The Park Bench That Brought Me Back to the Great Lakes
- Elizabeth Gates
- Mar 11
- 6 min read
Before launching the Great Lakes Guide Girl podcast, I want to share the quiet story that started it all.
Not a polished travel story.Not a story about a famous landmark or a perfect summer vacation.
This one is smaller than that.
It’s about a park bench.A rocky shoreline on Lake Erie .A grandfather I wish I had known. And the quiet pull of two lakes that somehow shaped my life without me realizing it.
It’s not epic. There are no celebrities involved, and nothing about it is particularly
extraordinary.
But it’s real.
And it’s mine.
So here is my Great Lakes story.
I was born in Buffalo, New York, in the early 1980s. Long before I arrived, however, my family had already settled in the area and built their lives here. While I’m not certain whether Lake Erie or Lake Ontario played a direct role in keeping my family here, I have to believe there was some kind of quiet pull.
My grandfather, Allan R. Dyte, was born to Frederick Dyte, an immigrant from Canada, and Maud Brown, who was also born in Canada. As family lore tells it, when Allan was about two years old, Maud ran off with her gynecologist and took two of her five children with her—Ralph and Wilbur. She left behind Frederick Jr., Dorothy, and Allan.
As a teenager, Allan took a job at Buffalo City Hall as a day laborer. After completing his schooling at Hutchinson Technical High School in Buffalo, Allan began working for the City of Buffalo in the Parks Department. He worked at the former LaSalle Park and specialized in athletics, but he also taught carpentry classes in the parks. I still have one of the children’s bookshelves he helped students build.
During this time, Allan was also raising a family—six children in all, five girls and one boy. Around this same period, he first stepped into politics. He ran for City Supervisor in the Delaware District and won several campaigns.
But in between work, politics, and raising a large family, Allan and his wife Helen would travel with friends to a little place called Mohawk Point—a rocky stretch of shoreline in Ontario, Canada, just about forty-five minutes from Buffalo. When Allan and Helen discovered it, they knew they had found something special.
Allan eventually purchased a piece of property there and planned to build a small lakefront cottage. As you might imagine, raising six children, working full-time, volunteering, and building a home was no small undertaking, and Allan was not a wealthy man.
As the story goes, the City of Buffalo was replacing park benches and selling off older or damaged ones. Allan purchased one of those benches and placed it on the family property at Mohawk Point. Many summer weekends were spent there—picnicking, sunbathing on the rocky beach, and enjoying time together while Allan and Helen slowly saved enough money to purchase the materials needed to build their modest cottage.
Eventually, the cottage was finished. The family spent many summers there before Allan’s passing. Sadly, after he died, the cottage had to be sold. What remained were the memories.
When I was a child, my mother brought us back to that place. We would rent a vacation cottage just two doors down from Grandpa Al’s old property. The cottage we rented was rustic and charming. I often heard my mother tell stories about vacations at Grandpa’s cottage, and I suspect our summers were not all that different from hers.
I spent many summers at Mohawk Point as a child. At the time, I never truly appreciated it—but I absorbed it all nonetheless. I never cared much for the rocky beach. To be fair, what kid wants to stretch out on a shoreline filled with stones and boulders? And certainly no one wants to get sliced by a zebra mussel in the water—that’s a story for another time.
As an adult, I now realize how deeply those days and nights by the lake rooted themselves in my sense of place and in the memories I still hold close.
Later in life, after I moved away, it became even more apparent how deeply the lake was woven into who I was and how I understood family, history, and home.
When my first son was born and I was living in New York City, I began researching my family history—particularly Maud. Where did she go? Why did she leave? How could someone abandon three of her children and disappear into another life? I had so many questions.
Over time, I realized that part of my fascination with her story was actually homesickness. I longed to be back near the lake, sharing those stories with my own child.
Every so often I would feel a surge of determination to research Maud again, but progress was slow. I would dive in while nursing my son or while he was napping, then set it aside for three to six months at a time. This pattern continued for nearly ten years. In between, I had another son.
In 2016, I finally made the journey back home for good.
That first summer back, I brought my kids to Mohawk Point for a day trip. I showed them the cottage their great-grandfather built and the one we used to rent for vacations.
To say they were unimpressed would be an understatement.
But I understood exactly how they felt. It wasn’t theirs. It was mine.
I realized that if I wanted them to understand what that place meant, they would need their own experiences there—memories that belonged to them.
About a year later, I began searching for a lake house of our own. After four years of searching, my husband and I finally purchased our property—the Gates Loch House—on Lake Ontario.
It wasn’t Mohawk Point. But it was ours.
The first week after closing, there was plenty of work to do. The cottage wasn’t in total disrepair, but it was unlivable. Every pipe had burst during the previous winter (surprise!), and we spent two full weekends ripping out layer after layer of old carpeting.
The kids helped.
They weren’t thrilled about it—but they helped. They invested.
During those first few weekends, we picnicked at the water’s edge, swam after getting dusty and dirty filling our first dumpster, and watched every sunset we could.
The place felt special—not because it was the lake house we had always dreamed about, but because it was the lake house we were building together.
All of us.
About a month into our cleanup and mini-renovation, my parents came to visit. My mother arrived with a gift: a park bench.
Not just any park bench—a vintage City of Buffalo park bench.
We placed it beneath the red maple tree at the water’s edge.
I can’t tell you how many sunsets I’ve watched from that bench, or how every single one feels a little different from the last. I’ve seen the kids sit there quietly after tossing rocks into the water. I’ve watched my husband’s daughter curl up beside him as they look out across the lake.
Moments like that remind me what we are building here—what we are sharing with our children and our family, and the memories that will stay with them long after these summers have passed.
Last year we began expanding the cottage. We hired members of the local Amish community to complete the exterior structure of an addition, and then set out to finish the rest of the work ourselves.
It hasn’t been easy.
But we’ve learned so much along the way. There’s still plenty left to do before we can truly relax and share the cottage with family and friends again, but I know it will all be worth it.
The kids are learning too. They’re investing their time, building something with their own hands, and making memories along the way.
And sometimes I find myself thinking about Allan.
Did he feel the same way?
I wish he were here to share these moments and tell his stories. Oh, the stories I’m sure he could tell.
So that’s my connection to two of the Great Lakes. I warned you—it’s not epic or extraordinary.
But it’s mine.
Maybe that’s the thing about the Great Lakes. None of our stories about them are particularly epic on their own. They’re small moments—sunsets on rocky beaches, old cottages built by hand, benches placed at the water’s edge where generations sit and watch the lake. But taken together, those moments become something much larger. That’s really what Great Lakes Guide Girl is about: telling the stories of the places, people, and quiet traditions that live along these shores. If you have a Great Lakes story of your own, I hope you’ll stick around and share it with me.
Comments