When I initially expressed enthusiams in attending this weekend I had no idea that that meant I would have to get up on the stage myself! When asked, I said "Oh no, I'm not qualified to talk about the Cove's history. I've never lived here. Surely you can get someone better!" Well, apparently they couldn't. Hard to imagine, but when I thought about it afterward I realized that I was the only one of my family going and so the only one who had the context of my forebearer's decisions.
That realization did not make me feel any more confident about speaking to an audience who was actually paying money for this! The space set aside for the presentations was the old boathouse, which is now a museum and filled with the bones of whales and seals and other exhibits guarateed to keep any smallish child interested for a good hour or two. In my day it was a big wooden shed filled with bits of boats, machinery, rope, chains, and dusty boxes piled high under filthy canvas tarps. It was so full of stuff that I never played in it as a child as one could hardly move once inside. The closest I ever got to the CPR red coloured building was the Easter holiday of 1982, when my mom and I painted the big sign that sat on the long side of the boathouse, pretty well the first thing anyone coming into the Cove by water would see.
The sign is still there, but my guess is that it's been painted since, as this landscape is tough on paint. Mind you, that "S" looks very familiar! Today, the boathouse is a clean and airy space, with a stage at the water end, and windows seeing out to rock and tree and the sound of water slurping against the pilings. There were probably only about 60 chairs set up, but it looked like a couple of thousand at least to me!
My nerves subsided somewhat when I spied a few people coming through that were familiar. These were some of the chums I adored spending time with every summer holiday. That first evening with my grandparents, I'm a little ashamed to say, I wished would end soon with a "you can go out and play, but be careful around the burner. And don't fall in the water! Wear your floater coats!" That last part we usually never heard as we had already raced out the door and down the stairs. Or perhaps we chose not to hear it as we felt like nerds wearing protective gear around kids our own age in shorts and flipflops.
There would be those first few shy moments when we'd try to act cool and say hi, hoping that they felt the same. Within an hour though we'd be racing bikes around the boardwalk, or jumping on the Z's homemade trampolines, old pieces of rubber tyre woven together and strung between big beams of wood, all suspended over a 20 foot ravine filled with blackberry brambles. Why did no one crack their head on a beam or fall down the pit I wonder now? Or we'd be putting a fishing line down through a hole in one of the boards of the boardwalk. We rarely caught anything, but if we did, we had to cut the line as nothing could be pulled up through a tiny knothole. Sometimes we'd go swimming. There was no pool at the Coveof course, but there was one in nearby Kokish, a rangy village that held the region's elementary school and an outdoor pool. For a shy loner, I was rarely so happy as I was then, bouncing over a gravel road in the back of a rusty red pick up with a crowd of kids going swimming together.
But our most common pastime, after walking the length of the boardwalk a few times, was going to someone's house and playing Rumoli all together. We used poker chips for counters, supplemented with pennies or beans as no one ever had enough poker chips. We'd have the music cranked up on the stereo while we played for hours and hours, just hanging out and making jokes and talking about stuff in between winning the Ace-King of hearts pot or the 10 of spades. I can never hear Queen's Killer Queen or Foghat's Slow Ride, without smelling mouldly walls and damp coats and stinky shoes and feeling the comradery of a wet, coastal summer night spent with the best people in the world.
It was an egalitarian group, as we knew each other from birth, or at least since they and we entered the Telegraph Cove portal. The age span was about 10 years at most, although those at the top end generally had come from somehere else and so felt too cool to play around with us. Most of the time I was the eldest, but I never thought anything of spending time with 6 year olds or 9 year olds. I spent a few birthdays up there, being a July baby, and still have a wooden dish carved out of a burl by Frank Ziggiotti, given to me when I turned twelve by his four daughters. I had my first kiss at Tthe Cove, and learned how to help load a tug with lumber and drive a fork lift (but was sworn to secrecy not to tell). I made batches and batches and batches of cookies. Besidescooking for my grandparents I cleaned old drawers and helped sort old photos and washed sheets and ironed table napkins and weeded annuals that probably wondered what their parent plant had done wrong to have them end up in such a cold, wet climate. We were the tail end of the baby boom, and this tiny town of 42 people included a population of under 18s that easily comprised 33%, mostly girls. A few years earlier or later would have meant quiet nights at home reading, there being no one to play with. Being in the right demographic at the right time maybe doesn't always promote intellectual supremacy, but it makes life a lot more fun.
And here come 3 - no 4 - of my dearest friends from that era! We hug so hard, all these years later, in this place that brought us together for another damp, cool summer day. I feel tears at the edge of my eyes, but seeing them here (and their mothers too , my goodness they were like my aunties!) gives me a bit more courage and I can stand up to make the first presentaion about the first half century of Telegraph Cove, speaking to those half dozen faces.
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