Imagine your cottage. It’s not just a building you go to when the sun shines and the lake glistens; it’s part of your family. It’s nothing elaborate — just a small, quaint house on the water, just a little more than four pine walls and a roof — but it has shaped you and your family’s history. The bumpy drive there, walking in the woody aroma, the sound of the lake lapping the shore … the memories are endless.

It’s been passed on through the generations. It belonged to your parents, and someday you hope to give this little treasure to your kids.

Now, imagine there was a predetermined year in the not-too-distant future when that cottage, or at least the land it sits on, was no longer available. What if your cottage had an expiry date?

This is the situation faced by hundreds of cottagers scattered across the lakes of Algonquin Provincial Park.

In the late 1950s, as part of its policy to preserve natural habitat, the Ontario government decided to eventually end the leases of all cottages in the park, mostly found in the lakes along Highway 60. In the 1980s, the leaseholders were able to convince the province to extend that deadline until 2017.

Now that year looms over the heads of more than 600 families that enjoy the cottages found in the largest park in Ontario.

There are, in fact, 304 leaseholds throughout the park, but you may never have noticed them. And they like it that way.

Situated in tiny, unassuming cottages — few with power or sewage systems — these cottagers want to remain overlooked. The cottages themselves, painted forest green and dark brown, blend in with the pristine environment.

“You never really thought of us, have you?” says Brian Maltman, president of the Algonquin Park Residents’ Association. “We remain pretty invisible, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

He says just about the only time the Algonquin cottagers receive attention is when they’re helping struggling park visitors.

“We sure get noticed when we fish people out of the lake,” he says. “There are lots of folks that start out on canoe trips and end up dumping in no time. And there’s where we come in.”

Maltman says the idea of lease expiry is based on an old idea, to “preserve instead of conserve the nature.”

“Old style preservation meant putting a fence around nature and letting the public peer in once in a while,” he says.

But Algonquin is used for a variety of purposes, including restaurants, shops and children’s camps. These commercial leases were renewed in 2005 for up to 60 years.

“Put in a nutshell, our argument to the government is that we fit in with the current make-up of the park,” he says.

Maltman argues that the cottagers’ footprint in the expansive park is tiny. “Collectively, our lease area makes up about 1/6000th of the park’s area. It’s nothing. But it would be devastating, absolutely devastating, to lose that.”

But the position of park officials is that a decision, albeit an old one, has already been made.

“What we have in black-and-white is the lease,” says Henry Checko, an Algonquin official who manages the leases for the park. “What we can say for sure is that it ends in nine years, and that’s that.”

Asked why the park would want to remove the cottagers, Checko says it’s a dead issue. “I don’t think we can get into why that occurred, or who made that occur — it’s just what we have. It’s just what’s been decided.”

He says he sympathizes with the leaseholders and knows that “these properties have been cherished in these families for quite some time.”

For Brian Maltman, it’s a fight that is far from over.

His cottage on Cache Lake was built by his parents in 1947. “And that makes us relative newcomers,” he says with a chuckle. The cottage community has been there since the early 1900s.

It’s a different experience than the cottages found in the “suburban North,” a term Maltman uses for cottages on Lake Joseph. “We’re very different than the places on the cover of Cottage Life. It’s not like: Oh, maybe this year, we’ll sell it.”

His family’s cottage, and hundreds of others, is “sewn into the fabric of Algonquin,” he says.

“I just couldn’t imagine summers without that place.”