The cottage on Rebel's Isle

By some miracle it still stands a good sixty five years after the first load of lumber was dragged across the ice to build a hunting camp. You know what a hunting camp is, it’s a minimal shelter with bunk beds, a wood burning stove and cast off furniture, mostly tables and chairs. Some even had a window or two. Some got fancied up with rocking chairs to circle the stove. It’s a place where men gathered in the fall to drink, hunt deer and moose, cook and play cards. A place to smoke cigars and be men. When they built this shack the big war was still a vivid memoury to Howard Fairman and his buddies, and a “police action” in Korea had a few of them missing a season or two. Many of the early birds on Lake Kasshabog flew fighter jets in Korea and duked it out with the MIGS. Most of them came back. In those days you had to be resourceful and inventive to build anything so far removed from civilization, which they were; our cottage proves it! If you want more proof, way down at the other end of the lake we found a home-built pontoon boat that floats on the wing-tip tanks of an F- 86 Starfighter.

Those guys are gone now and here we are squatting in the real estate agents tin boat puttering up the lake at a leisurely pace. We had come for a second look at another cottage on the mainland, which Annie had pretty well bonded with, and I just wanted to see it from the lake to be sure. For that purpose we’d rented a boat from the local marina and Karen, proud owner and operator of the little store there, asked if we were going to look at the island?

“Island?”, said I, my eyes glazing over.

And so there we were, gazing about under the spell of a hazy hot August day on Lake Kasshabog. The water was still, there was no breeze. We rounded a point and Darryl fetched his thumb toward a pair of islands dense with tall pines. “Which one, Darryl?” “The larger one on the right.” Remember the sound track from “South Pacific”? At that very moment from a half mile out I had claimed Rebel’s Isle for my own. The discussion with Annie about the other place would come later. The island sits out in the lake ringed by a dry-laid stone wall, bushy and overgrown with a small clearing where the cottage stood at the highest point of the rock spine that ran its length. It was dense with trees. As we approached, the little cabin stood white against the pines. There was a broken down boat house and a little dock where Darryl tied up. Birds fluttered and sang. We climbed an awkward set of steps to a truly hideous cement patio. Well, it wasn’t that bad; it was poured concrete over a stone foundation. But with strange dips and ridges designed to stub the unwary toe. Running the full width of the 30’ x 30’ shack was a screened in porch with storm flaps to flip up and hook on the rafters to let the air circulate.

The porch was an add-on to the original hunting camp so there were two windows flanking an inner door. Through this door and into the main space a small window winked from the opposite wall. The air was dusty inside and the bare stud walls, weathered to a mellow honey colour, glowed in the shafts of sun where the tiny windows allowed it in. Tiny as it was, it was cut up into even tinier rooms. There were two small bedrooms in the corners, a storage closet to the right and a bathroom to the left. By that I mean a walled in space with a toilet, a sink, and a shoulder height cylinder with a long glass tube running up its side. It had a domed top with a spout of some sort. An ancient and evil pressure tank.

The ceiling pressed upon our heads. Sheets of a pale fibrous material, somewhat stained by the ages had been nailed up to enclose the peak and make the space more heatable. Let’s say it was cozy in there. Outside again we circled the shack admiring its classic ship lap siding. The chaulky paint was white with blue-green trim. And there was a most interesting partial foundation along the patio. Running the full width is a wall of liquor bottles embedded in cement, flat bottoms facing out. I’ve often wondered if the production of this wall accounted for the irregularities in the patio surface. Somebody had to empty those bottles after all!

In truth, the size, look, and condition of the cabin were almost irrelevant to me. As I made my case to Annie who had partially bonded with the other place along the shore: you can change a structure, you can’t change the land. So that’s what we did, and here we are.