View from Eric Reguly's cottage on the lake, with the neighbours’ float plane to the right in 2024.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
Never in my life have I prayed harder for rain.
We cottagers in Northwestern Ontario are desperate for rain as wildfires − most of them “not under control,” according to the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources − consume vast tracts of the gorgeous wilderness around our pristine lakes.
“Fort Frances 14,” the MNR-designated name for the fire burning on the northern and western expanses of our enormous lake, Lac des Mille Lacs, covers almost 52,000 hectares and has already consumed at least three fishing resorts and dozens of cottages, known as “camps” in local argot. As far as we know – the access roads to our lake have been closed since mid-July – the 20 or so cottages on our stretch of Pine Point, the narrow north-south peninsula that bisects the lake, are still intact.
But for how much longer? One strong wind from the north – and no rain – could doom the properties. The MNR maps updated daily put the fire line four or five kilometres up the road. The power lines melted down weeks ago.
Reguly on the porch of his cottage on Lac Des Mille Lacs.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
One thing I know for sure is this: Were he at the cottage, my late father, Bob Reguly, would have ignored the evacuation orders. Not just because he built and loved the cottage and would have protected it with his last watt of energy, but because he knew how to fight fires.
During his university years in the mid-1950s, he spent his summers with the Saskatchewan Smoke Jumpers, parachuting into fire zones from Norseman float planes and walking out with his team of hard men to the nearest river or lake, where they would be picked up. It was one of the most dangerous jobs in Canada.
To be honest, our cottage and some of our neighbours’ places have little material value. They are mostly simple wooden buildings that would be considered shacks by the standards of Southern Ontario. The true value of our cottages lives in the memories and good times they produced during the decades we carved them out of the Canadian Shield with simple tools and our bare hands. The labour of love united our family and cottage friends and, in our case, was the one constant in our peripatetic lives (I have lived in a dozen cities in four countries).
Reguly in his friend’s boat after having landed a small pickerel.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
Lac des Mille Lacs lies about 100 kilometres west of Thunder Bay. From the early 1800s, it was on the fur-trade route. In 1870, during the Red River Rebellion led by Métis leader Louis Riel, the Canadian government sent the Wolseley Expedition to assert federal authority at the Red River Settlement at Fort Garry. Colonel Garnet Wolseley’s thousand or so men passed through our area on the way to Manitoba. Some of the men carved their names on a boulder on the remote south end of the lake.
Dad was born in Thunder Bay when it was the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, fished on the lake when he was a youngster, in the late 1930s, and marvelled at its beauty and ruggedness.
In 1968, the Crown sold off some of the lake’s land. Dad and I flew from Washington, D.C., where we were living, to Thunder Bay in a Vickers Viscount prop plane. He bought a one-acre plot on the sole sandy beach on the eastern side of Pine Point peninsula. The price: $400.
I remember sitting on the beach watching the loons and eagles and thinking I was in heaven. At the time, there was only one cottage on the lake.
Reguly painting the cottage's sauna house.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
Then to work. My father could not afford a chainsaw and cleared much of the land with a bucksaw while my mother, Ada, scraped, sanded, painted, planted a garden and cooked. A cedar-plank cottage went up, later a barn and a sauna. As we entered our teen years, my two younger sisters, Susan and Becky, and I were press-ganged into action. My work boots were (and still are) the combat boots my father wore in the Vietnam War, which he covered in 1967 for the Toronto Star.
We had no electricity for the first 15 years or so and moved with the rhythms of the day – up at dawn, in bed by dusk and reading ourselves to sleep by oil lamp. The fishing and hunting lodge down the road kept an ice hut, where we bought chunks of ice insulated by sawdust. Dinner was often freshly caught pickerel, which the Americans called walleye. From our canoes, we collected fiddleheads from the sides of creeks and swamps and, wearing masks and flippers, freshwater clams from the lake shallows. A few of the lads had small Honda trail bikes, and we would visit the remains of a 1940s prisoner-of-war camp along an old logging road.
Like us, none of the neighbours were rich and everything was built by hand for the love of the property and the lake. Everyone helped everyone else, and we would often celebrate a job well done with an afternoon of water skiing, followed by a beach bonfire and fish fry.
The cast of characters was amusing. Len, our bus driver neighbour, taught his dog to yodel when he and his guests played the guitar. Evelyn, a Kansas woman who married a Mexican, and her mother, Mama Viva, regaled us with stories of their youth in Texas, smoked and drank a lot – Evelyn routinely water-skied with a cigarette in her mouth − and left guns lying around like toys. (I once accidentally fired a .22-calibre rifle that was lying on the kitchen counter, sending a bullet into the roof beams.) Rodney, who was a fishing guide on the lake when he was young, would take me by boat to visit abandoned logging camps, with their hulking, rusting steam engines.
Reguly standing in front of the beach and a Cessna at Lac Des Mille Lacs.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
We were always aware that wildfires could destroy our hard-won creations. One summer, about 35 years ago, they came dangerously close. Every able-bodied man, me included, grabbed a shovel and manual water pumps. When the flames reached a kilometre from our properties, the cottagers who were not fighting the fires loaded valuable items into their boats, which were to be anchored offshore.
Just as we were about to give up hope, an orange-and-red Canadair CL-215 water bomber, its twin 18-cylinder engines roaring, came out of nowhere and did three or four drops, ending the fire threat. I cheered as the plane thundered overhead, seconds before getting hit by a wall of water.
There have been no reports of Canadairs trying to drown the fires on our lake; protecting the towns, villages and Indigenous reserves from the region’s dozens of wildfires is the priority, not a few cottages.
That’s why we are all praying for rain. We dread seeing the source of so much adventure, happiness and freedom go up in smoke. I wish my smokejumper father were around to protect his gift to his family.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Fort Frances 14.