Every year at this time, I treat myself to the great Canadian ritual of opening the cottage. Except that by now, I should call it a vanishing ritual because all the other cottages near me are simply houses on the shore. Ready for use at any time. No opening up for them. No adventure.

They miss the true experience of cottaging, in which you sweat through clouds of blackflies and skinned knuckles and freezing water to get your cottage up and running. These people in their turnkey cottages miss, for example, the ritual of the foot valve. Said ritual being the hallmark of my cottage life.

What? You don’t know what a foot valve is? How can you call yourself a cottager?

A foot valve goes on the end of your waterline and, in theory, works with the pump to pull water into your cottage’s system and keep it there. Every spring, when we start to get the cottage ready, the smallest member of our family wades deep into the water and sets out the foot valve. Then the rest of us fill the line and prime the pump and turn on the switch to start pumping. Except the pump never works the first time. Ever.

So, you send the youngest person back into the water (perhaps being kind enough to give them hip waders) and you pull out the foot valve and inspect it. (Yes, we should have done that first. But that is not the cottage way.)

When the foot valve passes inspection, it goes back into the water and once again we prime the pump and once again it does not work. We may prime the pump 10 times, and never does it start delivering water.

So, again, we think of the foot valve. We root around in our supplies and find maybe five other foot valves and decide one of them would work better. We can’t find the youngest person to send into the water now, so we send her mother, who hauls out the defective foot valve. We replace the valve, and once again it goes into the water and once again we try the pump and once again it doesn’t work.

So, we do what we do every year. We go into the waterless cottage and open our bottle of single malt. Then we sit around and talk about the pump. As we do this, an eight-year-old passes by the pump and flips the switch and suddenly water starts shooting out. The pump is working. We drink to that.

Then we connect the pump to the water lines that run to the cottage and various outbuildings. Now, we have water everywhere. Sinks are filling but geysers of water are shooting out of the ground and out of the bathroom wall where we never fixed the shower. And, of course, under the cottage itself. We indeed have an excess of water.

Then begins the second part of the ritual — creeping around with copper pipe and reels of solder and also plastic pipe and pockets full of clamps and screwdrivers.

This takes up the rest of Day 1 and part of Day 2. But by now, we only fix leaks that shoot streams of water. We decide we can live with the odd misty spray.

As all this goes on along with the odd bottle of scotch, we vaunt our muddy superiority over those turnkey cottagers we can see sitting in gazebos on their docks, drinking martinis with supermodels. Can’t they see they are missing out on the Canadian cottage experience?

By now, we can wander through the cottage and the outbuildings (six, if you count the privy), changing the odd pipe and hoping this isn’t one of those years we have to work on the septic pump. Not enough scotch for that.

Finally, I get to work on the water heater (because I’m oldest and most expendable). At this point, an eight-year-old child usually says: “Grampa, why are you putting those 50-amp fuses into that thing? Can’t you read it says only 20 amps?”

I turn from stuffing tin foil into the fuse receptacle. “Shut up,” I say, “and drink your scotch.”

Then I declare the cottage open, the ritual complete. IE