Honey Harbor and Barrie

Mom at Honey Harbor 1962

      Yesterday's post about Hiawatha reminded me of the Ojibwa and our trips to Honey Harbor, so I decided to share today a page I wrote in 2008 about some of our trips to Canada when I was young. The story begins with our visit to Barrie.

Eric, Dad, and Clark

    One winter, I do not remember the year, we went to Barrie, Ontario to visit my mom's cousin, Victor, and his wife, Martha, and their three boys during the city's Winter Festival. I don't remember much about the trip other than it took about three hours to get there – a drive to Toronto and then an hour west. It was very cold but sunny. The city is on a bay – I had to look it up – Kempenfelt Bay, which was frozen – and many of the festival activities were taking place on the ice, including, of course, the ice fishing. We might have gone ice skating – but all I do remember for sure about that trip was watching Martha play piano on the upright piano in their living room.

Dad at our first cabin

     There were three summers as a kid when we went an hour further west of Barrie and met Victor and the family at their summer place in Honey Harbor which is situated on the Georgian Bay, part of Lake Huron. It is in the midst of Ojibwa country.

     We went down a gravel road to Honey Harbor. There were a few tiny cabins, a boathouse, and a general store. At the end of the camp where the general store was, there was a hug wall of rocks – we could climb the rocks and play, or we could just sit and sun ourselves. On the water side of the general store was a dock where I would fish sometimes with Dad and sometimes by myself. I remember catching sunfish, and one time something heavy got stuck on my hook – it felt like a shoe, but when I pulled it up, I saw a turtle just before it got loose and swam away!

     At the other end of the small beach were the boathouse and another dock – sometimes we would fish from that dock too.

     In the mornings Victor would walk along the beach and clear off whatever had washed ashore – seaweed, dead fish.

     And in the heat of the afternoons, we would all go swimming.

Den, Eric, Toby

     One summer Victor took us out on his motorboat to a place called Beausoleil Island – I can still see the Beausoleil Island letters on the side of the big hill there. It was known at the time for it's large Native American cemetery – we took a walk through it and then rode the boat back. I have never forgotten how beautiful it was there.

     There were no televisions in the cabins at Honey Harbor – a concept totally foreign to my young mind. Mom brought jigsaw puzzles to help pass the evening hours.

     The second summer that we went, the general store had closed down and was converted to a three bedroom cabin – that's where we stayed that summer. Several years later, when I was a teenager, we returned to Honey Harbor again. That time the boathouse had been converted to living quarters, and we stayed there – the boathouse had lots of paperback books on the shelves and I read a few of them, mostly mysteries.

     Mom had pictures from our days at Honey Harbor – the boys posing with fish they had caught, Mom in a big flannel shirt sitting on the rock wall.

     We did not go so often as to take the place for granted, just often enough to make Honey Harbor special and create an aura in our memories about its history, its beauty, its lure still calling us back after all these many years. And we wonder what it might be like today?

     The pictures posted here are from our first summer in Honey Harbor in 1962.

This memory was originally written in December of 2008; Mom responded with a paragraph that same month: One more note about the Barrie, Ontario winter carnival. There was an ice fishing competition on the bay – you know, small tent like structures, men sitting in a circle...fishing lines extended into holes cut from the ice, a small heater puffing in the corner. Victor asked Dad if he would like to try it. Of course Dad didn't know and had to be told that he could not talk to anyone while they were in the enclosure because fishing licenses were required if you weren't a resident, and if Dad talked everyone would know he was a Yankee. You have to imagine the sacrifice Dad made being cooped up for any length of time, being mute with no audience to appreciate his banter. He came back to their house very cold, no fish. We chuckled over this for a long time.

162 20150611 Honey Harbor and Barrie Ontario