More Like White Otter LOG CABIN!

When you're twelve years old with delusions of grandeur, the word castle inspires a pretty opulent mental image for you.  My quintessential castle at age 12 was a vast stone structure with a whole mess of towers, parapets, and great halls.  It was like the Cinderella palace on steroids: bigger and more badass than Disney, filled with everything my eccentric girlish heart desired.

So when my father announced that we were going to see White Otter Castle, my mind was filled with similar images.  No, I was not deluded enough to believe that a castle in Canada could possibly be as epic as the one in my imagination, especially not one built in Northwestern Ontario.  Quite frankly, any castle owner would have deep enough pockets and good enough sense not to construct something greater than even Walt Disney's vision in a climate and ecosystem as cold and as harsh as ours.  Nevertheless, White Otter Castle had earned the name castle for some reason, and my twelve-year-old self constructed a mental picture that was modest enough to fit in Northwestern Ontario but awesome enough to still deserve the name 'Castle'.

Boy, was I an idiot.  Not only was White Otter Castle not a castle in the faintest sense of the term, it was also just barely a house.  White Otter Castle was really White Otter Glorified-Log-Cabin, and it had eaten away four hours of my life that I would have gladly spent anywhere else.  Even now, years later, I can think of a million things I would rather do than make that trip again.  Twelve-year-old Sarah would have gladly whiled away that four hours watching grass grow and seen something considerably more interesting than White Otter Log Cabin.  She would have volunteered to undergo one of those horrific devices from the Saw movies if it meant not having to see White Otter ever in her life.

It certainly didn't help that our trek to White Otter Underwhelming-Wooden-Structure occurred during our annual drive back to Southern Ontario.  Between the ages of too-young-to-remember and fifteen, my family - father, mother, older brother, two sisters, and dog - would make the twenty-odd hour drive from Orangeville to Fort Frances.  Packed in a black Ford Windstar with a maniac behind the wheel (my father would often do the drive in one very long stretch), it was a miracle we never tried to murder one another from being in such close quarters for such an interminably long time.  It was on the return trip that my dad decided we all needed to see White Otter.  It meant that we would have to stay overnight in Thunder Bay and face another whole day of driving, but being that my father is focused and driven enough to always have things go his way (and the fact that we were going to see a CASTLE!), we turned off highway 11 into Atikokan, rented a boat, and headed off in the direction of White Otter.  Four hours later, disillusioned to the core, I clamboured back into that God-awful van and prepared myself for another twenty-four hours of not being at home.

I'm sure there's plenty of reasons to appreciate White Otter My-Father-Lied-To-Me.  Apparently, there's quite the love story surrounding its construction, a tale of heartbreak and despair wherein the strapping young male is abandoned by his beloved after constructing her a beautiful home in the woods.  Having seen said beautiful home, I can honestly say I side with the beloved on this one.  There is nothing romantic about an unfurnished log cabin several hours away from civilization and only accessible by boat.  Here's hoping she found herself a nice city boy and they bought a beautiful condo together.

My sisters still make jokes about White Otter Log Cabin.  They insist that the trip was exciting, and they'd love to go back the next time they get the chance.  Ah, the follies of youth.  Clearly they don't remember the heavily graffitied walls of one man's exercise in desperation, the lackluster exterior of a structure unworthy of the name 'castle', and the prospect of spending another full day in the vehicle on top of having all their dreams of castles destroyed.