Somehow I knew the local people were unlike my family and my friends. They looked different. Paler. Less animated. They didn’t seem to smile much. Their clothes were old although on Sundays when they went to the white clapboard or red-brick churches in Bridgenorth they dressed in dark suits and dark dresses. It seemed to me they came from a separate world and lived in their own muted solitude.
I enjoyed going shopping. There were no shops in Toronto like Bridgenorth’s general store, where someone served you and where you could buy just about anything, but now I was getting bored and was happy to leave. It was hot. I wanted to get back to Grace and the cottagers and go with Perry to our fort in the woods.
At the bottom of the hill, Mum untied the boat, told me to get in and to sit by the motor, then she pushed the boat off the beach into the lake, hopping onto the long bow deck at the very last moment. She paddled far enough out so that she could lower the propeller, then she pulled the starter coil, put the motor into reverse and backed out until it was safe to put the motor into forward, swing around and head back out into the lake. It wasn’t safe. The propeller hit a rock and the shear pin on the propeller broke. Only our momentum now carried us forward.
Mum cut the engine, lifted the propeller out of the water, rotated it with her fingers and knew exactly what she had done. In the freshening westerly wind she paddled the boat back towards the cedar-lined shore. In the shallows she got out into the water and with a pliers from the fishing-tackle box, removed the flexible safety pin, took off the propeller, removed the broken shear pin and inserted another, one of many spares kept in the tackle box. My mother lowered the propeller back into the lake and got in the boat.
‘I bet Grace knows how to change a shear pin,’ she said.
THE SWIMMING LESSON
Grace’s mother drove her daughters, Rob and me to our swimming lesson the next day. The sky was threatening and there was a chop on the lake. My mother knew it was best not to venture out in the boat on days like that.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I told Mum.
‘If it’s too rough to go swimming, Mrs Blewett will teach you artificial respiration instead,’ she replied. ‘She will never put you in any danger.’
I wasn’t worried about danger. On a steely cold, blustery day I didn’t want to get into angry, rough water.
Steve and Perry were already at the marina. Mrs Blewett arrived and she was in her bathing suit. That meant we’d have to go swimming.
When my father built our cottage, Earl Blewett’s sawmill just north of the bridge in Bridgenorth was still active, sending its trucks over the frozen lake in winter to collect timber harvested during the summer and fall from the few remaining first growth forests around the interconnected finger lakes of the Kawarthas. Dad bought the cedar cladding for the cottage from Mr Blewett. Uncle Reub told me he thought the Blewetts could be descendants of the very first white men who came through Lake Chemong with Samuel de Champlain in the seventeenth century, that their real name was probably Bleuet, the French word for both cornflowers and blueberries. That was exciting. That meant my swimming teacher was in my school history books.
Now the sawmill was less active. Mr Blewett couldn’t compete with the prices at Beaver Lumber, where cheap pine from British Columbia was sold, so he retired his tug and added a marina and marine gas station. We hoisted our fourteen-foot cedar Peterborough boat up to the rafters of our boathouse for the winter, but cottagers with more valuable boats were starting to store their boats at the Blewetts’. These were handmade twenty-two-foot mahogany Shepherds, built 200 miles away in Niagara-on-the-Lake, or even more expensive mahogany Chris-Craft, built in Algonac, 300 miles west, across the St Clair River in Michigan. The sawmill owner’s wife, May Blewett, pumped gas at the dockside gas station and also gave weekly swimming lessons to the summer children. At the end of each August, if we passed our tests, she dispensed Red Cross and Royal Life Saving Society pins with our names engraved on them.
Mrs Blewett was older than our mothers, in her forties, and always wore a white bathing cap when she swam. All our mothers, especially Grace and Glory’s, were small and slim. Mrs Blewett had the robust shape of the local women, a large chest and an equally large bottom. She was what my mother called ‘buxom’.
‘It’s fresh today so we’ll practise artificial respiration on land then towing in the water,’ she told us. ‘Pair up everyone,’ and we did so with people we were comfortable with, Grace with Glory, Perry with me, Steve with Rob.
‘Do you remember what we learned last week?’ she asked. ‘Put your victim on his side, open his mouth and remove any seaweed. Then onto his front and press your hands firmly just below his shoulder blades so you hear him breathing out. You’ll be doing this to each other so get going now.’
Before Perry said anything I decided I’d be the victim, lay down on my stomach and put my hands under my shoulders, so Perry had my elbows to pull on when he was told to do so. Perry was almost a year older than me but we were the same height. His mother didn’t cut his curly light brown hair all summer and by the time we returned to Toronto at the end of August I thought he looked like a girl.
‘Ready, children? Rescuers, keep your hands flat and press firmly on your victims’ backs to expel water from the lungs.’
Perry pressed hard and quietly, and involuntarily I expelled air from my lungs. Rob pressed on Steve’s back and Steve emitted a really loud, exaggerated moan. The other boys in the class all laughed.
‘This is not a laughing matter!’ Mrs Blewett told him. I thought it was like being back at school and that wasn’t right. It was summertime and we were free to do whatever we wanted to, especially never wear shoes.
‘Now pull back on your victims’ elbows to make them breath in good air.’
Perry pulled my elbows up towards him. It didn’t do anything to my lungs but I intentionally breathed in, loudly.
‘Bruce, you are not on stage in Toronto!’
Mrs Blewett’s bare feet were inches from my head. ‘If you don’t take this seriously you will never learn how to save a drowning victim.’
Perry kept pressing and pulling and, having nothing else to do, I thought about how I would do this to Angus. Then we switched and Perry was the drowning victim.
Rhythmically I pressed on his back then pulled on his elbows. It was fun and I wondered whether next week I could practise on Grace instead.
After we finished attempting artificial respiration we sat in a horseshoe on the grass while Mrs Blewett told us how to break loose from a drowning victim who has grabbed you, then tow him to safety.
‘Steven, come here so I can demonstrate how to break a death grip.’
Grinning back at us, Steve went over and stood behind Mrs Blewett. Steve was fourteen years old, the oldest of us. His hair was curly like Perry’s but darker. Although he was much shorter than my brother, who was already almost six feet tall and catching up fast with our dad, whatever we did Steve made all the decisions. Rob had light skin and freckles. He burned easily. Steve already had a good tan, but not as good as mine. I never burned. It took only a single sunny day to turn me the colour of the inside of a Caramilk chocolate bar.
‘Grab me tight around my neck,’ she told Steve and he did so.
‘No! Tighter!’ she said and now he pressed himself firmly against her back.
Looking at us sitting