I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about communication, specifically in how we seem to be getting steadily worse at it, even as we over-share more and more of the trivia of our everyday lives on social media. In short: the more we talk on social media, the less we actually seem to communicate. This piece is far simpler than most of my more recent ones have been, as it comes from a childhood summer memory that was likewise, quite simple in nature.

I’ve mentioned in several of my previous pieces that, when I was a child, my family had a summer cottage that was located on a large island in the middle of a recreational lake in South, Central Ontario. At that time, there were perhaps two-dozen cottages on the island, and most of them had been built between the 1920s and 1970s. Although the island did have electrical service from about the late fifties onwards, there was no telephone service until about 1983.

Apart from the lack of telephone service, living on an island also had other challenges that went along with the unique rewards of that sort of life. To start with, everyone, and everyone’s goods had to come in and out by boat. Likewise, when you had guests or other family members coming to visit, you had two options for getting them over to the island. The first was that you could have someone wait at the mainland boat landing with the boat (which, depending upon factors such as highway traffic up to the lake), could mean that a person might be waiting for hours at a time, as it wasn’t always possible to accurately pin down a guest’s exact ETA. For that reason, some time in the late sixties, a number of the island cottagers got together with an idea for making things a great deal easier.

The largest landowner on the island also happened to own some property on the mainland, which was directly across from most of the island cottages, and this mainland property included a boat launch, and a large, two storey boathouse that was kept painted white. Since there was only about ¼ mile of water between the island and the mainland on that particular area of the lake, the white boathouse was, of course, a very visible landmark. Hence, it was felt that a visual symbol that could easily be seen against the white, would work well for folks, who had arrived at the mainland boat launch to send a signal across to the island cottagers that they needed to be ferried across to the island.

The symbol that was chosen was a large, metal disc, which was made from the lid of a 40 imperial gallon drum. One side of this disc was painted in bright orange, which did indeed stand out quite well against the white, and this orange side served to alert all the cottages that had a direct line of sight to the mainland boathouse. Whenever that orange spot appeared across the lake, the shout of:‘The disc is up!’ had pretty much the same effect as Hervé Villechaize’s character ‘Tattoo’ on the seventies TV show ‘Fantasy Island’ calling out: ‘De plane, boss! De plane!’ at the start of each episode.

The only exception to the orange disc was in the far rarer case, when its flipside would appear, which meant that the arriving guest in question was coming to visit another family, whose cottage was further down the shore, and out of visual sight of the white boathouse. That opposite side was painted white, and had a large, black letter, which corresponded to that family’s surname. In that particular case, a runner would be sent down the shore to their cottage in order to let them likewise know that: ‘The disc is up!’