Monday, August 20, 2007
Sometime during the night the power was cut. I realized this when one of the girls was heading to the washroom and realized that the light that had been left on for just that purpose was no longer shining. Nor were the lights in the main cabin on.
The implications of this were apparent when day broke and everyone got up. No electricity also means no tap water, as a pump brings all of the water to the kitchens and to the toilets in the two cabins. So we hauled water up from the lake by bucket for dish-washing and for filling toilet tanks. Turns out the power outage was not just restricted to us and our island, and while we made tentative plans to much frozen foods out from the electric fridge in the main cabin to the gas-fired one in our cabin, by early afternoon the electricity came back on
The girls were taken over to Ojibway Island to join the day camp there at the Ojibway Club. Annie is in the 6-7 age range and joins the “Snapdragons, while her older sister joins the “Rattlers” for those aged 8-9 years. The type of activities the camp does includes arts & crafts, tennis, sailing, swimming, canoeing, and (for Vanessa only) archery. They are both very lucky kids to be up here and doing such things, though they probably didn't think so during the swim session, as the water up here is cold.
The skies were overcast for much of the day, and so I spent much of my time happily finishing off a science fiction book I had started while up here – Iain M. Banks' short story collection The State of the Art, which had a couple of “Culture” pieces in it, a series I particularly enjoy.
By late afternoon the sun finally decided to come out, and I decided to take a walk around the island. Erika was telling me of a red dock that she had run across half-way down the island, so I set off to find it for myself, with Yo-Bob happily in tow. I made my way to the abandoned third cabin on the island, which has an easy route down to the south shore. I remember taking the same route last year, and noted that the water level had definitely dropped substantially since then. Places that were hard for me to traverse without getting my feet wet were above the water, high and dry. It made getting around the island a much easier task, though i can well believe what a read from a news piece I ran across prior to coming up here saying that some of the locals are now finding it impossible to traverse through some of the shallower channels.
Some of the rocks along here plainly exhibit the weft and weave of highly compressed and stretched rock that was laid down during the pre-Cambrian era. Much of it now worn smooth by water and erosion, the softer rock sometime hollowed out, leaving gaps in the harder rock. In places you could see where the bottom of an ancient glacier had scraped away at the rock, leaving deep but rounded grooves in hard stone. And what caught my eye were the twists of braided layers of rock, dark magnetite and pink quartz swirled together like so much colourful taffy, and then frozen into place. Many pictures were taken.
I eventually found the red dock, which lay on a large outcrop of exposed, smooth rock. A perfect setting for a possible future cabin. Just across the channel was a cottage perched on top of a mirror image of the bare bedrock as the one I was standing on. The area ought to make for a perfect swimming area for the kids, as the channel is relatively shallow (I saw no boat traffic go along it during the whole of my outing) and slopes off very gradually. What rocks are there are smoothed down, and there are only a few weeds around the fringes. Yo-Bob dipped his feet into the water in order to cool down, and fetched a couple of sticks I threw (not too far) into the water.
From there I walked further along the shoreline and then climbed the rocks to reach the other end of the island, the first time I had managed to do so. I sat down on a nearby boulder and enjoyed the scenery, listening to the incessant inquisitive “dee dee dee” of a small flock of nearby Chickadees, and admiring the view to the west. Several more pictures were taken. Yo-Bob eventually tired of the seeming inaction, (being an animal more inclined to action than contemplation) and so we headed back.
Not much to report on the way back, other than climbing up things is sometimes a different endeavour than trying to carefully climb down the same things. Thinking of future travels with the girls, I made a point of chucking any broken glass I found along the shoreline deep into the bushes. I found an intact clear glass bottle, which turned out to be an old Heinz ketchup bottle, from a time when they made flattened hexagonal bottles. I emptied its contents and took it back to the house as a souvenir.
Erika and her father picked up the girls from the Ojibway Club, and we settled back in our cabin for the evening. While the girls played with their picture books, I played a round of “killer cribbage” with Erika (she won). Afterwards we fed the kids and started a game of Monopoly, prior to putting the kids down at around 8pm. As for dinner, it turns out that Josef was making a pork roast, but in the oven rather than on the grill, which was taking forever. Feeling tired, I made my excuses for the evening, made myself a grilled sandwich and a screwdriver, and then went to bed. (Erika told me the next morning that the meal was served close to 10pm, and that it was well worth the wait. Oh well).
Labels: electricity, exploring, Iain M. Banks, Ojibway Island
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