The Stayhot
The following is my journal account of time spent at Echo Island on Hollow Lake in Ontario, Canada. Nothing can be truly real until it’s spent time bathing in our imagination, but I’ll do my utmost to keep my words believable.
“When you are young, you run hard and fast into the future and sometimes it returns you right back to the past”
We launched the motorboat onto Hollow Lake, it was a beautiful spring day under rolling clouds through a blue sky. It's about a twenty-minute boat ride from Mountain Trout House Marina, just outside Dorset and by the time we rounded the little island, one of those transitory clouds began to pour down on us. As the dock had not been installed yet, to moor, I went over the side of the craft while Annette brought us closer to shore.
The lake was surprisingly warm for May and the only shock was jumping into the lake fully clothed. It’s shallow here on this side of Echo Island. Luckily the Iphone in my bag was still dry after wading in the lake. Having secured our craft between two rocky outcrops and the dock, sitting on shore, we could now bring everything up to the century old cabin.
There was no running water, only lake water, as well as candles and a propane stove. Then our adventure began.
Once all was carted up to the cabin, we turned the propane on, made tea and started a fire in the cast iron stove. The cabin was cold and took a while to warm up, once I changed into something dry, I was eager to make the most of it, maybe starting with my sketch book at the kitchen table while I drank my tea.
The kitchen was large with an old oak table in the middle of the room, paraded around the table were 1940’s chrome chairs covered in shiny red leather, later I learned that Annette had purchased them when she was seventeen, for tens of dollars. Their first purpose was seating for waiting patrons in a barbershop, where they could rock on those chrome legs while reading their newspapers as they waited for a shave. Now the chairs have been retired and moved to island life, from the barbershop gossip to vacation table talk.
The room was packed with all kinds of vintage kitchen accessories, cast iron skillets, tea kettles and pots all in their dull black.
There was a whole army of mason jars holding basics such as oatmeal, sugar and tea, keeping all of the aforementioned safe from the craftiness of the red squirrel population on Echo Island.
The sink was huge and white with a cast-iron green water pump. The window sitting above the sink and some of the room trim was painted a deep aged red, the kind of red that changed depending on the light. Sometimes the red had a deep wine quality and other times looked pink or when the light hit it just right, an orange glow. Adding to this colour arrangement, a row of old glass bottles sat on the windowsill, blue, violet, green, amber and pinky red bottles back lit by the forest sunshine.
I think the true winner for this day was the white ceramic Art Deco teapot with a felted metal chrome cover to keep that brew as hot as possible, because hot tea was serious business in the 1920s. I think this was called the Stayhot and it definitely sticks to its name today. The Stayhot had so inspired me that I abandoned the sketchbook and headed straight to my oils and painted this little beauty on a small round panel. Tomorrow who knows what I’ll paint but there is never going to be enough time for me here, living in the present-past.
