Cottage Life

Each day, I like to check the news for any references to cottage living. Today, I found just such an article published in a South Korean daily. I found it really interesting to read about Cottage Living from a South Korean perspective. I’ve always wondered what people from vastly different cultures would think about my way of life up here in Muskoka.

From the looks of this article, people on the other side of the planet are less than impressed with the many tribulations of the Cottage lifestyle, but ultimately they do recognize its charm.

The text of the article is reprinted below:

Canadian Cottage Life: Pleasures & Perils
“Beware of the No. 1 recreational pursuit of city dwellers”
By Mike Loams

Imagine a two-hour-or-so drive from your smog-shrouded city deep into the great Canadian forest. From the four-lane highway headed north, you turn off into farmland and onto narrow, roughly paved roads, then onto even rougher gravel tracks, then a hard-packed earth lane prettily dressed with pine needles and maple leaves.

Suddenly, there is a small clearing of the pine forest just ahead, right beside a shimmering lake. Here is what you call your cottage, camp, shack, escape haven or up-at-the-lake-place. The small dwelling is made of logs, or more likely, plywood, perhaps with weathered gray cladding. It may be painted dark green, dark brown, dark red with a white trim.

There is a flagpole out near the dock. You left the Canadian flag raised up there last fall and now it looks ragged.

You climb up the stairs onto the creaking covered porch, veranda or patio deck and open the squeaky fly-screen cottage door. The heavy wooden front door is jammed, swollen from the typical dampness of a waterfront property. You struggle with the key opening the rusty lock and give a shove. You enter, seeing a mouse scurry away under a couch.

This is your haven, your dream-come-true. Here you will idle away idyllic weekends, two-week holidays, balmy summer and colorful autumn days, soft moonlit evenings, and nights punctuated now and then by the plaintive howls of wolves or the melancholy cries of loons.

In the morning, if you are lucky, you will wake to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, of bacon sizzling in a cast iron pan, of pancakes being flipped onto plates to be smeared with butter and drenched in maple syrup. Someone yells, “Breakfast is ready.”

Perhaps your sleeping partner will dissuade you from getting up, suggesting more personal pursuits beneath the covers. Eventually you will rise to greet another day, a day destined if you wish to be one of aimless hours, you being ignorant of ticking clocks, totally carefree. Yes, if you were wise, you left the laptop loaded with work at home.

After lolling for an hour or two in a well-inclined Adirondack chair you might be disturbed momentarily by a freckle-faced child brandishing a twitching perch or bass on their fishing line. Or a neighbor will stroll over to share a beer or two, or three. Someone will suggest a game of darts. You will decline. Someone else will suggest a swim off the dock. Maybe tomorrow?

Lunchtime will require some effort on your part, perhaps lighting the barbecue. Steaks sizzle, baked potatoes wrapped in foil hiss steam, salad bowls clatter as the camp table is set with cutlery and glasses out under the trees. The mood is summed up very simply by someone who says, “Hey, this is the life,” or “It can’t get any better than this.”

Perhaps it can’t get better, but it can get worse. Let’s do a reality check.

The usual two-hour drive from the city turned into four hours. There was highway construction halfway to the cottage. You were sidetracked into a zigzag detour over spine-shattering side roads.

When you arrived at the cottage, you found it had been broken into. The thieves probably came by snowmobile across the winter ice. They stole the two wall-mounted, stuffed fish, the bass that your grandfather caught back in the twenties. They also left broken beer bottles, pizza boxes, and stubbed-out cigarettes on the floor. You feel violated.

The insects greeted you and bit you incessantly, despite spraying repellent everywhere. Depending on the time of year that you went, there were clouds of black flies, deer flies, no-see-ums, mosquitoes, horseflies, ticks loaded with Lyme disease, and worst of all, fleas in the bunk mattresses. You warned the children as they scampered off into the forest, to watch out for poison ivy. It can give a person one hell of an itch and rash.

Unpacking the food from the car, you realized that someone had left on the back step of your city home the portable freezer locker containing packages of steaks, pork chops, lamb chops, and minced beef. One of your family said, “Oh well, we can catch and eat fish.” Some hope. Due to acid rain caused by pollution mostly blown northward from the United States, your lake had few if any fish willing to live in it. And those zebra mussels, which originally came into the Great Lakes on the hulls of ocean liners, have decimated the water fauna.

Fortunately, you hadn’t forgotten the pasta and the cans of tomato and meat sauce. And there was the beer and wine. It would have to be an Italian weekend.

Taking a break from repairing the bashed-in cottage door, you tried to relax on that Adirondack chair. One of the legs is coming loose. Another thing to fix. Closing your eyes, you waited, hoping to hear a loon calling on the lake. A whine grew into a dull hum, and then a growling roar as it came closer. You opened your eyes and saw six personal watercraft assaulting the tranquility of the entrance to your little inlet.

Water carries sound very effectively. You now heard a conversation a long distance across the lake at another cottage. The words you heard were not to your liking. Someone was chastising someone about something. They were swearing profusely. You wished you could cover your children’s ears.

Your cousin’s daughter, who you generously allowed to come, started talking on a cell phone. “Must they always be in touch with each other?” you asked yourself. Your neighbor, staggering drunk, appeared in the distance. You hid the beer.

The clouds began to fill the sky. The wind picked up and got rather chilly so you decided to light the log fire. There was plenty of kindling and many dry, cut logs under the porch. You felt good as the fireplace began to glow. Then the smoke came back down the chimney. Some animal must have built a nest up there somewhere. You had to douse the fire, climb up onto the roof and try and dislodge the obstruction.

That freckle-faced kid of yours came along, crying his heart out. You saw he got a hook caught in the back of his shirt collar and couldn’t get it out. That’s was least of your troubles. Pity though you had to make a hole in his shirt to cut out the hook.

The thieves who broke into your cottage also took your Monopoly, Scrabble and playing cards out of the cupboard beside the couch. They apparently tried to play with them but eventually scattered the contents over the floor. You all joined forces to gather up the mess and sort it out.

The red hotels of the Monopoly game were missing. Why would they want them? One “A” was missing from the Scrabble. Three of the playing cards had been torn in half; the ace of spades, diamonds, and hearts. You taped the torn card halves together with duct tape found in the tool box that fortunately was out of view under the sink.

You thought there would be some consolation if you knew you were sitting on a gold mine of a property. In the 1950s, your property was worth about CA$7,000 (US$6,300). Other properties around you shot up in value to the tune of $70,000 in the seventies and as high as $700,000 or more in 2005. But not yours. You are in some kind of cul-de-sac featuring two rickety bridges which, being over stream gulleys on your property, badly need repair. By you.

First, there was the problem of thick water weeds. They choked up most of the inlet where you are located. “It must be because of the warm water spring,” someone had suggested.

And then there is the really big problem of the access road. Two bridges just a short drive off the lane got washed out and had to be replaced. Your share of that cost was quite a few thousand. Then your local cottagers’ association sent you a letter whining about liability insurance and how it was going to soak up more than double the annual funds collected from cottagers.

You recall your grandfather boasting that this was pure wilderness, so wild it was even unfit for the loggers to come in and haul out those big pines. It is possible to tame wilderness, but at a huge cost, you thought. It is possible it is unfit for you and your family, too.

“Hang in there,” you say to yourself. You recall what Mark Twain, the American author and Mississippi paddle-boat captain, said long ago. “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Maybe your great, great grandchildren are going to hang onto it and eventually sell it and retire early to a luxury downtown condo as happy millionaires.

Meanwhile, if only the bugs would stop biting, this would all be quite bearable.

cottage life, korea, south korea, cottage