Lucky home owners

A skier on the river, striking out towards an island

There are many waterside properties along the Ottawa River. Friends of mine bought a house on the Ontario side this summer, at Wendover, east of Rockland; I went to visit them yesterday. Lucky people: it's a lovely house built in the 1990s and the views from their big living room windows would induce me to sit there all day, just gazing out, especially now that Francine has told me she can watch both sunrises and sunsets from that vantage point. On the horizon, across the river, is the escarpment of the Canadian shield, beyond Thurso, Plaisance and Papineau.

Fishing hut on the ice

At present, sheltered by a string of islands, the water is frozen along the stretch where my friends live (Cunningham Bay), and people were already venturing out on it on snowmobiles and skis. Nearby, one of the neighbours had set up a fishing hut on the ice. In a steeply sloping garden on the eastern side of the house, the children had made a toboggan / snowboarding run from the neighbour's house to the shore. They had a hut on that property, for warmth, with woodsmoke rising from its chimney.

In summer, floatplanes land and take off from here; Roger looks after one at a movable dock by his lawn, where he ties it down. He told us he was anxious about the dock during the autumn gales, before he'd dismantled it. If it hadn't been secured with metal ties, it would have disintegrated and the pieces would have floated away downstream.

Cunningham Bay from the air, a few weeks ago

The drive to Wendover and back along Highway 17A gave us many views of the river; on the exposed stretch near Rockland the surface snow had blown into ripples by the wind, like desert sand.