Bekanon Island : 2024
Georgian Bay: The Thirty Thousand Islands
For this story we need to go back in space and time: Three, maybe four billion years, should do it. And as for the spatial co-ordinates of earth, its place in our galaxy and its surface configuration at the time, that’s more the realm of astrophysicists: we’ll leave it to them.
Geologists refer to shields as vast stable areas of Precambrian rock floating on magma on the earth’s surface. These acted as the nuclei around which continents formed. [1]
The Canadian Shield constitutes the largest mass of exposed Precambrian rock in the world. Centred on Hudson Bay and with an area of 8 million square kilometres, it forms the ancient geological core of the North American continent as well as half of Canada’s land area.
The Canadian Shield was originally an area of very large, very tall mountains (about 39,000 feet according to Wikipedia - Everest holds the current record at some 29,000 feet). With all the tectonic turmoil that it took to create those mountains, this was an area of amazing geological complexity: the rocks, solid and semi-molten, were being squeezed, fractured and twisted. That was then. Subsequently we had 2 or 3 billion years of intermittent glacial activity grinding and scraping. These once towering mountains and volcanoes have now been eroded and polished down to nearly flat planes exposing their insides. The result is a cross-section of geological wonder and complexity.
By way of interest, at least 5 major ice ages appear to have occurred through Earth’s history. The most recent one, the Quaternary Ice Age began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (again: who knew?). What we refer to as “The Ice Age” was the last period of glaciation within the current Quaternary ice age. It peaked 20,000 years ago. At that time the world was 5C colder than it is now and 20C colder in glaciated areas. Currently we are in the middle of a warm interglacial period that began about 11,000 years ago.
Eastern Georgian Bay is part of the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. The granite bedrock has been scraped clean by the advancing and retreating ice from our most recent period of glaciation. The rock has been sculpted by two kilometres of ice moving over it and by resulting rivers, two kilometres down, at the bottom of the ice: enormous hydraulic forces combining with sand and gravel to wear the softer rock and leave behind the harder rock layers. The waters of Georgian Bay flow around all those tangled pieces of eroded and shattered rock and the result is The Thirty Thousand Islands. They often feel like massive granite sculptures by Henry Moore touched up with growths of windswept Eastern white pine.
Around 14,000 years ago the ice sheets began to retreat from the Great Lakes Basin. This allowed North America’s Indigenous inhabitants, already living in ice-free areas, to inhabit this newly exposed land. Archaeological evidence shows signs of human activity in the area dating back at least 9000 years.
For millennia, the Anishinaabe, the Indigenous people around northern Georgian Bay, were undisturbed by world events. Then, in 1615, they agreed to guide Samuel de Champlain on his exploration of Georgian Bay and beyond. That expedition, in August of 1615, travelled south from the French River to the southern end of Georgian Bay. It then continued on into what is now New York State. This was the first sense of a great change that was coming into their world. The European invasion was beginning.
Some three hundred years later north-eastern Georgian Bay was still remote, accessible mainly by railroad and steamboat. Lumbering, fishing and some tourism were the primary industries in the area. The first road to connect Parry Sound and Sudbury wasn’t completed until the mid nineteen fifties.
In about 1910 the Government of Ontario decided to sell a portion of the uninhabited islands throughout the 30,000 islands.
Bekanon Island
In 1927 American George Rogers, an heir to the Rogers Brothers Silver Company and the publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a large, well known newspaper, purchased one of these islands for $73.40. Named Bekanon Island, it was located in Henvey Inlet, off shore from Bekanon village and Bekanon Creek. It was an ideal location for him. About 2 ½ acres and nicely forested with white pine, Bekanon Island is like a plateau standing about five feet above the surrounding water, with a relatively flat top. It was a great building site.
By 1929 Rogers, clearly a man of means, had arranged for the construction of a family compound in the heart of this relatively intact wilderness. When finished there were 5 buildings with a total of 7 bedrooms. To get there from Cleveland, the Rogers family engaged in a major expedition: They would leave Cleveland by train and transfer in Buffalo to Toronto. In Toronto the family boarded a northbound train heading to Sudbury. About 60 km south of Sudbury they got off in Key Junction (now a ghost town) and took a locally run train (named “Old Sparky”) down a branch line to the dock in Key Harbour. Here the Bekanon Island caretaker (he lived on the island summer and winter for its first 20 years) picked up the family and brought them and their gear and provisions out to the island. This was clearly not a “going to the cottage for the weekend” kind of trip.
With time the island was sold to a lawyer in Toronto and shortly after the Second World War was sold to the Holton family in Hamilton, active in the business of textile manufacture.
After 35 years they sold the island to Hugh Jack, a dental colleague from Kitchener.
I first encountered Georgian Bay around the age of 12 when my parents took my two brothers and me to a family camp held over Labour Day weekend at a YMCA camp on Beausoleil Island at the southern end of Georgian Bay. I had never been anywhere so beautiful. I went there with my family for 4 or 5 years before I got side-tracked by the rest of life. By then I was completely hooked on Georgian Bay, its waters and its islands.
My second canoe trip into the Bay was an expedition in a borrowed canoe in the spring of 1969. I went alone. The Bustard Islands, located just off the mouth of the French River, comprise 550 islands jammed into an area of 3 km by 3 km. I spent the week that followed my first year at the University of Waterloo getting out to and exploring those islands. Occasionally I was completely lost, and was always astounded by this maze of passages through this complexity of islands.
Four years later, now in dental school I spent a part of the summer building a canoe designed around the demands of canoeing the Bay[2]. It still hangs in my garage and has been involved in almost all my subsequent canoeing expeditions out to the Bay.
By the early 80’s I was on the Board of Governors of the Ontario Dental Association. I ended up sitting beside Hugh Jack, also on the Board. I discovered his connection with the Bay (he had just purchased an island near Key Harbour) and we spent lots of time comparing our Georgian Bay experiences. He said that I should come up and visit Bekanon, his island. I thanked him but explained that I had young children and so asked for a rain check.
A few years later, David Mathies (an old friend and a recently graduated MD) and I spent a week paddling the Bustard Islands. The Bustards are largely wilderness, but seven of the 550 islands are inhabited, and we spent time thinking about the possibility of having a place of our own out here and luxuriating in all this wilderness. However, I already had a house on the water in Port Dalhousie as well as parents with a cottage in Sundridge and David was living in a house on Fairy Lake near Huntsville. It was wonderful to think about, but realistically, this wasn’t likely to happen.
Two years later I was organizing a week-long trip around Georgian Bay with my two daughters. They were now 7 and 9. Their mother, my wife would have some quiet time at my parent’s cottage in Sundridge. The three of us would pack a tent, put a canoe (my homemade one) on the roof of my ancient Toyota Land Cruiser and set out. We would visit the far end of Manitoulin Island, take the ferry to Tobermory and explore the cliffs on the east side of the Bruce Peninsula. As part of the planning, I called my aforementioned fellow Board of Governors friend, Hugh, and said that I would like to take him up on his offer of a visit to his island with my kids. Hugh said that he was already scheduled with patients in the time that I was coming by, but he would rearrange things and meet us at the dock at Key Marina. We were scheduled to stay for two nights.
Hugh met us at the dock in his beautifully polished 22-foot Starcraft in full convertible mode. Thirty minutes later we were tying up at his boat dock at Bekanon Island. We were treated royally and spent the days exploring in his 14 foot aluminium runabout and swimming from the dock off the back of the island. After dinner we enjoyed fires in the huge granite fireplace. Although old, everything on the island was in excellent condition. Hugh explained that when he purchased Bekanon Island it was tired, showing the signs of wear from the previous six decades, and set about to restore it.
He had a contractor on site for two summers rebuilding walkways, the kitchen and just about everything else. He had a barge bring in 8 tons of pressure treated pine. He sanded down all the floors and revarnished them himself. All the living room chairs had been recovered in white canvas and there was thick white carpeting on the floors. The 15 beds all got new mattresses and bedding. [3] There were amazing vistas out of every window. Hugh explained that in the 20 square miles around Bekanon there were some 800 islands with about 7 neighbours. It was essentially a rustic luxury destination in the middle of a wilderness.
I thought of David Mathies and our distant dreams of an island of our own, but I knew that Hugh would never sell and, even if he did, the numbers would be way out of our league. On our third day, as we were walking toward the dock to depart this bit of paradise, I decided to say to Hugh that if he was ever considering selling, he should let me know. He said that, in fact, the island was for sale. It was, for him, too much property for one person to occupy and maintain. I asked what he was asking. The number that he came up with was something about a tenth of the number that I had been thinking.[4] I asked him to give me a few weeks, and that, in conjunction with some friends, there would be an offer.
The rest of our trip around the Bay was wonderful, but the whole time I was looking forward to our last day, when we would drop in on David Mathies in Huntsville on our way back to Sundridge. The asking price was surprisingly low, but maintenance looked daunting. However, as a partnership the cost would be lower yet and maintenance would be shared.
The kids and I shared dinner with the Mathies and I launched into rhapsodies about the wonderfulness of Bekanon Island and how we could all live happily ever after as co-owners. David was all-in right away. Vicky, however, looked at me with the sort of scepticism that wives often save for someone trying to lead their husband off in a really dumb direction. What follows is a very condensed version of my recollection of our conversation.
Vicky: It sounds absolutely fabulous, and I am happy for you that you found this, but you have to understand: we have just finished getting David through medical school, we built this beautiful new house located on Fairy Lake in the heart of Muskoka and we have three young children. Additionally, we have debt beyond imagining and, no, we don’t need a second place on the water that needs two hours by car and a half hour by boat to get to. I have rarely, in my entire life, encountered an idea so poorly thought out.
Me: I take your meaning. However, would you consider at least coming out and seeing the island? Hugh has said that he can take us out in a couple of weeks on the Saturday following Labour Day. It will cost nothing, and at least you get to tour the island, and perhaps someday in some far distant future we may be able to think about a property like this.
Vicky: After a pause and a look at David M: Well, OK. We can go out and see the island: but, understand this: there is no way that we are getting involved. None!
Me: (to myself): Yes!
The trip out: It really wasn’t fair. It was an absolutely perfect Saturday on the weekend following Labour Day. Almost hot, with what was left of summer, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky or a ripple in the water. Hugh’s Starcraft effortlessly took us down the Key River, across the waters of Georgian Bay out to Bekanon Island. We toured the island. When I first visited the island it was in full “real estate presentation clean”, it was simply the way that Hugh kept things. This time, if it was possible, it was in even better order.
We wandered the island and all of its buildings and bedrooms. We curled our toes in the deep white carpets. We admired the new kitchen with new china and the views out of the all the windows. Nature was on its best behaviour. The sun shone brilliantly. There wasn’t a neighbour to be seen.
I disappeared for a while and then walked back into the living room. Vicky was sitting on the sofa beside my wife Glenna. They had been looking out the open patio doors at the islands across the way and talking. Vicky looked at me with this great big grin and said those memorable words: “David, I need this island.”
Thereafter we figured out how to arrange everything. We thought that a third couple would be ideal and approached Joel and Paula, David’s friends from his medical school days. Paula was quite pregnant with her second child, and she and Joel signed on, sight unseen.
By the end of 1987 Bekanon Island was ours
Ken Douglas, my good friend and lawyer, drew up a partnership agreement between the six of us. Friends who become partners without a clear agreement between themselves often destroy both their friendships and the partnership. This agreement assumed the worst to begin with. It is a nasty, perhaps brutal piece of business. It bristles with shotgun clauses, exits and resolutions. To paraphrase Paul Simon’s song, it provided 50 ways to leave your lover: you had to be on best behaviour. We all signed, and now, some 30 years later, as a result of this well-crafted, somewhat terrifying agreement, we are better friends than ever.
Bekanon Island, as a partnership, has worked so much better than we had ever hoped. Use of the island is on a time-share basis. We divide the warm season into 9 two-week time periods, and rotate who gets to choose first, second and so on every year. We have an annual business meeting, usually in November. It was in person until Covid and now we have embraced the ease of Zoom. The meetings are complete with financial statements, minutes and agendas. Every spring, around mid-June we have a work weekend, that is in the best tradition of Tom Sawyer and his fence: we have a waiting list of folks who want to join us and do some real things. We cover all costs: transportation, food and wine. We offer good food, decent wine, excellent company and compelling projects. It is pretty much a sold-out event every year. In fact one of our most capable friends is only interested in coming up if there is a particularly good undertaking on the books.
My one-sixth interest in the island in 1988 would have bought me a decent car, but not a great one. And it would have been rusted out and junked years ago. The island has done much better: granite breaks down very, very slowly, the buildings stay repaired and I have found a community of friends and friends of friends that would not have know each other without the trust and cooperation that it took to pull all of this together.
So: Here we are on the island. This is Part One. Part Two: Life on the island, adventures, misadventures and more to come in next year’s newsletter.
Further thoughts: Camping in the 30,000 Islands.
One of the great things about canoe camping in the islands of Georgian Bay is that there are essentially no portages. Another is that, unlike May and June in most of the rest of Northern Ontario, there are no blackflies. Blackflies need running water to breed, and there is no running water in the islands. Ponds and marshes, yes. Open water (e.g. Georgian Bay), yes. But there are no rivers, creeks or any other sort of running water, and so there are no black flies. So, for me, June is the best time to be there: long nights (the last twilight disappears around 11:00, very few people and no blackflies. Some years have mosquitoes, some none, but in 55 years of camping in the islands in June I have encountered one blackfly: I think that he was lost.
A final reason for Georgian Bay camping is that there are almost endless campsites. You can, within reason, camp where you want to on crown land as long as it is not an organized park. Most of the uninhabited islands (almost all of them in the north of the Bay) are available for camping. Bring a tent. This site clarifies the situation: https://northernontario.travel/
The open water of the Bay can be tricky if it is blowing hard, but is nicely manageable with lighter winds or calm. Between the islands it is almost completely safe. I now use a water taxi from Wright’s Marina to transport me out to the Bustards, but for decades I paddled out. My shoulders, still adequate, aren’t up to endless paddling in the way that they used to be.
I started camping out on the Bay in 1968. My last canoe trip was an expedition out to the Bustard Islands in 2019 accompanied by brother John and a couple of friends. I’m starting to think about the next trip, hopefully next year in June.
The Rest of the Newsletter
The big news in the Canadian world of things dental is the federal governments dental care initiative: the Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP).
Details are still being negotiated and worked out. The stakeholders include the federal government, the provincial government (healthcare comes under provincial jurisdiction), Sunlife (the plan administrator) as well as dentists (represented provincially by the Ontario Dental Association and federally by the Canadian Dental Association).
Although we, as an office, haven’t signed up yet, we’re quite certain that we will. The delay in enrolling is largely because negotiations are still underway and it’s good to see the final document before you sign on the dotted line.
In rough terms you would qualify if:
-You have an “adjusted family net income” of below $90,000
-You do not have access to regular dental insurance
-You are a Canadian citizen for tax purposes
-You have filed your tax return in the past year
Will this cover the entire fee? Generally no. As with many dental insurance plans, the CDCP will cover the large majority (about 80%) of the dental fee, but not all of it.
If you have an adjusted family net income of under $70,000 you will be eligible for 100% of the available benefits.
If between $70,000 and $80,000 you will receive 60%
If between $80,000 and $90,000 you will receive 40%
As an office, we are in favour of this program. It looks after families and individuals who don’t have access to dental insurance and whose circumstances makes dental care difficult to access. In the same way that OHIP shares the burden of medical costs across our whole population, CDCP promises to do the same for dentistry.
The Government of Canada website: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/dental/dental-care-plan.html
gives a lot more details.
Overall it looks like a reasonable plan with significant coverage for those who qualify.
With luck it will all be organised; we will be signed up and we will be able to put this to use making dental care more accessible.
If you have questions or concerns, do give us a call and we will do our best to help you.
Other Items:
Food impaction. We keep mentioning this, but it is worth repeating. If you have an area where food keeps getting jammed in, do come and see us. That jammed or impacted food feeds the bacteria that cause decay and it “turbocharges” the decay process.
Some years ago my brother lost part of an older filling and food started impacting between the two teeth. He was busy and put off seeing me for about 6 months. By the time he saw me there was a cavity that was almost into the nerve, which would have required a root canal and crown to save the tooth. Fortunately we were OK with just a new, much larger restoration, but it has become a cautionary tale. If food is getting jammed in, see us sooner rather than later!
Referrals:
We continue to be asked if we are accepting new patients: yes we are. We are happy to see new people joining our practice and we thank you for your referrals and your confidence in us.
In conclusion:
We here at Lakeside Dental wish all of you a most excellent spring and summer. I like the great Canadian winter, but I like the long days and freedom of summer better. Enjoy!
David Bergen & Team
[1] Continental shields, formed of Precambrian rock (more than 542 million years old) are bordered by belts of folded rocks of post-Cambrian age resulting in the growth of continents. Did you know this? I didn’t.
[2] Georgian Bay seems to have more than its share of steep, choppy waves. The boat was designed with a fuller bow and stern and greater freeboard to give greater buoyancy in those conditions. It was a tradeoff of speed for peace of mind.
[3] If my kids, relatively neat, but still kids, were walking about eating something, Hugh would follow them with a brush and a dust scoop. Hugh maintained things to a remarkably high standard.
[4] Cottages close to home with road access were in very high demand. A place in the far end of Georgian Bay with a half hour boat ride was apparently not. I would have paid a significant premium for all that isolation, but as it turned out, the market thought otherwise.