MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Summer 2019

83 BIOPHILIAC Like most of Ontario, the land around my family cabin in the Haliburton Highlands once lay beneath an ocean of ice, a fact I’m fond of recalling on the very hottest of summer days. Sitting on an old log lodged against a rock wall at the shore, I think of those unimaginable times when goliath boulders floated mile-high, locked in crystal waves that hung poised to break upon the land for some 50,000 years. When the frozen tide eventually ebbed, giant rivers poured the turquoise remains of exhausted snows down now-austere valleys lined by towering moraines. Pebbles tumbled through raging waters that ran opaque with rock flour ground from anything that had gotten in the glacier’s way. Then the great ice sheets were gone, and darkened mirrors—the countless lakes of the Canadian Shield—spread across a land scraped clean, like puddles from some Pleistocene rain. I think about the great forests that came later, verdant and vast beyond fantasy or imagination, a continental palisade interrupted only by the familiar outline of les mers douces —the sweetwater seas of the Great Lakes. And I imagine the behemoth white pine, maple, and oak standing silent as the first inhabitants of the land roamed these shores beneath their boughs—the same trees that would have borne stoic witness to the coming of the white man before falling victim to his hunger for timber. And I think about all of this because it was around that time that the great arbour whose remains I perch upon must have been felled, and woolen-clad, pancake-fed men, stale with another day’s sweat, would have snapped their suspenders with pride as it crashed to the forest floor. After the laborious task of buck-sawing the tree into sections, the log would have been skidded through the winter bush, pulled behind a draught team snorting indignant clouds in the frosty air as it jostled through achingly bright snow toward a frozen lake. Eventually, the horses would have left the log, along with the rest of the winter’s The log, so storied by this point, would become part of my own family tale. THE LOG How a dead tree is a time capsule for many lives words :: Leslie Anthony Log drive on the Petawawa River above High Falls,Algonquin Provincial Park. TORONTO STAR PHOTOGRAPH ARCHIVE