"You won't tell anyone I'm here, will you?"
Of course not. But let's just say a person who looks a lot like Jim McCaffrey went biking with his dog - which looks a lot like Jim McCaffrey's dog - this hot spring weekend and happened to find himself at the main G8 construction site.
He stood, as all do, marvelling at the huge structure that has been blasted into a hardwood hill back of the beaver pond not far from the high school. The facility, after it has its few minutes in the international spotlight on June 25-26, will be turned over to the University of Waterloo.
The building wasn't supposed to be here. First choice had been the Memorial Park, close to the Muskoka River, but McCaffrey, a local builder, joined with his brother Terry and sister Susan to launch a grassroots campaign to have it moved away from the park that had been originally set aside to honour those who had served in the First World War.
The McCaffreys spent $11,000 - some of the money quietly handed to them by the town's oldest families - and they won, forcing a location move that is said to have added more than $3-million to the overall cost.
But what's a few million? Especially when you're already talking about more than $50-million in a G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund that is going to leave a university satellite, a new rink and a lot of new pavement behind long after the G8 leaders have set off for Toronto and the G20 gathering that has already squeezed the G8 to a point where it barely even requires the upper-case G.
"It's a non-entity," McCaffrey laughs.
"People aren't even talking about it any more."
He's right. Something happened in town over this past faux-winter. Somewhere along the way - perhaps when the sugar maple sap began flowing so early - people stopped talking about mysterious visitors with no luggage taking rooms and photographs of the Deerhurst Resort grounds where the world leaders will meet.
They stopped worrying about the strange white crosses that kept showing up on the back roads around the site. They stopped wondering about the huge "bunker" they said was being built in nearby Dwight. They stopped the rumour that everyone in town that had ever broken the law was going to be rounded up and sequestered - I mean, who would be left to run things?
They no longer speculated on submarines in Penn Lake. And they no longer fretted about hordes of protesters running amok and leaving their lovely town desecrated.
Instead, they turned their thoughts to other, more intriguing curiosities.
Such as the ice going out in the lakes a month ahead of schedule. Such as hearing frogs singing when they should have still been frozen solid. Such as how the smelts were not only running early but were so thick in some of the streams this weekend that one young women claimed she could reach in and pull the tiny flashing fish out with her hands.
And yes, end of March and early April - and most people had already swatted their first mosquito.
At this rate, the locals were saying, by the time the G8 - once tabbed "the Blackfly Summit" in this very paper - rolls around, the bugs will have come and gone, and the leaves may even have turned.
News about the G8 has grown thin. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rebukes the Prime Minister of Canada for his narrow views on family planning and contraception, and it strikes some that Stephen Harper would have fit right in had he long ago attended the high school just down the road. Some believed you got pregnant off toilet seats, some thought you couldn't get pregnant if you did it standing up, and only the very bravest among us knew how to purchase a condom. You took a dollar bill - mercifully, this was in the age before the loonie - and you wrapped the bill around your pointer finger, walked into a certain eating establishment, laid the wrapped finger on the change mat and the cashier, without so much as an incriminating glance, would slip off the dollar bill and fill your fist with a rubber ticket to heaven, or hell, depending upon your own personal value system.
But now it seems the Prime Minister will not even be here long enough to meet any of the locals, not even Jim McCaffrey, the man who may end up having more effect on the G8 summit than all the world leaders combined.
There are still dissenters, but now few and far between. Instead, most are tickled that, thanks to local member of Parliament and Industry Minister Tony Clement, the town is getting all this next-to-free infrastructure without doing much more, hopefully, than avoiding Highway 60 for a few hours in late June.
Most of the angst has moved, like minivans and SUVs at the end of a long summer weekend, back down the four-lane highway to Toronto, where worries about traffic already has one councillor saying the city should push Ottawa to relocate the gathering to prevent Toronto from being "severely impacted."
Go anywhere you like, they're saying in Cottage Country, but not back here.
We've already got all we need of world leaders.