Apartment "Eh?": An American's Adventures In Canada

Dat Cottage Lyfe

Beach House. The Cabin. Lake house. A shack in the woods. No, I'm not just listing off breathy indie hipster bands (ok, at least that first one is); I'm just trying to capture how the rest of the world, with the means to do so, likes to summer -- at a house away from it all.

In Canada there is only The Cottage. Canadians live for The Cottage, and it is where Canadian winters go to die.

What is The Cottage really? Technically, it's a lake house. Canada is, after all, the land of 10,000 lakes. Crap, actually that's Minnesota. Well, you get my point.

But not all cottages are required to have water views, or quaint British gardens like you'd imagine. Here it's used as a verb for going to the country, starting as soon as the snow starts to thaw. Cottage-ing carries with it a world of traditions, its own vocabulary and customs. The Cottage is Canada's Walden. But with Muskoka chairs and two-fours.

(That's a case of beer, aka a 24-pack, for all my Yankees out there.)

I was skeptical of Cottage Life, until a couple of weekends ago. We stayed a friend of the family's outside Parry Sound, a town near Georgian Bay in the eastern part of Lake Huron. Basically we were staying at a giant house, with its own dock on a giant fucking lake, with water so smooth and dark it looked like molasses. I walked down a path along and over giant boulders leading down to the dock. The water was cold, even in the height of summer so I tried to step in gingerly. The effort was wasted: I end up succumbing to gravity + slippery ass, moss-covered rocks and falling, arms out, laughing, into the cool velvety water.

I swim like a shark's fin, eyes at water level. The water is the color of midnight, like it's trying to prove that blue is god's favorite color, or at least god's interior designer's fave. I cry in delight as a sort of pre-human nature takes over and I swim and paddle and float, observing every bit of water and air and animal around until human thought invades again. Warm patch, ice cold patch. Stay horizontal. Don't drift too far from the dock. You can't overthink swimming, or you start to imagine what's below, or mafia scenes starring cement blocks across the way, or even something as abstract as acid rain.

Fifteen feet away a skinny, baby seagull dive bombs the water for fish. I yelp in delight, alone, in a lake as big as the ocean.

I go in four more times, even joined by my husband, a man I've never seen swim. In fact, I've barely seen him get wet: he's always complaining about chlorine (pools) or sand (ocean). In this lake, he transforms into a poster boy for Canadian lakes, the Übermensch of Ontario's summer season. He shivers like a chihuahua getting in but soon he is diving and shaking the fresh water out of his hair like a strong, sexy merman I'd like to... well. You get the point.

I'm now a cottage convert.

I'm still learning my way around but the other essential elements of a Cottage Weekend include, from what I gather:

- DQ: The Dairy Queen. I know America has these too, but the vibe in small-town Ontario, filled with tan and/or awkward high-schoolers behind the counter dishing out blizzards to the muffled sound of top 40 hits still felt like going back 20 years to a Canada I'd never known.

- Tragically Hip: a band so tragically un-hip that ONLY Canadians have ever heard of them. But for millennials, their vanilla 90's power ballads form the soundtrack of every friendly get-together, especially in Cottage country. But at least they're cooler than the Barenaked Ladies, another hometown (Ontario) favorite.

- The Canadian Shield: drive to any cottage and you're bound to wind through a highway carved deep into Precambrian rock, dating back about 3 million years. Basically the highway slices right through majestic walls of stone, the same stone that forms the geological core of North America. In Canada, they give their rocks cool names that sound like badass armies.

- Muskoka Chairs: basically, an adirondack chair, but they don't call them that here.

- Chip Wagon: a food truck that only serves french fries with gravy. Why? No idea. Guess they haven't realized that in America we fry everything, even butter, and would never limit ourselves to fries.

- White people: Lots of them. It's in the countryside of Canada that you realize how much of this country was descended from people of British ancestry. For every bit that Toronto is a bustling multicultural, cosmopolitan city, cottage country feels just that much whiter.

- Cottage Life Magazine: Yes, this is a thing. "Your source for all things cottage since 1988." Recent articles include 'The Health Benefits of Napping' and 'Alberta "goose whisperer" helps a lost goose find its way.' and, for @toddboxer 'Brojects: How to build a floating hot tub.'

Ok Canadians: what am I missing?