Rebel's Isle, a cottage log.

We didn’t have trees in the city, not our own anyway – there were trees on the street lined up in neat rows. Our little house sat on a little lot and there was little room for gardening. You could touch the house and the fence on three sides, and once you allowed room to park a car there remained the most over-gardened perimeter strip in the neighbourhood. Here we are now on a half acre wooded pile of rock in a Northern Ontario lake, with a tiny old wooden cabin and a lot of work ahead to make it livable on our terms. We’d come to the end of a long journey to Rebel’s Isle. A little dazed I was, wondering now I’d done it what was it all about?

For me it was about fishing. Annie was not about to take another holiday at yet another fishing camp, no matter how wild and beautiful the setting. We’d explored the French River and watched the waves break over its rocky mouth at Georgian Bay, picked blueberries there, and stared at stars on an inky northern night. We fell in love with the country together. But she just couldn’t get into fishing. That was a bit of a betrayal, as I saw it. When we joined lives she was a skier and I was a sport fisherman. It was tacitly understood that I would learn to like skiing and she would learn to like fishing, and within this understanding our relationship could work. We got halfway there. I love to ski. On the other hand, Annie does not think that “squatting in a boat for hours trying to catch little fishies” is anywhere near as much fun as skiing, and she probably has a point.

Her feelings on the matter are strong. She tried. She allowed me to take her to a rustic fishing camp on Pigeon Lake, which was maybe not a good beginning. Rows of shacks along the shore and a bunch of guys playing cards and peeing in the night… Annie failed to grasp the charm of it all. We went twice to the French River Lodge for extended stays, a beautiful experience.

We took a weekend at Arrowhon Pines, deep in Algonquin. That was the morning we took a canoe and pushed off into deep pink mist on a hot July dawn. We dined in splendor, the scenery was spectacular, but fishing didn’t take. I knew it wasn’t going to work when she refused to stop paddling to go back for the lure I’d snagged. With the snapping of the line I knew deep down that we would never share the primordial obsession that is fishing.

I continued to fish, but outside the relationship. I took wilderness adventures, fly-in trips to the great white north with my buddies, but it was somehow too separate. It wasn’t working for us; I was either working or off fishing. Then one weekend we visited some friends at their cottage; to go fishing, of all things. Out on the water a trance cameover us; the thought that this could be nice. And there was a place for sale along the shore. As we wrote down the agent’s phone number we stepped onto the slippery slope toward cottage ownership; kind of like stepping barefoot on that underwater rock that’s slippery with algae and sets you sliding towards the dark deep water just beyond its edge. So began the search that led us to Rebel’s Isle and Jim and Ray and all the other great people we’ve come to know and love on Lake Kasshabog, known by the Algonkians as “lake of many passages”. And so it has been.