In retrospect, the adventure for Angus started the moment he stepped into the red boathouse at the wharf where the Lunge Lodge water taxi would pick him up. The lady at the store put the call through via a submarine telephone cable—his Smartphone was useless on the Upper French River, west of Lake Nipissing in northern Ontario, Canada. So, while waiting the quarter hour for the pontoon conveyance from the opposite side, he nosed into the enclosure which sat beside the boat launching ramp.
Inside the two-storey building, waves lapped against the pilings. There was a pair of bays for watercraft, neither occupied. Beyond them, the Upper French sparkled under late June sunshine. Whenever the water taxi approached, Angus would see it. He gave a wide berth to a dock spider the size of the flower on a daisy. Its black legs flicked around on a plank. Overhead, a couple of swallows bustled about the roof trusses, perhaps feasting on the dragonflies which abounded along the shoreline.
In the shadows opposite the open water doors, almost a dozen boats rested on two levels. Angus would later inquire of the lodge’s dock boy to whom they belonged, and would learn the owners were nameless cottagers on the Upper French. He thought it curious. For, the pleasure craft in the boathouse bore little resemblance to the aluminum, fibreglass and God knows what other space-age materials that characterized other boats out on the river, nodding at marina wharves, or shrink-wrapped for the off-season under blue plastic. No, the slumbering occupants of the red boathouse were of cedar strip construction, from another era.
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