Prologue

My parents moved us up to Northern Ontario on one of the lakes near Dryden the summer between my finishing grade eight and starting grade nine of high school. Of course, I was angry for leaving all my friends and Toronto, the city I grew up in, but at least there was lots of places to get away from them in the forest surrounding the lake and beyond. Dad got a job at the airport as the supervisor for the airplane repair company at the Dryden Airport, while my mother worked in town as an accountant. That left me lots of time to explore the shoreline of the lake in our small fishing boat with an outboard motor that Dad got to fish in the lake. He only used it on the weekends so I got to go out every weekday to fish or putz around.

There were several cliffs of exposed rock along the shore that I would tie up to and literally step from my boat to the cliff and climb to the top. Some were fifty feet high; others were close to two hundred feet high. If the cliff was angled somewhat, trees would be growing all along the face, but others were bare rock to the top. There were great views from the top that you could only get to by climbing the cliff as the forest was so dense and unpassable in most places.

I quickly learned to bring a backpack on my exploring adventures along the long lake as there wasn’t anyone around to ask for food or water. I would be out of the house from daylight to evening every day and only waved at one other boater the entire summer and that was when I went to the southern part of the lake one time. There were a couple other cabins at the Southern end but we had our house, really a special-built cabin, on the North East shore of the lake on some flat land between two cliffs with a hundred feet of shoreline and a small grass yard leading down to it. My mother would check up on me via my phone once a day around noon and then again in the evening letting me know dinner was ready. Both parents were workaholics which was great for me for lack of supervision during the week. They usually had something to do together Saturday in town and would be behind closed doors for most of Sunday. Other than having anyone to hang out with, things were fine with me. I did connect with my old friends in my various gaming sites at night so I wasn’t feeling lonely or neglected.