Ball Lake Lodge
How about it? This photo is from the early 60’s, just a couple of years before I started working for Barney Lamm at Ball Lake Lodge.
You want a sense of the scope of the business he built? Well, all the buildings in the left third of the photo were for camp operations, and there are others not captured in this picture. There are storehouses, the ice house, a fish house, Barney’s office and radio room, his wife Marion’s office; there is the camp store where guests could purchase fishing tackle or soft drinks or a Hudson Bay coat; the lunch box room where we collected supplies for our shore lunches; a motor repair shop and building that housed the electric generator; two bunk houses called ‘The Bachelors’ for the guides who lived at Grassy Narrows but stayed at camp when working; a bath house with showers and a washing machine; cabins for bush pilots that may need to spend the night; a dance hall; and cabins for cooks and the diesel mechanics and other skilled employees required to maintain this small village needed to support the fishing camp that could, when filled to capacity, host nearly 100 guests at a time.
I counted, there must be about 40 boats pulled up on the beach, outfitted to handle two Guests to a boat, three if need be. Barney employed a lot of guides.
By the time I began working there Barney started tacking a new red carpet down the length of the long dock; my first job was to keep it swept clean, always, two or three times a day.
You can only see four Guest cabins, sitting just above the beach. The rest of the cabins, the main lodge, are all tucked back in the forest, behind the ones you see, and off to the right.
The first day I arrived I was set to work as part of a crew that was going to build a new dock, much smaller, around a rocky point that is outside the photo, to the right. Dutch, Brian’s right hand man in the daily operations, was in charge of the job. I listened to them fine tune their plans and as Dutch turned to get to work, and as I followed him, he said to Barney something to the effect that, sure, they have a smart plan for building this dock, but after all “the devil is in the details.” I have such a clear memory of Barney stopping him and telling him with a certain passion I found compelling that no, Ball Lake was built with a “God is in the details” approach. I came to learn he was right, as Brian taught us how to fill each inch and every minute with a generous care for his Guests.
And those planes, tied up to the dock, a Norseman, a Beechcraft, and a Cessna, are but a small sample of the fleet of bush planes owned and operated by Brian’s float plane airline, Ontario Central Airline.
My fictionalized version of this, the Great Lodge at Innish Cove, is true in many ways to this remarkable place, this Eden, built by Barney and Marion and Dutch Ackerman and Joe Loon.
It makes me happy, it makes me sad.