The Double Meaning of ‘Meet Me at the Lake’
By Carley Fortune
In the summer before I began fourth grade, my family packed up our house outside of Sydney, Australia, where we had lived for six years, and returned to Canada. Goodbye to our suburban bungalow on Sterling Avenue, the pool, the palm trees. Goodbye to the orange terracotta rooftops that still look like home to me. My other home: Australia. Goodbye to cockatoos, kookaburras, and rainbow lorikeets. School uniforms. Sausage rolls. Caramello Koalas. Warm-weather Christmases. Gum trees. Wattle. Goodbye to all of it.
In Canada, I could have been one of those lucky kids who only went out to the cottage on long weekends, but my parents didn’t want to be city people. Instead of putting down roots in Toronto—the city where I was born, the city in which I now live—they decided we would move to Barry’s Bay, a tiny town in rural Ontario. We would live on the lake.
We arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport and stayed with my aunt and uncle for a few days so our dog, Belle, could recover from the flight and my parents could buy a minivan for the next leg of the trip. Vehicle acquired, my brother and I climbed in the back, and we all set off on the four-hour journey to our new home.
As a nine-year-old Aussie kid, I found the change in setting dramatic. The further from the city we traveled, the wilder the landscape became. The granite rock faces. Hills covered in pine and birch and poplar. Green seemed to come in different shades in Canada. Deeper. Lusher. And there were so many lakes, glittering out the window, sparkling through the trees. I’d come from a land of desert and dried-up riverbeds, but in Ontario, fresh water was everywhere.
Eventually we wound our way around Kamaniskeg Lake, the pavement giving way to a bumpy dirt road, a car-width path through the bush. We passed a handful of cottages before arriving at ours—a small A-frame at the top of a hill, overlooking a vast expanse of Kamaniskeg. As soon as the van door slid open, the dog took off. Belle ran down that big slope, through the brush, and jumped straight in the water. It’s like she knew it was there, waiting for her. We watched her swim, back and forth, along the shore for five full minutes. Our Australian rescue dog had found her happy place in a Canadian lake.
And I had too.
I lost countless hours staring out the window, tracking the seasons through the shifts in the lake. The bright blue stillness of early fall morphing into the choppy gray waters of November. The ice of winter. Fishing huts and skating rinks and snowmobiles. Watching it all melt away, always too slowly, in spring. And then summer came again.
I had a hard time making and keeping friends when I moved to Canada. We were a class of mostly boys, I had a weird accent, and my family didn’t go to church. I was an interloper. Friend dynamics were in constant flux, sometimes to my benefit, and sometimes not. But summer was a reprieve from all this. Summer was when the cottagers would come and my brother and I would spend all day in our bathing suits, jumping in and out of the lake, tipping the canoe, playing on Dad’s old surfboard. There were kids and water-skiing lessons and happiness.
When I was a teenager, I began to spend time at the water, plotting. What did I want from the next year? Who did I want to be? At the lake, I could unburden myself from whoever I was at school. I could imagine the person I wanted to be. I could be me.
The bright blue stillness of early fall morphing into the choppy gray waters of November. The ice of winter. Fishing huts and skating rinks and snowmobiles. Watching it all melt away, always too slowly, in spring. And then summer came again.
That’s never changed. Our parents sold our house on the lake more than a decade ago, but the lake still beckons, the same way it did to Belle. I carry it in my heart, my soul, my body. I can close my eyes and feel myself diving into the water, slicing through the colder depths, traveling beneath the surface until my lungs call for air. To get my fix, my husband and I began renting a cottage near Barry’s Bay every summer. I wait all year to see that view of water, shore, and sky. I wait all year for that inaugural dive into the lake.
The first summer we stayed at Bob’s—Bob’s Cottage, that’s what we call it—was also my first summer as a mother. Our son was six months old, and it had been a rocky start to parenthood. I struggled with my mental health, my identity, and the feeling that I wasn’t very good at mothering. But one morning, when the sun was already high and hot, we took our infant down to the water. I stripped him of his diaper, and we went for a swim. I held my baby to my chest, and dipped his toes in, and it felt right. Me and my son, his first time in the lake. It was a turning point for me as a parent, a promise that everything would be okay, that I’d be okay. I could teach my child to swim. I could teach him to love the bush and the birds and the trees. I could teach him to love the lake.
Every time we return to Bob’s, I seem to have some kind of revelation. I make a point on one of our last days to lie down on the dock, close my eyes, and listen to the sound of the water. I listen to my deepest thoughts, just like I did in high school. I reflect on the person I want to be. I greet the new version of myself.
The cottage is where I decided to quit my job as an editor-in-chief of a magazine to launch Refinery29 Canada. The cottage is where my husband and I decided to have a second child. I decided to write a book at the cottage. I drafted most of Every Summer After at the lake. I began Meet Me at the Lake there. I started my third book there as well.
It’s still freeing for me, being by the water, being in the bush. There’s no TV. No WiFi. No drinkable water. There’s space and there’s time. Morning birdsong and sunrises. Damp bathing suits and watermelon slices. It’s where I find myself, year after year, always at the lake.
Carley Fortune is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Meet Me at the Lake and Every Summer After. Carley is also an award-winning journalist and worked as an editor at some of Canada’s top publications, including The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Toronto Life, and the much-beloved, now-defunct weekly paper, The Grid. She was most recently the Executive Editor of Refinery29 Canada. Carley holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). Carley spent her young life in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and in Barry’s Bay, a tiny lakeside town in rural Ontario and the setting for Every Summer After. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons, and is currently working on her third book.