Going Back to Deer Lake

I went back to Deer Lake this summer.

I first went to Deer Lake the summer of 2015 under Northern Youth Programs. They had received a request for Bible school teachers from the pastor at the Harvest Pentecostal church and sent two young people there as part of their summer ministry program.

Just Laura and I, with a week’s worth of training under our belts, getting to know a community of around a thousand people. There used to be a Mennonite church in Deer Lake, the people there told us, but it burned down.

I remember I was homesick, and the Meekis family–whose father had at one time pastored the Mennonite church that burned down–took me under their wing. By the time I left five weeks later, I was their sister. Then there was Annie, who always teased me about Randall and laughed to see me blush. There were children, so many of them…I look at pictures now from that first year and marvel that the young people I still feel a special connection with all these years later are the very same children Laura and I spent extra time with that first summer in Deer Lake. There was jumping off a rock into ice cold water to swim with the children, and catching rides to the Northern, and letting the children show us shortcuts through the woods, and buying ice cream at the blue house, and striking crazy poses with the teen girls, and deep-frying bannock dogs with the church ladies, and pulling up on an island to eat fresh caught fish with Steve and Liza.

Naturally, I went back for Christmas.

And then again in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, the same summer I married.

I went back this year with my two children, partly to visit and partly to help with a vacation Bible school. Our neighbor friend Serena went along as a travel companion. Here we are in Barwick, Ontario, where we stopped to rest and to visit a friend.

Then we met up in Dryden with Morgan and Emily, two experienced VBS teachers who have both visited or lived in various northern communities, and flew on into Deer Lake.

I was thankful for Morgan and Emily’s experience, because mothering my two children while traveling, adjusting to a new routine, planning and teaching Bible school, and trying to make space for reconnecting with old friends was hard. I was disappointed I couldn’t do as much as I thought I could, but also thankful for their willingness and capability in leading with Bible school prep and teaching.

Here we are, walking the dusty streets of Deer Lake our first night in. The air is smoky because of nearby wildfires. In fact, the entire community of Deer Lake was evacuated to Toronto for several weeks this summer because of a wildfire.

I was sad to see SO MANY trees burned. Right next to the fuel tanks at the airport, all along the long, bumpy road to the dam, far far out on the lake when a friend took us boating. There were green trees, too, but so many black ones.

The smog and the black mirrored the state of my heart a lot during our brief stay in Deer Lake. Communication between my team members and I felt difficult. My children and I stayed in a separate apartment from the other three. I kept a somewhat different routine and worked on different aspects of Bible school prep, all of which, along with the difficulties of trying to communicate with no phone and limited internet made teamwork a challenge and made me feel cut off from the others at times.

But what hit me most of all, curveball, was the grief I felt going back. Grief that my relationship to the community would never again be quite what it used to, because I am a mom now, and my whole identity is different. Gone are the days of walking down the streets of Deer Lake and hearing people yell, “Hi Luci!” as they pass. Gone are the days of leading fifty plus exuberant young voices in “My God is so BIG, so strong and so mighty there’s nothing my God cannot do!” Most of all, gone is Deer Lake. Because I thought, while I was there, that this would probably be my last time, and thinking that made my heart weep.

“It doesn’t have to be your last visit,” Ivan said when I got home again. And of course he is right.

And there were plenty of things in Deer Lake that made my heart happy, too.

Reconnecting with old friends and seeing some of them in better places than they used to be brought me so much hope for this old world of ours and the people in it.

It made me happy to see the children I used to hang out with, so much older, but their faces still the same. It made me happy to know they still remembered me, and I meant something to them.

Marie came to teen girls’ night, not because she’s a teen, but because she used to be when I was there first. Teddy took quite a fancy to her, and that also made me happy. From the first time I met her, she’s always loved children.

Playing SORRY with Janet made me happy. Being with Janet made me happy.

A drive along the beach after the smoke had cleared made me happy. The sunset was almost as bright as the ones I remember. I have never been in another place as beautiful as Deer Lake.

The town improvements made me happy, especially the tourist-friendly ones like a pavilion and a washroom and lights strung along the beach (I never got to see the lights turned on, but I saw pictures and the multicolored glow on the water in the darkness is VERY cool.) Those kinds of things make Deer Lake look, not just like a spot carved out in the wilderness, but like a hometown people love and care about, a destination other people can come to and say WOW!

Bears at the dump made me happy. Because who doesn’t love bears at the dump? When a teacher asked at Bible school, “Do you know who made the bears?” one little boy answered, “The dump!”

Annalise loved climbing on the rocks along the beach.

Teddy loved picking blueberries.

And I loved having coteachers who befriended my children and made them feel comfortable, helping to make their stay in Deer Lake enjoyable.

My heart smiled at the open-hearted young girls who took my co-teachers for a quad ride. (Naturally I had to stay home and put the children to bed.)

And “Hosanna, Hosanna” will resound in my mind for a long time, with Morgan playing guitar, Emily leading the singing, and two little children under blankets pretending to be donkeys, while the child pretending to be Jesus skittered somewhere through the middle and all the rest of us waved branches.

I want to give a special shout-out to Elaine, who has coordinated Bible school almost every year that I’ve been there. The first words that come to mind when I think of words to describe her are faithful and trustworthy.

May that be said of each of us in the corner of the world God has placed us.

I grieved during my stay in Deer Lake because I felt I was saying goodbye. But my friends there taught me long ago that we don’t say good-bye. We say, “See you later.”

Somewhere in Deer Lake is a sheep blankie that Annalise lost, the blankie that’s been her special blankie for a very long time. Maybe a child there will find it and love it like she used to. She wasn’t upset, as I expected her to be, to leave town without her blankie. But when Ivan found her another one just like it at Wal-Mart (except softer and less worn), her whole face lit up.

“I wonder what I could give you that would make you that happy,” Ivan said.

“Probably a baby,” I said. But that is a story for another day. (And no, I’m not pregnant, just wishful.)

But in the meantime, here I am. And there is Deer Lake, a place that’s been my special place for a very long time. My people there are my people in a different way now…there’s a different kind of relationship that comes from going back later. I know that they remember me and still value our friendship. And they know that even if I’m far away and can’t visit like I used to, I still care about them. And maybe I can visit again–once in a while.

Like Annalise with her new old blankie, I am content.