Eel's Creek Cottage

In going through my old slides, I have come across photos of the cottage that was owned by Sue's parents through the 70s into the 90s. These are personal memories that I want to post, but I realize that they will hold little interest for my usual blog friends.

I think it was the year that we married, 1969, that Sue's dad purchased a very rustic cottage. If not, it was the year after. For more than ten years, we often visited the cottage for a few weeks in the summer, even though it was at least a six hour drive.

The cottage was on a stream called Eel's Creek, which despite the name was a good running stream. It was a very cottagey cottage sans plumbing or running water. Although we had to make do with an outhouse, we have electricity. There is a corner of the building in the background (right) of the following photo.  That was the porch where we would eat and sit at night and read or play games. From the porch, we could see the stream, which you can just see a bit of behind Shauna and me in the photo. Just up the slope from the creek, there was a rural highway that could get quite busy. While one might think that having traffic going by the cottage would be a bad thing, we would sit in the porch at night and enjoy the stream of traffic going by, especially on a Friday evening as the weekend cottagers fled north from the city.

Baby Shauna with me in her first year, 1973.

There was a waterfall on the property which we may get to later. It was on a ninety degree bend in the creek and was a place where the logs would jam up. One day, Sue and I started pulling a few logs out. Sue's dad got inspired and rigged up a block and tackle to winch bigger logs out. He was very good at knowing how to jerry-rig whatever was needed to solve a mechanical problem.

Sue's dad sitting on pulled logs with baby Shauna.

Speaking of Sue's dad, here he is again (below) with Sue's grandfather. They were attempting to install a pump to get water from the creek to the cottage. It worked somewhat for awhile, but we would usually have to get washing water from the creek by pail. We could obtain our potable water needs from the Ministry of Natural Resources in the nearby village of Apsley.

Dad and grampa are making a holder for the eventual water pump while I watch keenly in my shorts and black socks. I had no memory of ever dressing like that and have thought black socks with shorts to be an assault on all that is righteous for as long as I can recall.

Getting back to the waterfall, I have two photos, one that I have shown previously of me and youngest sitting in the waterfall, so we are probably jumping ahead in time for maybe ten years from the previous photos. She wore a bathing cap to protect her ears that had drainage tubes inserted to help deal with her earaches.

A wider view of the Falls with lots of accumulation of logs. Although we pulled out a lot of logs, spring runoff would bring plenty more downstream.

Bathing beauty Sue getting some sun on the bank by the Falls.

Although it sounds ghastly, Eel's Creek flowed clean enough for a little swimming. However, it was over my head in spots and the the rocky bottom could be hard on the feet when one did find a spot in which to stand. We had a big inner tube that we would tie up. We could float down toward the waterfall and pull ourselves back up. Of course Allyson (now PJ) had to be held. We would go to a nearby lake for better swimming, particularly for our young girls.

Shauna might have been close to nine in the photo, and she'd had
swimming lessons, but of course we watched her closely.

Shauna playing in the creek with her cousin, Jamie, who,
sadly, succumbed to brain cancer several years ago.

What else should I mention? How about this little bridge by which we accessed the property? Sue's amazing dad, being the clever and industrious man that he was, built a sturdier bridge a few years later.

And there is this (below): the smudge pot. Whenever Lou was there, he kept it going, supposedly in a battle  against the mosquitoes, but I think he just liked doing it, and it was a way to clean the rubble and burn the trash. It was always an enjoyable sight, and it stirs pleasant memories all these years later, as do all of the pictures.

I think we first visited the Eel's Creek cottage in 1969. We would return when we could into the early to mid-eighties. By that time, it was getting more rundown and with the family growing up and with us living far away, we stopped going sometime in the early to mid 80s, but we did enjoy it for many years.

It stayed in the family for a long time and was enjoyed by Sue's siblings and their families. They lived much closer and could come and go more easily and frequently. We did go for a few years after we took this photo of the younger Allyson circa1980.

These were pleasant memories for me. If you kept reading, I hope I conveyed that.