Meditation With Dad

[Written the last week of January, 2022]

 Meditation With Dad      

by Leaky Leigh the Busy Bee

So we’d take our regular route to Steinbach from Altona. From there the #1 led us to Hadashville where we’d turn onto another highway that took us through Whitemouth and Rennie and finally to Jessica Lake where we’d stop. Mr. Scharf ran the tourist camp here. We’d find him in the small grocery store where we’d buy pork-n-beans, weiners, hotdog buns and maybe even marshmallows. Dad would add a Pepsi for each of us and, if our luck held, an Old Henry chocolate bar. In my experience fathers just bought such things without inquiring about preferences.
     Then there’d be the boat to rent. Always a heavy wooden thing that needed four mature men to carry it. Off we’d set for Lake Meditation. We’d drive very slowly once we left the sandy section, a smooth two-track trail that curved this way and that. It rose and fell under us like the gentle swells of the ocean long after a storm. Ah, but now came the next leg, three quarters of a mile of broken granite, uneven and rough (really only a sort-of trail marked by the absence of trees and scratches where car bottoms had struck rocks and ledges) that threatened to disembowel the ‘56 Mercury. Slowly, with our hearts noticeably beating now, the car, with the five of us in it, inched over a veritable obstacle course till it finally stopped above the final stretch of the trail that led down to Lake Meditation.                              Once or twice, despite all father’s best efforts, there’d be the inevitable bang of the differential smacking a rock. Oh! No! We quietly feared, and father actually spoke aloud, the possibility that the oil pan might have been cracked and oil would leak out on the rocks below the car. On each trip we always anticipated the spilled oil and the disabled car and a four mile hike to the main highway to hitchhike to Skarf’s for help, but it never happened. We always lucked out! 
     The boat now had to be unloaded (from the top of the car? From a trailer? I don’t remember for sure). Then, sudden joy racing through us—even through father, I think—we would each take hold of the gunnel at a different place and begin what we all knew to be a half mile portage from hell, muscles straining, mosquitoes landed by the thousands on our faces and hands, and no one able to slap at them because of carrying the boat.
     It weighed two hundred pounds dry. The first leg of this portage sloped in a friendly fashion downward for approximately three or four hundred yards at a rate that always managed, in the years that I used it, to distract me from the trials ahead. At the end of this gentle part began the ungentle. Ah, yes! the infamous swamp! Many decades before, during some lengthy and unlikely dry spell (maybe “the dirty thirties”) when the swamp presented no trouble because not wet enough, someone had built a hundred yards of courderoy road that, given the right conditions, served as a reliable passage through the worst of the swamp. 
     But not in these years that we crossed over it. Now a shallow lake, swarming with bloodsuckers, filled with slimy weeds and  mosquitoes, made up this area. I said shallow, but not shallow enough. With water up to our knees, feet sinking into muck, unseen logs floating near bottom, others bobbing up around our knees, logs that were more obstructions than anything, unstable, slimy, shooting sideways under our feet, we somehow slogged through till solid ground eventually gave us a rest. But not rest for long. Once again we’d rustle ourselves up and face one and a half million mosquitoes. But here, after the hellish swamp, it was all easygoing path, right up to the lake. Next, we all got into the boat and crossed Lake Meditation, father’s two horse Evinrude crawling straight across its middle   
     Once on the other side and on the portage to Horseshoe Lake, the real work began because here we had to work this boat up a steep incline and over a rock-strewn pass and then down a decline so precipitous it felt at each step as if no footing could ever be found, just some more sliding on stones and gravel. But we’d make it. We always made it. As we came around the last bend, a majestic sight greeted us.  To the right, a cliff a hundred feet tall, a small bay directly in front and to the left, the very tip of the start of the five mile horseshoe that made the lake. And jacks. Lots and lots of jackfish. To put the sugar in the tea, high up on the cliff for all the lowly world to see, an eagle’s nest with young ones in it. We set up the tent, collected some firewood in case it rained at night, and then quickly got in the boat for an hour’s worth of fishing before bed. .