by Emil O. Foofnick, beard flecked with campfire smoke and walleye scales
There’s a place where time forgets to tick — where the loons call just to remind you that silence is alive. That place, my friends, is Pine Beach Lodge on Eagle Lake in Ontario, Canada.
Helen’s spirit still hums in the rafters there — soft as the morning mist off the lake — though her chair by the window now sits empty except for a folded afghan and a memory or two. Her grandson Rick and his wife Allie keep her dream alive, and they do it with that quiet Northern grace that doesn’t need to say much. Just a nod, a grin, and a “Coffee’s hot — help yourself.”
The lodge itself is a museum of memories — walls lined with the ghosts of a thousand good days. Old lures hang like Christmas ornaments, each one with a story far bigger than the fish it once fooled. Mounted pike glare down from the beams with that smug look only a twenty-pounder can pull off. There’s a stuffed bear hidden to surprise newbies (or maybe two, depending on how much rye the storyteller’s had) and a wolf with a grin that suggests he knows more than you do.
I’ve been going there longer than my casting arm remembers. With my boy and his friends, with old Randy — God rest his laughter — and with more kindred spirits than I can count. We’ve swapped enough fish tales in that lodge to fill a library — though not one of them, I suspect, would survive peer review. By the time the second pot of coffee or the third whiskey bottle runs dry, the walleye are longer, the winds wilder, and the “one that got away” is practically a submarine.
Out on the water, Pine Beach becomes a map of memory:
Tugboat, where the big muskies lurk like rusted anchors.
Gull Rock, where you can swear the birds are laughing at your casting.
The Log Spot, where we once caught five pike and one blue heron in as many minutes.
Three Sisters, those three stubborn islands that look harmless until they’re not.
And beware the others — Grandpa’s Rock, Bob’s Rocks, and Rick’s Rocks — the hidden sentinels of Eagle Lake. They sit just below the surface, patient as old fishermen, waiting for the inattentive and the overconfident. I’ve missed kissing a few of them with my prop over the years. They don’t kiss back kindly.
But even when the line snaps or the motor stalls, there’s no real loss here. Because Pine Beach Lodge isn’t about catching fish — it’s about catching time. Time with your people. Time that smells of pine and outboard exhaust, that sounds like laughter bouncing off cabin walls, that feels like the steady hum of a trolling motor and a heart at peace.
There are places to get lost up there — a thousand coves, islands, and quiet corners — and every one of them somehow leads you right back to yourself.
So here’s to Rick and Allie, the keepers of the flame.
To Helen, whose spirit still keeps the coffee hot.
To Randy, who’s surely fishing in fairer waters.
And to every soul who’s ever watched the sunset bleed across that lake and thought, “This… this is what heaven must look like.”
That’s Pine Beach Lodge, my favorite place on Earth.
That’s all I have to say. I will say no more.
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