On the weekends, Tom and I love to go hiking in the forests around the city. We tramp up and down hills in rain or shine, wearing full hiking gear or totally inappropriate city clothes depending on when the urge strikes. And almost everywhere we hike we see massive stumps in various stages of decay supporting entire cities of fungus, moss and smaller trees. These stumps always have telltale notches cut into them from where the lumberjacks who felled them stood as they pulled the saw back and forth. Most are more than a meter in diameter; they are the old growth trees that were the original inhabitants of the area.
When I picked up the Georgia Straight this week and read about a couple who totally renovated a Queen Anne style house in a nearby East Van neighbourhood, using mainly salvaged materials from other old houses, I had one of those "of course" lightbulb moments. "If you take a wood-frame building prior to the 1920s, generally it's going to be built out of first-growth forest." The timber that was created by felling those massive trees went to build the growing city, building houses like the one we live in, which was built sometime around 1910. The very bones of the house, all the beams that hold the walls and ceilings up, the wood trim around the windows, doors and the entirety of the dining room, all grew once upon a time in the silent cathedral of forest that is Lynn Valley.
When we go hiking in the forest now, I will look at each stump and think, "Did my house once grow here? Did you give your life for my wainscoting, for the door jambs and windowsills I arrange my knick knacks on today?" This is the history of Canada - the hundreds of years those trees spent growing in the mists and rain.