A Muskoka Story

A ragged squall line had assembled itself haphazardly over eastern Georgian Bay, leaderless soldiers who could not entirely decide whether to attack or to remain at the ready. The storm cells ultimately found their resolve and quick-marched south across the Bay, turning inland at the Moon River and cutting a cooling and turbulent swath through the thick, still air to Bala Bay.

The late afternoon August heat funneled the dark clouds east across the widest part of Lake Muskoka, whipping frothy waves from water that had been glass mirror calm moments before. The unchallenged wind and a driving cascade of rain bounced hard off the mottled windward rock faces at the south tip of Browning Island. The storm brigade was fully engaged now, making a landfall under black booming clouds to strike the shoreline and the low hills beyond, one half hour of a summer storm’s fury. A random lightening strike, unannounced by thunder, sheared the crown of a battered white pine that stood tallest on the crest of a bare granite ridge, two miles east of the lake. This ancient king headed his own seamless and ageless army, a forest that rippled in one unbroken emerald mantle from the south branch of the Muskoka River to Kashe Lake, creased only by the summer mud and the brackish water of the Beaver Creek and a hundred other tiny lowland openings in the larger watershed.

The heat of the strike threw a volley of sparks that cascaded into the dry deadfall lying sheltered from the storm that now ripped into the forest. A fire began with an explosive burst in this kiln of covering brush and old blueberry bushes, its searing flames arcing high into the lattice work of limbs above, curtained by the pelting rain of the thunderstorm. The contest between the two great creative forces of Nature played out as it had done since the last Ice Age, no prisoners and no witnesses.

The hiss of steam signaled the battle’s denouement. A dead tree had been reduced to potash, and the bark of a dozen more old growth sentinels was scorched. The fire that began with such power after the lightening strike had met its end at the marshy creek edge. The storm was over, as its remnants careened east towards the lakes and forests of Haliburton.

The heat of the sudden fire opened hundreds of resin soaked cones that had been scattered season by season on the forest floor. Thousands of seeds were released from the dormant cones, a bounty for the squirrels and the birds in the face of the approaching autumn. Five seeds germinated, and one seedling that took root in a particularly rich loam filled crease in the ageless Shield rock grew to become a mature pinus strobus, the Eastern White Pine. Fire and water, death and re-birth were the ceaseless interplay in the great primal forests of Muskoka in 1650.

My grandfather, Hart Crawford, was not a stickler for proper grammar, but I am certain that he would say that the Tree demanded the respect associated with the use of a proper noun. Hart spent his entire life in and around forests and wood of all kinds, with a career that began as a death defying treetopper in the Douglas fir forests of the Queen Charlotte’s in 1918. The Crawfords were a family of successful lumber and coal merchants in Campbellville when in 1904 they purchased a 1700 acre tract near what would be the Reay Road in the backwoods of Muskoka.

The Tree was over 250 years old when the Crawfords became its owners. It stood at least 180 feet tall, an old and monstrous white pine even by the impressive standards of the species, rooted in the low ridge of the world’s oldest rock, survivor of dozens of fires like the one that gave it life in 1650. Hart never understood why this mighty specimen, so visible to the many mercenary loggers who flooded into the Muskoka backwoods after 1850, could have escaped their attention or their saws. The Tree lived unscathed well into my grandfather’s stewardship, a landmark for travelers passing along Highway 11 and a monument to elemental Nature.

I suspect that for Hart Crawford the Tree had become something of a personal talisman. It was the last virgin white pine any where in Muskoka, a tangible and living throwback to the district’s great lumbering era, of log drives down the Muskoka River and the whine of the Gravenhurst sawmills that dominated its wharf before the era of the great hotels and the Sagamo. I believe that the preservation of the Tree became a part of my grandfather’s identity. He would never have taken the Tree down, but it was twice struck by lightening and so badly damaged in July of 1948 Hart was forced to have the great tree felled. It is an odd twist of family fate that my grandfather’s saw mill located near the Reay Road burned in August that same year.

The Tree lived on in the years that followed 1948. My grandfather was very friendly with Gordon Sloan, the proprietor of the well known Gravenhurst restaurant that bore his family name. The Sloan bar, named the ‘Inner Sanctum’, was built from the beautiful and workable wood of the Tree. My grandfather, a social man and a hail fellow well met, was a frequent visitor to the Inner Sanctum; a part of his own essence was imparted by the warm pine paneling created from his great prize.

In an act of both preservation and sentimentalism (although he staunchly denied it), Hart kept a number of cross-sectional pieces from different parts of the Tree. For years these segments lay unadorned under my grandparents’ workshop at their Brydon’s Bay cottage. On our summer visits my sister and I sometimes attempted to count the tiny rings in the old wood, trying hard to imagine how these rough wooden slabs were a part of the living creation that our grandfather said was once the greatest and the oldest in Muskoka.

These vestiges of the Tree remained in storage until 1972, when my grandfather decided to donate a specially constructed dining table to Sloan’s from the wood that he had saved. The table was beautifully fashioned from a cross-sectional portion that had been taken closest to the Tree’s base. The circumference was as beautiful and as irregular as when it stood unchallenged for 300 years in the Muskoka forests. Its lightly stained surface now resonated with the richness of life itself. My grandfather had a plaque fixed into the heart of the table, inscribed to commemorate his majestic pinus strobus. Our family had a memorable meal at the new Sloan’s table in August 1972, to venerate the Tree, as grand and as wonderful as it was in life, now re-born as the Table. Hart Crawford was very pleased.

It is an odd twist of our human nature that we often expect that things that are dear to our memory will remain unchanged forever. My grandfather died in 1974, and my grandmother in 1985. With her passing I did not visit Gravenhurst very often, but when I did I went into Sloan’s to look at the Table, and remember my grandfather, his Tree and all that was represented there.

I was not aware until recently that Sloan’s was sold some years ago and its contents distributed or dispersed - the Table is now elsewhere. My fault....not keeping track of a memory.

The last time I saw Hart Crawford he was in his coffin, laid out in a Gravenhurst funeral parlor, old Ontario style. He made no protest as the Masons worked their peculiar magic over his body, speeding his passage to the hereafter. To find his table would be to see him again.

©2006 Zaswonderwords