During the twenties Mr. Peterson--a duck hunting buddy of my father's--leased a high spot near the Doty Highway to locate a hunting cottage. Very early in the great depression my father acquired the property in order to prevent Mr. Peterson losing the property altogether. The progressive purchase and loss and sale of homes in the Lindquist family is a story in itself, and accounts in part for my great love of the Flats. The Flats was the one constant in our peripatetic moving from house to house. Another time I'll write about housing in the depression.
We visited the Peterson's or rented their cottage during the twenties. I've finally figured out that when we had money we rented a boat well at the end of Anchor Bay Drive. When we were too poor, we left the boat at Mr. Clawson's (duck hunting buddy) house on Anchor Bay Drive.
Taking the Putt-Putt all the way from Clawson's up the cut to the North Channel and then on to the cottage was a long trip in the dark on a Friday night, at the speed we travelled. Every Flatter can apparently navigate all those shallows and channels awake or asleep. I liked being right in the prow of the Putt-Putt, but mother preferred to have me right next to her, preferably with one arm holding me down.
Fish flies are a fact of life on the Flats. The period is short, but dramatic. Sometimes the gorgeous weather at the beginning of summer makes a newcomer to the Flats decide to paint his house. If it coincides with fish fly season, that house is quite a sight! I've seen it. A never to be forgotten event is driving 43 miles back to Detroit on the narrow highway in fish fly season. The sound of tires rolling over millions of fishflies will stay with you for seven decades. I know. It does.
Peterson's cottage, as it became the Lindquist cottage was incredibly precious. The best spot was the front porch, screened, of course. There were rocking chairs as well as a double bed on the porch. When we arrived on Friday night, it was late. On the counter in the kitchen were four kerosene lamps that had been cleaned and filled just before we left the previous Sunday evening. These were lit and then distributed to the dining room, the back bedroom, upstairs, and one left in the kitchen. The perishables had to be put away. The ice block we had purchased as we left the mainland was installed in the icebox, the drip pan installed under the icebox, and milk and vegetables put into the icebox. More ice was put into the small chest icebox on the porch and soft drinks were put in that one, and the drip pan installed under the ice chest. Keeping the drip pans from overflowing was everyones' responsibility. Whenever time hung heavy on mother she would ask, "has anyone checked the drip pans?"
Many years later, when the ice boxes were trashed in the marsh behind the cottage, Bill and I rescued the brass hardware from the rotted icebox. Would that we had known that the iceboxes were being junked. We could have refinished them as antiques. The hardware will turn up someday among our effects. The water tank in the attic had to be filled. Everyone took a turn. The pump was primed and we would begin to fill the twenty gallon tank in the attic. We worried not at all about the purity of the water in those early years. A well point was attached to a pipe that ran from directly in front of the sheet piling across the yard and under the house to come up into the kitchen.
When all the food had been stowed, if we had company with us, mother would make coffee and the adults would sit around the long oval dining room table. It was a round wooden affair with a huge central pedestal. All the leaves were left permanently in the table and the table was covered with oilcloth. This was the only oilcloth that was ever part of our lives. Mother had an aversion to oilcloth, and only breakfast was served on it. Lunch and dinner was served on any one of several long tablecloths spread over the oilcloth. Sometime I'll write about oilcloth.
I was sent to bed out on the porch, and my brothers slept upstairs. On stormy nights I slept in the front bedroom. The windows around the cottage were opened when we arrived and where there were no full screens, the small sliding variety were used to keep out the mosquitoes. The windows in the front bedroom and dining room that opened to the porch had no screens but were opened wide to let air in. The front and back doors were tied open to let the breezes go through the house. I loved to lie in bed outside the dining room windows and listen to the adults talking over coffee. Their voices would sound further and further away. That was the warmest, most secure feeling I have ever known in my life. Nothing would ever change. I would be on the front porch in bed every summer weekend for my entire life. My father and mother and their friends would forever be in the dining room talking and laughing. I was safe, loved, strong and healthy and so was everyone else. I have no words to describe how precious it all was. The voices sounded even further away, and then it was morning.
A soft morning breeze gently hummed in the screens. You could hear mother in the kitchen. You could hear red winged blackbirds in the marsh. There would be a splash as either my father or one of my brothers dove into the cut next to the cottage for an early morning dip. After a trip to the outhouse, a scanty wash was followed by my carrying last night's lamp from the center of the table to the kitchen counter to be cleaned and stored for the day. Then back to the dining room and brush away the collection of bugs and other flying carcasses that had stayed behind on the table where the lamp had stood. I would set the table with the odds and ends of china--no paper plates for my mother. Breakfast was eggs and bacon and some of the buns or bread that mother had baked on Friday at home in Detroit. No coffee and bacon ever smelled so good.
The first summer that we owned the cottage, in 1930, maybe 1931, my father and I planted willow trees around the cottage. They were just five foot branches with most of the leaves cut off, and we stuck them into the clayey ground. They needed nothing more from us. They became huge over the years. They have grown old and died.
To the west of our cottage was Mr. Brown's cottage. Mr. Brown had lost his property during the depression. He sold or gave the building, which had deteriorated badly to my dad. The porch floor had caved in and some of the floors inside. Dad gutted the cottage and we moved it to the west side of our cottage and it was anchored half on our lot and half over the water in the cut, and became our boat house. What an idyllic spot. You could sit on the floor with your legs hanging into the boat well, and sunbeams reflecting off the water danced on the ceiling and walls. It was always so warm in there, often too warm, and the lazy sounds of insects, and water perpetually lapping on the sheet piling or against the boat forever in my ears. One of the things my dad loved to do was to give me tangled fishlines to unravel. I was not patient, and he was sure that taking an end of fish line in my hands and carefully following its course through the tangles without pulling would be just what my character needed. I did a lot of that in the boathouse. In later years the boat house was moved to a lot on the other side of the cut. Then my mother blossomed. Painting and decorating that little house was my mother's joy. She took old furniture from Detroit and painted it in cream and pale green. The paint harmonized the various styles. She sewed curtains and prepared that little spot for some fortunate family. Dad sold it to Harold Irwin, the salesman for Ring Screw Works.
Strangely, I have no idea of what my brothers liked about the cottage. I knew that my mother thought the cottage boring. She didn't swim except on rare occasions. She worked as much as she could to pass the time. She didn't row a boat, or run a motor. She dug a garden and planted vegetables, she rocked on the front porch and embroidered table runners and table cloths which she gave to friends and relatives as gifts. The only boat rides she took were to and from the cottage on weekends. In later years she took up fishing, and was incredibly successful. Another essay will cover mother's fishing.
My father's love for the Flats was profound. He never tired of finding another project to work on. There was always something to build, remodel, improve, go into town in the boat for necessary supplies to accomplish these projects and to bring back more milk, more bread, more cold meats, and anything else mother ran out of. It often included an ice cream cone. And he could talk forever to his cronies that we met. I was always safe anywhere we went and I was never checked on or reprimanded. I adored my father and tolerated my brothers. I only played with my brothers when my mother forced them to play with me.
I always wound the mantle clock on arrival. My mother and father would stop it before they went to bed, because they didn't like it chiming in the night, but I would start it again in the morning and everyone enjoyed its cheerful chiming throughout the day.
In the kitchen there was a window in the east wall, with a counter below it, with open shelves beneath the counter. On the north wall near the east end was a cupboard with doors above where the dishes were kept, and below it was a deeper cupboard with food supplies and large utensils. To the left of the cupboard was the big cookstove. It used wood for fuel. It had a space above the heating area where you could keep things warm or warm plates. It had a water reservoir where hot water accumulated, although there always was a very large enamel or aluminum tea kettle on the stove. It had a large oven in the center. Next to the stove was the door to the dining room. On the south wall next to the door to the back yard was the icebox. Next to it moving east, was the drainboard, the pump and the sink. And then you were back to the counter under the east window. On the west wall was the door to my parents' bedroom, then there was a mirror and a metal box for a comb and hairbrush, and a small chest below with a bowl and ewer for personal hygiene. Towels hung above it and on each side. Next to it was the door to the dining room and the door to the attic. There was a trap door at the top of the staircase and many bumped heads year after year, as persons hurried up the stairs without looking up to see if the trapdoor had been opened.
Around the corner in the dining room on the south wall was a server. A black oak affair with a long drawer full of many odds and ends, an open shelf below the drawer, and on the server was the mantle clock, ashtrays, and a framed picture of a little boy sitting on a cement step at the entrance to a garden. Below the picture was a verse that said, "Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I'm going out in the garden and eat worms. Yesterday I had two smooth ones and one wooly one." In the corner was a metal covered asbestos platform for the heating stove. The heating stove was used during duck hunting season and on rare cold days in summer. On the east wall was a window, and between the heating stove and the window was a metal Remington Arms advertising picture. The painting was of two men with shot guns and assorted hunting dogs, on point. On the other side of the window was the phonograph. The north wall had two windows and the door to the porch. The long dining room table had 14 chairs around it. It could accomodate even more in a pinch. Such an eclectic selection of chairs you never saw.
In the back bedroom there was a picture of an old hunter, with a hunting dog resting his head on his master's knee. It had a silver frame that many years later I wanted to salvage. I got it home, but when I took the print out of the frame, the frame started to crumble in my hands. Such heaps of of shreds of dry wood! There was also another metal advertising picture in that room. It was of a World War I doughboy leaning back over a wooden gate to pat a hunting dog on the head, taking his farewell from his pet, and it said underneath, "Not this trip old boy!" In the front bedroom was a picture of one of the boat races on the Detroit River featuring one of the early Gar Wood speed boats. There was also a picture of a lady in flowing robes, with long curling hair, in an oval gold metal frame, that Peter now has.