High on the Big Stone Heart by Charles Wilkins

Author:Charles Wilkins [Wilkins, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Essays, Canada, Post-Confederation (1867-), Travel, General
ISBN: 9781770705111
Google: DHd4sh3FtCgC
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2009-03-02T04:54:10+00:00

Back at the berry patch on Southwood Road, I have been climbing for perhaps ten minutes and, breathing fairly strenuously, find myself about halfway to the top, well out of sight of the ground directly below. And there a strange thing begins to happen. Perhaps it is the wind as it gradually enfolds the sounds of a distant road or outboard (I recall from childhood how it swallowed up the voices below). Then there is only the wind - and the tops of other pines. Decades, then centuries, slip away. And as I pause to look around, I can, with a minor smudging of the visuals, transform the surrounding second-and third-growth pines into the giants of old.

It is somewhat ironic that the verdant landscape of my reverie bears little resemblance to the prevalent cottage landscapes of a hundred years ago. Countless photos from the great era of logging show cottages, even resorts, on land that has been all but reduced to scrub - land bearing an occasional skinny birch or maple, a bit of ground cover, and not much else.

Nor were the lakes of the era even a remote equivalent of the postcard-like jewels we know today. Photos show the waters of Muskoka, Haliburton, and the Kawarthas, or at least parts of them, nearly solid with logs, particularly after spring runoff, when their tributaries were routinely crowded and un-navigable because of the hundreds of thousands of pine logs on the move from their upstream origins.

Logs moving through locks as late as June and July may have been a thrill for cottaging kids. But if the rivers were more or less clear by May, the lakes and bays, particularly near the towns, were often crowded until well into the summer as logs awaited their pass through the mills (late in her life, my mother, Norma Wilkins, recalled seeing thousands of giant logs afloat on Bala Bay, and men strolling around on them with pike poles).

Lindsay Hill, a former curator at the Muskoka Lakes Museum in Port Carling, says that that town's Steamboat Bay, now a bustling arc of consumerism, was once home to a number of sawmills whose legacy is a lake bottom and shoreline that, in places, is still buried under ten feet of compressed and decomposed sawdust.

"What few cottagers realize these days," says King Wright, "is that pines not only grace their shorelines but actually created those shorelines in the first place - or at least the pine industry did."

To understand how and why, it is necessary to know that, in Ontario, during the 1860s and '70s, some 240 dams were built on streams and rivers in order to elevate lake levels, making it easier to float logs to the mills. In some cases - say, on Sparrow, Kashe, and Ahmic lakes - the water level was raised by as much as six to twelve feet, creating an entirely new shoreline.

"The original idea was that these dams would be removed when the logging ended," says Chris Blythe, an ecological consultant in Magnetewan, Ontario.

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