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Photo by Hannah Whittaker (via BOOOOOOOM!)

The stillness of the water and the coniferous forest on the opposing shore in this photo send my mind straight to Manitoba’s cottage country (though, for my purposes, I ignore what appears to be a small mountain/hill in the top left quadrant of the photo).

For me, cottage country = the Whiteshell and surrounding provincial parks like Nopiming. Of course, that’s not the only place in Manitoba where people keep their summer abodes, from the small, simple cabins in Wasagaming in Riding Mountain National Park to the rambling mid-century structures in Grand Beach.

This coming weekend, the plan is that my friends an I will decamp to Ruth’s parents’ cottage (the location of which I forget, frankly. It’s not important, anyway, since I won’t be driving there. Unlike that one time in college when Erin, Gillian and I struggled to find Lynsay’s Grand Beach-area cottage without a printed version of the emailed instructions. Also it was nighttime. We found our way there eventually, but not before using a few more litres of gasoline than was strictly necessary had we been better prepared).

Anyhow, back to the photo you see above. The flame burning counterintuitively on the water doesn’t seem that strange, for some reason, once you’ve spent an evening lakeside by the fire, preferably at an isolated waterfront cottage, at sunset once the motorboats and Seadoos have been put away for the night. Ideally, a loon will call the lake home, and you’ll hear its eerie call echoing off the water’s surface. (I idealize only the loon’s signature call, here; did you know that loons have been observe hunting smaller birds for pleasure? As in, killing wantonly with gusto and not for the purpose of procuring a meal? Strange but true…)

In the early evening haze of dusk, a campfire can mesmerize, can bend reality, not unlike Hannah Whittaker’s photograph. There’s something mystical about The Lake, as Manitobans call it, and maybe that’s one reason that the city empties out in the summer months, its inhabitants drawn away to the nighttime stillness and the lakeside flame.