“Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.” Author Ally Condie

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” The narrator (older Gordie) in the movie Stand By Me.

Here on Substack, I have written about my teenage experiences helping to build cabins on Lac La Ronge (see here, for example). The cabins were built on behalf of three families: the Caspers (our family), the Enviks, and the Kuhlings. Our connection to the Envik family goes back to the early 1960s, when my father earned the money for his university education by operating heavy equipment at the construction of the Gardiner Dam on the South Saskatchewan River. Bruce Envik was a few years older than Dad, but they became good friends while working on the dam. The Enviks eventually settled in Regina, where Bruce rose through the management ranks at Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and Saskatchewan Credit Union. In the mid-70s, the Enviks introduced us to the Kuhling family, who lived in a magnificent, old Edwardian brick house in Moose Jaw.

For the Caspers, the years between 1968 and 1974 were unsettled. We moved around like a military family. First, my parents found their forever home in an idyllic ranching town called Maple Creek, just north of the Montana border. Then, for reasons related to my father’s relationship with the local school board, we moved to the other side of Canada, but not in the way you might think. Instead of moving west to east, we moved from south to north and spent two years in the Arctic before settling, for good, in northern Saskatchewan. In between the moves, my parents had a second baby, my younger sister, and adopted another baby, my younger brother. While still in her 20s, my mother had open-heart surgery to fix a heart valve issue.

Life settled down after we arrived in La Ronge. The newfound stability allowed us to reconnect with old friends whom we had seen only fleetingly, if at all, for several years. The Enviks were at the top of the renewal list, and my friendship with the two Envik boys, Brad and Blayne, began in earnest.

There is a photo of the three of us that was taken in the den of one of our houses—there were four in four years—in Maple Creek. Brad is about five years old, apple-cheeked and handsome; I’m a toddler at three, and Blayne is a year younger than me, just barely past the baby stage. Our first introductions occurred in the darkness before our earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the mid-1970s, when our paths began to cross more regularly and for longer periods, that we knew whether we liked each other. Thankfully, we did.

The Enviks, followed closely by the Kuhlings, began to come to La Ronge for summer fishing vacations. The one I remember best was a four- or five-day excursion to an outfitter camp in Pickerel Bay, a thirty-five-mile trip across Lac La Ronge to the far eastern side of the lake. That experience may have been the catalyst for the cabin-building years that followed, as the three families imagined enjoying the physical beauty and recreational opportunities of the magnificent northern lake from the comfort of their own dwellings, as opposed to the tiny, dark, mouse-infested outfitter cabins we rented in Pickerel Bay. And now that I write these words, it occurs to me that the plan to take leases and build cabins on Lac La Ronge, whenever it was hatched, was much more than the sum of its initial tasks and timelines. It set in motion nearly half a century’s worth of summer vacations and all that they entailed. For the Caspers, the Enviks, the Kuhlings, the Hornes, the Bristows, and many others, Lac La Ronge in the summertime was like the Catskills were to New York Jewish families in the 1950s, except our resort was supersized, you had to do your own cooking, and none of us were Jewish. But there were theme parties and fancy dinners, fishing, water skiing, hot tubs, and golf. There were work crews to help replace a roof or rebuild a deck, and there were long, lazy, hot days when no one did much of anything. It’s only now, nearly fifty years after it began, that time and forest fires have ended the project our parents set in motion. Of my parents’ generation, only the Enviks spent any time at their cabin this summer. In a few cases, the Enviks and Bristows, for example, younger generations will continue to use the cabins and nurture the legacies of their forebears. Other cabins, like ours and the Kuhlings’, were sold to new owners as it became difficult for aging parents and widespread families to maintain and use them. The Horne cabin was lost to a forest fire in June of this year.

The Envik boys and I were there at the beginning. Initially, I was closer to Brad, as we bonded over a shared love of water skiing, and pooled our money to buy a cheapo slalom ski from Lowenberg Marine. But Brad was almost two years older, and his good looks and new driver’s license began to steer him in directions that did not involve him spending a big chunk of his summer vacation at a remote cabin with his parents. As Brad drifted away, Blayne and I discovered we had mutual interests as well.

Brad and Blayne were classic examples of the father’s DNA dominating in one child, the mother’s in another. Brad inherited his father’s good looks, height, easy smile, and outgoing nature. Blayne was handsome as well, but more in the image of his mother. He was more introverted, and he had her slender, straight nose. His hair was fifty shades of blonde, all of it fine and straight as the edge of a ruler. Just as with his mother, his reserved nature masked a wry sense of humor, an inherent kindness, and a warm smile. Yesterday, I had a conversation with my sister about Blayne, and she commented that one of the things she remembers about him was his kindness.

Blayne loved to fish. He was always finding a spare moment to drop a tiny jig off the end of a dock to catch a yellow perch, or cast a spoon into a grassy flat to coax a jackfish (northern pike) into a violent strike. I wasn’t as keen, but I did enjoy it, and in the summer of 1980, as we worked on the Casper cabin, we hatched a plan to catch some rainbow trout.

Rainbow trout are not native to northern Saskatchewan; however, provincial wildlife authorities have stocked the fish in several small northern lakes in an effort to boost recreational opportunities. Of the examples I can think of, all are small endorheic lakes (no outflow), presumably to prevent the rainbow species from spreading more widely throughout the ecosystem, or perhaps more likely, to prevent the rainbows from cohabiting with northern pike, which would likely eat them all as soon as the rainbow fry were dropped in the lake. I always loved to catch them, as they are spirited fighters and delicious table fare.

The three cabins built for the three families all featured a moderately pitched roof and two gable ends. The roofs were not supported in the traditional way, with multiple rafter sections providing strength and support to a roof sheeted with plywood. Instead, we set three beams that ran the length of each cabin from gable to gable. My father found a deal on some cast-off power poles that the provincial utility wasn’t going to use, and these served as the beams. To make the beams easier to install, we built the gable ends first. To support the power poles, we built the gables with vertical logs that rested on the wall header. We trimmed them to match the pitch of the roof, then cut notches for the three beams to rest in. In doing this, we only had to lift the power poles as high as one of the outside walls. Once they were resting on the gable ends, we could roll them into place.

With roof support at the outside walls, two beams at the midpoints of the gables, and one beam at the peak, the spans were still much too large to use plywood. Instead, we used sixteen-foot, tongue-and-groove 2x6s that we clamped into place before nailing them to the outside wall and two beams. The roofing went quickest with a crew of three. Typically, that crew was the Kuhling père, Blayne, and me. One of us worked the peak, one on the middle beam, and one at the outside wall. We floored the loft with the same methods and materials.

As we worked day after day at the Casper cabin, Blayne and I began to itch for a day off to go fishing. We planned to load a canoe into our speedy, Starcraft bowrider and trip thirty miles across the lake to a spot near Rapid River, which is the outlet that feeds water from Lac La Ronge into the Churchill River System that makes its way to Hudson’s Bay. Just before Rapid River, if you know where to stop, there is a steep, up-and-down portage that brings you to West Lake, which, at 20 acres, is not much more than a big pond. West Lake is stocked with rainbow trout.

Our parents were not sympathetic to our wishes. The vacation was almost over, and there was still much work to be done. “When you finish building the floor of the loft,” they told us, “you can go.”

A trip across Lac La Ronge is not to be taken lightly. It is a huge lake, and there are open stretches where the waves can become dangerously rough in a small boat. Blayne and I fretted over the weather forecast. The hot, calm weather was expected to get blown out by a cool front that would make the long passage to West Lake slow, uncomfortable, and, to our parents, too dangerous to allow. With one day of good weather remaining, we made a plan to finish the loft and journey to West Lake all on the same day.

We woke at three in the morning. We were sleeping in a tent, so it was easy to get to the dock without waking anyone. The eastern horizon glowed as the earth spun us toward the sun. We untied the boat and paddled quietly for two hundred yards. Then we started the engine and motored quietly until we felt sure no one would hear us. The trip to the worksite was short, no more than five minutes once we throttled up. By 3:30, we were walking into the gloom of our partially finished cabin. Half the loft floor was already complete. If we wanted to fish that day, we had to finish it before breakfast.

We used long bar clamps to pull the tongue of a fresh 2x6 into the groove of the flooring that was already secured. Then we nailed it home. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat. In three hours, the loft was done, and when we returned to our camp, we made sure to shut down the boat and paddle the last few hundred yards so as not to alert our parents.

When we joined them at the breakfast table at seven a.m., we felt quite proud of our achievement. As we drank coffee and ate a bowl of cereal, the conversation turned to the work plans for the day. My father addressed us first.

“So boys,” he said. “Do you think you can finish that loft today?”

We looked at each other knowingly. “Oh yes,” we answered. “We think we can.”

Dad nodded, satisfied with our answer. He drained his cup of coffee and set the cup back on the table. “Well, let’s get going then. We’re going to get an early start today.”

Blayne and I looked at each other and smiled. His father saw the look and narrowed his eyes sceptically. “What?” he asked.

Now it was Blayne’s turn to talk. He looked at his father and said, “I think we’re going to go fishing today, instead.”

“Hmmph,” was the response. “Like hell you are. You’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah,” I continued. “I don’t think so.” We were both grinning like fools, and our parents began to suspect there was more to our little rebellion than met the eye.

“What have you done?” my father asked warily.

“We finished the loft,” I answered. “You said we could go fishing after we finished the loft, so we finished it.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“When this morning?”

At this point, we spilled the whole story. We told them how we paddled away silently, worked for three hours, and returned before breakfast. And that, according to the conditions they imposed, we were now free to go to West Lake for the day. We offered to show them our work, but they took our word for it.

The fishing trip was a success. The ride over was smooth, and we humped the canoe up and over the ridge separating West Lake from Lac La Ronge. To catch fish, we paddled slowly and trolled small, colorful spoons (red and white, green with yellow spots like a frog) about an inch long. There was no pattern we could discern that made it more likely to catch fish in one part of the lake or another. The fish seemed to cruise randomly, so we did as well, paddling aimlessly, sometimes just listening to the gulp and pull of our paddles, and sometimes talking like the four boys in Steven King’s classic coming of age story, “The Body,” which was made into the movie “Stand
By Me.”

Vern: Do you think Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?

Teddy: What are you, cracked?

Vern: Why not? I saw the other day. He was carrying five elephants in one hand!

Teddy: Boy, you don’t know nothing! Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman’s a real guy. There’s no way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.

Vern: Yeah, maybe you’re right. It’d be a good fight, though.

That exchange is from boys a few years younger than we were, but you get the idea.

We caught five or six nice rainbows, ate the ham sandwiches we took with us for lunch, then dragged the canoe back over the ridge to the big lake. The wind had come up a bit by the time we started back to the cabin. We were cruising fast, and Blayne kept a tight grip on the canoe to keep it from bouncing as we skipped from wave to wave. We idled up to the dock at 4 pm, a little bleached and burned by the sun and wind, but happy with our day.

You may have guessed that this is a sad story told by way of good memories. About a week ago, my mother informed me that Blayne had passed away. This just a few years after Brad, the older brother, died after a battle with cancer. Blayne was a few days short of his 60th birthday.

Heartbreak is everywhere, sadly. It’s rare to find an untouched family. One of the other lake families, the Hornes, lost their son to cancer at age 36. My father didn’t make it to his 60th birthday. The Envik family is in the unenviable position of suffering a double dose, both sons gone before their parents, but I write about Blayne because his case seems special. The lives of the others I mentioned are well-documented, their achievements, smiles, photos, laughter, and legacies recounted by family and friends alike. Blayne’s life, to all of us who knew him in the late 70s and early 80s, has been lost for decades.

I don’t know much about how it started or progressed, but it seems that the scourge of alcohol abuse found a way into his life. I’m sure his parents tried to intervene and counsel, but Blayne rejected their attempts to help, and the estrangement deepened to the point that he refused contact with them. He married, but he was divorced at the time of his death.

The last time I saw him was at my father’s funeral in La Ronge. It was early October 2000. My parents were such good friends with his that he abandoned, for a few days at least, his policy of strict separation from everyone who was a part of the happy, wholesome weeks we spent on Lac La Ronge two decades earlier. Outside of a dinner at his parents’ house in 1994, when I had traveled back to Saskatchewan for a friend’s wedding, I had not seen him in many years, and he didn’t look well. The funeral was in the gymnasium of Churchill High School, and we passed in the hallway outside the gym in the moments after the service. We greeted each other, and he mumbled a few words of condolence and moved on. Everyone in the hall wore expressions that were grim or solemn, and many cheeks were streaked with the tracks of tears. Amidst all that unhappiness, Blayne’s face stood out for the level of torment it portrayed. Maybe it was the situation, but it seemed more than that. It struck me as a profound and general unhappiness, and I can only hope that it was not representative of all the years, nearly fifty of them, since we parted ways as friends.

Though I used the phrase, it is wrong to say that Blayne and I parted ways. We didn’t even drift apart, as friends often do when their plans and goals diverge. But when the cabins were finished and the end of our high school years approached and passed, Blayne stopped coming to La Ronge with his parents, and but for the dinner and the brief encounter at Dad’s funeral, I never saw him again. He was there, and then he wasn’t.

He was funny. During the summers we were together, Blayne was always doing things to make us laugh, especially the girls. One summer, we built a raft out of green logs saturated with sap and moisture. Blayne planned to use it to fish around the perimeter of the island and cast to spots he could not reach from shore. We nailed a 2x4 frame to the logs to hold it together, then struggled to drag it to the water because it was so heavy. It barely floated; the top sat about even with the surface of the lake, and any additional weight, like a human, would cause it to sink immediately. Blayne’s antics after the launch, calmly casting a lure while his fishing platform sank slowly under his feet, had us rolling with laughter. When he came out of the water after swimming or waterskiing, he would let his arrow-straight hair hang over his face like Cousin Itt from the Munsters, then part it to expose one eye, or two.

I owe my very first exposure to the sport I love the most, alpine skiing, to the Envik family and Blayne. Blayne didn’t love waterskiing like his older brother, but he liked downhill skiing, and he invited me to go on a ski vacation with his family after Christmas in 1978. Those were the years we spent every Christmas with my maternal grandparents at their farm in southwest Saskatchewan. The farm is about an hour’s drive from the Trans-Canada highway, and my parents ferried me to a rest stop near Maple Creek, where the Enviks picked me up. We drove all day and pulled into Kimberley Alpine Resort, just outside the Bavarian-themed town of Kimberley, B.C., right at sunset. To our left, the mountain loomed above us, and I stared, wide-eyed, at the steep pitch that rose sharply above us.

Kimberley has long held the crown as the ski area with the longest, lighted run in North America. The lights cover the full extent of a run named “Main,” 2,100 vertical feet, about a mile long, which is the slope that impressed me from the car. We were staying at a condo on the mountain, and after check-in, Blayne and I wolfed down some food and dressed to go skiing. Blayne had his own equipment, but I had to visit the rental shop to get boots and skis. It wasn’t busy, and we were lining up at the T-bar in short order.

It is, in general, not a good plan to take a beginner skier straight to the top of a mountain, but we were thirteen and fourteen years old, so that’s what happened. It was very cold that night, about -25°C, and the lift and adjacent slope were almost deserted. The T-bar pulled us up and up and up, in light and shadow, and the cold, polished snow squeaked beneath our skis. We paused at the top while Blayne flexed into the front of his boots and said, “Do this and this,” and then took off. To that point in my life, I had never slid down anything higher than the modest hills around my hometown, so to stand at the top of a mountain at night, and stare out and down at the twinkling lights of a town like we were hovering in a helicopter, was exciting beyond what words can convey. My breath plumed around my head, and I followed. My years of skating and cross-country skiing served me well; the cold air bit into the tip of my nose and the skin over my cheekbones, and I was hooked for a lifetime.

The next morning, the ambient temperature without any windchill effect was minus 36°C. Today, many resorts close for the day or delay their openings when the combination of ambient temperature and wind chill effect exceeds -30°C. That wasn’t the case in 1978. At nine am, the lifts were running, and Blayne and I were on them. We checked each other’s faces to ensure there were no frozen bits (skin turns bright white when it freezes, trust me, I know), and took breaks when our fingers or toes got too cold, but we skied all day. That was the start of my skiing career.

There is a technique in film that is sometimes used at the end of movies that tell stories about people, real or imagined, who share a transformative experience. The method involves a narrator or scrolling text describing what happened to the main characters after the events of the movie. Films that use this technique include Band of Brothers, American Graffiti, and the previously mentioned Stand By Me. Because it is a part of life, there is always a sprinkling of tragedy among the after-stories. Think of the hot-rodder with a soft heart, John Milner, in American Graffiti, who was killed by a drunk driver not long after the events of the film. Or Chris Chambers, the narrator’s best friend in Stand By Me, who escapes the dysfunction of his family and becomes a lawyer, only to die from a stab wound while trying to break up a fight at a fast food restaurant. In some dramatic foreshadowing, Chris Chambers was played by River Phoenix, who died from drug-induced heart failure just eight years later, when he was twenty-three.

In our story, Blayne is the tragic character, or that’s what it seems. But perhaps he’s only tragic in our minds, the tragedy a projection of our own disappointment that he chose not to be a part of our lives, when we would have chosen to be part of his. Maybe he was happy with his choices; these are things I can’t know. For him, and for others we have lost, I hope there is good fishing in heaven.

If this post gets enough likes (🖤), I will buy a shirt and wear it in the summer months.

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