You expect to find some flotsam in the spring, especially on a lake as big as Panache—my lake—after a freshet as intense as the one we got in 2023. But generally, it appears in a prosaic form: bleach bottles, dog toys, plastic drums sprung from the underside of docks. What I spied from my own dock last May was poetic—a slender craft with fine, upswept ends, adrift in the very centre of the lake, like a dream. From a distance it resembled a mini gondola or the kind of skiff an impressionist painter might have captured on the Seine.
It turned out to be something even more exotic, yet at the same time familiar. As I paddled out with my girlfriend for a closer look, I saw that, unlike my own canoe, this one was older, narrower, and carved from a single tree. We lassoed it and towed it to land.
Determining the dugout’s owner and provenance required a foray into what, for me, are less familiar waters: social media. There’s a group for Panache Lake cottagers, so I joined it and made a post. Within a couple of days I heard from Mary Crowder, who said the craft looked like something that belonged to her son.
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Troy Crowder, for those who aren’t hockey fans of a certain age, is kind of famous, especially for his fisticuffs. He played for several NHL teams (1987–1997) and never backed down from a challenge. He is also a long-time cottager and collector of handcrafted treasures.
“My mom says I’m a hoarder,” he says. “But I just love anything that somebody invented back in the day, whittled themselves, whether it’s skis or golf clubs or any mode of transportation the Indigenous people would have used. That one is a river canoe from Indonesia.”
The hockey player acquired it during a trip to Southeast Asia in 1999/2000. “It was in this yard where a guy collected all these old boats,” he says. “The fishermen would sell them to him, and he would resell them, or make them into tables or cabinets.” Troy paid about $250 U.S. for his find, then had it shipped to Canada in a sea container.
The dugout escaped his boathouse when the lake level rose to near-historic heights. He wasn’t surprised it stayed upright and afloat, but he was relieved it didn’t stray too far. “To me, it’s a piece of art.”
This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of Cottage Life.
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