That island connection

By Joel Thurtell

On the wall of our kitchen there’s a framed motto that says, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

Back when I worked at the Detroit Free Press, I thought we should have hung up another version: “If Zlati ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

Last summer, after I’d gone some weeks without posting a word on JOTR, I got an e-mail from Zlati Meyer, a terrific reporter at the Free Press and congenital gadfly who seems programmed to speak her thoughts frankly and without a trace of subtlety.

Why hadn’t I blogged in so long, Zlati wondered. I was flattered — Zlati confessed that she checks JOTR three times a week, and it had been a long time since I’d posted anything.

She was right. After blustering to myself about how nobody pays me to do this blog and I can post or not as I like, I had to admit that I didn’t like disappointing readers, and in fact, I get great satisfactoin from doing the blog and thus was also disappointing myself.

But as I told Zlati, there were good reasons why I stopped blogging. The death of my father-in-law, a good and true friend, followed by the death of my own dad, a great guy whose loss I miss every minute, sandwiching our purchase of an island cottage in Canada where there is no landline phone or Internet in part explain what looks to blog readers like a long dry spell.

It was anything but, as I explained in a column written on the porch of our cottage and which I fully intended to post from my point of Web entry, the English Pantry sandwich shop in Little Current, Ontario. Earlier in the summer I published a book — a collection of essays about sailing and wooden sailboat restoration. Then from Little Current and McGregor Bay, I brought out yet another book. But I’m stealing my own thunder. Here is the column I intended to post from the English Pantry, but never did:

LITTLE CURRENT, ONTARIO – I’m posting this column from this wonderfully mythic port on the north side of Manitoulin Island because there is no landline telephone or Internet service at our cottage on a small island twenty miles or so north in McGregor Bay. But I’m tapping this piece out on my laptop on the front porch, and every time I look up, I gaze past a pair of tall pines and what would be a large inland lake except it’s connected by channels and cuts to other lakes, all of which make up a big bay that is a microscopic part of a bigger body of water known as Georgian Bay that is part of Lake Huron which really is one with that other huge body of fresh water known as Lake Michigan. I’m looking across our lake towards a big body of land known as Garden Island, and its cottage and surrounding rocks and pines and firs are wonderfully mirrored in the water at this hour of 8:31 a.m. on Sunday, August 16, 2009.

Somewhere underneath all that water, there are lots of smallmouth and largemouth bass and plenty of pike. Somewhere, I say, because I have not so far been able to find them, despite owning a fancy boat with an electric trolling motor, fish finder and two reservoirs with pumps to supply aerated water to bait fish and anything I happen to catch.

I’m writing this because I realize I haven’t posted any thoughts on joelontheroad.com since July 10, 2009, when I wrote about my amazing experience guiding the French filmmaker Florent Tillon up the Rouge River. I was made aware of my lapse by my friend, Zlati Meyer, who wrote –- very flatteringly — that she checks my blog three times a week and nothing, nothing, nothing each time.

Although I might argue that nothing, nothing, nothing is what I get in return for writing in this space, that would not be true. I have plenty of loyal readers from whom I hear, and the whole experience of writing my blog – approaching its second anniversary – has been an exciting thing. My friends, many of whom I have never met, who read my blog, deserve to hear from me.

Where to begin?

Well, there have been losses in recent months. The death of my father-in-law and great friend, Hank Fonde, for one. My dad, Howard Travis Thurtell, nearly died last week, but rallied so much he actually pulled one of his pranks. Lying in a hospital bed in Grand Rapids, he feigned death for a few seconds, hoodwinking my brothers and then getting a big laugh out of his macabre joke.

[Dad died for real on September 4, 2009 in his bed at the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans.]

There have been other losses.

I hear from staff at Wayne State University Press that the book I co-authored last March with Pat Beck is doing well; Pat and I continue to give our talks and slide show about our canoe trip up the Rouge River in 2005 and we have a growing calendar of talks coming up this fall.

Pat and I also published an audio version of “Up the Rouge!” under the imprint of my publishing company, Hardalee Press in Plymouth. Hardalee Press in July published another book, “Plug Nickel,” a collection of essays I wrote about my seven-year quest to restore a wooden Lightning sailboat. The name of my boat: Plug Nickel.

I debuted that book with a trip to Lake Onondaga in upstate New York, taking part in a regatta of vintage wooden Lightnings. I’ll be writing about the Onondaga Yacht Club and their annual woodie regatta – which they say was inspired by the wooden boat columns I wrote for nearly six years for the International Lightning Class Association’s monthly magazine, “Flashes.” That is another story.

Then too, I’m publishing another of my books, and that has been quite a project. It’s called Seydou’s Christmas Tree, a true story about how a Muslim kid and friend of ours in Togo taught us a lesson about the meaning of Christmas. You’ll be hearing more about that, too. The big challenge has been publishing a book from McGregor Bay, where, as I mentioned, we have no landline phone and no Internet connection. Very interesting, but possible in the same way that I will post this column on JOTR.

[As it turned out, I never posted this column from the Bay. But I did publish Seydou’s Christmas Tree, using the wi-fi connection at the English Pantry in Little Current and the wireless hook-up of our friends Zoe and Burnley McDougall across the water from our cottage.]

Our main focus this summer has been on McGregor Bay. My wife’s family, the Fondes of Ann Arbor, took their first vacation in McGregor Bay around 1965. They were introduced to the Bay by a neighbor, Jim Skala, who owned an island not far from the marinas on Birch Island, part of a long concatenation of islands stretching from Espanola through the La Cloche Mountains south to Manitoulin Island, largest fresh water island in the world. Manitoulin Island is so big that it has huge lakes with their own islands, and for all I know those islands have lakes and islands ad infinitum.

I first came to the Bay in 1972, just before Karen joined the Peace Corps and went to Togo in West Africa. She’d talked of her family’s island, a three-and-a-half-acre hump of granite and quartz in what is known as the outer part of McGregor Bay. She told me how wonderful the place was. I couldn’t picture it. She urged me to pay a visit. I drove up with her younger brother, Mark, and his buddy Jim Bowditch, in the summer of ’72.  It was a long run up I-75 and then it seemed even longer as we got on Highway 17 going east from Sault Ste, Marie. Probably took a good twelve hours. Espanola is a paper mill town and even now, you can smell sulfur. In those days, there was little effort to contain the stench, and I was not impressed. We left Espy and headed south, winding up, down and around the La Cloche mountains, gateway into a very different world.

I’ve lived in many places and traveled to plenty more, and I can say that I have never seen a more beautiful place. The convergence of cracked hummocks of lichen-encrusted granite, pine and cedar forests and mirror-like water – clean water, by the way – make for a landscape that would be better depicted with photos, which I will try to supply.

Exhausted after our long drive, Mark, Jim and I sacked out in a bunkhouse at the top of the Fonde island, known on maps by its TP number, “TP” standing for Thaddeus Patten, who surveyed the Bay for the Canadian government in the early twentieth century. From where I’m sitting, I can look across the water at the Patten cottage on Vim Island, built in 1917 and the place where Thaddeus Patten’s great-granddaughter, Zoe McDougal, lives and where I approved the proof of my new book about the African Christmas tree.

That morning back in ’72, I was sound asleep when Karen’s parents, Hank and Edith Fonde, drove their motorboat, the Slick Chick, through an archipelago of small islands, spits and shoals to a big island called Wardrope and hailed their friend from Ypsilanti, Papa Jake Stewart, on his dock at the northeast end of Wardrope.

Papa Jake owned a bar in Ypsi, and so the story goes – he’s dead, so he can’t be prosecuted at least in this world’s system of justice – he used to buy a new outboard motor fuel pressure tank every spring and fill it with vodka, smuggling five gallons of hooch through customs in hopes it would last the season.

Papa Jake was a fisherman of mythic reputation. He had a wooden pen beside his dock where he’d release the gargantuan Northern Pike he caught so his neighbors could marvel at his fishing prowess. Hank and Edith asked him how was fishing, and Jake responded that it was lousy, especially around those parts. Thereupon, Hank and Edith dropped their Rapala lures into the water and within a few minutes of trolling had landed seven monster pike within sight of Papa Jake’s pike pen. (You were allowed six pike per license, so they were well within the legal catch limit.)

When they got back to their island, Hank was all for filleting those pike asap. Karen begged him to hold off till I woke up. But I didn’t wake up. So she went up to the bunkhouse and roused me.

“Come see the pike mom and dad caught!”

Pike? Pike! Karen knew I liked to fish, and in fact, I grew up on the Flat River in Lowell and I did a lot of fishing. As a kid of four or five, I’d take my pole and some worms – a family friend owned a worm farm – and I’d go fishing in the tumult of water that tumbled over the King Milling Company dam under Main Street in Lowell. This is not something that would be tolerated today. A kid, almost a toddler, fishing in the spillway of a dam, no life jacket, no parent, indeed no adult in sight? My God, call the cops! Arrest the mom and dad for neglect!

Catch limits? I knew nothing about that. I kept whatever I caught, mostly little suckers and bluegills. My dad or mom would clean them and fry them up. Pike? I’d never seen a pike other than the ones pictured in photos on the shelves of Owen Ellis’s barber shop.

Pike! My God, Hank and Edith had pulled in monsters, to my eyes. They WERE big. Seven and eight-pounders. In no time, I was out in a boat with Hank, who’d taught me to tie the Improved Fisherman’s Knot, and we were trolling off Wardrope and sure nuff, I started catching pike. And bass. Yes, wonderful, tasty bass.

Was I hooked on McGregor Bay? Hoo boy!

Next thing I knew, Karen was in Togo, next door to the Sahara, a helluva long way from Northern Pike, and I was driving the Yellow Cab my brother and I owned in Ann Arbor and scraping up money for a trip to West Africa. A few months later, I was in Togo, training in the Peace Corps to build schools and wells in the sub-Sahara. As exotic as Togo seemed, it was my reality, and McGregor Bay seemed like a dream.

Fast-forward to 2007. The descendants of Hank and Edith and their cousins, the Woods, heirs on each side to one-half of an undivided island, decided to sell what everyone agrees is the most beautiful island in the Bay. The price was too high for us, but not too high for Joe and John Shields, identical twins who are government chauffeurs for members of the Canadian Parliament. The Shields brothers tore down the old Fonde and Wood cottages and are building new cottages – not bigger ones, but structures with an emphasis on glass for better catching the marvelous views in every direction.

It was the Shields brothers who played an essential role in connecting Karen and me to Brian Cram, who early this summer sold us a cottage and 1.8 acres on another TP outcropping —  a steep, heavily-wooded seven-acre island in an area of the Bay we hardly knew back in the days when we were concentrated on the Outer Bay.

In our “new” place, a cottage with more square footage than our house in Plymouth, there is a black and white photo dated 1929 showing a building closely resembling our place without its long row of storm windows. You can see two big Union Jack flags hanging from the inside wall of the porch. So our place is one of the oldest cottages in the Bay, which began to attract cottagers in the early 1900s.

I’m going to stop writing now, because it’s time to fry up some incredibly tasty bacon from the butcher shop in Little Current along with a mess of eggs sunny-side up. The weather being clear and fairly still, it will be a good day for us to pack sandwiches, put the cooler in the latest edition of the Slick, our 16-and-a-half-foot Crestliner, and go exploring around that vast mass of land known as McGregor Island in search of Russian Pass, Hanging Rock and the East-West Channel, all so far unknown to us.

I’ll post this next time I go to Little Current, where the best wi-fi connection to the Internet is at the English Pantry. Great excuse to order a tasty sandwich and upload this column.

P.S. I love this life without phones. I saw the most amazing thing yesterday. We were listening to a concert given by the Linvilles, a family of fine musicians from West Virginia. The concert was preceded by a delicious dinner of sloppy joes at the Parish Hall on Iroquois Island in McGregor Bay. Besides good food and great music, nobody – not one single person – did I see or hear yammering on a cell phone.