By Patricia Lee Sharpe
The water is black, a mirror dotted with water lilies, some white, some yellow. The lily pads are green. They're gold and orange, too, since we are well into August, and fall is on the horizon here in Ontario, where the sub-boreal forest clings precariously to granite.
Oh yes, the palate holds another color. Lilac. Pale violet flowers
thrust up from knife-like leaves that provide a vertical contrast to the laid back lily pads. Unfortunately these charming purple blossoms are water hyacinths, and they are taking over the world. Here they clog up the channels between islands. They turn shallows into swamp.
Such observations aside, I am in paradise.
The Practicalities
My son and I were canoeing on Kasshabog Lake, about three hours northeast of Toronto, where my daughter-in-law’s parents acquired a cottage way back in the 1960s. It’s a simple place, hardly changed since then. 
It has two bedrooms, a living room with dining alcove, a kitchen and—hmmmm!—a bathroom that offers only bathing opportunities, the kind with soap, the use of which is forbidden in the lake. All other bathroom functions are performed in an outhouse that looks like a bright shiny W.C. but operates like any other hole in the ground. There’s also a little one-room guest house, where I slept, and a tool shed. Running water for washing, cleaning and cooking is pumped up from the lake; once used, it runs into a septic tank that has to be babied. Although the lake is totally safe to swim in, we relied, for drinking water, on five gallon plastic jerry cans filled, as needed, with tap water from the nearest town. Garbage went into a compost heap at which the unintimidating regulars greedily snacked: squirrels, chipmunks, crows, etc. This is lake country, and you can get lost out here, 
but I wouldn’t call it serious wilderness, despite the bears that have been known to lumber through, on occasion, and a pair of battling mink that were seen in the lake two weeks ago. I guess I should mention the ferocious red ants, too. They swarmed hungrily on discarded fish heads. Plastic and paper got carted out, eventually, by boat, then driven for disposal from my daughter-in-law’s parents’ house in Peterborough.
La Vida Non-Electronica
The cottage has electricity, which runs the fridge and the stove and gave us light for reading. The rule: only non-professional reading allowed. Though phone cables run beneath the lake, the cottage has always functioned as a refuge and lacks a landline. We used our multiple cell phones only twice: once to reassure the ever-anxious mother of my grandson’s friend that all was well with her boy, and once to coordinate a dinner visit from my daughter-in-law’s parents. Otherwise the phones were switched off. No incoming calls accepted. Despite occasional whining from the pre-teens, who argued for the educational value of watching the Olympics, TV was verboten, and adults' email messages accumulated unread and unmissed day by day. All computers remained untouched in their shoulder bags. No homework allowed! The days passed in splendid isolation.
And so we began to share stories around the table after dinner. We’d dream up silly characters and link them in crazy ways, going around the table, laughing and taking turns at keeping each tale going. There was the one about the fast horse and the monstrous muskellunge, the one about the clown with Groucho glasses and the bite-happy red ants, the one about fat fish food lady (see below) whom I was tempted to drown, narratively, but in the end graciously rescued. 
Although we happy refugees from la vida Electronica were content to keep life simple, I should mention that there are more than a few impressive, all-weather houses on Kasshabog Lake, each equipped, most likely, with every conceivable state of the art gadget. At least two lake residents own pontoon planes. They added the occasional aerial dimension to the noise pollution from the traffic on the lake, which was incessant on weekends. Not surprisingly, then, many people moor a whole fleet of motorized craft in front of a house or cottage. 
My favorite curiosity was the cannon positioned on the edge of a dock, its barrel pointed at the channel. Not very neighborly.
Murky Arrival and the Morning After
Except for the cottages located on the lake’s many islands, most can be reached by road, but our haven remains, by yearly ratified family choice, inaccessible even to SUVs. By the time we’d progressed, on the day we arrived, from airport to superhighway to country road to dirt track and reached the boat landing, the sun was long gone, so my first glimpse of Kasshabog Lake was monochromatic, a murky moonless night, delightfully mysterious. We parked the rental car, loaded wheelies into a very basic boat propelled by a mere six horse power motor steered from the stern, donned life jackets, got ourselves properly balanced and backed slowly away from the dock.
The islands that first night were silhouettes. Here and there tiny rocky islets protruded from the surface like cairns along a foot trail, but more sinister. Definitely to be avoided. The forest, a smudge only slightly darker than the water, was punctured by the odd bright flicker signifying a window but such lights seemed as remote as the web of stars above us. The lake was glassy, almost silky. We crossed it so slowly the sound of the motor was more a purr than a roar. Imagine the river Styx as a benign experience, a wonderful transition from the plugged in life to the serenity of being totally out of touch.
In the morning I finally saw where I’d landed. The location was everything I’d hoped for, remote-feeling and beautiful enough. The cottage sat on a huge slope of granite scoured clean by glaciers eons ago—imagine the backside of an enormous hippo. The opposite shore was a distant strip of green, and the houses on the intervening islands were hidden within the forest. Green forest. Blue sky. Blue water. And rock, rock, rock. 
When I thrust my canoe paddle straight down among the lily pads, to check the depth in order to see if it was time to turn around and head for deeper water before we ran aground, the paddle always struck rock, not muck.
About That Water
The water in Kasshabog Lake is not crystal clear. It’s a healthy lake where water plants grow (without rising up to tickle a swimmer’s legs) and fish flourish, even enormous muskellunge. It is greenish, therefore, and the rocks at the bottom and along the banks are coated with algae. If you try to climb out of the water via the rocks in front of the cottage, 
you will slip back, unless the rocky slope is kept scrubbed and abrasive. In the old days, swimmers from this cottage hauled themselves out of the lake by way of a knotted rope attached above the water line. Now the dock has a ladder that takes the worry out of emergence.
And no, again, you cannot see the bottom of Kasshabog Lake, not if the bottom is more than a couple of feet below you. So, if you are the type who imagines all sorts of monsters lying in wait among submerged rocks, Kasshabog Lake takes some getting used to. It took me three days to feel comfortable about swimming a dozen feet from our dock. Once the gradual aversion therapy had worked its magic, I didn't want to get out. The water temperature was perfect. You could swim for an hour and never get the shivers. Lovely! But no sooner did I learn to love what my son calls “slimy green lake water” than it clouded up and rained for a couple of days. A rotten reward for courage!
Not that furry rocks or greenish water bothered the boys. That’s my 11-year-old grandson and his 12-year-old pal, who was invited to join the family at the lake for the second year in a row. They dived, they splashed, they wrestled, they bopped one another with green, orange and yellow foam noodles, they rode an inflated alligator named Mickey. And twice a day, before breakfast and before dinner, they took the boat out to fish. They caught (and we ate) bass and an a very 
nice pickerel. Since I’m no fish enthusiast, I found the little bass uninteresting, but pickerel served with a lemon butter sauce was delicious, thanks to my daughter-in-law's expert fish cookery. Fish or no, we ate well at the cottage.
The Boys and the Boat
Given its six hp motor, our boat didn’t go very fast by speed demon standards, but it had power enough to cover the territory within which the boys were permitted to fish. 
Even so, the boys cast envious eyes at some of the craft that went by the cottage. They imagined themselves driving overpowered boats that threw up impressive rooster tails and left long foamy wakes that turned into boat-rocking waves. They saw themselves speeding by in deafening PWCs (personal water craft) or trolling lazily from monstrous pontoon boats whose platforms were shaded with striped canopies. 
In short, if there were a contest for pokiest, oldest boat on the lake, the craft they were stuck with might have won first prize. But it took them fishing. It got them away from the adults. It gave them the pride of the catch. It also took them to the marina for an ice cream or a bag of 5¢ candy after lunch every day.
Fish Food Lady
Some days the boys had to fish from the canoe, because we adults had commandeered the boat for some boring errand or another. One morning they anchored at one of their favorite fishing sites, where rocks break through the surface of the water about fifty yards from shore and fifty yards from a cottage, of course. Already they had developed an unhappy relationship with the resident cottager, whom I call Fish Food Lady. This dimwitted creature regularly seeded the water in this unpolluted lake with commercial fish food, the stuff usually sold for angel fish and neon tetras confined to fish tanks. She had already shouted at the boys for poaching on “her” territory. They had already thrown the law back act her.
In Ontario, you control the land your cottage stands on, but you do not own the shoreline or the water in front of your cottage. Not even the first millimeter. Strangers may haul up on a rock in front of your grandiose house. This is perfectly legal. Secure in their knowledge of this law, the boys had returned to this site where they never caught a keeper, but they had the repeated satisfaction of hooking smaller fish. So what if they had to toss them back? To a boy, anything on a hook is good. (Yes, this process is cruel, but it’s legal, and the authorities encourage it.)
One morning when the boys took the canoe out and ended up in contended waters, Fish Food Lady really lost it. She swam out and threatened to overturn the canoe. That’s pretty serious stuff, which is why I equate Fish Food Lady with the invasive water hyacinth. She’s a noxious weed and worse. What kind of a monster threatens to overturn a canoe holding two young boys? Talk about creatures from the deep!
In fact, FFL didn’t touch the canoe, but she scared the boys. They were so angry they reported the threat to my daughter-in-law. Her first impulse was to join the fishing party on the next round. Her second impulse was more judicious. "There's no time to make a point," she told the boys. "Our time at the lake this year is almost over." So she persuaded them eliminate that stop from their fishing route. There would be no shoot out on Kasshabog Lake.
Aha! So that’s what cannons are for!
Envoie
Now, back to the water lilies and the enticements of a water body so large that I covered a mere fraction of its surface. Those canoing expeditions were what I most enjoyed about being on Kasshabog Lake. I liked the rhythm of paddling in sync with a partner. I liked the glide of the canoe, the sense of lightness. I liked the occasional thump of paddle on gunwale, the musical dripping of water on water from a raised paddle. I liked the bird song and the intervening silence.
I like my other life, too, the one in which I’m writing this, on a computer, to post on a blog, illustrated with digital photos lightly photoshopped.
La vida electronica is a life my grandson was born to. He's back to his video games by now. But he has this other birthright, the serenity and simplicity of life at Kasshabog Lake. He wants to return next year. So does his friend.