My birthday comes in the month of April, so the weather on that day is cemented like a survey stake into my memories of spring.
On the morning of the big day there’s usually a bit of snow in the shade of the house, and the sodden lawn has frozen overnight. But the sidewalks are bare, the streets are covered with sand, and the flag-blue sky echoes with the beagle-like yelping of migrating geese. The polar air mass is falling back, falling back, retreating to its refuge in the high north, and the tropical air mass is sweeping into southern Manitoba. By the end of April, the days are sunny and warm and mint-green leaves are emerging from the elm trees. By early May, we’re making plans to return to the lake.
My dad has finished the boat. With its broad rear end and deep midsection it’s designed for hauling a family, but it has a dashing aspect too. It’s red and white and there’s a bold lightning strike down its side. Just as the invention of the airplane opened up a whole new world of the sky, this boat will take us on into a new state of evolution. We’ll become emperors of the water.
Once spring arrives, there isn’t a person in the city who isn’t walking with a bounce in their stride. The citizens of ‘Winterpeg’ tend to feel defensive about their city, as if the sub-zero temperatures were their idea. But when the month of May arrives, everyone feels vindicated. Winter is over, and now this prairie outpost is on its way to becoming one of the best places in Canada instead of one of the worst.
With the bush country only an hour’s drive away, there are thousands of pristine wilderness lakes where city people can go camping and canoeing. And because of the abundance of inexpensive vacation property, Winnipeggers have the highest rate of cottage ownership in the country. When the Victoria Day weekend arrives, it’s generally assumed that anybody with an ounce of sense will be heading ‘down to the lake’. Two days before the appointed day, my mum has already done the shopping, my dad has filled the boat with freight and tied it down under a tarpaulin, and Danny and I have packed our clothes, comic books, and BB guns. On the morning of Friday, May 18, my parents issue strict instructions – come straight home from school, no dawdling, so we can get a jump on rush hour.
Everyone in the city has the same plan. Once we load the car and get underway, it takes half an hour to creep through heavy traffic into St. Boniface, where the great slaughterhouse and its awful smell mark the edge of the city. The highway is so choked with vehicles that we might as well be refugees fleeing Budapest with the Germans blowing up bridges behind us. My mother sits in the front seat of the Buick with Mary Kate, the squalling baby, on her lap. Nanny sits beside her, with Peter the toddler squished in between her and my dad.
Our family has gradually somehow become what Zorba the Greek described as ‘the full catastrophe’. Despite all the theories about kids being products of their environment, every human being in this car is different. When he grows up, Peter will become an orthopaedic surgeon, with hands as graceful as a blackjack dealer’s, but right now he can’t seem to get a glass of orange juice anywhere near his mouth without dumping it all over his shirt. Mary Kate will become a judge when she grows up, but right now she is having a major fit because she’s lost her pacifier. The other five – my brother Danny and I and our three older sisters – are crammed into the back seat, threatening each other in furious whispers. When Sally grows up she will become a pediatrician, but right now she is acting like a bit of a child herself, elbowing Babe, the future ethics professor, who is unethically sitting on a paperback copy of Bonnie Prince Fetlar, The Story of a Pony. The missing book belongs to her sister Wendy, who is frantic, because she loves the book and loves horses more than anything else on earth, even though she is allergic to them. We have to fight silently, because only one person in this car is allowed to make a sound, and that’s my father who, as he creeps through traffic, regularly thumps the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and grumbles about the ‘bloody idiots’ he’s sharing the road with.
We arrive at Laclu at sundown. The cottage looks a bit faded and neglected after the long winter. Some of the young apple trees have died, and the soggy lawn smells like a collie. After hauling our bags into the cottage and dropping them beside the fold-out couch on the veranda, my brother Danny and I sprint down to the shoreline to look at the lake. It’s always the first item on the work list when we arrive at the cottage – we have to run down the hill and look at the lake.
The water looks the same, black and cold, and the dock has survived the winter. My dad built the dock with timbers, rocks, and rough lumber. The challenge around here is building a dock that will make it through the spring, when big rafts of ragged ice come drifting down the lake, tearing out buoys and docks, and pushing big rocks up onto the shore. Ice-out usually happens in a few hours, and if the wind is from an unfavourable direction, the ice destroys everything in its path. It’s a final pointless gesture of hostility from winter. Our dock is bent and heaved slightly, but it escaped major damage. Walking up and down, testing it with our weight, we judge it sound. My brother elbows me and points across the darkening lake to a necklace of delicate yellow lights moving along the far shore. It’s the Canadian!
Every Friday night the Canadian arrives and stops at the little railway station alongside the lake. I’ve never ridden on a train. With so many kids in our family we can’t afford it, but Danny and I love watching the Canadian stop, toot its whistle, and then slide off again. Its dome cars and myriad lights reflecting on the glassy water evoke some romantic postcard image of old-time Canada.
When it’s gone we continue our inspection. The water is tea-coloured and barren, devoid of life; not even a minnow has survived the winter. We skip a few stones, then explore the tangled woods along the shore, where we discover a dead thing secreted in the underbrush, a great malodorous sodden hump of black and white feathers. It’s probably a duck, or perhaps a loon. It’s been lying under the snow all winter, and now it’s rotting like a thawed mammoth. We poke it with sticks a few times, then walk back to the dock, where we listen to a celebratory yodel echoing across the lake. Another loon has evidently survived and is announcing to the world that it’s ready to take a go at life.