Wood Lake, ON - Murray McLauchlan
My Watermark is Wood Lake, Ontario.
Every time I come back to Ontario from anywhere I always feel at home. Home to me in Ontario is this, it's what we're in, it's Ontario's lakes. As a kid I had this great mystery about them, the Great North Woods I used to call it, but it really did mean something to me. When we first as a family were able to go up north to a place called Wood Lake, near Bracebridge, Ontario, it's where I caught my very first Bass, it's where I had my very first taste of real freedom as a kid.
Old Bob Crowley, the guy who owned the cottage we were staying at, had this little plywood skiff with a 5-and-a-half horsepower Johnson on it. One day he said "go over to Milton's Marina and get us a loaf of bread". So I got in the boat, never driven a boat before but I knew how the engine worked, took off, got the thing up on plane, and I think they could have heard me screaming all the way from Toronto because it was absolute freedom. I've always loved boats and I've always loved lakes ever since.