A seaworthy craft, a watery expanse, and a cottage on the shore

Trigger: Adhesive aluminum lettering

Location: Belle Ewart, Ontario

If you have Torontonian cousins, you may have heard of it. Pronounced in an affected Canadian accent, which makes the “o” sound, to the New York ear, like a gaping yawn, the term “the Cottage” can refer to one of several destinations. The oldest and best-known is Belle Ewart.

Located about 50 miles north of Toronto, Belle Ewart is a small, shtetl-like township that hugs a corner of Ontario’s fourth-largest lake, Lake Simcoe.

When I was growing up in the 90s, we spent all of July at 1149 Claver Avenue in Belle Ewart, morphing into amphibious creatures as we vacillated between lake and sun, lake and sun, lake and, ah… sunset. Sunsets are always beautiful, but when that ball of fire dips into a horizon-less shimmering expanse, it’s more majestic than when it bumps into tall buildings.

In those good old days, most cottages were about the same size: small. Few had more than one story, and most were built with siding as opposed to brick or wood. (Things have changed since then, and some of the cottages today are, shall we say, a bit more sophisticated.)

“The Cottage” isn’t exclusively Jewish. Belle Ewart functions as a regular town, and, true to Canadian culture, is open to all ethnicities. Still, come summertime, when some 50 frum families would make Belle Ewart home for two months, we quickly became the overwhelming majority.

After years of waterlogged summers transitioning between rowboats, paddle boats, inflatable dinghies that punctured upon impact, and plain old-fashioned swimming, my father decided that it was time to up the quality of our nautical experience. In 2000, when I was nine years old, he ordered a secondhand motorboat from an early version of something like Craigslist.

Several days later, a truck showed up bearing the newest addition to our Cottage experience. We prepared to be super excited for our seaworthy craft, but as the driver unloaded his cargo, we quickly realized that excitement would not be our primary emotion. Rather, it was pity, because the motorboat was, essentially, a rowboat. The boat’s motor was a white chunk of machinery with a small gas tank that got clamped against a little plank of wood screwed to the back of the boat.

It was basically a rowboat. With an attached motor.

We all gathered around, staring at the sad contraption — but what really tugged at our heartstrings was the adhesive aluminum lettering plastered upon the boat’s side: “THUNDERBLASTER,” it read.