House on the River A Summer Journey

Sunday I am steering the boat through unfamiliar water, translucent columns of lavender and silver. We are alone on the lake at the end of summer. The vast sky, the low horizon, are a homecoming, but the shimmering opal light is nothing I have seen in Canada. The rare enchantment of this pale, floating world will soon transmute into the blue lake fringed with evergreen that is the essence of our summer memory. We have talked for years of the boat trip, and now the landscapes are slipping by. Ten years ago, in 1987, my uncle Nat and aunt Ora rented a houseboat to travel with their children through the locks of the Trent-Severn Waterway in Ontario. Their journey ended at Bobcaygeon, the town where for fifty years my grandparents, uncles and mother, and then my generation of cousins spent summers lounging about the ramshackle cottage that in my imagination continues to represent paradise. Each fall since then, my uncle would say to me wistfully, "Maybe next summer we'll go on the boat trip." Last December, I realized that he was over seventy. If we did not go soon, the trip would remain a dream. With us on this journey are my mother and my children. At nine and five, Jake and Ella are finally old enough to be safe on a boat but not too old to disdain the idea of a week with their family. Within me is my third child, whose anticipated birth in the coming winter sealed my decision to go. Why has the phrase "the boat trip" held me for a decade in its thrall? Why does travel on a rented houseboat seem the most sublime of voyages? And how have I come to be a writer whose family and past-from which I fled-are increasingly replenishing? My escape from Toronto, my determination to forge a life away from my birthplace, to inhabit a world more operatic than placid Canada, has returned me in the middle of my life to the place where I began. Not to the pinched, puritanical winter of the city, but to a Sabbath of plenitude, my heart's sanctuary. "Many waters cannot quench love," declares Solomon's Song, an invisible banner unfurling above me. Standing on the deck this first day, I am shocked by pleasure. I proclaim my allegiance to urban intensity, but this landscape is, like poetry, the seeming luxury that turns out to be essential. I want to memorize not what I see-which unfolds, extends, retreats second to second-but its effect on my body, refurbished by ease and sensuality. The boat moves up Pigeon Lake, one of the Kawartha Lakes that span the province. Beyond us, the Muskoka region has the grandeur of the true north. But I love the Kawarthas, wilderness domesticated, tamed. The forests do not seem primordial. The lakes are of a civilized scale. Twenty years after fleeing Canada for the swooping majesty of New York, I can savor a water journey with the shore always in view. In Manhattan, the blue geometries of sky wedged between brick buildings are glorious and sufficient. The morning sun gilds the pediments as I walk. I do not long for nature; I remain as entranced by the charge of New York as I did when I was a child and first encountered the city, looking up at the march of skyscrapers, the colossal department stores. On the lake, however, most of what I see is light. How expansive it seems after the round of winter. For I am a changeling, a voluptuary of summer born in an icy land. From September until May I pined for the long days, a connoisseur who could divine the quotient of sunlight from a sliver of dawn at the edge of the bedroom shade, who huddled at the vent near the floor, waiting for the reassuring hum of the furnace as if it were salvation. The exclamations of my family dissolve the reverie. We have reached shore instead of the channel toward which we were blithely heading. Much laughter ensues, as we arRapoport, Nessa is the author of 'House on the River A Summer Journey', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400048878 and ISBN 1400048877.