Ode – BIG

I follow a ritual whenever I go out: I pat my pockets. One pat for my wallet, one for my keys, and my right pants pocket for my Swiss Army knife. I couldn’t leave the cottage without it because there’s often a rope to cut or a screw to tighten when you are far from the shed. It’s portable, uncomplicated, and multi-purpose, an ideal cottage tool. Indeed, there are probably more Swiss Army knives at cottages than there are in the Swiss Army.

We have been through so much together, my knife and I. Hand and handle. With it, I have carved ducks (wooden) and steaks (beef). Cleaned fingernails, spread butter, pried off bottle caps, and whittled walking sticks. I have screwed with the screwdrivers, cut with the scissors, and tweezed with the tweezers. And with the magnifying glass I have tried—without success—to light a fire in wood chips.

I have even used the reamer—although only to punch that extra hole in my belt. (I should never have eaten that fourth cheeseburger.) And yes, the corkscrew has proved itself at our cottage when guests bring real wine. (We run more to screw-top bottles and beer. Corkscrews don’t abound.) Swiss Army knives can have as many as 31 features, but mine is in the middle, with 11. It’s a close relative to the original knife, first produced in 1891. Eleven are enough for me—although a saw would be nice—but I don’t really need the hook disgorger, the wire cutter, or the ballpoint pen, which are some of the attachments on the SwissChamp, the biggest model. Nor do I need the model with the built-in watch—not at the cottage. My knife is not utterly perfect; in our quarter-century relationship, I have lost toothpick and tweezers (replacements cost $1 and $2) any number of times. I have broken the scissors. I have sharpened the blade so often it looks like an eagle’s beak.

But the blade will endure for years, and that’s just as well, for we have ducks to carve and sticks to whittle, my knife and I, in the cottage days to come.

This essay by Paul Rush was originally published in the April/May 1998 issue of Cottage Life.

10 ways camping makes you a better cottager

How to deal with camping in the rain

As it turned out, the first canoe I looked at was the one I bought. Canvas and cedar, red, double-thwarted, 16 ft.: made in Quebec, so I was informed; built from the mould of the old Chestnut Prospector—the canoe favoured by no less an authority than the author and filmmaker and master canoeist the late Bill Mason….Unquestionably, it has proven to be the best buy I ever made. Beautiful, reliable, a pleasure, always, to paddle. It was that rarest of purchases: a thing that proved to be as wonderful in actual use as it promised to be in the store.

We paddled everywhere—in part because it was a pleasure to do so, and in part because I quickly discovered that the canoe was always more reliable than the noisy, oil-spewing outboard that came with our rented cottage. I noticed that whenever I used the outboard, I ended up with wet feet, or wet groceries, or soggy cardboard cartons of the bottles and tins we were taking in to the Archipelago township’s recycling depots. There was always, no matter how assiduously, and guiltily, I pumped the filthy bilge into the lake, a pan of oily water in the bottom of the boat that was always just as high as the holes in my running shoes. When I used the canoe—as, increasingly and, eventually, exclusively, I did—there was no bilge to pump, no oil to spew, no spark plugs to curse, and everything stayed miraculously dry, including my sneakers and socks.

Two bandaid fixes for outboard engines

…I also noticed that canoeing made us happier than the outboard ever did…But paddling a canoe did become something of a political gesture. In cottage country there is a feud that goes on, sometimes politely, sometimes angrily, between the noisy and the quiet, between the polluters and the environmentally considerate, between the self-absorbed fun-lover and the attentive observer of nature. It is a feud, so I fear, that the good guys are not going to win. Nonetheless, when you paddle a canoe, you cannot help but take a position, doomed as it may be, on these battle lines. It is impossible to start to pay attention to the subtleties of good soloing, for instance—the variations of stroke, the adjustments of the canoe’s angle, the all-important positioning of weight—without drawing the unhappy comparison to the skill-less twist of a PWC’s throttle. It is impossible to silently explore a marshland without realizing how intrusive the sound of an engine would be amid this breathless magic. It is impossible to paddle out to the open of Georgian Bay after dinner to watch the sunset without realizing that the Prospector’s slow, silent, and graceful movement is what allows us to be there, for such an extraordinary moment, without altering anything by the noise, or the discharge, or the speed of our presence. The canoe perfectly suits our reasons for doing what we do every summer. It fits in.

This essay was originally published in the July/August 1999 issue of Cottage Life.

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