MacNab School was one of many red brick schoolhouses built during the pre-confederation era. Often located on rural intersections, these small schools formed the foundation of education in pioneer life and of Ontario’s public education system. They were founded to “foster social, moral, and economic progress through formal classroom instruction.”
MacNab School was named after Sir Allan Napier MacNab, soldier, lawyer, and businessman, and the first premier of the United Canadas—Canada East and West—from 1854 – 1856. In my childhood and in my limited realm of experience at the time, I had no idea who MacNab actually was. To my brother—who actually attended MacNab school in Grade 8—my friends, and I, it was simply a Saturday biking destination if we didn’t go to our secret Diving Board.
The “Diving Board,” was located across a bay from the entrance to Lock One of the Welland Canal and McNabb School. The entrance to Lock One consists of a landfill of huge boulders, which creates an artificial and sheltered channel to funnel lake freighters from the open water to the canal lock system. The Diving Board was so called because we, or perhaps other kids who played here and predated our own activities, had taken a stout plank and wedged it under the rock to make a very functional diving platform with no bounce whatsoever. The Diving Board was our focal point. It was a specific location and deserves proper noun status.
Before learning to swim, I nearly drowned in this location, as the water is quite deep here. The entrance channel extends at least one kilometre into the lake. Before I knew how to swim, my friends encouraged me to make my first dive off the board, assuring me that the water was shallow and I could stand up. Encouraged, I took a shallow dive and absolutely panicked when I made the rapid realization that this portion of the lake was bottomless. The water was cold, and I was scared and began hyperventilating as I thrashed wildly to save myself. Someone else eventually saved me. I had been initiated to the “Diving Board.”
The Diving Board became a second summer home. A place where, in our splendid isolation, we could share jokes, smoke, theorize about the mysteries of girls, look at our stash of Playboy magazines, and build a raft to cross the “Great Water.” We hoped to reach McNab School on the other side of what was really a bay formed by the Lock One extension and the natural shoreline. We could easily bike there, but why would we when, with greater personal risk and challenge, we could go by water?
We began this colossal construction endeavour by gathering up driftwood and logs along the shoreline using the Diving Board as the central depository. I think we had all read, or at least heard about, the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on the Mississippi River, still one of my favourite books. Using vague and otherwise nebulous notions of nautical constructions and our vast knowledge of sea lore, and despite our collective ignorance, we proceeded to build a raft that would transport us one day to MacNab, a place where we hoped we could experience new opportunities and religious freedom, where there would be a chicken in every basket, a car in every garage. Our imaginations always got the best of us.
My personal childhood vision as an explorer was to claim all of the lands we surveyed for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain in thanks for defeating the Moors and driving Islam out of Spain. At the time, I had a vague sense of history and reality. What we really wanted to do was build something and get out on the water and have some adventures and maybe a quotient of raping, plundering, and pillaging along the Lake Ontario coast line, where not even the OPP could stop us. We were young, we were invincible. We were stupid.
Construction began slowly at first, and eventually came to a complete standstill. The idea that many hands would make for light work was nonsense and really had no application to our project. There were simply too many nautical engineers and too few labourers. We all wanted to lead and direct. Realizing the folly of our ways and reading up on recent labour legislation, we soon devised a division of labour efficiently utilizing our means of production in such a way as to produce a raft that, although did not reach or exceed any Canadian safety standards, could float if proper counterbalances were applied in the right places. We had a raft!
The next step was the meticulous hours of planning that would go into garnering provisions and supplies for the journey. This meant going home and gradually sneaking things out of kitchen cupboards sans detection. My dad, who bought the groceries, had a pretty good mental inventory as to what provisions were in the house, so the risks of discovery were high. The length we were willing to go to for discovery and adventure was irrepressible. In the end, we got a few cans of beans and some wieners—the staples of any nautical diet.
The day we decided to launch to reach MacNab School on the other side of the bay was somewhat blustery. We thought a healthy headwind would add to a heightened sense of adventure. There were four of us, and if we stayed in position, the raft was fairly stable. Our makeshift paddles were an innovative combination of hockey stick and plywood fused together with high-alloy aluminum screws in a secret bonding process. We were psyched, and we were ready.
We paddled like galley slaves, only to find we were making no headway and noted a gradual tendency towards being carried out into the vastness of open Lake Ontario. After only a few minutes, I began to tire. We were paddling out of sync, and I was developing a blister. Morale was low, the taste of impending mutiny was almost palatable. Like General Custer, we were mainly bluster with no backup plan and no life jackets. I recalled with some degree of grimness the fact that I could not swim. Collectively, we hoped for the ninth mechanized battalion, the army corps of engineers, or an outdated Sea King helicopter to come to our immediate rescue, but, as fate would have it, it was none of those.
My dad had found us and was pulling up in his blue 1953 Ford, my mom scrambling out of the passenger door before my dad had come to a full stop. Images of Bonnie and Clyde flew through my head. My parents, usually calm, began to wildly scream at us to make for shore. I don’t think the full impact of our folly really had registered in our adolescent brains. I began to get scared. My fear spread to the crew and we paddled like demons to shore, landing some 100 metres north of the Diving Board. In another half hour or so, had my parents not appeared, we would have been a speck out on the Lake and located right on the freight lanes entering Lock One. Need I say more?
My mother was clearly upset, and I don’t know if my dad was more relieved to get the beans and wieners back or that he had been instrumental in saving his sons from disaster and thereby preserving the bloodline and his legacy. In retrospect, I think we at least merited a nomination for the Darwin Awards.
Sadly, we never reached MacNab School, although my brother attended there the next day, arriving by yellow school bus.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marty Rempel
Marty Rempel, now retired for the fourth time, has been an educator in many capacities and places, serving as a teacher in Germany, Kuwait, and the Bahamas; Special Education Co-ordinator in Northern Alberta with Cree and Dene students; and principal in Jinhua, China. Last June he retired as principal from a private school in Markham, ON, which caters to students from mainland China. Now he spends his time reading the news while drinking dark coffee on his balcony, solving world problems, writing, and planning his next trip with his lovely wife.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Fall 2025 issue.
