MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Summer 2019

84 labour, sitting on the ice. Come spring, the jumble of wood would have floated free upon the lake known as Kashagawigamog—the “long and flowing waters” of the local Ojibway. Driven by the J-hooks of bellowing shantymen singing whiskey-loosed ballads, the log and its compatriots bobbed south toward the Gull River mills at Minden, Norland, and Coboconk. But somewhere before the lake’s narrows, where the water funnels over sand bars and long weeds flutter beneath the surface, the boom must have broken open. And the log, floating high, slid silently onto the sand in a small cove. For decades it lingered in the bay, rocking on grey foam waves, season upon season, sinking lower in the cool water, its cells growing heavy with time. Herons perched on the ragged, peeling bark, and turtles hauled out as it steamed under summer’s sultry stare. Eventually, sometime in the late 1940s, a British immigrant successful in his Toronto printing business would purchase the land and build a comely log cottage, with a dock and a lawn and a rockwork waterfall that passing boats would stop to admire; in the early ’70s he would sell his near-north retreat to the nephew whom he also sold his business—my father. And the log, so storied by this point, would become part of my own family tale. I remember sitting on the log with an aunt as a child, dangling toes in clear water that sparkled over ripple marks in the sand, teasing minnows that darted toward us, tracking the bright-blue pincers of crayfish that poked from beneath it. There were also clamshells, snails, frogs, spiders, beetles and my favourites—dragonfly larvae that crawled out on the wood to ease slowly from pupal casings. Leaving these crispy ghosts of their aquatic existence behind, they emerged as mosquito-eating helicopters that danced daily across the lawn. I’d turn these castings in my hand, marvelling at their symmetry, at the secrets of metamorphosis held in frozen-pose gossamer, then place them back where they’d been—a part of the log’s story. The vicissitudes of winter ice, high water, and frequent storms shifted the log every year. Up and down the waterfront it moved, turning always against the rock of a retaining wall built for my great uncle by local stonemasons. No longer capable of floating, the log now owed any movement solely to shape or bullying by winter ice. And I sat on it in all its myriad positions—with friends, cousins, sweethearts. If that log could only talk. Every spring, on the first ride north from the city came the cry: “Where will the log be this year?” And it would never disappoint or betray, remaining in our cove, where we could love it in absentia with the unconscious familiarity reserved for favoured objects. But the log would never leave. Almost 60 years on it still lays high on the beach, unmoved for decades; rotten, moss-covered, surrounded by grasses, bristling with alder shoots and bright blue forget-me-nots. Imbedded in the sand, it’s a horizontal icon of both nature and pioneer hubris, a stoic sentinel of the land’s marvelous history that belies the passage of many bare feet, canoes and myriad beer bottles. An ode to summers and generations past. A truly Canadian log. The forest of its birth is centuries gone, but a present incarnation looms behind, crowding the cottage towards the lake—which, as lakes do, remains eager to swallow anything. So the log waits, where my daughter has known it, but known it not. She sees neither glacial ice nor unimaginable forest, hears no songs from mustached shantymen echoing sharp across October waters. Instead, there are only forget- me-nots that dance upon the log, swaying to wind that hums over the sand, ripples the grasses, and occasionally draws her gaze to the flowers—as bright a blue as a crayfish claw.