Camp Morton
Touring the vestiges of my childhood summer stomping grounds
As I’ve written before, when I was a little boy, my grandmother, who was a night owl, would nonetheless rise at dawn when we were at the cottage to watch the sun rise over Lake Winnipeg before returning to bed and sleeping until mid-morning.
I remember peeking out from the bedroom I shared with one of my brothers and seeing her sitting quietly and gazing out across the lake.
Recently, while on a trip home to Winnipeg, I spent a day and night as a guest of friends at a lovely cottage just a couple of kilometres north of the cottage of my childhood. I rose at dawn and took some pictures. The only thing missing from the scene was a troupe of pelicans I had seen flying parallel to the shore the night before.
I also got to visit Camp Morton, where my family had rented that cottage every summer during the late 1950s and 1960s. It was named after an eccentric scientist and Catholic priest, Thomas Morton, who had an equally eccentric cottage (about which, more below). In the 1920s, he built a summer camp for orphaned and underprivileged Catholic children: boys in July and girls in August.
In addition, during World War II about a half-dozen cottages were erected for rental to Catholic families. They were collectively called The Arcade for some reason. The cottages didn’t have kitchens and meals were eaten in common at the camp mess, with the camp kids eating first and the families afterwards. This arrangement was a great relief to my mother—never an enthusiastic cook.
In the 1970s, the archdiocese of Winnipeg, which by that time was struggling to maintain the camp, sold it to the province.
When I visited the other day, along one of the paths through the bush, I bumped into a old man (meaning someone roughly my age) who had worked at Camp Morton shortly after the province took it over. He was out feeding the birds. He seemed genuinely excited to meet someone who had been a denizen of the camp in its original form.
He remembered Monseigneur Morton’s cottage, which may have been the most exotic in Manitoba, modelled as it was on a castle in France. “The Castle” as it was universally known somehow became the quasi-property of our family for a decade and a half. My grandparents rented it all of July and my parents all of August. We kids spent the entire summer there along with our mom and maternal grandmother, with our dad, granddad and aunt Madeleine coming and going as their work would permit..
The man I met said he was working at Camp Morton when the province tore down The Castle, presumably because it had become expensive to maintain, which he said he felt at the time was a shame. It is doubly disappointing because the province has for some reason chosen to preserve many of the other elements of the original Camp Morton, more as relics than as functioning buildings.
The facade of the chapel, which was the centre of a very active religious life at the camp, has been maintained, and now fronts a covered but open-air picnic area. The water tower and changing house are still there, with their distinctive facades of stucco decorated with a brocade of shore stones.
I realized as I padded around my childhood stomping grounds how extensively the place had invaded my consciousness. I still dream of it often, though always in distorted form, as dreams will do.
I made friends over those summers, at least one of whom, Joe Greene, remained part of my life until his death here in Ottawa, where I now live, during the pandemic.
Camp Morton was where I learned to swim (sort of), got my first bee sting and my first really bad sunburn. I’m embarrassed now to say that with our friends the Newmans, we hunted frogs with a pellet gun. And we played flag wars in the bush with the camp kids.
Lake Winnipeg is shallow but wide—15 or 20 kilometres to the far side from Camp Morton, depending whether you measure from the closest visible peninsula or the farthest shore. You could get heavy surf and stunning storms. Anyone with a cottage on the lake will recall with relish watching prairie lightning marching across the lake.
All trace of The Castle has now disappeared—even the round driveway which was still visible when I last visited with my brother Mark decades ago. In the area where it once was, the province has constructed log cabins and yurts available to rent. So, the place hasn’t lost its ability to create childhood memories.
Thanks for such a charming personal ode to one of those life touchstones we all cherish. Loved the line about the “old man. About my age.” Look forward to seeing an exhibition of your photos someday here at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery.😉
Wonderful memories Paul. I have similar thoughts about Ma-Me-O Beach south of Edmonton. Not quite the south of France. But it was exotic enough for me.