The Rescue Mission

EVERY FAMILY HAS ITS OWN travel-to-the-cottage routine, a set of rituals that help us transition out of our frenetic city lives. We plan the meals, pack the car, and watch the clock tick down toward departure time; we feel the week’s worries dissipate on the drive up; our memory unlocks the smell of cottage air long before we arrive, tantalizing us with anticipation. The routine is all about easing us through a portal in space-time, from a life where we are always racing forward to one where we are in the moment. And we bristle when nuisances—late Friday business meetings, traffic jams, an empty gas tank—roughen up the transition.

But what if you couldn’t reach your cottage at all? What if the space-time portal were suddenly boarded up, and your get-to-the-cottage routine was ground to a halt? That was the dilemma that Peter and Mary Perdue confronted six years ago, the kind of daunting existential threat that left them wondering if they’d ever be able to enjoy their cottage again.

Their cottage is on Nares Inlet, some 50 km north of Parry Sound, Ont., one of the many narrows along the Georgian Bay coastline. As with all of the inlet’s 45 cottages, the only way to reach Peter and Mary’s place is by boat. For more than half a century, the cottagers have relied upon the marina at Springhaven Lodge, an old-school fishing lodge located at the head of the inlet. It had been owned and operated by the Scale family since it first opened in 1959. So when the Scales announced, in 2014, that they were putting their property up for sale, it sent shudders through the entire Nares Inlet community.

“We all tend to assume that these things will just keep going forever,” Peter says, “so it was a shock to the community. I mean, if people thought about it