Forty-eight years ago - Canada Day 1968 - I poked my head out of the canvas flap of a small tent, pitched on the lakeshore in Quetico Park. It was a dream come true - exquisite honeymoon with a wonderful woman, one week into a new life in Canada.
Pierre Trudeau was Canada's new Prime Minister, Brewers Retail was on strike, as was Canada Post, and thousands of young people were hitchhiking back and forth across the country.
This morning - Canada Day 2016 - I poked my head out the door of our home on Pelican Lake, stepped quietly, coffee in hand, onto the deck at dawn, and watched three otters cavorting like kids in the calm water in front of me.
A little later a mother mallard and three ducklings glided elegantly into shore in front of me as Alfie my red squirrel sat upright on the rail a few feet to my right and scolded me for standing too close to his sunflower seed breakfast.
This Canada Day is as awesome as my first. It's been a great run in my adopted country so far. Being here is still a dream come true after all these years, and I look forward to another 48 (or so) in a great country surrounded by amazing citizens.
By 8 o'clock Mary and I were in the boat, enroute to camp, where I mixed ingredients for a rhubarb/blueberry pie, and a batch of banana, peanut butter, oat cookies that I had read about, and promptly fired up the barbeque to cook them.
Tonight I'll be taking a group of people on the Minnitaki Queen for a sunset cruise, polished off with an anchorage just off the town beach to watch fireworks after dark.
By 11 o'clock I expect to be back at camp, sitting in the hot tub with a glass of wine, reflecting on what an exciting country welcomed me almost a half century ago.
The dream continues!
Happy Canada Day, my friends.

Pretty stormy day, so I've been relegated to the Palace.
I've been on a charcoal kick lately and decided to prepare tonight's supper in my smoker. Menu is ribeye steak, baked beans with sautéed onions, mushrooms, and bacon, and baked potatoes.
Red wine with the meal and Spanish coffees after, in the hot tub under the twilight clouds.

There's a story here. Gerry Rodeghero (left) and Dick MacKenzie at breakfast.

Today, early, before the rain started and while the air was calm, I sipped coffee in silence, mesmerized by the still surface of the lake.
In a half daze, I suddenly saw a boat half a mile across the bay, speeding away from a pretty little point jutting out from shore, always a brilliant beacon from my perch in the Palace.
My mind wandered to the near-full moon rising above the bay last night. It was a wonderful, cloud shrouded night. I grabbed a camera and positioned to capture the Saturday night geranium moon shining from the far shore into my face through a hanging basket of brilliant flowers.
"Wouldn't Ma love this," I thought, reminiscing about her many visits over the years. As I watched the moon I could envision my mother sitting with me, a blanket draped over her shoulders to keep out the slight chill. She would show the contentment of a lady at peace, but her eyes would twinkle bright with mischief. Her mischief came often, unexpectedly, but always welcome. I think sometimes that she has moved on, still clutching some unused marvels from her bag of mischief.
I continued to watch the speeding boat across the lake. It was going much faster than most boats, angling away from me, heading for the main lake a mile east at the mouth of our bay. I thought it strange that I couldn't hear the motor.
Once my vision was obscured by a tree in the yard that came between me and the vee left behind by the racing boat I hustled inside, grabbed my binoculars, focused across the bay.
Last evening, before the moon rose, I discovered a Mallard hen and nine tiny ducklings hanging out between the pontoons of my docked Minnitaki Queen. I had gone into town to transfer boats and captain a surprise birthday scenic cruise for a grand young man and his beautiful family. It was a glorious outing and I was able to share pictures I took of the ducks as I hung over the rail of my big boat. The ducklings were so tiny I'm sure they were hatched only hours before I discovered them and it seemed special that all nine of them and the birthday boy shared the same birthday.
Two hours later, after the cruise, I again transferred from the Queen to my Pelican Belle for the return to camp. The mother Mallard and her brood were still at my dock, hunkered onshore in a patch of grass for the night.
The boat I saw with my naked eyes, speeding across the water, was nowhere to be seen through the binoculars. More puzzling, besides the disappearance and total lack of engine roar, was the mirror surface of calm water. No wave or wake broke the stillness.
Several hours and a pot of coffee later my wandering mind wished my dad a happy father's day. He was only 49 years old when he died 41 years ago. I thought, with much happiness, of my visit to dad's grave in Ohio last fall, only a few months after my mother joined him there. It was nice to see them together again.
As I smiled and lost myself in pleasant memories from years gone by, I looked up and over to the beacon point across the lake where my brother and I scattered a handful of Ma's ashes last summer.

Shopping for the weekend - a bag of minnows and a box of wine. Seems like a song... "The Days of Wine and Minnows."

This is a kind of "go to hell diet" Saturday night.
The Palace is alive with hot oil in a Dutch oven, french fries, battered walleye, and (wait for this) deep fried battered bananas.
Battered apple chunks are better, I think, but deep fried bananas sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar piqued a mighty fine dessert sans granny smith.
Cooked up this way, a single modest sized walleye, one large russet, and an apple make a great meal for two.
How can something so simple and delightful wreck a diet in one night? (I rationalize over another glass of wine).

After all these years I still marvel. My boyhood overflowed with dreams of life in the wilderness, a part of nature's gentleness and beauty.
Tonight, the Palace, sunset, still waters of the lake, silence, solitude, fresh fish and steak on the bbq, wine, cigars, faithful dogs asleep at my feet, memories and dreams flowering, utter contentment, shrouded in the mists, usher serendipity.

Some days are charmed beyond delight.
Tuesday, a lazy Tuesday afternoon, cloudy, windy and downright chilly, I took the dogs and a big cigar and set out for a leisurely cruise on the Minnitaki Queen to nowhere in particular.
A half hour into enjoying the scenery and the solitude among the soft clouds of cigar smoke, the silence came alive with the ringing of my cell phone.
"Hey, did you just shut down your boat?" came a familiar voice as I cut the motor to hear better. I was a mile from the nearest house on shore. No boats were in sight.
As I scanned, puzzled, all around me, I answered my friend John Milling, "Yeah. I just cut the engine to hear you better. Where the hell are you?"
It turns out John and his wife Allison had walked with their sister-in-law to the top of Sioux Mountain for an afternoon view of the lake and the town from the highest peak around.
Later, by design, the trio made their way down to where the mountain meets the water and I boated to the same spot, and from there we rode the Queen under the railroad bridge and further down Pelican Lake, until we arrived at Dick's Hideaway and chatted up a storm for the next hour or two, sitting on the Palace deck in a warm sun that emerged just for us, we liked to think.
Later, after supper, I met my friends Merle and Edith Burkholder, avid bird watchers (I guess the accepted term is "birders") who had offered to introduce me to some birds. Our three-hour meander down old bush roads and an abandoned train line was an extraordinary experience. In that time we recorded 30 different species - none of them rare or unusual, but half of which I have never identified.
Edith has an amazing knowledge of birds and their sounds that kept me totally enthralled and, although I'm confused by all the new information she gave, I'm sure some order will eventually emerge from the chaos that my mind is working to absorb.
Merle? He's too modest. "She's the birder," he says quietly, nodding gently toward his wife. "I just tag along and take some pictures." (To see some of the pictures he took last night go to the Facebook page "Sioux Lookout bird watchers" https://www.facebook.com/groups/1562941740691971/ ).
I had been looking forward to an early night to begin reading a new novel, released yesterday, by one of my favorite writers, but I was so full of beautiful thoughts and utter contentment, that by bedtime I didn't have room for any more goodness.

As I approached the dock at camp Friday on my first trip out I spotted a bear in the front yard. That's never good news.
By the time I got the boat tied up the bear was gone, but he had been pretty destructive.
You can see in the pictures that he dumped all my tomato boxes over and demolished my nice crop of good growing early tomatoes. He made the rounds, leaning with muddy paws on every window he could reach, pushed in a couple screens, ripped a vent cover off the wall of the crawl space, and even chewed or clawed some of the siding off one corner of the cabin.
Anything left lying around - buckets, tools, flower pots (yes, he even pulled down a hanging basket of geraniums) was tossed around and scattered.
Luckily he didn't get my barbeque, smoker, or cooking utensils - except a long handled wooden stirring paddle that he shredded - but I fear what this week will bring when the dogs and I aren't there to keep it scared away.