A Summer Affair

Coming to Lake of the Woods for the first time is like your first kiss. You swallow hard …. And you never forget the moment.

I first came to Lake of the Woods in an aluminum boat by the light of the moon in 1973.

With me, I brought my husband, clutching his briefcase and his Canadian Tire tool kit, and our two daughters aged ten and seven.

Thirty years later, I can still feel the night wind spraying my face as we bumped across the waters of Big Stone Bay. And with the white pines watching us wordlessly and the smoky clouds smooching the moon, I fell in love for the second time in my life.

Now I am a grandmother and a ‘keeper of the stories’. This is one of my stories:

Daylight is just crawling into bed with me when a strange man in hip-waders introduces himself through my screen door. “Name is Joe Skidd, lady. Come to borrow your Kipling Island canoes.”

Squinting through the shadows, I hear him spit tobacco in the direction of my daisies.

“Wild rice is ready to harvest, lady. Bring you some bags.” I must have raised an eyebrow above my flannel nightgown because disappearing in the half-light he croaks, “The Great Manitou will bless you.”

In that first summer of ’73, you understand, I had no background on either Joe Skidd or the Great Manitou. But in a few days, old Joe brought back our canoes along with three bags of beetle-coloured rice and armloads of Anicinabi wisdom. Welcome help, really, for the pregnant gal from the prairies along on an island with a radiophone, half a gas stove and two kids.

“Them beavers, they don’t like lye soap,” he says one afternoon. And braiding his wife’s brown stockings with rawhide strips, he lashes bars of lye soap around our sagging dock. By noon the next day, a flotilla of beavers is smacking its way towards Northern harbour. Joe just chuckles when I tell him.

The barbecue is smoking one Thursday night when Joe shows up carrying a tin pail sloshing water. “Brought you all some fresh pickerel,” he grins. “Fish won’t bite on Friday … all those damn Catholics out to get ‘em.”

July yawns its way into August and Joe’s slow charms continue. When the breezes of memory blow in the right direction, I can see the fireflies sparking down by the dock. My daughters wooing them into mason jars. And I can hear Joe’s old Johnson motor coming through the dark. I see the light in his black eyes before anything else. Joe didn’t own a boat light, “Just use the stars,” he said.

And then in his boat I spy a sprawling aloe vera plant as big as Moses’ bush of fire. He is already digging in the clay-soil, rooting the botanical wonder before he feels the need to speak. “Good medicine for bee stings and razor cuts,” he says winking at my daughters long before leg waxing ever enters their minds.

I never saw Joe again after that first summer, although his boys came by to borrow our canoes. But my education on Lake of the Woods continued without him. I learned that in the great long ago, Joe’s ancestors believed that the Great Manitou took a handful of southerly wind, blew His breath over it and created for Himself the Lake of the Woods. And while it’s a place of wonder on a map, it is also a placing shining in remembrance in our hearts. A place where families come, generations at a time, to create and then to tell their stories … because no machine of man’s invention will ever replace the storyteller. And we are all storytellers.

I should mention Joe was right about The Great Manitou blessing me. The beavers never did come back.

This is an excerpt from Tom Thomson’s book, “Lake of the Woods - A Way of Life” published in 2002. Tom, a self-taught photographer/artist, was born & raised on Lake of the Woods and continues to reside there. His book is available locally at the Blue Heron, the Painted Sheep, Lakelife, the Hardwear Company and Hojoe Coffee & Books.