That last walk along the waterfront. That last lure cast or flat stone skipped. For the brave, that last brief swim. That last look back as you drive up the lane through the leaves of autumn. The view over the stern of the boat as the wake spreads and the cottage dwindles in the ever-growing distance. This is closing the cottage, preparing for winter, putting away the joys of summer. Hating to see the seasons end but knowing that closing holds the certainty of return. I have snugged up a number of cottages in my life. When I was a child, we closed the old cottage on the Moon River, near Bala, Ont., on Labour Day weekend. Screens stacked on beds, shutters on all the windows, boats under the verandah, and cupboards cleaned and linen stored. Some of that ritual is with me still, although cottage closings have moved from Labour Day to Thanksgiving. And modern cottages—really houses on the shore—never close. (Sadly, they also miss the joy of opening in spring.)
This last is the most traumatic, for running water, hot and cold, is the lifeline of the cottage.
Cottage closings are signalled by two key events—unhitching the floating dock and tucking it away from the ice, and pulling in the waterline. This last is the most traumatic, for running water, hot and cold, is the lifeline of the cottage. More important to most, it lets one use the indoor plumbing. Fastidious people believe summer is truly over when they have to use the outhouse. Not me; I grew up (so to speak) sitting in a two-holer on the Moon. Pulling in the waterline at our cottage, which is on the Trent-Severn, calls for someone, my younger daughter, Julia, to don chest waders, walk out into the lake, and lift the foot valve and the concrete blocks that keep it submerged. She drags this ashore, and then we take off the valve and clean it, disconnect the 100 feet of plastic pipe from the pump, and drain it. Then I drain the pump because one year I didn’t and the pressure tank—somehow full of water—froze and split. This is a more complicated procedure than in the old days when we had a hand pump that delivered cold water, and the pipe was cast iron with no foot valve because we pumped up a minnow a day. That pipe was wrenched apart (with bad words) and pulled out of the river.
There’s more to shutting off the water than simply pulling the line. All taps must be opened and all lines under the cottage must be drained. Our place is 50 years old, and the crawl space is criss-crossed with piping festooned with taps. We don’t know quite what all this plumbing does, but we do know enough—rather, Julia does—to open everything. Not only does she open taps, she takes off those little valve caps on faucet nipples and stores them in an empty baby food jar. Those valve caps are tricky; in the days when I crawled under the cottage, I dropped one, and it vanished forever down a chipmunk hole.
Up top, I put plumbing antifreeze in every single drain I can find. Even in ones in the old bathroom that hasn’t been used (I think) in 10 years. And before we finally leave, I get as much water as possible out of the toilet with a turkey baster (not the one used the previous day for our Thanksgiving turkey). I am wiser now than I was at that cottage in Muskoka. In the year it finally got indoor plumbing, cold water only, I was there in October by myself. Fearing the toilet would freeze, I dumped a box of salt into it. This was not appreciated by the man whose job it was to close the cottage and who concluded, as he told my father later, that the place had been beset by vandals.
You will know, of course, that cutting off the water is almost the last step in closing the cottage. We have been using water for cleaning and scrubbing up to the end. And we also store some water in white plastic pails I bought for $1 each at a dairy. I fill them half-full and put a top on. This means I’ll have some wash water if I get up for a few days over the winter. (Which I will.) The water in the bucket will thaw, as the cottage does, and be ready for use a few hours after arrival.
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If you do plan to visit your cottage over the winter and you want to use the toilet, you can store a large pail of water mixed with windshield washer fluid to keep it liquid. Then just dump a small pail into the toilet after use. A plumber told me this trick; I don’t know what it does to the septic. Tucking away the floating dock is another rite of closing. On lakes where water levels vary, most cottages have floating docks and most people unhook them and tow them to a sheltered spot.
This means finding the muscle power to unhook a ramp that, in our case, weighs roughly 250 pounds. We either drag it onto the fixed crib or sit it on the dock. Whichever seems easier at the time. Then one or two people get to pole and paddle the dock to the protected channel behind the island; pleasant work on a pleasant day. By the end of Thanksgiving weekend, five or six other cottage docks will show up back there. (All of them better than ours.)
Photo by Roberta Phelps
Indeed, every year when we take the dock out, we plan new ways of simplifying this chore. My son-in-law, Philip, and I stand on the fixed crib and talk glibly of drilling into the rock and perhaps pouring a concrete step. Or building a smaller crib just a yard or two further out into the water. And sometimes our dock ideas are grandiose. One year, Philip sketched out a diagram showing twin towers anchored on the shore. One end of a long, new dock would be tied into the towers and, with a winch, we could easily raise the whole dock from the water and easily lower it again. I think the plan was for the end sitting out in the water to rest on folding legs. An idea whose time, at least for us, has not yet come. Maybe someday…
Most of cottage closing is a mixture of tradition and common sense. Take food, for example. In the weekends before closing, we try to take less food up and eat more that we have stored over the summer. We do leave staples, such as salt and sugar and coffee and tins of beans and soup, but we eat our way through the perishables. This means bread we froze in June and hamburgers of dubious vintage and that sometimes Augusta, the wonder dog, eats like a queen.
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At Thanksgiving, we have the mystery muffin festival when the various grains, such as oatmeal and Red River cereal, get turned into muffins. Sometimes they are delicious, sometimes less so. But taste doesn’t mean much because the muffins are vehicles for using up butter and jams. They carry a heavy load. Another tradition is that the tinned ham goes to a food drive. Every year in spring, we stockpile a tinned ham, corned beef, tinned stew against heaven-knows-what emergency. Every year, we box them up and give them away. (One year, a guest ate the tinned ham, and I felt so guilty that I bought another to give away.)
Much of cottage closing is minor but important. I varnish paddles if the weather holds. I oil padlocks. I sort through tubes of caulking to see if they must be protected from freezing. I make sure we have a bottle of scotch in case of…well, who knows, and a few half-bottles of drinking water. And that we have lots of matches and flashlights and batteries. Some of the newer porch furniture gets moved inside or goes under the cottage, but there are some cedar chairs that have sat outside for 50 years and that’s where we leave them. We have a boathouse so that’s where the pedal boat and the good canoe go. The thwartless fibreglass canoe and the little rowboat eventually go over the back channel to winter over.
Since our cottage now is on an island on one of the Trent-Severn reservoir lakes, water levels and boats are important to us. If the level is down in early autumn, then we have to store the big inboard at the marina about three kilometres over the water and row, pole, or paddle over the narrow back channel behind the island. There we have a trail that leads to a parking space on a private road. When we first moved to the island, I had a marvelous scheme for storing the good canoe. Some previous owner had installed a steel beam over the slip in the boathouse, complete with chains and pulleys. Presumably, it had hauled large boats out of the water in those days.
Here was my chance at last to show Father Mooney that, even though I had flunked his Grade 11 class in physics, some knowledge of pulleys had remained with me.
Photo by Jon Sprunt
I arranged the existing pulleys (wrong the first time, right the second), made a rope sling, and easily lifted the canoe from the water. It sat there suspended. Very satisfying, but… But the boathouse had a leaky roof, and I worried that the canoe, sitting upright in the air, might fill with rain and crash down. Worse, it might fill with rain, which would then freeze and split it open like a ripe cantaloupe. So, pushing with a paddle, I tried to turn the canoe upside down in the sling. Very tricky with it hanging up there over the water. It showed a distressing tendency to remain right side up. Then I had another idea.
I lowered the canoe, tied four lengths of twine through the drain holes in the gunwales. When I raised it again, I was able, with some effort, to turn it over. Then I tied the ends of my four pieces of twine to those convenient nails that are always hammered into boathouse walls. Perfect. Now I had a suspended, upside down canoe and a crude death trap for anyone walking into the dimly lit boathouse. Stout twine tautly strung at neck height. Because we have a lot of dead oaks on the island, we do have firewood, but at closing time, we make sure that the oldest and driest is in a covered woodpile closest to the cottage and that we have stacks of kindling. If the weather is right, this is the time of year to do a little burning of brush along with the traditional last-evening small fire to toast the final marshmallows of summer. About five years ago, I rose early one still, misty morning and thought it the perfect time to burn the refrigerator-sized pile of brush and weeds we had accumulated on the shore. No wind and everything wet from overnight rain.
The bottom of the pile was dry and, in a few minutes, I had a thick column of dense white smoke roiling into the sky. As I sat on a rock drinking coffee and poking at the fire, I suddenly heard voices such as you hear on a taxi radio. Strange place for a taxi. Then I heard the motor of a large truck and decided I was hearing voices floating in from a hydro crew. And then I heard a bell and a siren. Oh, oh.
I walked to the south end of the island as a large, red fire truck pulled up at my neighbour’s cottage on the mainland about 90 metres away. The Galway-Hastings & Harvey volunteer fire department had arrived. A fully rigged-out fireman dismounted from the truck and looked at me. “Good morning,” I called over the water. He just looked. “Burning brush,” I yelled. “No problems.” I think he was disappointed that there was no call to swing into action, but he was pleasant about the situation. “Okay,” he said. “Just be sure to tell the fireboat.” Fireboat?
I walked back to my fire as the truck rolled away and sure enough, a boat came sliding out of the low mist on the lake. Two women and a man in full gear on a boat called The Big Fisherman. Not, I suspect, the regular fireboat. Because of low water and shoals, they hove-to about nine metres out. When I told them I was merely burning brush, they offered to start up the pump and put it out for me. I assured them all was under control and they vanished back up the north end of the lake.
When they were well gone, I dumped pails of water on my fire and kicked it apart with my work boots. Then when it was dead out, I transferred most of it to my main compost pile. Later that day, I phoned the fire department to thank them for their prompt attention, and they explained that a cottager new to the lake had seen the thick pillar of smoke rising and called in the alarm.
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I still do have legal fires these days, but I can tell you I’m sure to keep the smoke down. When all the other chores are done, we have to consider the cottager’s dilemma: mice. Years ago, in Muskoka, mice strolled into the cottage as a matter of right. It didn’t make much difference because all the linen was stored in trunks and there was no food. They always, however, found a few balls of yarn in my grandmother’s sock drawer, and if mice were still in residence when she came up in the spring, she put on thick gloves and scooped all nests into the blazing woodstove. She was tougher than I am.
We have gotten a little careless about mice because we haven’t seen any for a few years. Yes, we put linens away and put any loose food in metal containers, but we have a lot of clothes on hangers, and I am mindful of the time the mice built a nest in my grandmother’s bathrobe pocket. (Yes, the nest went into the woodstove.) I think this year, I will put out traps, although I am more worried about what to do with the flying squirrels that have moved into the attic.
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All this is about the mechanics of closing but, as you cottagers know, the shutting of the cottage is a time of mixed emotions. We put away the things of summer and the rites of summer. Closing marks a break in our long-running family gin game, played with six wild cards and played only at the cottage.
Closing means I will no more have to play Monopoly. As a matter of principle, I never play Trivial Pursuit at the cottage, but sit in my chair and read and shout out the answers to those playing until I am sent outside to split wood or watch stars. Closing means I won’t have another game of crokinole until maybe May, and closing means that some of those old, cottage mysteries will look fresh when I do return. (While I will visit the cottage a couple of times over the winter, it will be just that, a visit. It won’t be cottaging. I will feel like a stranger and the cottage strange.)
Finally, closing means just that, going away: children counted, bags packed, garbage gathered, taps open, windows shut, drapes drawn, drains full of antifreeze, power off. Do we have the dog’s leash? Indeed, do we have the dog and is she dry?
In most cases for most people, when the answers to all these questions is yes, then it is up the driveway and into city life. At our island, it is different if the big boat is already in storage at the marina. We do ask those ritual questions and put the leash on the ritual dog (she is wet) and prepare to leave. At this time of year, dock-less and big boat-less, we carry our baggage over the island and load up the small rowboat and the multi-patched fibreglass canoe. Then we cross the 90 metre channel, pull the boats well onto shore, flip them over, and trek through the woods to a cottage road.
But closing up, leaving, is more than just going away. It is making the promise of return. True, leaving is an ending. But without endings there are no beginnings. A year ago—or was it two or three?—we finished closing late into the crisp autumn night, crossing that back channel with the air sharp as a pang of regret. Frost on the trees, stars out. The woods dark in front of us, the island floating black behind us on the moon-silvered water…turning away with flashlights to that trail through the woods, realizing that each step away is part of a continuing journey. That going away is the prelude to coming back.
Paul Rush also wrote about the special rituals of winter cottaging in our Winter ’21/’22 issue. This essay originally appeared in the Sept/Oct ’00 issue of Cottage Life.