Highland Fling

The Highlander, eh; tis the name of my new newspaper (the flappy sheets of printed matter where folk less inclined towards the wonders of our digital world get to read my drivel!).

Where I come from Highlander means northern folk from the Scottish Highlands. I believe our fair Canadian county took its name from the hills and glens of Scotland, too, after pioneering settlers noted a resemblance to their homeland. You may know a different story of course and I’d be the last to refute it because all I have to back mine up is a Wikipedia entry!

But the Scottish Highlands look nothing like Haliburton County, resplendent as it is in its red, green and golden crown of maple and spruce. The Scottish Highlands are more crew cut than crowning glory, having been stripped of their tree cover a long time ago by inhabitants hungry for building materials and fuel. The rugged hills and valleys are now all rocky crags and tussock grass, dotted with purple blooms of heather and the odd fellow in a skirt, sorry kilt!

But then again, you folks, or rather your ancestors, stripped Haliburton County of its trees too a while back, didn’t you.

Don’t deny it: I’ve seen the historic photos of the landscape around the Donald chemical factory and elsewhere nearby. They look like some horror story where the lead role was a mad axe murderer holding a grudge against the local foliage.

Since then, I notice that your trees have been very well behaved. The spruce even grow in rows. That’s what I call keeping them in line (if you’ll pardon the pun). Then again, I can see how you did it. My recent foray into gardening – something alien to me until I landed here in Haliburton – has opened up a whole new world of highly aggressive gadgets that would scare most any plant into submission.

The chain saw; yup, pretty horrific if you’re a tree. Ride-on lawn mowers the size of family cars; something that not many an English garden warrants – we could prune most suburban lawns with a pair of nail scissors in a couple of hours. And then there are weed whackers, what a name! You Canadians certainly tell it how it is. Back in Blighty we have a much more benign version called a strimmer. It runs on electricity rather than roaring into life courtesy of its own engine and is waved around with little more effort than it takes to swing a handbag. The plants don’t take much notice of it and many of the weeds remain standing defiantly tall even after a couple of passes with it. But a weed whacker, there’s a tool.

Strapped in to said dealer or weed destruction, steel toe-caps on, protective eye-wear lashed to my face, I recently vibrated across the garden towards a clump of weeds. Plants, critters and my son Little Z cowered as I strode by. I had spotted a spruce sapling who had decided to rally against the years of wisdom inherited from his forefathers and grow out of line. Vzzzzzz, VZZZZZZZZZZZZ. He got whacked, mob style, out in the open in view of all the other spruce. I felt like I had sent them a message. Stepping back, I growled in a menacing voice: “Mess with me again and I bring out the brush saw.”

But I digress. We were talking about the Highlander, Highlands and all things High Brow. See that, I linked the Highlander with intellectual stuff in the space of eight words! And, apart from this column maybe, your new newspaper will be full of the brightest and best in Haliburton County. We’ll give you the high brow, middle road and low down on what’s what and what’s not, all the way from Dysart to Eyre and McClintock and a whole lot of places in between: not all of them with Scottish names and most of them donning a fine head of trees, some well trained, others an unruly but beautiful mob of red and gold.