Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 25.
Summering up the Gatineau
Shirley Selwyn
This article was written in 1952. After Harley Selwyn's retirement from the federal government in 1953, he and Shirley sold their Ottawa house and built a home on Selwyn Road at Kirk's Ferry, where they extended their “summering” season while wintering in Florida for nearly 25 years.
Much study has been given to the migration of birds but little to that yearly human migration known as going to the summer cottage, or “summering.” Summering, colloquially speaking, is living at a summer cottage for the period between school's end and Labour Day. It is a way of life peculiar to the American people, both Canadian and “Statesers.” Europeans of wealth are accustomed to owning more than one home, but it is in prodigal America that the ownership of two homes is taken as a matter of course, not by the privileged few, but by ordinary people.
When summers in town had become sieges of quarantine for chicken pox, measles and mumps, my mother-in-law suggested that she'd found her children healthier after they'd started spending their summers in the country. So we bought a cottage in the Gatineau, fourteen miles from our Ottawa home and my husband's office. The Gatineau is a Laurentian valley down which winds the Gatineau River from the sparsely peopled North. It is a logging river, but now that its shores are settled by summer residents, the logs which once floated freely are in booms. Once a day, at least, these acres of logs destined for pulp are towed downstream and the scent of the wood is sharp in our nostrils.
From the first the children loved it and were happy. They learned to swim, row boats, paddle and sail. They wore a minimum of clothes so that when the boys took a skinny dip at night all you could see were white buttocks. It used to give me pleasure to import a city child and watch sunlight and fresh air vivify him as water imparts life to a dry plant.
Sometimes you hear women protest that cottages represent a lot of work. This just isn't so. Consider what a pleasure it is to have no brass or silver to shine, no hardwood floors to wax, no rugs to vacuum. A swish of the dust mop keeps oiled floors respectable. Sand from the bathers’ feet obligingly percolates through the jute rug and can be removed at a convenient time. Who wants to be owned by inanimate objects and slave for their upkeep on a lovely summer's day?
Laundry? Soak instead of scrub. Rinse in the river with the sunlight warm on your back, the birds singing, the far hills to rest your eyes upon. Town conveniences of stationary tubs and a washing machine are outweighed by the four grey walls and dank chill of the cellar in summer. Whoever had a visitor when they were doing a town wash who came and gossiped or seized part of the clothes and helped with the work? Cooking? Coal oil stoves can produce superb cakes and roasts. It's not only the sauce of a good appetite that makes them seem So.
Garbage is incinerated. Cans are washed and stacked in cartons and on a convenient day they're rowed to mid-stream, filled with water and sunk in the depths. The hands dip in and out of the cool water, the boat drifts idly downstream and darned if the task is no task at all but a pleasant pursuit.
Your relationship to people undergoes a metamorphosis. The man who delivers the milk or bread is an acquaintance for whom you feel concern and offer a cool drink when the day is hot. You greet the stranger walking on the country road, for you are fellows in the country way of life. In town, when newcomers move to our street, we are scarcely conscious of their arrival. In the country when newcomers occupy a nearby cottage we call, invite them to tea, make an effort to give them the opportunity to meet people if they care to do so. There is a sense of responsibility for the stranger that is lacking in large communities, In disaster, you are among friends. Succour is as close as your nearest neighbour and you know this with calm certainty.
Children growing up before World War II spent their teenage summers as holidays, playing. They golfed or played tennis or swam. In the evenings, they called at one another’s houses collecting the gang for the nightly pilgrimage to the store for mail. As August approached the bonfires commenced and one family after another gave corn or wiener roasts. The children sat about the flickering firelight singing. The older ones enjoyed their first romances; the younger ones teased their elders till their 10 o'clock bedtime gave the seniors peace.
There is a sense of well-being which comes from being close to the good earth. The artificialities of city life disappear so that people are without tension. Men who lived under heavy strain during the war years because of the responsible posts they held found they could better carry their burden when they could put the city behind them. In our community we had two Air Marshals, two Major Generals; as for Colonels, they were small-fry — we had them by the dozen. We also had a number of scientists whose war work carried them back and forth across the Atlantic, but they always returned home to the Gatineau. The much-maligned civil servants under pressure because of the war found peace amid these hills.
Our golf club was started on land rented from a farmer. The fairways were clipped by sheep but each enthusiast held himself responsible for the upkeep of a green. As more and more people wanted to play, fees were charged and the club was incorporated. Finally, members taking debentures, the land was bought. The sheep have given way to groundsmen; a water system rectifies mother nature's neglect. We have built a clubhouse consisting of a huge room opening onto a verandah with a view. We have a model kitchen, and in the basement, showers and lockers. The fee for seniors, at first $15, is now $20. The Club is the centre of community activity. We have dances, movie nights, games nights, and members use it for receptions when they marry off a daughter. All feel responsible for the well-being of the Clubhouse and if a thing needs doing, a member quietly attends to it as if he or she were in their own home. Strangers remark on the extraordinary atmosphere of goodwill, seem bewildered by it, and ask if we realize what we have.
At the age of eight, for the low price of $3, the children are able to start golf. At fifteen, the fee becomes S$5. The club has parent and child competitions and each week a junior day is set aside when, under the guidance of a Junior Captain, the children have both instruction and their own competitions. Incidentally, the juniors have become so much better than their seniors that the Club Championship, one year, was competed for by two juniors. The older members, in desperation, have established an “old man” competition where entrants must be forty or over.
Perhaps the worst postwar plague from which we suffered was the motorcycle epidemic. We fought it but teenagers were paid appalling sums in competition for their labour, and easy money bought the deadly contraptions. The air pulsing and crackling with explosions, a dozen of them would arrive. They'd have a bathe, and then mounting the jet-propelled steeds would thunder off, with the hills echoing their roar. At other times the youngsters would crouch on their haunches making a mystic circle around their motorcycles, which would be in a hundred parts, with grease debauching the greenery. There they'd polish the parts, oil them, and discuss mechanics at length. Later, stock cars and MGs replaced the two-wheeled menaces and that, alas, marked the beginning of adulthood and departure.
But they do come back. On the (August) Civic Holiday weekend this past summer, my husband and I retired to bed after an evening of reading. At about twelve 1 was awakened by John, our eldest son, who was standing over me saying, “Mum, go and sleep with Dad. I've brought two girls up for the weekend and I said they could have your bed.” I grinned sleepily at the two girls. One I'd known since she was a brat. Isn't it strange how often the brats turn into the most interesting of them all? The other was vaguely familiar. She was wringing her hands in an agony of embarrassment. “You do know me, Mrs. S. I met you at Mrs. A's tea last winter.” John had another man with him and was taking him to share the lower cabin. Then our younger son Dave arrived with Eleanor. His face fell when he saw the crowd. “Oh well, Eleanor can have my cabin. I'll sleep on the studio couch in the living room.”
It was dawn when a knock at the door awakened me. “There’s someone at the door,” I called to Dave. “It's only Ann and Dunc,” he growled sleepily. As Ann and Dunc, my daughter and son-in-law live in Toronto, I knew he was talking in his sleep, so I resettled myself. The knock was repeated. This time I jumped from bed. In the half-light, I could see Ann and Dunc who was holding the baby in his arms. Ann wailed, “Mum, isn't there an empty bed in the house?" They had decided in view of the long weekend to motor down during the night and surprise us! I put the coffee to perking and did a general reshuffling. The men in the lower cabin were made to take the verandah couches for the travellers’ need of rest was greater than theirs. They didn’t think it quite so funny to be pulled from their beds as they had thought it funny to rout me from mine.
We've stumbled on a way of life that includes the best of both town and country living and stretched our summers at both ends. We let our town houses for five months each year and live in the Gatineau. This started accidentally as a result of two circumstances: the terrific demand for rental of our unoccupied town houses during the Second World War, and the location of our summer homes within commuting distance, so our husbands were not merely weekenders. Quite a number of us have done this. For a dozen years now, from first pale shoots to fiery glory, the leaves surround us. Though autumn is breathtaking in beauty, the quickening earth in spring is lovelier still. Dozens of freshets cascade down the mountain sides and ears fill with the sweet sounds of tumbling waters. The air is like wine, the smell of the damp earth a stimulating perfume. The stars regain the heavens and the waxing, waning moon is mistress of the skies.
The very people who shiver in apartment houses where leases do not obligate landlords to have fires after the first of May are the ones who ask, “But aren't you frozen in the summer cottage?” Cold? With our Quebec heater well stoked and our ceilings insulated to keep the heat from escaping, our grate fires are lighted at night for sheer joy of the leaping flames. Extra money from our rented town houses enables us to put in electricity, refrigeration and bathrooms.
In the spring, when first we go to the Gatineau, a dozen cottages are occupied in our locality. The men commute to work and the long day stretches invitingly before the women. After the rush of winter engagements and the turmoil of the city, it is a gift of peace. We busy ourselves with paint and the incipient artist comes to life. For the most part, it is not on canvas that we create, but we become interior decorators. Our furnishings are not intrinsically valuable; therefore, we experiment, splash colour, devise bold decor to the heart's content.
Then there’s always someone looking for a game of bridge. The seasons ring the changes in weather, but seasonal migration or summering rings an environmental change that stimulates the whole personality.
The return to town in the autumn is just as exciting as the spring exodus. The despised brass and silver are greeted with joy. The well-set mahogany table agleam with silver and crystal is a satisfying sight. Theatres, libraries, committees offer a challenge to the mind. Even the fact that the bathroom tap gushes both hot and cold water amazes me and the purr of the oil furnace when the north winds blow is a good sound.
I should say that country living is at its best when it supplements town life, and that being a migratory human is the very best way to get the finest from both town and country. Certainly the memory of cottage life will always be a happy one for our children. It has given them healthy bodies and confidence in themselves and their fellows. The birds aren’t able to record their reasons for seasonal migrations but humans can, and hence this tale of “this our life exempt from public haunt.”