A Few Small Verities

Big Bras d'Or evokes what Jan describes as my hackneyed "Ah, the eternal verities." The climate scientists tell us the end is near but I take small heart from the Old Reliables I find around me every spring when we return to Cape Breton.

The carpets of bunchberry and clintonia are at least as spectacular as they ever were. Maybe more. A pair of loons pledge their troth to each other on the still water of Dalem Lake. The flame-throated Blackburnian warbler asserts his dominion from the same tall spruce overlooking our middle meadow as his ancestor did when I first took notice three decades ago. Their deed to the land goes back far before my own. Not all the verities are as warmly embraced as the warblers. Hordes of blackflies greet our every spring arrival. Eventually they wane a bit, only to be replaced by the mosquitos. On the bright side, the bugs are a boon to the warblers. Feast well, my feathered friends. Every June brings a brief migration of carpenter ants. Once upon a time I fretted they would devour the cabin before the shingles had a chance to curl in the sun. The cabin still stands and now I mostly let the ants alone. As Bob Nagel puts it, they're only doing what they're supposed to.

Squirrels have the run of our immediate neighbourhood and why not, they are permanent here, not mere arrivistes like the noisy diesel-powered creatures who arrive in June and are gone by October. Jan was very pleased with her newly painted bathhouse; the squirrels seemed much less impressed but they were clearly delighted with the jar of stale peanut butter we placed in the crook of a nearby birch. Their quarrels over the stuff endlessly entertained.


When I was a boy John F. MacDonald had the place next door to the old Livingstone homestead. the most memorable of the John F. residents was a bilingual
parrot who could berate in Spanish as well as she did in English -- and tell you whether John F.'s son Alistair was out milking the goats. Today all that is
left of John F.'s house is the foundation. The parrot is gone but a forest of Solomon-seal and Day lilies flourishes by the ruin. We liberated a few of the flowers and transplanted them by the bathhouse. The heritage flowers appear to be doing well.




After two weeks back at the old cabin we are settling into our own routines. I have cleared the trail to Dalem Lake of its usual winter allotment of windfall. We found our first junco nest yesterday and heard our first pine grosbeaks and yellow-bellied flycatchers on the homeward leg just this morning. The lake seems warm enough that our first Dalem dip could occur tomorrow morning. Then we'll know that summer has really arrived.

--Alan

Marathon Man

Sometimes serendipity happens too. On Saturday at the indispensable North Sydney Library, where we collect and ship email and pursue our miscellaneous Internet preoccupations, we crossed paths with Dana Meise [pronounced 'MY-zee'], just arrived on the ferry Smallwood after spending 47 days completing the Newfoundland portion of a cross-Canada walk. We are very impressed with pals Mary, Mike & Mark who are embarked on a similar transcontinental odyssey, albeit on bicycles; to cross the country on foot, alone, seems all the more astonishing. Carrying as much as a hundred pounds on his back and averaging 35 to 40 kilometres on each walking day, he actually trudged 65 km to complete the last leg of the Newfoundland slog. Imagine it.

Dana is a 33-year-old forestry technician from Prince George following his bliss from east to west. Our 3xM pals are doing it in the opposite direction. They have been at it for about the same length of time and have already progressed deeply into the blackfly-infested wilds of northern Ontario. Dana has a long way to go. To give him a break from the tent we invited him to spend a night with us at the Big Bras d'Or cabin. He arrived after nightfall -- under his own power of course -- and entertained us with accounts of his Newfoundland adventures. And tales of time spent in the bush west of Prince George with a grandfather who lived off the land on moose, deer, bear and what he grew in his own garden.

When it comes to facing a big challenge his granddad taught Dana that "if you work hard, it comes easy". Dana is walking the country simply because it's a big challenge he has wanted to do for a long time. His night at Big Bras d'Or turned into a rest day during which he entertained us with accounts of his adventures with bears in the wilds of British Columbia and Alberta and his happy encounters with fascinating Newfoundlanders, both human and not. Sharing a stretch of the Trans-Canada Trail with an unworried lynx was one highlight, meeting Newfoundland legendary railway historian Mont Lingard another.

It was a great treat for us to befriend a young guy who is not just a marvel of determination and grit but reflects a positive attitude towards people that we all -- maybe I particularly -- would do well to emulate. We said our farewells this morning, Dana having to submit to a short ride across the Seal Island bridge. No walker, not even one embarked on a Great Hike across the country, is allowed to walk across the Seal Island bridge.

Happy walking, Forrest Gump.

--Alan

Dana Meise's blog:
http://www.thegreathike.com/

Mary-Mike-and-Mark's blog:
http://canadac2c.blogspot.com/

Paradise Lost

Jan and I are settled into the summer place at Big Bras d'Or, somewhat recovered from a rude welcome. For the first time in the 37 years since I built the cabin overlooking the Great Bras d'Or, miscreants broke into the place, looting it of most of my power tools and other items of personal value. Anyone who has had to deal with a similar experience will appreciate the storm of emotions that swarmed us in the ensuing days. My initial homicidal fury morphed into a deep gloom that had me thinking about leaving Cape Breton forever. Now I have reached a stage of looking for ways of making my former shangri-la less vulnerable to thieves and vandals, and trying to restore some of the feeling for 'Bigador' the thieves stole along with the material items. Oddly perhaps, I find myself feeling apologetic on Cape Breton's behalf: we have learned a lot of this goes on around us.

On the bright side, friends have been exceedingly kind and supportive, and the non-human residents of Big Pay's old farm are as delightful as ever. A white-tailed doe and her two yearling fawns make an occasional appearance near the cabin and the varying hares -- still showing white feet -- munch on their grass, evidently not too concerned that the nuisance humans are back for another summer. Jan makes sure there is plenty of sugar water for the hummingbirds but, never mind, the little warriors want it all for themselves and battle endlessly. A barred owl has serenaded us a couple of nights from behind the workshop. Several species of warblers sing their territorial-imperative songs within earshot of us: Magnolia, Parula, Myrtle and the beautiful Blackburnian. We have a fine show of wildflowers, as our Flickr pictures will demonstrate.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigadore/



The calendar says summer is just around the corner but there is no sign of it in Cape Breton. It is the Drolet woodstove that has kept us warm most days, not the sun. Today we're told to expect a high temperature of no better than 13 degrees. But Jan is Doug Brown's daughter and her garden is planted nonetheless.

Given the extra projects delivered by the break-in artists we haven't put much mileage on the bikes or hiking boots but that will change soon enough. In anticipation of our September return visit to the Great War battlefields I continue to look for relics of the Boularderie soldiers who went off to Flanders and France and never returned. Nova Scotia Power doesn't supply us with the wherewithal to operate a sewing machine but that doesn't stop Jan from making progress the old-fashioned way on her 'Jewels of the Pacific' quilt for the Auckland-Victoria Challenge.

-Alan