What they miss on a Muskoka walk – I cherish with all my heart

I can’t remember one moment in my life thus far, (51 years in this body anyway) when I have found it tiresome to be in the company of unspecified enchantment(s). My mother once said to me that I looked at life through the eyes of an artist, and wrote with the heart of the poet. We count on mothers to say things like this, during moments of frustration and discontent. She had high hopes that I would eventually become a best selling author for all my hours spent huddled over the typewriter. Maybe I should be disappointed I haven’t achieved great acclaim as an author, yet as I’ve written frequently in these blog submissions, at the very least, “I’ve led a writer’s life.” By this I mean, my enterprise of immersion, observation and perpetual wonderment at all things surrounding me, has been reward enough for my toil in the profession.
I’ve sought it out. As a child, wandering the Burlington ravine where Ramble Creek meandered through the thickets of live and decaying vegetation, toward the stone-laden waterfront of Lake Ontario, I quested for signs of the “fantastic,” every step I took. I watched carefully for signs of ghosts and wee beasties lurking in the cavernous and dark places under outstretched boughs, and in the morning shadows fingering along the creek bed. I kept an open mind about such paranormal stuff through every play moment and creek-side frolic. I was allowed to freely wander the sun bathed lowland of my Burlington neighborhood. I was in paradise. A place of grand stimulation to every molecule of untapped imagination; a place to explore where nothing was entirely as it appeared, and magic was cast about like the sunglow dazzling down through the canopy of hardwoods, like gold veins exposed across the forest floor.
In my early days, wandering with a gypsy’s heart, I knew that my truest satisfaction on any day, was to be amongst these soft, thriving ferns; in the midst of the cheerful melody of windsong and waterfall, and the trickle of the shallow creek’s flow over the exposed flat rocks that made a perfect bridge from here to there,…. on the way to nowhere in particular. It didn’t matter to me that this little wooded ravine was in the midst of an expanding, soon-to-be city, Burlington, and that one day it would be stripped of its vegetation and replaced by an urban jungle. I was too young to know about urban sprawl but astute enough to find the importance of memorizing the experience, as if a mural study of the way things used to be here in paradise lost.
I don’t take anything for granted around me these days, especially those values of Muskoka community life I happen to adore. Change is rampant here now, and it seems that everything I have particular admiration for, gets gobbled up or knocked down sooner (than aspects I deplore), by the eroding wave of progress. I’m always making mental notes I suppose, although it’s not what I intend to do when I set out to walk the mainstreet, or sit in Gull Lake Park for a summer concert night on The Barge; one of the most fascinating, beautiful nights of entertainment you can spend in my hometown. I guess to some degree, I even worry about losing The Barge concert series, should political will to preserve it diminish in any way. I hate losing precious traditions, and sources of inspiration, and for my wife and I, spending our Sunday nights through the summer at Gull Lake Park, has become an end-all to a summer well spent.
As I used to wander and dawdle along the Ramble Creek ravine, seeking out every vestige of mystery and magic, I’m not much different today, as I amble slowly along my daily path from home to mainstreet and back. As a writer who frequently feels cursed by creative enterprise, I confess to observing my surroundings as almost a last will and testament, as if every venture could be the last biographical chapter. I worry a lot about Muskoka’s welfare these days and with considerable justification.
I have pondered many times that it would be helpful at times, to be able to turn off the adventurer’s quest of discovery, and just take an uncompromised, otherwise unremarkable walk. At no sacrifice of enjoyment of course. Alas, it is not possible. Just as it was impossible as a youngster to separate thoughts of the fantastic from the clear context and knowledge of reality. I could of course see each leaf and fern for what it was in nature,…. yet I never doubted these same plants could be the protective shelter from daylight, for Queen Mab and the midnight revel of fairies and their kind.
Think of me as foolish and disconnected from the mainstream of observation and dissection but I steadfastly fall upon the advice of author Washington Irving, who worried about the failings of tradition and lore by the exposure of precise science upon all the mysteries of existence. He wrote about the dissection of the elements of nature, in order to identify what properties of nature give and extend life. While not dismissing the relevance of science and its exactness to help man fully appreciate nature, he cautioned that it was important as well, to possess equally, the elements of intrigue that stir our imaginations from complacent thought. Iriving thought life would be a dull existence without the fantasy of keen imagination and expectation; a poor partner however, of this new study of life science. Afterall, what would the scientist, even today, say to the keeper of lore, who believes with heart and soul that fairies still haunt the woodlands.
If you, for example, stand out in this moor I call The Bog, for even a short period of time, you can imagine all sorts of mysterious events and sounds unfolding in dark, heavily wooded pockets of the gently contoured earth. When the crows are agitated in the early morning here at Birch Hollow, it’s as if they’re chattering about my intrusive footfall…. the unwelcome watcher in the woods. They will flutter noisily overhead as distraction, and perch directly above and “caw” with a ripping reprimand for the voyeur’s unwelcome entry into their domain. At once you take notice and look up, and recognize you are being closely watched by a half dozen wise old crows possessing the treetops. There are strange natural sounds the traveler tries to identify, as coming from friend or foe. There is a tree for example, that has made the most curious ticking, knocking sound for the past two years, and I have yet to appreciate why it emits any sound at all. Even after close inspection, all I can attest is that it is a “noisy” tree. Enchanted? Possibly! It ticks away whether in wind or the still evening air, yet there is not overlapping branches or tree top that would explain the rhythmic tapping all day long.
Throughout the day these often subtle enchantments will carry-on, defying the observer to identify the precise cause. The change of light and intensity, from morning until moonlight bathes across the scene, always manifests a profound change of mood, reflected by a certain fear and trembling of all mortals in its embrace. I cherish my walks in these haunted woods.
I can’t imagine even one day spent separated from this over-active imagination of mine. I couldn’t survive for one day without the company of expectation and passion for exploration; whether it is a pleasant stroll from snowy churchyard to corner store, or hike along the lakeshore to the pinnacle of cliff that affords such a startling view of golden sunset on a tranquil bay. I would be lonely indeed, without the partnership of enchantment, that challenges me each day, to look beyond the obvious, and regale the natural and the supernatural, as I benefit from the beat of a heart; alas I’m have remained the captive of childhood wonderment, of which I’m happy to remain thusly fettered.
Think back to that wild imagination you had as a kid. Now go and find it again, give it a good shake, and make up for lost time. Being young at heart isn’t just a cliché. It’s the science of emotion. Life’s too beautiful to be under-explored.
Thanks for participating in this blog adventure at Birch Hollow, Muskoka. More to come.

Apathy costs us all – watching from the sidelines as our Muskoka hinterland destroyed

It’s groundhog day and in reaction to a large meeting of the world’s leading scientists (today) to discuss global warming, it seemed the perfect time to chastise local government, AGAIN, for short sightedness in the home district. How can we fix a global disaster before making things right in our respective neighborhoods? Just some thoughts on how we can defend Muskoka….our own environs in certain peril!
With all this enlightened thinking about global warming and ecological well being, can we expect that a few local politicians will rise from their seats at council tables, to demand an end to urban sprawl across the Muskoka landscape?
Will just one politician rise and ask, “Why do we need this condo project in Muskoka?” “Why do we need this box store?” “What are the benefits to the environment of a strip mall?” “Don’t we have enough shopping opportunities already?” “Over-retailed,” is it possible?
I would cherish the day when a local council decided that there is more to Muskoka’s future than purely economic development.
Muskoka is a district ripe for exploitation. There is NO ceiling to development; new initiatives by government to appease development interests can change plans with surprising ease. To think we’ve got limits to growth in this region is nonsense. There are few iron-clad plans without built-in wiggle room.
When I think about local government today, and what they represent in our respective communities, I can’t see beyond their far too flexible economic development interests. It seems everything is to build-out, expand, and make bigger as an illustration of community dynamic and progressive enterprise. I don’t get the impression they spend much time examining social issues, such as needs of the local food bank, homelessness, social well being of the citizenry generally, and I can’t remember the last time I read a story about councilors cracking down on local crime and the sale of drugs in public places. I do hear about their dealings with developers and planners and other related empire building strategies but I wonder if they occasionally read about local occurrences of crime, and truly appreciate that city building causes city problems. Some urban experts might wish to suggest that local politicians start upgrading their education, to know the increasing social requirements of a large population and crime problems experienced by all expanding centers in North America.
I get the opinion that local elected representatives don’t get the full picture because they’re not tuned in to the right channels. When they re-locate an urban park, such as in the case of the recently sacrificed Jubilee Park, in Bracebidge, (now to be used as a university campus) they don’t talk about the negatives of robbing one part of town to pay off another neighborhood….as if in their wonderland they can do whatever they want “consequence free”! And when consequence does rear its head, well, the folks who got us in the mess have retired from politics or departed this mortal coil.
When a golf course was being constructed near us a while back, residents in our neighborhood would comment to us about the wolves, foxes, deer, bear and owls that had been coming into or around their yards. Gads, isn’t this great. Just like going to a zoo except it’s in our yard! Do you think one, just one elected official, would ponder before glad-handing such a mega project, what “habitat” means. What “declining habitat” means to all life on this planet. So while many in our town were tickled silly watching increased animal traffic particularly in the immediate area of construction, our family felt sick seeing the creatures displaced from their habitat, and found no joy seeing homeless wildlife looking for lodging like intruders in their own region.
I have stated quite publicly that I am not anti-development but I most certainly do not approve of developmental speculation that is running rampant in our region at present, affecting far more habitat than ever in Muskoka’s history. Our permanent population does not justify the urban and residential expansion, unless there has been a huge undetected migration to our region…..that hasn’t yet showed up in the grocery store cue which is pretty thin in the midst of a Muskoka winter. Maybe all the new property owners are in the tropics for the winter. Investment properties you say? If the new development in Muskoka was representative of a population shift, that would be something significant; more accurately is the statement, “if they build it, they will come!” So screw habitat in the name of “let’s build something else we truly don’t need!”
If I was to ask a local politician why we require this present orgy of development, they would more than likely quote some developer….. who may have uttered a profound comment like, “you want to prosper don’t you….you surely don’t want your town to roll over and die because you won’t except any new development?” As a long time reporter I’ve heard it all. Just not statements like, “Well, where will these foxes and wolves find habitat if we destroy this forest?” “Where will all the frogs and snakes and little critters slither to, when we tarmac over this lowland.”
I find it offensive that we are welcoming economic development to our region because it’s offered….not because it’s exactly what we need but because it just happened by when “we needed something, anything that looked progressive.” If our elected officials in Muskoka, don’t make environmental, ecological stands soon, and give the heave-ho to plans that don’t suit the wellness and recovery of our hinterland, we will be forced to deal with the same-old-same-old of every expansive urban area in the world. It will be at the expense of our tourism industry which, if this historian’s memory serves correct, is still after all these years, the number one industry in our entire region. Many of our visitors and cottagers contend with urban dilemmas at home, and don’t require an added measure of the same on their retreat into the hinterland.
I would like someone, a politician even, to tell me how in God’s name, a new shopping mall will help maintain the quality of life for my children? How it will companion with the environment to make the world a better place? The forest? If it had been conserved for its environmental contribution instead, would have assisted our capability to survive another generation. Maybe the biggest problem our elected officials have these days, is thinking beyond tomorrow and the next day. What they are facilitating today is a much quicker demise of the natural world whether they are enlightened enough to believe it or not.
I would like in the future to be able to take my grandchildren on a stroll through a Muskoka woodland and not hear a jackhammer, an earth mover, a nail gun, or smell freshly rolled tarmac; or see the ugly backside of a shopping mall rise through the woodland mist. I would like to think environmental conscience will one day share equal attention in the proceedings of local council. Being a progressive community might one day be synonymous with “ecological protection,” “conservation,” and “healthy environs.” I dream of the day of sensible proportion, when development isn’t just the lark of land sharks and speculators.
Thanks for reading this blog installment, and if you experienced some flames coming out of your monitor, it’s reflective of the chagrin of this writer-historian….watching helplessly as another acre of Muskoka is sacrificed out of greed not necessity.


Please check out my other blog at http://gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com/

Ada Florence Kinton worried about loss of Muskoka woodlands in late 1800’s

Took exception to the woodsman’s axe

Since the mid 1990’s I have written frequently about a young lady by the name of Ada Florence Kinton. Following her death in the early 1900’s, her family in Huntsville, published the journal she had commenced before arriving in Muskoka, entitled “Just One Blue Bonnet,” most of the text devoted to detailing her work with the founding Booth family, and the world missions of the Salvation Army.
I found the softcover text one day in a second hand book shop, in the Town of Bracebridge. As I am an antiquarian and collectable book dealer, I couldn’t believe my good fortune, to be able to secure this biographical treasure, with many references to the outdoor experiences the young artist enjoyed in North Muskoka. What made her exceptional to me, as both an historian and a Muskoka heirloom collector-dealer, was that it offered impartial observations of building advancements in the region’s fledgling villages, particularly in Huntsville, where her brothers were already prominent businessmen when she arrived from England.
For the purposes of this blog entry, my interest is in her honest appraisal of how these communities were being constructed between forest, rock and water. Ada Kinton was an accomplished artist and teacher who was forced to come to Canada after the death of her father and the settling of the family’s estate. Her mother had died some years earlier. As she already had brothers and their young families in Canada, it was decided she should travel to the new Dominion, until she could make more secure plans for the future.
She arrived in Canada in the winter season and when she describes the lonely and bitterly cold journey to Muskoka, the final leg by horse-drawn sleigh, it’s obvious the adjustment from the old country to new was going to be long and difficult to heart and senses.
During this period in the newly opened District of Muskoka, Ada made many important observations about the living conditions, social and cultural observances, and advancements in civilized existence established by the new settlers to the community; some homesteads created in the English tradition inside and out. She wrote daily notes about what the community looked like, at work during the day, in gay regalia for special events, as witnessed in either full sunlight, or enhanced by the moonlight reflection off the newly fallen snow. What was striking for me was her many sojourns back into the woodlands south of Huntsville, where she sat for hours making sketches of the flora and fauna, some she describes in colorful detail. She would write for awhile, sketch for a time, and then pause to enjoy the many creatures she could see moving back and forth between birch and evergreen.
She makes numerous references to the forests in peril, and the ceaseless work of the loggers to reduce whole woodlots to stubble in a matter of days. It wasn’t simply to provide room for new buildings but rather to harvest the lumber for building purposes. The harvest of timber in Muskoka was becoming a huge industry in the late 1880’s with much timber being exported from the region to other important Canadian centres for milling and re-sale. Ada Kinton had some concern that these thriving forests were going to be toppled without any recognition of what purpose they serve the creatures within. Would they consume every wooded acre in the district?
Ada Florence Kinton saw the beauty in nature at a time when most settlers looked at trees as both a nuisance and a survival material. They could cut and mill it for their own homes, sell it outright, or use it for fuel in their fireplaces. There was always a good and honest reason for hacking down a tree; it was in the way of a future garden, it was worth money, and it wasn’t serving any other useful purpose. She despaired that there was no way of protecting this inherent resource. While some people vacationed to Muskoka to see these woodlands, the loggers raced against the clock to fill quotas for timber to the mill. Needless to say Muskoka communities were stripped rather bare in those early years, part by necessity to establish villages and farmsteads, the other because of plain and simple greed. It was a resource and there was money to be made. Now tell me what’s different today? Even though many folks continue to come to Muskoka to see our beautiful forests, trees still have that nuisance – value attraction that encourages their annual removal a/ to enhance the lake view and b/ to be sold off to build something or other….or burned up in a fireplace.
The honest, untutored opinion of Ada Kinton, in the late 1880’s, was that we were being reckless with clearing. Those who have little use for the pretty picture of nature, might argue, “what do artists know about anything; they just get emotional when they see a tree cut down.” What Ada Kinton saw was not only a beautiful vista in an enchanting region of the world but a critically important habitat for the creatures of the land. Something we forget about today when another wetland or woodland meets the developer’s mission of over-consumption.
On an unscheduled writing pause, I’ve just now come in from a walk down into The Bog, the charming greenbelt across the road from our home here at Birch Hollow. I can’t really describe the pleasure of being immersed in the heart of this amazing little habitat, surrounded by urbanity. There are deer tracks throughout the upper embankment of The Bog, and it has become a great distraction for our dog Bosko….our very own Deer Hunter. There are many Chickadees and Blue Jays flitting branch to branch overhead, and the squirrels have been chattering warnings to the dog since we touched the outside edge of the forest. The sunlight is dazzling off the newly fallen snow, and what began as a seriously cold day has matured in early afternoon to be most pleasant and inspiring. Ada Kinton would have celebrated this place as well, seeing and feeling its intricacies, its abounding life forms above and below. I would feel terror today to hear the start-up of a chainsaw, just as she feared the distant slash of the woodsman’s axe.
In the past few weeks of blog entries, as I’m sure you can read etched with frustration and annoyance, I’ve tangled with some members of local governance about what is in the best interest of Muskoka. As you can undoubtedly sense, the effort has been as fruitless and ignored as Ada Kinton pleas to spare the forest over one hundred years earlier.
When I look out over a perfect winter landscape with its plethora of inhabitants, all creatures great and small, above the snow mantle and below, I can’t help but wonder what catastrophe of man will be great enough in order for him to stop, and ponder awhile, if sacrificing nature for tarmac and urban sprawl all these decades has generated this most recent despair?
I confess to coming to these woods a lot in recent weeks to seek sanctuary from the urban philosophers and their condo aspirations; the commerce seekers, who know how to suck the last shiny penny from our coffers; the land sharks, the speculators who know we’ll buy the monstrosities they build. It seems so impossible that wisdom might prevail at some point, and a government official, an elected representative, just one, would rear up and say, “Enough, enough! We have consumed too much. We have abused our inherent duty to protect our environment. We must conserve and protect before we build one more strip mall, one more condo unit, one more box store.”
Alas, I am but a hopeless romantic, reared on the work of Washington Irving, who adored such natural splendors, enchanted forests and haunted waterways; Charles Dickens who lashed out against the urban sicknesses, and marveled at natural wonders……standing in awe at Niagara Falls having witnessed nothing as its parallel….just as I’ve adored the words of poet Robert Frost, these snowy woods and leaning birches reminding me of his stops along the way…..Wallace Stevens poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where nature, the sea haunts eternal. Yes, I am mired in these antiquated thoughts of nature and its place in our lives. Yet I have no reason to seek escape from these naïve, outdated thoughts,…ones I have learned from sage authority, wise to the ways of life and times; nature and her seasons.
At the age of 52 this year, I’ve written about environmental protection since the mid 1970’s and I can’t look at my home community and find one woodland I was able to protect from urban expansion. Even when I tried (most recently) with a great sense of desperate mission (and dedicated companions), to save a century old parkland in urban Bracebridge, known as Jubilee Park (where I played as a kid), the fight was lost before it began. The open space where I used to take my wee lads to play, when I lived in that neighborhood, will soon be the campus of an Ontario university…..a place of higher learning. It’s just hard to understand, in this newly turned-on world to issues such as global warming and environmental well being, how we can still be so narrow focused, as to deem irrelevant, a little open space for the enjoyment of an old, well populated urban neighborhood. But it happened and those who tried to save it have no choice now but to watch as one vision of future prosperity is replaced with another.
There are some folks I hear tell, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the earth moving equipment, to gouge out and build upon this open space as soon as possible. I feel sorry for them, I really do, and I’d gladly offer them a walk in partnership through this open space at The Bog, if I thought it would soften hearts of stone.
I’ve spent too many years in this mission to promote environmental conscience to abandon it now. I’m only half sorry to have to tell my opponents in their mission to pave over Muskoka that I have no intention of dropping my protest, my pleas for conservation any time soon. While I can’t stop the determination of government to sell the public on the philosophy that “expansion is good, expansion means progress,” I can be a stick in the spokes whenever opportunity presents. While I’d like to see the citizens of Muskoka rally to the cause, I don’t really expect the cavalry will possess many more than the few committed souls who make it a matter of daily life, to guard the well being of mother earth.
You decide what will inspire the human spirit; my choice is a stroll through the woodland. Can’t find a parallel experience strolling through the strip mall!
Thank you for reading this blog editorial.