Salini Perera/The Globe and Mail
This summer Ian Brown explores how Canadians are reclaiming their lives from quarantine, whether it’s the thrill of a haircut, the risk of a hug or a chance – finally! – to jump in a pool again.
As someone who, alas, does not own a summer home, but who loves being at one, let me say this: The trick to getting invited to a pristine cabin during the time of COVID-19 – to escaping the pandemic and finding safety in the wilderness while the country steps out from under lockdown – is to ask in such a way that the request can be easily turned aside.
In our case, and I would like to be as delicate as possible about this, four of us – my partner and I, and two closely bubbled friends, Executive 1 and Executive 2 – wanted to spend a week together at a cottage. And so it was that my brave wife approached another couple of our acquaintance – a man and woman I will refer to henceforth as The Host and The Hostess, with whom we had been semi-bubbled in the city – to ask if it might be possible to rent a farmhouse they owned adjacent to their beautiful cabin in the Eastern Townships, south of Montreal.
The Hostess, an exceptionally gracious person, replied, “No. But you should come and stay as our guests,” or satisfying words to that effect. This was not the assumed outcome, but it came as no surprise, given the generosity of The Host and Hostess. I admit I am gushing here.
The four of us signed up for COVID tests, passed, and drove to the Eastern Townships two days later.
The Hostess embraced me as I walked up the grassy steps to the main log cabin, my first friendly hug in five months. I imagine this was how the frozen Vikings felt when they discovered the fresh green shores of Ireland. The cabin sat in a clearing in a deep green woods a few miles from the border with Vermont. A second cabin, the “studio” where my wife and I were billeted, nestled in a glade across a stream that burbled through the entire property. There were huge bursting gardens everywhere, in full bloom. There was a swimming pond at the top of a hill, and another swimming pond at the top of another hill. Both houses were stuffed with books and pictures and objects: baskets, vessels, idols, mementos, maps. Everywhere you turned, there was something to read or look at or think about or be surprised by. It was like visiting a scale model of a daring but orderly and carefully preserved mind.
I rose early the first morning and began looking through the cabin’s bookshelves. On a shelf below an 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I found the journals of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, the 17th century explorer who, with his brother-in-law Medard Des Groseilliers, explored Eastern Canada as far as Lake Superior, and laid the foundation of what eventually became the Hudson’s Bay Company.
He turned out to be good company for someone cadging a stay at a cottage during a pandemic. Radisson was one of the greatest mooches in Canadian history. He cadged his way halfway across the country and back for 25 years, ingratiating himself with enemy Indigenous tribes and warring French and English authorities alike. He arrived in Trois-Rivières in 1651 at the age of 16, escaping war-torn Europe only to find himself in the middle of a 15-year smallpox epidemic that eventually halved the Huron and Iroquois population to about 19,000 souls. A year and a half later, a band of Mohawk kidnapped him – a tactic of their mourning wars, in which they tried to rebuild the population lost to the epidemic. Radisson figured he was about to die. Instead the band adopted him, and he quickly took to their ways. “I lived for weeks without thinking of whence I came,” Radisson wrote. I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought of COVID-19 all morning – the first time that’s happened since the pandemic started.
There are specific techniques to being a guest at a Canadian cottage or cabin, habits of kinship and reciprocity that haven’t changed since Radisson’s time. My sources must remain unnamed, but all advice is guaranteed verbatim.
The trick is to be relaxed and yet watchful. It helps to arrive with something to drink (not the ice wine your in-laws regifted two years ago) and a useful gift: a Rembrandt is excessive, but a Mixmaster might not be, if you’re staying a while.
Be alert to what needs to be done without being asked – ”How do you like your parsley chopped?” is not a question any host wants to hear. On the other hand, don’t overdo it. Executive 1 grew up in a large country house whose former dumb waiter had been converted into a laundry chute. When a guest – a Mrs. McLeod – begged for a task to justify her stay as a guest, Executive 1′s mother told her she could strip the beds and drop the sheets down the laundry chute. It was only later the family discovered Mrs. McLeod had pushed the sheets – at considerable effort – down the cold air intake vent instead, necessitating the rebuilding of an entire structural wall.
Be grateful. Do not be the friend who phones a cottage owner in January and says “I’d like to book our week.” Appreciate the uniqueness of the place you are, especially in this noisy pandemic of zero privacy. Especially do not be like the nephew of a woman I know who recently stayed for a 12-day week at his aunt’s modest cottage and then e-mailed her a picture of twin beds “which could replace the current uncomfortable arrangement in our second sleeping bunkie.”
Buy the provisions for and cook at least one dinner and one breakfast, preferably without exotic ingredients: Many cottage owners complain of being “overwhelmed by condiments” at summer’s end. Be adaptable. Do not wear your bathing suit to dinner unless you are very, very attractive.
A wise person whose name I have forgotten once defined a gentleman as “someone who always makes people feel comfortable.” Radisson agreed wholeheartedly. When his Mohawk captors slaughtered and broiled some Huron enemies, he joined in and ate them. He didn’t want to offend his hosts.
COVID-19 has nevertheless changed the dynamic of being a weekend guest at someone else’s cottage. “What we’ve noticed,” a woman I will refer to as The Tall Extrovert told me the other day, “is that we haven’t had cadgers per se this year. Three or four couples who usually come up haven’t come up.” She attributes this to her novel stipulation that all guests have a COVID-19 test before they arrive.
Instead, the guests who do come up stay longer – a week instead of three days. “So we have less variety in our guests, and more volume.” Her other main cottage country COVID creation is “boat cocktails.” You visit friends at their cottage via water, bringing your own drinks and your own hors d’oeuvres, tie up to their dock and never leave the boat. “It’s lovely, actually,” the Tall Extrovert insists. “Except that sometimes it gets a little hot in the boat.”
Another new trick is for the potentially infected party to arrive at the cottage two weeks early. A Canadian acquaintance who lives in Manhattan breezed across the border with his Canadian partner to endure two weeks of enforced quarantine, alone, in a family cottage on a private island in Georgian Bay. “That’s the first time we’ve had the island to ourselves,” he said. “But you have to make sure you have the place stinking of Lysol when everyone else shows up.”
This is the way we live this summer, as the pandemic eases and ebbs towards the fresh spectre of school. Everyone is carefully playing the odds, on the grounds that the odds favour the careful.
News filtered in slowly to the cabin in the woods over the week, clogging the feeble WiFi: The world was clearly coming to an end. Sean Hannity had turned on Donald Trump. Justin Trudeau had turned on Bill Morneau. The supporters of Mark Carney were turning on Chrystia Freeland. Meanwhile there were historic floods in China and soaring death rates in California.
Late one afternoon, I took a break from reading The Host’s books and walked up the forest path to the upper pond for a swim. I dove into the impossibly soft water and swam the length of the pond and turned over on my back and watched the leaves of poplar trees flicker silver and bronze in the breeze. Clouds of all shapes and sizes drifted across the blue sky: amoebae, bras, barns, a dog or two.
This is the world: it is dire, but it is also beautiful. A hopeless cause we can’t stop fighting for.
I pulled myself up the wooden ladder out of the pond onto the small cedar-shingled deck where The Host was watching the calm water. He had been thinking about his daughter, who is pregnant for the first time. He had been contemplating the daunting future, with climate change and the postpandemic recovery clouding the view. He was wondering how that future might look to his unborn granddaughter as she turned 30.
“How do you keep going in those circumstances?” The Host said. He wasn’t complaining; he was wondering. “How do you keep hopeful?”
I am happy to report that, because of the time I spent reading the books I found in the cabin in the woods, I was able to pass along the wise advice of Harold Nicolson, the British diplomat and diarist. To ignore the darkest possibilities of the future, Nicolson observed as the Cold War descended on Europe in 1946, is both cowardly and blind. But to be frightened by them is “to deny one’s soul.” Even Pierre-Esprit Radisson, the great two-faced opportunist and cadger, knew that. His Huron friends had a word for it, one they pronounced chagon. It meant “be cheerful and have courage.” It seemed to work for him.
Seeing the future in the salon mirror: The thrill of my first pandemic haircut
Treading water: a simple comfort during a global pandemic
Post-COVID belt-tightening in the age of the adjustable waistband – and a bear market
Trading one bunker for another: Finding a respite from the pandemic on the golf course
The most popular outing of summer 2020: Getting a COVID-19 test
Quite a catch: Finding solace in fly-fishing
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