanism works).
Bravely ignoring the little biter, we pushed on through the archway. But now the Steven King-esque townsfolk of Horsefly Castle Rock had all been made aware of the BBQ meal and descended en masse to land on the broad and delicious expanses of my own and Dad's body. We started to run madly. I took a moment from my mad flight to take a picture of Dad.
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| Dad captioned this: "urban male is confronted with nature...the 'Wildman' within him is running from his troubles" |
The pretty field turned out to be not the idyllic Eden it had appeared moments before, but rather a stabby, pokey, stingy nightmare of sunshine and biting. I had just enough time to look down the hill and see absolutely no sign of the beach and then we turned and ran back to the cemetery. We continued a brisk pace, Dad continuing to tell his grotesque Steven King story, me taking a last longing look at this lovely untouchable place.
Ah well, at least I have my own sweet horsefly free Southern Ontario woods to come home to!
2
Our next destination was St. Luke's Anglican Church Nearly New Shop, north of camp and up the hill. On our walk towards the shop, we saw more of the camp and encountered several enthusiastic and sweaty young adults moving around with purpose and cheerfulness preparing for camp season.
We passed the barn-like church hall and turned left towards to the rectory. A sign by a small door at the back of the rectory showed us into the Shop. In a low roofed, linoleum floored addition, shelves of trinkets and households object lined the walls. Another room, an addition to the addition, perhaps, housed books.
I had only moments to take this in before we were immediately greeted by a friendly, comfortable, slightly dominating woman of indefinable age. Dad and the Shop lady immediately got into an escalating one-up-manship game in which each tried to prove to the other (and possibly me, and possibly God) the superiority of their knowledge and appreciation for the Shop. As fast as the Shop lady could tell us where things were located, Dad was equally quick to to guess where they might be. As quickly as she covered the bases on what the Shop held, Dad was replying saying that he was looking for that very thing. As quickly as he spoke of his needs, she was proudly cutting in with even more important information about this illustrious centre of retail. I'd never seen two people more on the same mental wavelength about how to engage with a space, while at the same time sounding more like they were in battle. As an introvert on the verge of "too much vacation", I took a conscientious objector position and avoided eye contact with either of them.
The conversation went on, but I lost track of it for a while as I got lost in knick knacks, jewelery, and books. I drifted to the original rectory building, passing through a 60s looking kitchen converted into a workspace, a small hallway piled with boxes and then into a room that was probably once a dining room or a study, with white walls, tall windows and the look and feel of a pleasantly or gracefully haunted house. I absorbed myself in the women's clothing there, looking for a dress for a friend. She had recently watched several episodes of Friends and developed an obsession with 90s style Phoebe Buffet dresses, but was having a hard time finding them. I felt certain there would be no better place than St. Luke's Nearly New Shop in Lyndhurst, Ontario, to find a dress from the 90s.
While I sorted through old clothes, Dad and the Shop lady's conversation continued, drifting in from the kitchen. It had transitioned into an intense bout of name-dropping related to the Anglican Diocese of Ontario. Between the two of them, they knew every deacon, priest, server and lay person in all of eastern Ontario. It was like a gentle buzz of who's who in the heady world of Anglicanism in my ear.
My attention was caught when I suddenly heard,
"Perhaps you would like a coffee while your wife is shopping?"
I was half way into a dress, over my tank and shorts (while still wearing Dad's Tilly hat), and I went back to the kitchen in this state of semi-undress.
"Did you think I was his wife?" I asked.
"Well, anything goes these days, you know!" said the woman.
"I'm his daughter," I said, laughing, and went back into the other room.
For some reason, I found myself feeling really flattered. I thought it over while continuing to shop. I wasn't flattered necessarily at the idea that my dad would have chosen me for a wife or that he was a great catch (though given his extensive knowledge of Anglican society and his confident attitude in orienting towards her Shop, certainly the Shop Lady might admire him), but that I had somehow, at the age of 37, transitioned to an age where I might be a reasonably aged wife for a man in his early 60s (although the "anything goes" part of the comment suggested I can probably still pass for a dewy young trophy wife). It was the sort of feeling one might get if one overhears a parent's friend remarking on one's maturity as one enters the teen years - a sense of finally belonging to a limited and status-y club. A feeling came over me, standing half dressed in a rectory in a small Ontario town, that I was finally a grown up. And it was a good feeling.
I bought: four glasses, two shirts, a Phoebe Buffet dress for my friend, and a YA romance novel. The glassware reinforced my grown up feelings, while the YA reminded that no aging could truly alter my destiny to be, as a friend once called it, "quietly eccentric". A fine balance.
3
The rest of the afternoon spent itself lazily in more antiquing, wandering, Netflix and eating, interspersed with intermittent feelings of irritation with Dad's basic existence in my world mixed with feelings of immense love for him and gladness for his company (classic family vacation mode). After an early dinner, we decided to go canoeing.
Canoeing had been an high point in my imagination leading up to this trip. From the agoraphobic perspective, canoeing represents Amazonic strength and freedom. To be able to not only leave your home or neigbhourhood, but also THE LAND, and then KEEP LEAVING IT, further and further way, until you are floating over a dark abyss requiring your ongoing brute strength and mental perspervance to continue to not die in it - well. I pictured my strong, tanned arms matching Dad's equally powerful strength as Group of Seven like landscapes passed by, the wind in our hair, like characters from a Fitzgerald or Irving novel, strong, beautiful, tanned, healthy, better than other people ... that was going to be the apex of my vacation, I knew it, the moment I could say: I AM A NORMAL PERSON DOING NORMAL THINGS and thus I AM A GREAT PERSON!
Regretting my choice not to bring my Crocs on vacay, and rueing the necessity of leaving my knock-off Tom's on land (perceiving they would be getting wet pretty much immediately), I somewhat anxiously bare-footed into the canoe which we'd managed to flip over from the grass near the dock and shove into the slime at the edge of the water.
Oh the slime, the slime! Memories of family camp on the Rideau River, where once a year some unlucky bastard would fall in and the cry would go up, "So and so fell in the slime!" and all the other kids would run down the hill to laugh and point at the child whose tears were mixing with slime as his mother comforted him.
I cast a mistrusting look at the slime, took a deep breath, and sat down in the front of the canoe while Dad sweated and grunted to get the canoe launched. I've never seen anyone have such a hard time getting a canoe into water. It was as if the very water did not want me in it. I was certainly not feeling like I wanted to be in it either anymore. I had forgotten how high up one sits in a canoe, trembling there above and yet so close to the water, unable to avoid looking down into it's hellish depths. The slime was perilously close. And under the slime: who knows what! It wasn't even so much the one foot of water that felt primally frightening to me so much as the certain knowledge that soon it would deepen into a yawning abyss of darkness, on which I would be floating like a tiny perishable bug ready to be snapped at or tentacled by any lurking sea monster.
Dad finally got the canoe into the water and we were afloat. As we paddled out into the lake, the water did indeed deepen and now I could see longer weeds (oh god, their ghostly fronds lurking up to caress unsuspecting ankles! I felt like Sam and Frodo in the Dead Marshes).
Then came the darkness of the deep - but oh, it was sparkling like diamonds on the surface in the wind as the wind picked up.
Heart-breakingly beautiful in the sunshine.
Strong tanned arms! Group of Seven Landscapes! Wind in my hair! F. Scott Fitzgerald! Normal person!
The canoe continued to bob and shift in the water as Dad pushed us out further into the lake. The wind on my face was like magic, but my brain could not come to terms with the water and soon my moment of euphoria was lost to feelings of dread. The canoe was like a fine skin separating me from the existential void if the unknown. It was like standing on the top of a very high building, except the building is located over an alien planet that forces you to review everything you understand about physics. Oh for solid ground! Oh for plants that poked rather than insinuated! Oh for logs that were seats rather than foot catchers and fish-hiders! Oh for empty spaces that were light filled vistas rather than dark nights of the soul!
I tried to keep looking at the surface. Just look at the surface! It was filled with light.
"Dad," I said, "I'm not sure I can do this."
"You're fine, "he said.
"Mm. No." I said, "I don't think I can do this."
"It's good," he said.
"Nope. Can't do this! Can't do this!"
"You'll be ok," he said.
"RESPECT MY CHOICES!" I commanded, in a voice that suggests that although I don't have kids, I'd probably be a very good at bossing them around if I did have them. "BACK TO THE SHORE! NOW!"
"Ok! Back to the shore!" said Dad, without a trace of irritation or judgment in his voice, bless his heart.
In a very short time we were lugging the canoe back onto the shore. I was deciding whether to feel ashamed or not. Should I be mad at myself for failing at the thing I felt like it would be the apex of success on this trip? Thinking back over the many things that I'd done over the past few days, I decided not to. It's ok sometimes to realize when you've reached your limit; it's ok to rest after you've achieved a great deal already. And well, after all, this IS a vacation. I felt proud of myself for everything I'd acheived thus far, and decide that facing my primal fear of lakes (something I had WAY before agoraphobia) was an adventure of another day.
Yet - I didn't feel quite ready to quit.
"Can we go out in the rowboat?" I asked Dad.
"Sure!" he said.
Soon Dad was rowing me back out on to the lake while I sat in the bottom of the boat. It was wonderful to sit there, nestled down low within the sturdy walls of the boat, unable to see into the water, my eyes in line with the horizon rather than the abyss. The early evening was warm and pleasant in the boat sun-warmed boat. I watched my Dad row me and remembered him rowing me and my sister around the Mississipi Lake when we were kids. I felt like crying in a nice way.
At my request we hugged the lake edge where I could easily ask Dad to "pull over", if I needed to make a mad dash onto the back forty of another cottage. Every dock felt like a bus stop does when I'm challenging myself to take a bus - a reassuring exit point. Dad said hi to a guy on his dock. I checked out people's boats and lawn furniture.
As we came around the lake to the opening where the river flowed into it, the place where we'd gone swimming the day before, the light shifted and we were bathed in the direct warmth of the deep yellow of a 5 o'clock sun. The wind picked up and fine strands of my hair blew in front of my eyes. I squinted at Dad as he pulled at the oars above me in the boat. My dad. My father. I felt safe and protected and loved. I felt completely cared for, taken care of. Yes, I was floating above an existential void in a small craft with no bailing bucket, but my father was at the helm of this vessel.
We passed beyond the river and out into the lake. The wind picked up more and the lake was a wide expanse of white ripples and glittering reflections and cool air.
Dad was reflecting on how unnecessary it was to purchase insurance which would provide coverage for returning your body to Canada should you die in another country.
"Who cares if your body comes back?" he mused. "They can bury me wherever."
I admired the Group of Seven shoreline of craggy rocks and bending pines. A loon popped up and down. We explored further along the shoreline and I wondered again about the lives of the people who lived in this beautiful, yet (to me) isolated place.
After a while, we went back to the cottage straight across the lake. This was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, with the sparkling and the light and the air and the distance from shore and the abyss and the sky. Back near the shore to the east of the cottage, Dad got me to pick a yellow water lily, and later he carefully put the lily, some lake water and some rocks in a little tupperware container so he could bring the flower back to Kingston with us, carrying a little bit of its home with it.
