The Name in the Lodge Record Book
The Canada Trip
You have to understand what the Canada trip was in my family, or none of this makes sense.
Every June since 1987, my father has driven to the same lake in northwest Ontario. Same lodge, same week, the second full week of June, as regular as Christmas.
It is a drive-in lodge, which means you can get there on a gravel road instead of a floatplane.
A dozen log cabins, a fish-cleaning house, a dock with gas, and an office that smells like coffee and outboard oil.
The men in the trip changed a little over the years. My dad, Uncle Jim, Jim’s son Ryan, a couple of my dad’s friends from the paper mill. And me, every year since I turned 14.
I am 39 now. I am a physical therapist at the clinic in town, and I spend my days getting people back on their feet after knee replacements and bad falls.
That week in June was the one week I did not think about anybody’s knees.
Hailey had been hearing about Canada since she was old enough to sit on my lap. Loons at night. Shore lunch on an island. Her grandpa cleaning walleye so fast you could not follow his knife.
When she was 6, she asked if she could go. I told her when she was older. She asked every June after that, and every June I told her the same thing.
Last fall, I decided she was old enough. She was 12, she could swim, she could cast, and she had sat through three cold mornings on Lake Du Bay with me without one complaint.
I told my dad at Thanksgiving. He did not say yes. He also did not say no. He said, “We’ll see,” and passed the potatoes.
In March, when he sent around the numbers for the cabin and the boats, I wrote him a check for $1,800. That covered two spots, mine and Hailey’s, and our share of the big cabin and the boat rental.
He cashed it. I saw it clear my account the next week. To me, that was a yes. I told Hailey, and she did not stop smiling for about two months.
So I want to be fair to my father. He never said she could come.
But he took the money, and he let her plan, and he let her buy a tackle box. Then he said it at the table, in front of her.
That was the part I could not get past. Not the rule. The way he let it land on a 12-year-old girl who had done nothing but want to sit in a boat with her grandpa.
The Check
Jenna and I talked about it in the kitchen that night after Hailey went to bed. She was angrier than I was, and she is not an angry person.
“Did he ever say why?” she asked. “In all these years. Did anybody ever bring a daughter?”
I thought about it. Ryan had a sister. Some of the mill guys had girls. Not one of them had ever come. I had never once wondered about it, which says something about me too.
“He never said why,” I said. “It was just the way it was. I didn’t think about it because it never cost me anything.”
Jenna was quiet for a while. “It’s costing you something now,” she said.
Four days later, on my lunch hour, I drove out to his place. He was in the shop behind the house, filing a chainsaw chain clamped in the vise, the radio on low to the farm report.
He did not look up right away. He finished the tooth he was on, counted his strokes under his breath, and then set the file down on the bench.
“I need the $1,800 back, Dad,” I said.
He wiped his hands on the red rag he always kept in his back pocket.
He went inside, and I heard a drawer open in the kitchen. He came back with his checkbook and wrote it standing at the bench.
He tore it out carefully along the perforation and handed it to me. His handwriting was the same as it was on every birthday card of my life, all capital letters, leaning a little forward.
“You want to tell me why?” I asked him. I did not mean the check. He knew I did not mean the check.
He looked at me a long moment. Something moved across his face that I did not have a name for then. Then he picked up the file again.
“It’s just the way it’s always been,” he said. And he went back to the chain.
He did not ask what I wanted the money for. I did not tell him. I drove back to the clinic and did a hip evaluation and could not have told you a single thing I said in it.