The Bay

I wrote this column in July, 2010, but somehow didn’t find time to post it. Too much fishing, kayaking, sailing and painting of the cottage, I guess. Here it is now, a couple months late. I plan to write occasional columns about the Bay through the year. — JT

By Joel Thurtell

It’s early a.m. here on Eaton’s Channel, so I’ll wish you all a good morning.

The sun is bright, the sky is deep blue and the water is so still I can see a perfect reflection of Garden Island on the channel’s surface. It is wonderful to be living here in McGregor Bay.

I tell our friends in Michigan that the Bay is tucked into the northwest corner of Georgian Bay, which is almost a Great Lake of its own adjacent to Lake Huron. J & G and Still Water marinas, which give us boat access to the Bay, are about 20 minutes by car from the swing bridge over North Channel at Little Current on Manitoulin Island.

Well, I’m not like some Canadians and Americans who can trace their history in the Bay back to when it was first populated by summer people in the early 1900s, and I’m not related to the Ojibwa people who run many of the Bay businesses and whose reserve controls access to the water. Their ancestors occupied this land long before white people heard of it.

But I’ve been coming up here long enough to remember when the now-defunct store on Iroquois Island was owned by the Ferguson family.

Besides, I have this blog, joelontheroad.com, and I can pick whatever topic I want and delve into it as far as I wish.

My first visit to the Bay was in 1972. I’ll never forget leaving the sulfur stench in Espanola and swinging suddenly into the La Cloche Mountains. I didn’t know their name then, only that these pine-cloaked peaks’ chiseled beauty — sometimes natural and sometimes caused by explosives — was the most striking scenery I had ever laid eyes on.

I’ve been coming back to the Bay year after year.

I can remember when it was no big deal to pull out pike that weighed 7 or 8 pounds and think they were not all that big.

Sometimes fishing is good, sometimes not. But the sunset over Eaton’s Channel a couple days ago was absolutely stunning in its glorious reds and oranges that permeated the sky and leaked across the still waters of the channel and Patten Bay.

For years, I looked forward to those rare weeks in the summer when I could come up here and fish, sail, swim and write. I wrote the better parts of two novels in the bunkhouse of TP 1071, the Outer Bay island once owned by my wife’s family.

My wife and I live in a cottage on an island near Store Bay, where the Fergusons and later the Turners ran the combination grocery store, gas station, liquor dispensary, post office, sporting goods emporium and unofficial social center whose closing in the 1990s is still mourned by everyone who remembers it.

We live on a 7-acre island with no land line telephone. My cell phone worked for a while if I stepped up to our deck and stood on the picnic table. It stopped working a couple weeks ago.

But if you are a Bay person and have an idea for a story, please e-mail me at joelthurtell@gmail.com. That is possible because after a long debate with myself, I hired a fellow named Dave King from Kagawong on Manitoulin Island to install a satellite dish and connect me to the Internet.

The long debate, I find, is being carried on by lots of people who want to be connected to the Internet, yet fear that the connection will rob them of something precious — that out-of-touch feeling that comes from living on an island. For decades, I exulted in telling my newspaper bosses that they’d better read my stories real well, ask all their questions now, ’cause they wouldn’t be able to phone me on the island.

I tell myself that if I were still working for a newspaper, I would not have installed the dish, because I wouldn’t want editors to be calling into my island sanctuary.

But I’m not so sure. I remember last year, when some knucklehead drove his girl friend’s motorboat high onto an islet in the channel by Harrison Rock. Margaret Beard’s cottage faces that channel, and she watched the guy come barreling down the channel, do a sort of U-turn and gun the boat onto the rock. Like a gazillion other people, I was over there with my digital camera recording the Folly of 2009.

Well, if I’d had the Internet then, I could have posted photos and the story on JOTR. So all my bluster about not wanting to be bothered by editors boils down to this: I’m a reporter, and I love breaking a story.

And now, I’m the editor who bothers me about details and deadlines.

The Internet makes it possible. Still, I hear people adamantly refusing to be connected to the Web. It’s part of another discussion: Why, in fact, might some Bay people shun electricity in favor of propane, wind turbines and solar panels?

People who live in the Bay are a fascinating lot. Excepting the year-round residents (who have their own stories), they chose to have summer cottages in locations that, with few exceptions, can’t be reached by automobile. When I tell friends in Detroit that we drive eight miles by boat to get to our cottage, they say, “Oh boy, I couldn’t handle that.”

Why would anyone want to live in a place where you have to come and go by boat? Where you have to husband gasoline and watch out for shoals, listen to weather reports and cancel travel plans because of wind, rain or fog?

Well, I happen to love boats. Motorboats, sailboats, canoes, kayaks. My grandmother had a farm on the Flat River in my home town of Lowell, Michigan, and my first “boat” was a raft I made out of logs I tied together with rope. What a blast!

Bay culture is so different from conventional community life in the United States and, I’m sure, Canada, because the water connects us all and humbles us all. Our driveways are those wooden docks that stick out in the water. For some, they are not driveways, but veritable parking lots.

The Bay, or the water in it, is our common denominator. It makes sure we know that we are not omnipotent sorts who can pick and choose when and where we go and whom we are friends with.

Have you ever smashed your motorboat into a hard granite shoal at full speed? Lapse of memory? Distracted? Simply being reckless in unknown waters? Realizing that your boat is not what it once was, thanks to your stupidity, is a real downer. You might want to forget about it, but collisions with rocks can be highly public events. They become part of Bay legend.

It is not just the bill for repairs, but the knowledge that you are fallible, that puts your spirits in the dumps.

We have all done these dumb things. And for those who have not and are feeling superior, I say: Just wait.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com