After crossing big, island-strewn Buckhorn Lake, we faced a different sort of labor to divide: our first lock. At Buckhorn, we were more than 800 feet above sea level. Lake Ontario, toward which we were heading, is at 244 feet. That's a differential that has to be tackled in steps, and here was step one.
The approach was busy with boats, all tied according to procedure along the painted blue line on the concrete wall that funnels toward the lock. From there, once the lock gates open, you have to motor in slowly and take your place along either side of the lock chamber.
Houseboats for hire at Egan Marine on Pigeon Lake, two hours northeast of Toronto.
(Gerald Martineau - The Washington Post)
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"Captain, take your bow up close to the Larson [cruiser]." The amplified voice came from the Parks Canada lockmaster, in a glass booth alongside the gates. "Bring your stern closer to the wall. Deckhand, loop your line onto the cable. Cut the engine, captain."
The lockmaster probably figured she needed to be explicit with us, because we'd no doubt just rented our boat down on Pigeon Lake. But the "captain/deckhand" business was something that could have been trouble, if the captain had taken it too seriously.
We did as we were told, and looped our lines around two of the thick black cables that hung along the sides of the chamber. When the last boat behind us was secured, the lock gates closed, and the water level began to drop. Soon we were at the bottom of a big stone tub. When the lower gates opened, we were 11 feet closer to sea level, and the concentrated bustle of the lock gave way to open water and the wooded shores beyond.
One more lock -- a mere four-foot drop, at the entrance to Lovesick Lake -- and we were ready to moor for the night. Like all of the locks, the one at Lovesick provides mooring space along its upper and lower approaches. "Tying up to the wall," it's called. Because it was already pushing 6 o'clock, it seemed like a good idea. But Kay balked.
"All this empty shoreline," she said. "All these islands. Why can't we just go find a place to anchor, away from the lock and all the other boats?"
"Because -- who knows what the bottom is like? Or how shallow it is along the shore?" I was making the caution argument, as an excuse for packing it in for the night.
Kay had a perfectly reasonable suggestion: Ask the lockmaster. I did, and she pointed to an island about a quarter-mile away. "Over on the other side of Wolf Island," she said. "It's deep right up to shore, and there are plenty of trees to tie to."
Fifteen minutes later we were nosing into a little cove on Wolf Island, where we tied up all by ourselves, out of view of the lock. The propeller was just fine, and, as I sat drinking wine out of a china cup, I wondered whether natural law dictates that some of us have to marry the right person to keep us from always coloring within the lines . . . or tying up to the wall.
THE MORNING brought dead calm and bright skies. We unhitched from the trees and started off across Lovesick Lake at 8. We had less than an hour's cruise to the lock at Burleigh Falls, a monstrous 24-foot drop that left us, when the lower gates opened, looking out into a different world.
At some point on Lower Buckhorn Lake, the day before, we had crossed the dividing line between the gentle limestone hills of southern Ontario and the granite fastness of the Canadian Shield. The shield is the stark stone floor of Canada's north woods, a vast shelf of 2-billion-year-old rock that protrudes in pinkish-gray crags from a realm of evergreens and white birch. The lakes here are shrapneled with rough rock islands, dramatic perches for summer cottages that always seem more alluring than the ones along the shore. Stony Lake, which we just barely nicked before trending south, is where you wish your rich Canadian grandfather lived.
Now we funneled into the loveliest part of our route . . . and the most ominously named. But Hells Gate wasn't nearly as treacherous as it sounded, except perhaps for travelers so taken with the scenery that they forgot to watch for the markers. Here was a marker-buoy slalom course, slinking through a clutch of the 1,100 islands that dot Stony Lake. The Ontario palette of granite and dark water, birch and pine, played out in endless permutations, with one safe thread of passage through it all. Kay looked ahead for the markers; I wove through with the red ones to port and the green ones to starboard, the convention when going downstream. One island, accessible only by boat, had a pretty little Anglican chapel. I don't know if the markers were in place when it was built, in 1914, but if not it must have seemed like a welcome place to stop and pray.
And suddenly we were out on Clear Lake, a big, bland body of water created when a dam was built. With the shores a half-mile apart, our 5 1/2-knot pace made it seem more than ever like we were pedaling a bus.
