Chicness is my weakness, as the great Tori Spelling says. First thing I’m going to do when I get to New York is reclaim my bike. Then I’m going to pedal out to Brooklyn and beg Nina, my beloved Lithuanian hairdresser, to fix me.

I’ve had a year and a half of two-dollar Third World haircuts. I’ve hacked at it recreationally with a blunt nail-scissors. There were several dodgy dye-jobs (“You don’t have semi-permanente, señorita? Oh, yeah, permanente, whatever.”).

And now the final indignity: a Canadian haircut. An Ottawa haircut, like Jean Chrétien. It was a reckless economy measure before New York embezzles my pension, and though my sister swore that Pierre had Toni & Guy training, the bowlcut he perpetrated lacks the je ne sais rien of my Cambodian ‘do.

I look like the lovechild of Wayne Gretzky and Rosie O’Donnell. Fecking Canadians.

It’s lo-og, lo-og,
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.
It’s lo-og, lo-og,
It’s better than bad, it’s good.Everyone wants a log,
You’re gonna love it, log
Come on and get your log,
Everyone needs a log.

—Ren and Stimpy

Ranger Rick is a hero of mine, the Soo’s own Renaissance man. Here is how to make a Canadian Renaissance man, in case you’re wondering:

1. Plant him in a home-built cabin eight miles up a dirt road.
2. Give him ten brothers and sisters to knock the corners off him, and a mother and father who teach him not to be scared of anything.
3. Keep him away from school until he is old enough to resist indoctrination. Let him regularly stash his hated city shoes at the gate, “borrow” a boat, and wave to the foxed truant officer standing on the bank.
4. Marry him off to a fine and formidable co-conspirator at the ripe old age of nineteen.
5. Endow him with a quick mind, a boxer’s speed, a seanchaí’† art, an aesthete’s eye, and a woodsman’s soul.

On the phone, Rick coaches me on woodchopping. When he worked at a ski-lodge as a young man, he was given the job of splitting wood one whole day a week. Since he could split enough in eight hours to keep the entire resort going for the week, it was pointless letting anyone else do it. He spent his solitary chopping marathons inventing jokes for his large collection, and new material would be demanded by the other grunts as soon as he finished.
“Now, you’re stacking the logs end in?” he enquires. I have no idea. He explains that if I’m loading logs against the cabin, the fat end goes against the wall (or was it the other way around?). Of course, I tell him, as I realise this is why my drunken woodpiles need to be braced. Wood warms you five times, he says. Chopping the tree, splitting the logs, stacking the pile, carrying it in, and finally burning it.

This summer I was given a gift of an Annie Dillard book, On Writing. I haven’t read her famous Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I suspect she is too exquisite for my taste. Prepaid phone cards. This guidebook is a series of metaphors comparing the act of writing to various kinds of hard physical labour. For God’s sake, woman, I wanted to tell her, writing isn’t tin-mining. Tin-mining is tin-mining. Ask the Bolivians which they’d rather do.

But she has a chapter on log-splitting that stuck in my mind. Every morning she had to split her firewood to heat her draughty writer’s cabin on some island on the Pacific Northwest. The epiphany eventually ambles in: aim for the chopping block, not the log.

This is absolutely true. I forget how Annie Dillard ties it to writing, but it applies to Rick’s ski-lodge punchlines, too. Log-splitting is a satisfaction that ranks far above popping bubblewrap and just below squashing mosquitos. These days I live to see two quarters of basswood fall away from the blade like flakes of cod. I’m hampered by poor coordination (will I hit the log?) and a weakling physique (will I be able to swing a maul without braining myself?), but splitting wood requires technique more than strength. My technique so far is focused on not whacking myself in the coccyx when I drop the axe behind me, and on hitting the log with the sharp edge when possible. The really big logs have bested me and my maul, but I have the aching shoulders to prove I’ve tried.

Woodfires are luxuries in Ireland. Our native forests were cut down centuries ago, now replaced by dreary ranks of non-native Christmas trees. We burn turf (peat) or more usually, coal. I love these Canadian trees that turn colour and drop leaves just like storybook trees. I love that this cabin is built of logs still wrapped in silver bark. But lordy, after splintering birch into toothpicks all day long, I can hardly grind the pepper on my dinner.

† Seanchaí is an Irish term for a storyteller or yarnspinner. It was a dedicated role in the community, and taken very seriously.

The tree guys came today. Tim picked them up from the government dock and brought them to the island to examine the big trees that loomed over the cabin, too ornery for his novice chainsaw skills. They agreed a price and got to work. Paul was a Newfie and Bill was from Nova Scotia, so they sounded just like my Roscommon relatives. They were fine specimens of northern manhood as it is romantically imagined by too-thin girls in Manhattan: flannel shirts, handlebar moustaches, and powerful chainsaws. They gave the old birches a good seeing-to.

I tried to impress them by nonchalently mixing chinking concrete in my old wheelbarrow. Unfortunately, I can’t answer questions and keep count of measures at the same time, so there was a suspicious amount of sand. Then I was distracted enough to tip in a full bucket of water, swamping my too-heavy mix. I arranged my I-meant-to-do-that face and they politely continued oiling their chainsaws and answering Tim’s questions.

They climbed doomed trees and leaned back in the straps glamorously. Their chainsaws—orange Stihls with 20-inch blades—roared. They hacked at giant stumps, shaving them flush to the forest floor. They cut huge boles into firewood lengths, leaving me to cart them to the woodpile. Then they puttered back to the mainland.

The spell of beautiful weather in Ottawa has been broken. We got several inches of rain yesterday and were saved some lumberjacking by the wind. The gales put me in the mood for chinking. Chinking is the kind of primitive house project I can really get behind. To chink, you mix concrete according to whatever crackpot formula Google invents, and daub it on the gaps between the logs. In my case, I slop it on, admiring how my lumpy mix matches the silver cedar logs, dropping huge gobs on the leaves until it occurs to me to put down a plywood blob-catcher. The process is satisfyingly close to clay-and-wattle daub, in which we would all still be shivering if progress relied on people like me.

I am reading The Walls Around Us, by David Owen. The subtitle is “The Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works.” He’s a New Yorker kind of guy, so it’s heavier on the deeper meaning of gypsum than on practical application. (Did you know that Benjamin Franklin brought gypsum to America from France?) Because he’s tweedy, I trust him more on his descriptions of what his contractors did in his eighteenth-century Connecticut house than on his own excursions into DIY. But if you can tolerate the smirkiness of a former editor of the Harvard Lampoon, it’s interesting. And now I get to parrot nonsense about the history of lime as I make concrete in an old wheelbarrow with a garden trowel.

Six parts sand, four parts lime, one part Portland cement and a bucket of dirty river water. I couldn’t find the hog bristles that the traditional log chinking formulas require, and Tim refused to humour me by shaving into the mix. I’m also hindered by my inability to mix more than Lilliputian amounts of concrete at a time. A sofa-cushion-sized bag of sand weighs more than half my weight. Though I’m a crack baker who doesn’t own an electric mixer, my pastry arm is still too puny to stir more than a few teaspoons of this stuff.

The winter lodge is still at the, uh, drafting stage. My sister has blessed me with a crop of new Canuck in-laws who are kindred spirits. When they left college, Kim and George moved into an old building on forty acres at far side of Ottawa. It’s off the grid, and they didn’t have the money to get the power lines extended. Undaunted, they built an extraordinary modern house around it over several years. Their best stuff is salvaged: the mortuary-refrigerator doors into the garage, the hospital cabinets, the mid-century modern furniture rescued from the roadside. It’s elegant enough to have been in Architectural Digest, and completely solar and wind-powered. My first Canadian Thanksgiving was spent oohing and ahing at this marvel while the kids ran as wild as my ideas.

George was glad to help enthusiastic building newbies. Tim’s cabin has plenty of room for one or two people, but you can’t insulate an old log cabin properly without destroying the essence that makes it cool. “Why don’t you insulate it temporarily?” George said, “Wrap it in Tyvek and stack haybales outside it. That’ll get you through a winter while you plan something really good. And you can practice on a small structure in the meantime.”

So that’s what we’re doing. Chinking. Roof insulation, covered by painter’s drop cloths. Tyvek and straw bales for that Three Little Pigs appeal. That hairdryer-plastic stuff on the windows. Preparing ground. Taking out wobbly and/or inconvenient trees. Figuring out a year-round water supply. Planning a little practice building, just for fun—a Japanese bathhouse (pattern #144) maybe. And after all that I can go to Ireland for the winter, morally secure that Tim will not freeze due to my dereliction.

Inexplicably, Canadians are into Coronation Street. I gather this from CBC radio, which reports on Coronation Street viewing parties, called “Ping Parties”.

In case you don’t know, Corrie is the longest-running soap in Britain (I think). It’s set in adenoidal Manchester, and apparently it’s grim up north. As is traditional in British soaps, most of the characters are deeply unattractive and whiny, and their lives are long strings of misery relieved only by trips to the pub, where they fight. Periodically, British gossip mags show the soap stars dolled up in “At Home” interviews, but they cannot be glamourised. For example, Gail one of the longest-running characters on Coronation Street, is a nag and looks like a camel. Far too many articles have been written about how the Americans like their escapism to be aspirational while the Brits seem most comforted by schadenfreude, but clichés stick because they’re true.

I watched Coronation Street every evening when I was at school. So did everyone else. Finish dinner, clear the dishes, bring the tray of tea and biscuits into the fire just as the elderly theme tune started at 7.30. I haven’t followed it since my Leaving Cert, though last I heard they had graduated to serial killers and scandalous affairs. When the CBC played the opening music last night, I started to fret about my Maths homework.

The most entertaining part of the Canadian absorption in Coronation Street is that they clearly can’t follow it. On last night’s show, they played a snatch of dialogue and then invited listeners to call in to tell them what they were saying.
   “I think it’s ‘goshad’,” said one presenter.
   “No, it’s ‘gooshit’,” said the other, “Though I have no idea what that means.”
Luckily, Canada has plenty of ex-pats to enlighten them. “She’ll be gutted“ the character had said. Meaning, she’ll be upset, emotionally devastated, have her insides torn asunder.

I wonder if they’d hire me as a simultaneous translator? I speak four English languages pretty well…

Further reading: Wikipedia entry on Coronation Street.

Tim assigns my chores in the morning. After I moved the latest pile of green logs to the woodpile and helped to jack up the sagging cabin, I was to sweep the pine needles off the roof. “Are you okay with heights?” he asked. Fine, I lied.

I managed to get up the ladder. Then I stopped. The pine needles were slippery. I sat on the ridge and pushed the broom six inches, then yelped as the duff slid off. Tim took pity on my scaredy-cat antics and followed me up. It was fine, he showed me, not pitched steeply at all, and once I cleared a path through the pine needles, the roof-tiles were nicely grippy. Then he stepped back onto the extensible ladder, which slid right to the edge of the slick deck. He hung on to the roof with one hand and held a corner of the ladder in the other. I had to wiggle off my safe perch to reach out and retrieve the ladder. He got down safely, and the shock treatment had me fatalistically strolling across the roof for the rest of the afternoon.

The beavers are thriving on Kedey Island and Fitzroy Harbour. At night their tails slap the river as they bring down the trees like rapacious Scott MacNealys. Only oaks are good enough: they turn their snouts up at the basswood that grows like weeds.

The fecund beavers have polarised the hood, and I am entertained by reports of the debate. String ‘em up by their buck teeth, says one side: the country-born, the Albertans, the tree-huggers. Don’t upset the fluffy animals! says the equally well-established colony of pinko freelance writers. “It says in Cottage Life that beavers don’t like loud rock music,” I offer helpfully, but so far we haven’t got around to dosing them with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Inertia is with the beavers, and with luck they’ll make a log bridge by spring.

Kedey Island is about a sixth the size of Central Park, but the human inhabitants are nicely varied. I got to meet some as they closed up their cottages this Thanksgiving weekend. The next-door neighbours are a Thai-Cambodian family now from Ottawa, determined that their boat won’t be ice-bound this winter. I scored a dinner invitation when I dredged up Sawat dii khaa in greeting, much to my own surprise. Behind this cabin lives a pair of sisters who have been coming here since the 1930s. This year they coped with their stolen lawnmower by rowing the replacement back to the mainland for the winter. There’s a retired Chemistry professor from Alberta, a right-winger who clashes with the colony of writers and artists. The Helferty family place has a Dodge straight out of Havana in the back yard. It was marooned on the island in the Fifties when the ice melted early one spring, and has never left. Further down there’s a beautiful old camp owned by a woman who worked in what used to be called Silicon Tundra, the Nortel-Alcatel-Corel corridor a short way down the highway. A Chinese family putters about the only cabin on the tiny island next door: they retired this year, Molly says, so they can start enjoying the damn place at last. Murray, the Toronto writer has been coming to his wife’s family’s cottage for twenty years. He warns me about the mean German Shepherd in the place next to his.

Then there’s an abandoned cabin that calls to my new building instincts. Carved into the outhouse wall in beautiful serif script: “Edward Kedey, 1915”. The carving may be an island feature, or maybe a cottage tradition that’s new to me. The beams that hold up Tim’s cabin are a palimpsest of the visitors since the thirties. “Les Swamp Girls, été ’98”. “John D. 1986 England.” He’s carved his name near the top of the second beam. I haven’t signed this wooden guestbook yet.

On Friday I went to Montreal to sit a five-hour French exam for my Canadian immigration application. The TEF is a tedious business indeed, especially when you haven’t used French in thirteen years. Once upon a time I spoke good French, thanks to painful stints as an exchange student and jeune fille au pair while my friends were whooping it up as Gaeilge at Irish college. A country of the chic and the golden-limbed is no place for a gawky fourteen-year-old from the armpit of Ireland, and for her part, Anne, my evil penpal, made it clear that Limerick was not worthy of her argyll cardigans and natty little scarves.

It was worth the torture to learn how the French summer en famille. Her family owned a farmhouse on an island off the Vendée, and twenty or thirty aunts and cousins filled it for the month of August. It’s true: French mealtimes, at least for that sacred month, are an event, not a snatched, mindless scoff. We Irish and British had no food culture to be proud of back then, but here was a country that did not run its day on fifteen cups of tea, two Kit Kats, and a plate of chips. I was still a fussy eater, and was fascinated by the attention they gave every salad, each piece of fish.

While evil Anne took windsurfing classes I tagged along with her aunts to the market every morning and tried to follow the vivid discussions on ripeness and freshness. At dinner I swallowed the escargots and the jugged hare without chewing, trying to hold my face still. On one outing I shot a pheasant and almost fainted; I’ve never eaten pheasant since. I fell deeply in love with Benoît, Anne’s 22-year-old cousin on a break from his military service, and pined for him over the crêpes. He and his brother Laurent headed out to les discothèques with a jeepful of gorgeous women every night. Stuck at the children’s table, I scratched my oozing bites and seethed.

French concerns, as expressed in Friday’s test, don’t seem to have changed since then. There were several questions involving labour strikes at the railway station. A long comprehension test on the sad decline of les vacances in France. I sorted recipe steps into the correct order. I wrote a suitably aggrieved letter to an imaginary newspaper protesting in fractured French that English was not the only language worth knowing in the modern world. (It was that or debate “Should access to culture—books, cinema, and theatre—be free?”) There was a painful piece on mondialisation, or globalisation. I waited for the multiple-choice rant on American pig-dogs and the absence of weapons in Iraq, but they denied me the joy.

My oral exam was severely compromised by the discovery just beforehand that Hugo the receptionist was Ecuadorian. We had bonded by telephone the week before as I persuaded him to register me for the test a fortnight after the closing date, and he was now thrilled to learn that I knew his country fairly well. Before I could stop him he replaced every French word in my head with a stream of excited Spanish. For the thirty-minute test I had to rent an imaginary flat and persuade a friend to try a new home-concierge service, and throughout I sounded like a Madrileña with severe lead poisoning.

The reward for having every ounce of French extracted over a five-hour period was getting to spend the rest of the day in Montreal. The last time I was there was a daytrip eight years ago, before I’d learned how to travel. All I did was eat an obligatory crêpe in the tourist district and head back down to New England. But ooh, Montreal is fab! I didn’t realise until I got there how much I’d missed a big-city fix. (Oat-uh-waw, bless its paisley brocade vests, doesn’t count.) Over a Moroccan lunch at a street café I ogled the parade of babes and imagined myself back in Brooklyn.

Montreal’s bagels and smoked meats are better than New York’s, not that New York will believe me. In the old Jewish quarter the bakeries are still owned by old-timers, but the bagels are made by Cambodians—and they get it. Mordechai Richler would be proud. On Friday evening they were still dropping them out of the ovens while groups of Hasidim strolled to synagogue.

The junkshops and pawnshops are full of deals and finds. Their Central Park has a hilltop view of the city. Bikers weave between the buses and the skateboarders with the right level of anarchy. The two-dollar chocolate tarts would draw tears of joy from a parsimonious gourmet. And Montrealers make smoking look really cool.

There’s a glorious mix of languages on the street: French and English drowned out by Farsi, Spanish, and Urdu. In the stores there’s a little handshake protocol with the staff as our language modems figure out whether to offer French or English. I’m a Nowhereian, and I like to be surrounded by other outsiders. The friction of cultures rubbing together heats up a city, and that energy can’t be faked. I was still high on it when I canoed back to the Kedey Island cabin under a full moon, listening to the beavers and the wild geese.

Mysterious but welcome weather in Ottawa: 22°C in October! All the better to make my transition to rookie builder, though so far I’m just a fetch-and-carry slave and a puny one at that. I am learning several new terms, a few of which I can use in sentences. Yesterday I moved a giant woodpile and demolished an old outhouse with a crowbar. Today I assembled a complicated Malaysian wheelbarrow and got ready to move the washhouse fifty feet south to make room for the glorious winter cabin. My trusting nature comes in handy:

Q: But how do you move a washhouse?
A: Oh, you just jack it up and push.

Tim is learning to fell trees and stalks the property in chainsaw chaps and hardhat like a Village People refugee. I haul and dig and get my first fix of CBC radio, which I couldn’t get at Lake Superior. It’s a delight after years of threadbare, grovelling NPR in the US. The kind of radio I like only gets produced with government funding, it seems. Fine by me. I’ll happily pay taxes for decent news and arts coverage, on radio at least. (And I’m enough of a pinko to consider contributing towards healthcare for all children while I’m at it.)

The geese were in fine form on the river tonight, flying back and forth in lopsided formation and honking monogamously. On the opposite bank the neighbours were chopping and mowing and playing. There are at least four million giant dock spiders in and around the cabin, but apparently no mice on the island, which alone is worth the canoeing. It feels decadent to leave a bag of sugar on the kitchen table.

I have come up with a plan that Adam Stein deems “sufficiently asinine” to meet his approval. This verdict is from a man who bussed across China during the SARS epidemic, so I am proud.

Ranger Tim owns a log cabin on Kedey Island in the Ottawa River. It’s a beautiful cottage, built by a retired cop from Ottawa. Not surprisingly, the ex-Mountie didn’t manage to get the logs to fit as perfectly as the Finns who built the Beaver Rock camp in the 1920s, and so this cabin is not exactly winterproof. In fact, Tim clocked it at 26 below in the kitchen last February, with the small woodstove going full blast. I would start weeping and shedding extremities at those temperatures, but then, I am not Canadian.

So I am going to help him to build a small winter cabin before the Ottawa freezes, which should be any minute now. I’m considering it a second autumn. He doesn’t have a job. I don’t have a job. We have copies of A Pattern Language, The Timeless Way of Building, and several worrying titles along the lines of Fun Projects With Your Chainsaw. He just bought an outboard motor, a secondhand chainsaw, and several boxes of woodscrews. I bought steel-toed safety boots. I am all set for Cabin Girl: The Sequel.

Kedey Island is almost civilisation. Just across the river is a village that could be in rural Connecticut, and the bright lights of Arnprior are just six miles away. The Pilates-and-Pinot-Noir yummy mummies of Ottawa’s Glebe are forty-five minutes away. But when you can only leave the island by boat, it feels closer to Laos than London. Water comes from the river. You chop wood to stay warm. You “flush” the toilet with ash from the fire.

When I arrived from Ottawa yesterday morning, I paddled the groceries across by canoe and then helped prime the pump to squirt Ottawa River water into the washhouse. No more sweet Lake Superior water; this stuff runs brown and silty. The well stinks, so we ferry drinking and cooking water across from a kind neighbour’s house. My tasks so far, other than bringing order to chaos, evicting hundreds of spiders, and making large pots of soup, are mysterious. I will be “chinking”. I will be digging a trench to sink the waterline. I will be splitting wood. I will be…um, sitting on the sofa playing hooky with my laptop while Tim goes to Canadian Tire.