Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Woke up early, sometime just before 7am. On any work day that would count as having slept in, but up here the only commute I had to do was to head outside to
I joined Erika in her daily delivery of the girls (Vanessa, Annie and Kassandra) over to the Ojibway Club. She soon discovered that yoga classes were offered every Tuesdays and Thursdays, so off she went to that. The local store sold newspapers, so I picked up the day's copies of The Globe and The New York Times and settled in for a while to do some reading by the dock. While at the shop I also picked up a couple of postcards depicting the local lighthouse along with the stamps necessary to send them off to my Aunts and Uncles in England. Prior to settling down with the newspapers I went wondering about the immediate grounds of the former hotel, and went inside to look at some of the local notices and to read the captions on old black and white pictures scattered about the ballroom depicting the history of the establishment. There are pictures of Edwardian-era adventurers going out for boating trips, big catches of fish, and scenes from various phases of construction for the century-old building I was in.
Erika met me dockside when she finished her yoga class, vowing to come back for more on Thursday. We went to explore the grounds further together, to see if we could find what our kids were up to. We lucked out on finding Vanessa in the Arts & Crafts building, where she and a bunch of other kids were working on a paper-marche piggy bank. What struck me most about the Arts & Crafts building was that each kid who had played in the place had been invited to write or otherwise paint their name on the walls. One of Vanessa's friends (by the name of Lola) pointed her mother's name on one section of wall, who also happened to be the woman who was the yoga instructor the class Erika had just finished. Didn't find where or what Annie was up to, but we had fun taking in the sights of the island during our leisurely stroll. Erika expressed that she didn't really feel that she was part of the group that casually comes up here every year, and I responded that while the both of us may always be outsiders, the hope is that our girls will grow up and be a part of the local summer community of visitors to the area someday.
Checked my BlackBerry for messages from work. One of them was an invitation for me to present at a DITA XML conference in Brussels, Belgium. Nothing could be so far from my mind right now that the technical complexities of my work. Unfortunately my company is restricting travel budget only to sales-related efforts at the moment, visiting so Brussels is not in my immediate future.We picked up Kassandra from the dock (she goes for the half-day program), some further supplies from the island's grocery store (many items on sale thanks to it being the end of the season), and I ended up buying a copy of Our Pointe au Baril, which is a local history of the islands.
We brought Kassandra back and basically decided to hang out on the island until it was time to pick up our girls. Erika set off on an errand to Pointe au Baril Station, while I stayed and wrote on the postcards I had bought. Around 2pm there was a bit of excitement when I spotted a boat on its side by the southern end of Eyrie Island just across from the main island we are on. I didn't see anybody on the boat and there was otherwise no sign of any distress, leading me to think that maybe it was a boat that had gotten loose from its moorings and beached itself. I went back to our cabin and donned my swimming trunks and flippers, but by the time I returned there was another boat already on the scene, along with some kids emerging from the other side of the island, who must have “abandoned ship” when it got stuck in the shallow waters. Soon the beached boat was put into tow and a small flotilla of kayaks and power boats left from the other side of Eyrie Island, heading back to Ojibway.
In the evening the girls went back to Ojibway for kid's movie night. While the kids watched "Madagascar" we were invited to have a grand dinner at the Ojibway Club. While there we met Peter and Fay, old friends of Josef's, and whom we hadn't seen since our initial visit up here years ago when Vanessa was still a toddler. Both are resident in Southern Carolina, but come up here for the whole of the summer now that Peter is retired. Peter has been coming up here since 1967, and I got him to talking about the place. I asked him about whether he thought that water levels had fallen over the past year, and he responded that in his estimation it had gone down by almost a foot in just the past week. He talked about channels that were no longer navigable by boats with any draught to them, and how the waterline was visibly dropping year over year. He didn't know what the cause of it was, but he expressed the belief that global warming (which he emphatically did not believe in) definitely had nothing to do with it. I had heard something in the news about billions of liters of water being siphoned away from the lakes, but I had hoped it was either a mis-heard news story or an urban myth (much like the “NAFTA highway” that was recently exposed as being a confabulation).
Sometime during the conversation a challenge was thrown up between Erika and Ariane: make your way to Peter and Faye's island cottage separately by boat using only a map of the islands. Not so much a one-on-one challenge so much as an individual test as to whether either of them could take a nautical map and use it to make their way from point A to point B. I have every confidence in Erika, and basically whoever is able to do it pretty much proves that they are capable of navigating their way around the islands solo.
After the very filling dinner I picked up both of our girls from the movie hut, drove back in the boat in the dark to our island, and went to bed happy but exhausted.
Labels: BlackBerry, Eyrie Island, Kassandra, Pointe au Baril, The Ojibway Club, yoga
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