My love for the Flats, by the fact that I am the mother of Peter Meek, has lasted longer than his. My first visit to the Flats was in the summer of 1920, and was the occasion of my first observation about the world around me, my first subjective and objective comment. It was a story so frequently told by my father and mother, that I now realize that they also knew it to be a startling observation by their youngest and only female child. And the spell of the Flats elicited it.
Captain Hartman lived in a hip roofed sparely built cottage about a hundred yards from the North Channel Gun Club (after many ownership and name changes, now the North Channel Yacht Club. All I can remember of the Gun Club was a big music box that played huge brass cylinder records.
Since we visited Captain Hartman's daughter in Buffalo in later years, there must have once been a Mrs. Hartman, but I only knew the Captain as a man living alone. Or maybe, like my mother, Mrs. Hartman wasn't all that crazy about the Flats.
Captain Hartman lived pretty simply, and did little cooking. Consequently it was no inconvenience for him to have all his pots and pans strung together on a long piece of twine and hung from a couple of pegs in the kitchen. This was his alarm clock for visitors, since he himself was an early riser. When my three older brothers, George (1907-1924), Harold (1909-1996), and Ben, (1913-1993) my parents and I visited Captain Hartman during the summer of 1920 I was perhaps 17 or 18 months old, being born on January 6, 1919. Like most cottages, the second floor was just an open space with a flight of stairs leading to a trap door in the attic floor for access. My brothers slept up there and I was on the first floor with my parents. In the morning Captain Hartman collected the pots and pans in a pile and grasping all the handles in one hand would hurl them up the stairs. One pot would fall, and being tied to the others would pull another pot behind it, and this would dislodge more pots and the resulting clatter would rouse the sleepers in the upper story.
Captain Hartman was pretty rudimentary about housecleaning, too. The cottage either had been built to slope from front to back, or had achieved that configuration over time, because his method of cleaning all the wet, sandy, muddy footprints off the floor before he left on Sunday night to go back to Detroit, was to sluice a pail of water through the front door, and then follow the water with a mop, all over the living room and kitchen and out the back door. This was the result of his years living on boats. At home, where we had all wooden floors, our mother was a twice a week floor scrubber, followed by spreading newspapers over her freshly scrubbed floors. The whole family did their most exhaustive newspaper perusal during floordrying time.
We had arrived on Friday night, after dad got off work. Very early on Saturday morning, mother dressed me and then handed me to my father to go outside while she prepared one of her famous meals that made her one of Captain Hartman's favorite guests. He liked coming to her house, too. Dad and I went out into the dewy grass, and the sparkling morning so characteristic of the Flats in summer. At that time, my dad still had some curly hair, but his forehead was already receding. He would be bald most of his life, but George and Harold had his gorgeous curly hair. Harold, as an adult, kept his hair in a kind of butch cut that hid the curliness. But I can tell you that in their teens, George and Harold had the kind of hair you'd die for. Mine wasn't like theirs, but it had its own wavy curls. At 18 months however, I had precious little blond hair that mom never put ribbons in, and never spat on to make curls in it. It was just very short.
From the altitude of my father's arms, I had my first look at the St. Clair Flats. I looked down towards the North Channel, and then slowly panned my head around looking down the Snibora. Across the channel were the shallow areas full of reeds, and probably red winged blackbirds. Finally I turned my face towards my father's, and made my first comment on the world, as I saw it. "lots of tardy." (water). The beauty of the Flats had elicited my first cultural comment.
I loved water. My mother's twice weekly floor scrubbing resulted in one of my early accidents. She had poured boiling water into her pail from the big tea kettle when the phone rang. She turned away to pick up the phone, and having heard the water pouring I came toddling around through the door to the dining room and pulled the pail over on myself. I was bandages from the waist up, and out of love and consideration she carefully bandaged my hands with the unburned ring finger and pinkie left free on each hand so that I could have some control over my environment.
Not many minutes later, she missed me, and found me out in the back yard at the very top of the wire fence, using just my ring fingers and pinkies to climb. I loved climbing, as well as water.