James B. Hendryx -- Cabin in Canada
JBH spent from early spring to late fall at his cabin in Canada. These two recent pictures show the cabin, which appears similar to how it was 40 years ago, altho the original cabin was a dark green that blended into the trees.The cabin is on Basswood Lake (also Lake Wakwekobi) about 15 miles north of Thessalon, Ontario, above the north channel of Lake Huron. This was the only cabin on the rocky southern shore -- located as he liked with no neighbor "within rifle shot".
He started coming to Basswood Lake in the late 1920's, first staying on Drewry's Island (the "little" island). Sometime later he bought the cabin from Bill Phillips and hauled it across the ice to its present location.
The Early days
When I first started spending the entire summer vacation there, the cabin had no electricity and no phone. There was no road and the only access was by boat from Bill Phillips Camp, a resort at the west end of the lake [disguised as "Phil Billips" in New Rivers Calling]. Heating and cooking was with wood stoves, lighting with kerosene lamps, and the ice box was exactly that -- I'd take the boat to Bill Phillips to get ice from the ice-house, filled each winter with ice cut from the lake and stored in this building with thick sawdust-filled walls. Amazingly the supply lasted all summer. The only running water was pumped by hand out of the crystal clear lake - not a problem until my grandmother wanted to water the garden. There was a nice two-seater outhouse. JBH fired up the stove early every morning and made coffee. While inside, he sat under a window by the stove working on crossword puzzles with his bookshelf of dictionaries (including a classical Greek dictionary) behind him, or wrote on the screened porch in a very comfortable chair with a board across the arms, holding a typewriter. In the evenings he would try to listen with a battery-operated tube radio to the Detroit Tigers games broadcast from Detroit on WJR.Development
There were slow changes - eventually bottled gas was used for cooking and running a new refrigerator. Finally, electric lines were run close enough to pay for the extra poles to bring power to the cabin.
A Fall
This pattern continued until late one Fall, perhaps 1961 or 1962, when my grandmother broke her hip slipping on a rock one stormy night on the way to the outhouse. This was the end of the Canadian idyll, as she never went back there.Sale
When JBH died of lung cancer in 1963, she was eager to get rid of the cabin. For me this had been paradise on Earth and expected it to be in the family, and perhaps I would even be lucky enough to own it someday.Suddenly I'm told that it was sold for $2500. There was never any mention to anyone in the family before this! It was one of the darkest moments of my life. This was the only place I've ever loved and I still feel a deep pain of loss. Perhaps, if any positive can be found in this, it permitted me to become a nomad, not bound to any particular location. This outrageously low price for the land, the cabin, and its contents, was, I believe, the act of an unscrupulous neighbor taking advantage of a grieving widow who was trying to manage, without a clue, her own financial affairs.
Now
The cabin is now owned by the Jennings family. Jeff and Bruce Jennings used to come to Bill Phillips Camp and were close enough to my age so we played together when I went to the Camp. Bruce (brucej@realtor.com) sent me these two pictures which were taken in 2000. He said that my grandmother had offered to sell the cabin to his grandfather, Bill Wright, who was a friend of my grandparents, but that he declined to buy it. 15 years later the Jennings bought it when it was put up for sale. They've done some remodeling - indoor plumbing "for the women" with the men still using the outhouse, windows on and stairway from the porch, expanded kitchen, and more. However, the one astounding "improvement" was a road, passable by 4-wheel drive vehicles, over the rocky terrain, surely using a lot of dynamite as most of this is solid basalt. Having hiked a lot back there I would have considered that impossible.Things change.