On a hot night a couple weeks ago, a cottager neighbour left his solid doors open, creating a cross breeze through the screen doors.

Around midnight, he was awakened by his dog barking wildly. Getting up, he found his dog on the inside of the screen door facing an adult black bear on the other side.

He closed the doors. And told everyone the story.

In this area, we usually think of bears staying one step up the escarpment. But across much of that land, there is no water. Someone pointed out to me that the easiest place for a bear to get a drink is here on the shore.

In early spring, when the bears awaken, there is lots of water up above, but little food. Up and down the road, we’ve learned to take down our bird feeders, keep garbage secure.

There is a beaver pond half a kilometre south of us, and a place the same distance to the north where they dug a couple ponds for the wildlife. But by mid-summer, most of the water is down here in the Bay.

With so much water in view from the house, with waves always moving, I start to take water for granted.

But the streams that flow all winter and overflow in the spring dry up when we don’t get rain. They are not spring fed. They run with snow melt and rainwater that seeps through the fractured limestone that is carried down the hills to the bay.

Even the pools dried up in the hot dry July we just had. The streams were dry stone. They are flowing musically right now, so the bears don’t have to venture down to our homes, but it is hard to know how long that will last.

We draw our water from the lake. There is an interesting contraption called a shore well that collects water and, with a submersible pump, gets it up to the house.

We all have them. There are a few old pipes that I see when out on the water, so I guess that at one time people used a different kind of pump to pull in water, but the shore well is now the preferred method.

But, if you don’t have access to the shore, there is no water.

You can try to drill a well – but you won’t get water.

Houses on the other side of the road collect rainwater and have buried water tanks. Water trucks regularly fill them.

Again, with so much water lapping and crashing up against the land here, it is hard to imagine how dry the ground is just a few metres away.

The dryness was pointed out to me when I asked a master gardener to identify a tree on our property. Actually, there were three, in a group, all of which had brown dead branches a third of the way up the trunk.

The gardener said they were a fir tree because the stem that held the cone went up rather than hanging down. And likely they were Fraser Firs, a tree that needs moisture and humidity. That gardener had not succeeded with them.

I took down the one that stood out from the clump as a Christmas tree. The other two I mulched and watered thoroughly the next summer. Still, by fall, the brown had crept up the trunks.

I took out another that sat on the edge of the clump. I left the last, buried beside cedar and spruce. The brown is now halfway up the trunk, but I planted a young cedar in front of it, hiding the dead branches.

The tree grows a bit each year, spreading green upward even as brown creeps up the trunk. A reminder that this clay soil dries out.

We’ve had good rain lately.

Still, because I grow most of my veggies in containers, I have to water.

But the sky is watering the in-ground plants now. And the trees. The ash are suffering, but water is not their issue.

And I am learning that even with the deep waters of Georgian Bay right in front of me, I cannot take water for granted.

Cathy Hird lives on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation.

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