September 20: For several years I’ve harboured the idea of renting a boat and doing a day tour of the Muskoka Lakes. There are lots of alternatives in the fiberglass / aluminum boat rental universe, but I felt that I wanted something special if I was to spend the day dawdling down memory lane. This lead me to Muskoka Launch Livery, and Demoiselle, a 1951 Duke Playmate.
Afte
r a few perfunctory instructions from the owner, Stan Hunter (“Neutral is pretty much hypothetical…”), Kate and I unleashed all 25 horsepower and headed up Lake Muskoka from Scarcliffe Bay. I twisted the accelerator in the centre of the steering wheel to the stop and we gathered momentum (speed would be a misnomer). It seemed that Demoiselle topped out just under a plane, so the bow always seemed a bit too low, and we were often spritzed with water over the bow.
The serene pace of our tour meant we could focus on the scenery, and on the cottages and towns we had come to visit. I’ve many memories of my time in Muskoka that involve cottages my family rented, or cottages I’ve owned along the way. While there was a period when I had visited Muskoka at least once a summer for more than 45 years, it’s been a long time since I’ve spent any meaningful time exploring these past haunts.
I will admit to misgivings. When I sold our last cottage, one of the reasons was that I felt Muskoka had become very pretentious. There seemed to be a race toward the biggest, Most Ridiculous and Expensive Cottage award that I didn’t want to enter. Rather than the friendly, family-oriented place I remembered from my childhood, Muskoka and its’ cottages seemed to have become status symbols for the privileged few. Useful smaller family cottages were being demolished and replaced with reproduction homes from Toronto. Nothing seemed to be too outlandish: swimming pools (there’s a whole lake out there you may not have noticed….) tennis courts, waterfalls.
So it was that we idled up to the place where my Grandfather’s former cottage had stood. It was a single-storey, 3-bedroom, 3-season cottage with a furnace and a stone fireplace when he owned it. There was a one-slip boat-port where he stored his boats, one of which was a 1953 Greavette launch and the other a Peterborough cedar stripper with a 10 horsepower Evinrude motor. I would call the cottage comfortable but not exceptional; there were certainly grander cottages on the bay.
It has been replaced by this monstrosity. The boathouse alone is larger than the cottage had been, and has the now apparently de rigueur boathouse with a waterside recreation room (with wet bar), and living space upstairs. We saw this type of cottage / boathouse in many places as we wandered back to Scarcliffe Bay. It seemed that everywhere we went, the quieter, more modest cottages I remember had been replaced by garish, shouting monuments to wealth and power. Look at me; see what I’ve got….
I’ve been very conflicted writing this. Clearly my Grandfather’s family – my family and I – were very privileged. In hindsight, I remember those days as much more restrained and respectful of the traditions of cottaging in Muskoka. Perhaps this is a touch of “rose coloured glasses” but those were the attitudes that brought me back there for more than a half-century. They have now largely been replaced by a generation bent on displaying its’ wealth and poor taste. The connection to the past seems to have been lost. All that remains is a token outdated cottage here and there, and some old goof wandering around in a 1951 Duke Playmate.
http://www.muskokalaunchlivery.com/