In Ontario’s cottage country, there’s a new sound of summer: Shhhh

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In the warm and sunny days heading into the long weekend, it is so quiet you can almost hear the trilliums bloom.

There is not a ripple, not a vessel, not even a loon on Myers Lake this warm mid-May day as the first buds and wildflowers announce that winter has finally been beaten back. Soon, the cottagers will arrive in numbers.

If Henry James thought the two loveliest words in the English language are “summer afternoon,” the two loveliest in Canadian English must be “spring awakening.”

This weekend, once and in some places still known as the Victoria Day celebration but better known in Ontario’s cottage country – a vast territory of lakes, forest and rugged Canadian Shield that includes Muskoka and Georgian Bay – as “May 2-4 Weekend,” an homage to cold beer and the now-traditional launch of summer partying.

Heavy partiers might want to give Muskoka’s Myers Lake a pass this year, though.

In early March, at the request of many, but not all, Myers Lake cottagers, council for Georgian Bay Township (year-round population 2,499), passed a special bylaw for the lake and surrounding properties. It bans “human sound” – yodelling loons can breathe easy – “such as yelling, shouting, hooting, whistling, singing,” as well as loud noise from speakers no matter what the time of day or night.

Noise bylaws are common in such tourist areas, but invariably involve a set time period, say from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. This particular bylaw is far more restrictive, and has divided support among the 60-odd properties on Myers Lake. Last summer, there were seven complaints about noise on the lake. At a public meeting in February, eight property owners came out, seven of them supporting the bylaw change. Nine property owners wrote to the townships, four backing the change but five against it.

Wrote one cottager in support: “We have been having a terrible time with the noise on the lake. All types of noise. I am two cottages over from a rental property in a small bay which is rented all summer. Unfortunately, many of the renters have no respect.”

One cottager who is against the bylaw sent a lawyer’s letter opposing the new “Quiet Zone,” as it might affect “the current lawful use of cottage properties for short-term rentals.”

Excessive noise is hardly a new issue in any summer vacation area. Many find personal watercraft as annoying as spring blackflies. Large boats, particularly the speedy monsters known as “cigarette boats,” can render canoeing and conversation next to impossible. Weekend parties, with music and beer on the dock, is commonplace. To many, these are the sounds of summer.

Not surprisingly, once the new bylaw was announced on the MuskokaRegion.com website, ridicule was quick to follow.

“This is insanity at its best! You cannot regulate respect or common sense – not to mention summer fun!”

“Welcome to tyranny. Everyone with a spine should show up at this lake and have a really loud water barge party; the residents don’t own the water.”

“Wow. Kids can’t squeal with laughter and we can’t whistle down the road to a happy tune. Sad.”

“God help someone if they are drowning or their canoe flips and they can’t yell for help or if their toddler is not listening and parents have to whisper!!! What a joke!!!”

“The no-fun police strike again.”

“Seriously – next thing is no farting allowed.”

One commenter seized on the term “summer residents” in the announcement. “If you actually lived there,” he wrote, “then you might have an issue.”

Subtle and not-so-subtle tensions between visitors and locals is nothing new in cottage country. Locals often view vacationers as rich city-dwellers with little or no sense of how a jet pump works but with a sure sense of privilege.

When Fanny Cox Potts, writing under the pen name of Ann Hathaway, published her novel Muskoka Memories in 1904, she took note of the rift. “For the past few years,” she wrote more than a century ago, “the population of Muskoka has been gradually dividing itself into two classes – tourists and settlers, otherwise capital and labour, pleasure and toil, butterflies and bees … and between the two there is a great gulf fixed … one thing is sure, each class would be badly off without the other.”

The initial appeal of cottaging was escape. The late historian W.L. Morton spent a lifetime studying the Canadian identity – he wrote a whole book on it in 1961 – and he concluded that the “alternative penetration of the wilderness and return to civilization is the basic rhythm of Canadian life.”

That can mean the isolation and challenge of a canoe trip or the relative comfort – complete with WiFi – of a permanent or rented cottage. The relatively reachable Muskoka-Georgian Bay area has long appealed to Americans as well. The attraction is the same: getting away from it all. “Every so often a disappearance is in order,” Colorado naturalist John A. Murray once wrote. “A vanishing. A checking out. An indeterminate period of unavailability.”

The people of Myers Lake – a small body of water surrounded by modest cottages – like their peace, as do most cottagers, but perhaps none has gone so far as to outlaw even whistling.

As one of the website commenters put it: “Good luck in enforcing this,” before adding the hashtag “#youcantfixstupid.”

Georgian Bay Township thinks perhaps you can. The fire chief, Tony VanDam, who is also the bylaw officer, told council that police will only investigate if a complaint is made and that police would have discretion as to whether a warning will suffice or a charge should be laid.

In the event of recurring noise problems from renters, he said: “If there are repeat offenders, the property owner will be charged, unless the property owner can prove that they’ve done everything reasonable to stop the noise.”

One councillor, Brian Bochek, suggested to council that those renting their cottages could put in the contract that the renter pay a $2,000 security deposit for potential noise violations, and if a bylaw charge is laid the renter would lose that $2,000. Both owners and renters share responsibility, he argued.

Clearly, there is an issue here about cottage rentals, something that has become increasingly common in cottage county.

“Cottaging is becoming more a rich man’s sport,” says councillor Patrick Edwards, a semi-retired CPA who divides his year between a Toronto home and an island in Georgian Bay. “People are being forced to rent out part of the time just to help pay for the place.”

Mr. Edwards says his cottage, built decades ago by his in-laws, was once charged $50 a year in property taxes. Today, he pays $9,000. After eight years on council, Mr. Edwards says he will not stand again for office, but he has never forgotten something a previous mayor, the late Mike Kennedy, told him: “If you don’t have a bylaw, you can’t do anything. People will just laugh at you.”

“You have to have some rules,” Mr. Edwards believes. “The question is, how and when do you enforce them? I think you only have to do it once. Just nail one guy. Do that once and that will control bad behaviour.”

The new bylaw, Mayor Larry Baird says in an e-mail, has just been put in place – “and so far no complaints that I’m aware of.”

That may well change on May 2-4 Weekend, when the empty roads surrounding Myers Lake will fill with cottagers and renters desperate for a break after the longest winter of “cabin fever” in memory.

“We need a summer to be able to analyze if it works or is too restrictive or has resolved the problem of alleged disrespect for peace and quiet,” the mayor wrote.

“At this point I have no opinion on the success or failure of the bylaw.”