Daniel Sanger is a journalist, writer and consultant on urban issues in Montreal. His most recent book is Saving the City: The Challenge of Transforming a Modern Metropolis.
For many, going to the cottage/cabin/camp/chalet (choose one depending on where in Canada you reside) is about chilling out/kicking back/taking it easy (again, take your pick). At least that is what beer commercials and other guides as to how-life-should-be-lived tell us. A place that is all BBQs, beach volleyball, lounging on the dock and perhaps some cavorting on a Jet Ski. With, every so often, a bro with some sort of six-pack – alcoholic, abdominal, both – getting pushed into the drink by a squealing cutie.
That has never been what going to our cottage has involved, and not only because it is on an island in Georgian Bay that is all glacier-ground granite and has virtually no sand, so no beach volleyball.
Rather, our cottage has always meant work. Not toil and drudgery work, or watching-the-clock work.
Instead, the good kind of work. Work undertaken in the company of siblings, cousins and friends, with a common purpose and a collective benefit. Work that involves laughter and learning and usually a bit of blood. Work that you may have had your fill of by late August but which, by mid-February or so, you begin to crave, as much as you crave lying on those smooth rocks or paddling the old blue canoe.
Antoine Sanger-Lemercier tows a load of wood – and his cousin Tommy O'Neill-Sanger – to the island building site.
When we were young, it’s true, work at the cottage wasn’t something we looked forward to. More something we sought to duck out of. The after-breakfast chores were unavoidable. Bringing up water from the lake. (A steel bucket in each hand when you were big enough. Until then it was two trips down and back up the rocky path.) Chopping kindling for the fireplace and the woodstove in the kitchen. And the one that I, as the youngest, seemed to always be assigned: cleaning out the porridge pot in the lake. Scraping out all the gunk was tiresome; watching the minnows chase after the oat scraps as they fell toward the bottom was mesmerizing.
Chores done, it was off exploring, or over to the paddle tennis court, or to find a cousin to go fishing or swimming or smoking with, whether it was homemade cigarettes made of pine needles or cedar bark or stale Du Mauriers pilfered from the pack on the mantelpiece.
It seemed as if my brothers and I were related to everyone in our inlet, our summer universe, even if it was true of only about half the cottagers. It had started with the sister of my great-grandmother who, about 120 years ago, having concluded that the Kawarthas just didn’t have it and that Muskoka was already too overrun, met a surveyor from Barrie. He told her of a beautiful stretch of Georgian Bay coastline he’d visited. Soon she had bought three islands, and my great-grandmother another three and other sisters, other islands.
For the first summers, they came up by train and boat and lived in tents with their children and maids. The menfolk weren’t into it. For my great-grandfather there was the vegetable garden to tend. For his brother-in-law there were bars and taverns that needed patronizing.
But for the men of the next generation there was no place better. My grandmother married a man who had four brothers. All of them bought islands in the area and all of them became educators, the better to guarantee long summers off. So cousins were everywhere and even people who weren’t cousins felt like they were since we had usually known each other since childhood and our parents, likewise.
Different branches of the Sanger family made their properties on nearby islands. This old board-and-batten structure was torn down in 2019 to make room for new construction.
When we went out for our daily adventures, you had to be careful about which family of cousins to visit and when. Since we were all on different islands, or, in the case of the big island in the family, on different points or bays, our uncles and aunts would see us coming. Visit Aunt Pat at the wrong time and she might make you take a nap. Aunt Mary might try to coax you into blueberry picking, which was purportedly fun, but which I just found frustrating because the pickings were invariably slim, whether because of not enough rain, not enough sun, too many bears or simply the thin soil of the islands.
When the uncles saw us coming, however, they saw free labour. Uncle Tom and Uncle Bob would quickly find us a pile of brush to clear or a boat to move. Or they would get us hauling stones, whether for a path, a patio or the crib for a dock. But stonework was perilous for them as well as us. A toe or a finger would inevitably get crushed, and if the injury was bad enough, the uncle in question would have to take us to the nursing station in the Pointe.
Uncle Bob came up with the most memorable make-work project of my youth – going around his small island catching as many fox snakes as possible. For some reason that summer they were everywhere on Catawissa and over a long afternoon it seemed that we caught dozens. Bob didn’t want us to kill them, just torment them a little, which of course is a young boy specialty. We duly threw some into the water, hung others from trees, tried tying one into a knot.
Still, it was Uncle Tony who was the real king of make-work projects for idle youth. His go-to classic if there wasn’t something that actually needed doing: having us straighten rusty nails pulled from old boards.
As we got older and more reliable in our wielding of saws, hammers and axes, we took on bigger tasks, embracing cottage work with enthusiasm. Building a new outhouse or shed, extending a deck, even adding a back bedroom to an old cabin became vacation projects. Docking and wooding expeditions after oak, maple or birch on the mainland were routine activities. Then, some time in our 20s, my brothers and I – there were four of us, less than three years apart – became our uncles and the cottage became our own labour camp. We reveled in the peace, the beauty, the nature, the company of family, immediate and extended. But as much as anything we went there to work.
You’ll note I say we became our uncles and not our father. It wasn’t as if he was dead or absent or in the hammock with a G&T and a Le Carré novel as of 11 a.m. He was just English – private-boarding-school, punting-with-Pimm’s English – and despite his best efforts remained a peripheral. His word, not ours. No better at the requisite skills of Georgian Bay than he ever got at skating on the Canal. Our uncles, on the other hand, came by it naturally. They, like us, started going to the bay as babies and several, like their own fathers, wisely decided to become teachers.
Daniel Sanger's maternal grandparents, Ottilie and Phil Ketchum, build their log cabin in 1924.
Family legend has it that my mother’s parents built their original cabin – a one-room structure made of logs salvaged from a broken boom – on their honeymoon in 1924. There is photographic evidence to that effect, although the photos show them surrounded by Indigenous labourers, so how much building my grandparents did themselves might be questioned.
My grandfather was something of a do-it-yourselfer even if there may not have been a great deal of doing. Heavily influenced by the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, he felt that living close to nature, and very simply, was the truest path to moral and intellectual purity. Best to produce what you needed yourself, but only if you really needed it.
My grandmother, he felt, didn’t really need a kitchen. A campfire on the rock in front of the cabin was just fine. And that one-room, 450-square-foot log cabin? Spacious enough for my grandparents and five kids. It was only when the sixth came along and my mother and her sisters became teenagers and insisted on a bit of privacy that my grandparents bought the big island, which came with a much bigger cabin, a bunkie and lots of room for expanding.
It was on this island that, in the 1960s, my Uncle Tom built Uteecee (Uncle Tom’s Cabin – get it?) out of vertical cedar posts. It is a gem of a cottage, if one that gives architects and engineers nightmares for its minimal shear resistance. A stiff wind – and there are lots of those on Georgian Bay – should in theory push the cabin over. (It hasn’t happened yet.)
In those days, you could build what you wanted, where you wanted. Permits and building codes were in the fussy future. So when, a few years later, the big cabin burned to the ground after lightning struck a nearby tree, Uncle Tom, Uncle Tony, Uncle Nick and a few scattered cousins and recruits rebuilt it with a similar, vertical cedar-log design.
In this way, a family tradition was formalized: We built our own cabins, ideally out of logs.
Logs are the preferred material for the Sangers' cabins, but post-and-beam is the next best thing.
My brothers and I abided by this when it came time to build a sleeping cabin about 30 years ago, and then, about five years after that, we took on the rebuild of our grandparents’ honeymoon cabin, which, after 75 years, had been half consumed by carpenter ants.
There was, however, an element of prefab to both undertakings: We bought squared timbers with lovely dovetail-joint corners from craftsmen who actually knew what they were doing and barged them, carefully numbered, out to the island. We just had to assemble the cabins like Lincoln Logs, put a roof on, a floor down, and windows and doors in. Even then, rebuilding the honeymoon cabin took us so long – about seven summers, if you must know – that cousin Peter (who, to my knowledge, has never made anything more complicated than a cocktail) still makes fun of us for it.
After that we took a breather from serious building for a decade or so. My brother Richard built a treehouse with his boys and a zipline from one island to another. The rest of us didn’t get much more creative than a canoe ramp, constant docking to adjust to the changing water levels, and general repairs and maintenance.
I suppose that in those years, there may have been some chilling out/kicking back/taking it easy, in amongst the hours spent keeping our children from setting fire to the island, cutting off a body part with one of the many sharp objects that lie around the cabin, or just disappearing, whether into the open bay in the Laser, to the bottom because we aren’t very strict about wearing PFDs, or into the woods of the mainland when out exploring.
And there was certainly a lot of reading, always one of the great pleasures of going to the cottage.
As children we would spend the entire summer up there with our mother and, in the day or two after school ended and before we left the city, she would take us to Shirley Leishman Books in downtown Ottawa and have us choose a title. One to savour, she suggested, that we might not finish until mid-July or so. I usually ended up insisting on the latest Astérix, which I had read by the time our VW van lumbered into Golden Lake, the first stop on the seven-hour journey, if all went well and there wasn’t too much vomiting by kids or dogs.
Still, the shelves at the cottage were rich with books, whatever age you might be. Early favourites of mine – The Lang’s Fairy Books, each a different colour. For the older and more literarily ambitious, there were copies of Finnegans Wake, The Pilgrim’s Progress and for a while some Proust. I never opened those. I was more than happy reading the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser or whatever P.G. Wodehouse or Elmore Leonard was around, with an occasional upmarket foray into the short stories of Alice Munro, Richard Ford or Raymond Carver.
I did read a classic here or there – Midnight’s Children, One Hundred Years of Solitude, even a Dostoyevsky or Jane Austen – to keep my mother from despairing too much. But cottage reading, I felt and would sometimes argue, was for pleasure. A bit of edification along the way was a welcome side benefit. But it wasn’t supposed to be work. We had our fill of that.
Guiding wooden beams into place with makeshift pulleys is a laborious, slow process that has not yet produced a finished building.
Soon enough, we took on a project, still ongoing, that may yet still be our undoing.
Those general repairs and maintenance I referred to doing during our decade-long lull? Well, clearly we didn’t do enough of them because by about 2017, the board-and-batten cabin my brothers and I shared was hardly fit for occupation any more. It had stood up for almost 100 years – it had been built by a skilled carpenter (not a member of the family) who sawed his own boards from salvaged logs – but had suffered its share of insults and injuries.
In the mid-1970s, we had tried insulating it under the illusion we might comfortably spend winter weeks there and not done a very good job. It was never occupied by any of us for more than a few frigid days in a row. Our work, however, seemed to have been appreciated by a family of raccoons who one winter climbed down the chimney and trashed the place. A few years after that, a bear, hungry for whatever was in the food cupboard on the other side of the board-and-batten, ripped open the kitchen wall. And even if we did manage to convince the bats who had long lived in the roof to move to special houses we built for them and nailed high up on nearby pine trees, every year there seemed to be more mice and spiders as well as an occasional exotic. (Ever come across a horsehair worm? Happily they only take over the brains of insects.)
Beyond that, the cabin was just too small. Or rather, we had grown too many. For my mother and her siblings there was always a bay or a point or another island to expand to, where they might build their own place and live the pioneer fantasy we all, in a way, pursued every summer. Our generation was the first that had had to learn to share.
Happily, my brothers and I all got along well and for years it went smoothly. But we had ourselves proliferated and our own kids were themselves reaching the proliferation point. We are not much of a STEM family but even with our very basic math we could calculate that we might soon all be limited to a single week every summer.
So we recruited an architect friend who understood us and our aesthetic, and he drew up plans for a bigger cabin, with large common areas, two closed bedrooms and a sleeping loft. It wasn’t going to be a log cabin but the next best thing: post-and-beam.
Matthew and Toby Sanger look over the plans while brother Daniel, middle, discusses next steps with architect François Émond and Bob Vandenberg.
There are probably several reasons we didn’t study the drawings made by François and his engineer as closely as we might have. Our shared STEM challenges. Much of the print was very small and we were at an age when our eyesight was weakening. A family tendency to be excessively, even stupidly confident and optimistic when embarking on challenges, whether it be heading off on a backcountry ski expedition, down a river full of rapids or building a complicated cabin.
Specifically, we didn’t take into adequate consideration the size of the posts and beams. On a page, 6″ x 18″ x 16′ is just a bunch of numbers and dimensions. Coming off a flatbed truck at the marina, it is a massive and very heavy piece of pine. All the more so if, as ours were, it was a living tree about six months previously and the wood was still quite green.
We had about 30 of these to get out to the island along with dozens of only somewhat smaller timbers. And not just out to the island but up to the building site and then into place, which in some cases meant more than 20 feet above floor level. Without, it should be added, any heavy machinery.
At first that meant crowbars and rollers and lifting intelligently – with the knees, one end at a time, using the beams’ pivot points – to get the timbers off the barge and up to the work site.
It also meant dragooning whoever might be willing to help us. Uncle Nick was always keen but he was also almost 80 by then. Other relatives? Not so much. I never knew so many of them had bad backs and bum knees.
But we had Bob. Bob was edging toward retirement but wasn’t at peace with the idea of not working most every day. Coming from a strict Calvinist background meant that Bob often wanted to start earlier and finish later than my brothers and I (our work ethic is more lapsed Anglican), but that was a good problem to have.
Better yet, Bob’s father had been a builder, frequently of cottages, and so Bob had spent the summers of his youth helping out on construction sites around Southern Ontario. Translated: He knew what he was doing. This became very obvious on one of the first days when, as my brothers and I were standing around, wondering just how we were going to erect the two central columns of the cabin – each of which was 8″ x 8″ x 23′ – Bob got busy making a tower of scaffolding out of scrap wood. To this, he lashed a makeshift mast from the top of which we hung a fancy pulley set-up one of my brothers had invested in. In no time, the columns were vertical and we were away.
Away slowly. Each beam and each column was its own adventure and a two-beam day was a banner day. More common was the three- or four-beam week, with long hours spent manoeuvring the timbers onto the cabin deck, cutting them to within an eighth of an inch of the required length, and then raising them into place with a combination of pulleys, chains, blocks and scaffolding.
These days would begin with a swim and porridge and end with a swim and a beer, followed by a good meal and perhaps a game of cards during which we discussed the day’s progress and what we might get accomplished the next.
Members of the family take a break from loading more beams at the local marina.
There was not much reading, at least by me, at least of books. Nothing I picked up could keep me awake or pull me in.
Then, last June, a cousin visiting the work site compared our project to a book she and her husband had listened to as they had driven across the country from Vancouver. A novel about building a cathedral in the Middle Ages. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.
It was not the kind of book that would have been found on our cabin’s shelves. It was too airport; my family too literarily snobby. But my cousin and her husband both had PhDs and spoke of it almost rapturously. I was intrigued. Next time I was in Parry Sound, I bought a used copy, brought it back to the island and plunged in. To my surprise, I was weirdly swept away.
There is no elegance or artistry to the writing. The books – yes, after racing through the 1,008 pages of The Pillars of the Earth, I just as quickly read its 1,024-page sequel and its 832-page prequel – are nothing if not formulaic. But they spoke to our undertaking.
The heroes, male and female, starkly drawn, are disruptors. There are those in medicine who suspect that illness may not just be about humours and that not everything might be cured by bleeding. There are those in industry who devise more efficient ways to felt wool and smelt iron. There are those in commerce who understand that prosperous peasants are consumers too. But the central heroes tend to be architects, engineers and builders, with a vision for a church or a bridge or fortifications to protect a town from nasties (almost invariably hidebound and deviant nobility or clergy) and are willing to challenge convention and come up with new solutions to realize that vision.
With our crowbars and rollers, our pulleys and chain hoists, we were hardly inventing new methods. Rather, as much as anything, we were resurrecting methods that had been abandoned with the arrival of backhoes, Bobcats and spider lifts.
In that small way, there was some disruption in how we were building the cabin, even a little bit of heroism. At least I hope our children and grandchildren will see it that way. After all, as I have been forced to tell my kids on occasion as I try to extract a day or a week of their labour, my brothers and I are building the cabin for them and their kids and their kids’ kids.
Although that’s not entirely true. Nor is it just because of family tradition and doing right by our ancestors. Or saving a whole lot of money. It is all those things, but especially it is about working together, with a common purpose and collective benefit. With laughter and learning and a bit of blood (but so far, no broken bones or worse).
There’s a lot still left to do on our cabin, but the heavy lifting, literal and figurative, is done. Still there’s the insulating, the roofing, the cladding, the flooring, the windows and doors, and the interior finishing … I can’t wait to start this season even if I know there’s enough work to take us into 2025, perhaps 2026, to give Cousin Peter more ammunition to tease us.
Once it’s done, maybe a summer or two of chilling out/kicking back/taking it easy. Certainly some reading. There’s a whole wall of Ken Follett at Bearly Used Books in Parry Sound. Then we’ll have to find another project, more work, the good kind of work, to see us through.
When the project is finished, the Sangers will be able to enjoy a more leisurely time in the woods.