Shortly after the turn of the century and two or three years before I was born, my father bought a small cottage at Grand Bend on Lake Huron. This was to be the family summer home for over a quarter of a century. The Bend, as it was familiarly called, took its name from a sharp bend in the meandering Aux Sables River about a quarter of a mile from the lake into which it was prevented from emptying at this point by a series of sand dunes.

A decade or so before we went to Grand Bend, however, man had sought to improve upon Nature by cutting a channel to the lake through the obstructing dunes, thus leaving the old river bed a mere trickle of water fed by spring freshets and summer rains. A long pier and breakwater prevented the cut from silting up and provided a safe harbour for fishermen who worked seine nets about a mile out from shore.