More on Doug Roberts and that great Canada trip in 1976. Four of the seven in the gang were in the Woodridge Class of 74 (the others in Class of 75), so I think its OK to share this here. That summer we hauled a fold-out tent camper deep into Ontario on the misinformation that in a particular national forest would we could camp anywhere we wanted. But when we reached our destination, it turned out that all of the area had been posted no camping, and we had no place to go. We were literally four hours from any well-populated place. We pulled into a clearing where a house and a small collection of cabins were to ask for advice. It was Lucky Lake, and we were indeed very lucky because Al and Mary lived there. They rented out cabins and small boats for fishing. They even had a small general store. Sure boys, they said, we could camp right there! Welcome to Lucky Lake, eh! They were a delightful couple and opened their property, and their lives, to a bunch of long-haired, hard-partying young Americans only a couple of years out of high school. Al sat by the campfire with us many nights, told us stories and corny jokes (Two peanuts were walking through the woods - one was a salted was a favorite of his that I remember almost 40 years later) and drank tons of beer with us. I have lots of stories from that week: I could talk about water so clear and clean that we got jugs of it out of the lake for drinking, and you could open your eyes underwater and see fish; getting ice for our camp coolers that was cut from the lake in winter and stored in slabs all through summer buried in sawdust in a cabin floor; taking boats way over to the other side of the lake to get naked and bathe (cold Canadian lake, were talkin major shrinkage ...); fighting over whether to take Dennis Shand to a hospital many miles away or just yank out the big fishing hook that had pierced all the way through his thumb ourselves (we took him to the hospital). One day I had walked down a path in the woods to an outhouse we used. While I was sitting in there, I heard an airplane. I looked out the door (why shut the door deep in the Canadian forest?) and watched through the trees a small plane landing on the lake. I finished what I was doing, ran down the path, jumped in one of the boats and puttered out to the plane, thinking there might be some kind of problem. It turned out it was a natural-resources official who went from lake to lake to test water to make sure it was clean, clean enough to drink. He was a nice fellow, as we found all Canadians to be, and he agreed to take off over me so that I could get a good photo from the boat (I did!). Yeah, there are lots of stories, even a few that arent appropriate here. It was a magical trip, made even more so by the comradarie of a special group of guys I loved - and love - as brothers. Those were friendships bred in Northampton-Peninsula-Woodridge schools and cemented firmly by many life-changing experiences together, in a place that only the best of friends know. Here are the boys who made the 1976 Canada trip at Lucky Lake: Doug Roberts, Dan Smith, Mark Harger, Dennis Shand, Tim Forbes and Doug Shand, and down front with me is none other than Al himself, wearing his ubiquitous Gortons fisherman hat (BTW, Im wearing an old, beat-up Woodridge football practice jersey, and a hat I hauled back from Nicaragua that summer).
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 18:05:27 +0000
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