Cousin Dan Delivers Archival Gold

After nearly a week of fair weather the rain and drizzle returned with a vengeance to Cape Breton. SAD [Seasonal Affective Disorde] erodes the psyche. How marvellous that worthy indoor pursuits have come along to provide relief. Cousin Dan Livingstone came for a visit bearing archival treasure: two of his father Harrison’s old photo albums. I spent hours photographing the old pictures. A selection is available for viewing on my Flickr site.

In the waning days of August Jan is in canning mode. We are the richer for a big cache of green tomato chow and several jars of the prized bakeapples. While Jan preserves I watch for breaks in the rain to snatch opportunities for making progress at construction of a new storage shed. Rainfall amounts for August are two and a half times normal. I have only dim memories of sunny days.

Only a week to go before we head back to the Western Front to mingle with Great War ghosts. I busy myself familiarizing the brain with the whereabouts of key places, battles, cemeteries and grave sites.

--Alan

Robert Masterfinder

Jan has yet another reason to cherish The Great Nagel. Blessed with a fine day Monday we three spent several hours clearing brush from Bob’s old Big Hill road and scouting a new trail route across his back forty to Dalem Lake. She oughtn’t to have needed the reminding but Jan got a refresher anyway: that it’s a bad idea to wear beloved jewellery whilst working in the woods. Her comfortable old fleece sweatshirt sports a hole, a souvenir from an old bonfire spark, hidden by a brooch as we set out on our bush-whacking adventure. Several hours and a few kilometres later, alas, her brooch was gone. It was only small consolation that she discovered the loss only moments after a serendipitous close encounter with a beautiful barred owl. A day later she resolved to mount a search for the brooch. I set our chances of finding it as somewhere south of 10,000-to-one. I was wrong. Robert has a long history of finding other people’s lost jewels and valuables. But spotting a bauble on a sidewalk or a sandy beach is one thing; he couldn’t possibly find Jan’s brooch in a five-kilometre stretch of trackless woods. Retracing our route, Jan and I walked right past the brooch. Robert didn’t. I was amazed – and still am.

Just because we don’t have running water or real electricity here in the Big Bras d’Or woods doesn’t mean we live like poor folk. Chef Jan is forever turning out four-star feasts on our little three-burner gas range. Once in a while I feel duty-bound to give her a break in the only culinary art I can fake a modicum of skill: East Indian cookery. Cape Bretoners apparently have no taste for Indian food; at least that’s what we conclude from the paucity of ingredients we find in local stores. But in the absence of garam masala or real paneer we make do with what we find. On Monday I put together a four-part extravaganza that seemed pleasing enough to Bob and The Mighty Sparrows, Lynn and Louise.

Though well past their childhood years the twins still have lots of wonder in them. After dinner, under a starry night sky, we went down to the swimmin’ hole in search of something wondrous. Now that we’re into the final third of August we found what we went looking for. Late August brings a bloom of bioluminescent diatoms to our shore: tiny creatures that light brightly and briefly when the water around them is disturbed. How marvellous it is to swim in a galaxy of tiny water fireflies as the stars of that other galaxy twinkle overhead.

--Alan

Here Came the Sun

Wednesday brought a most astonishing and welcome surprise: sunshine. After another grey drizzly start to the day, the cloud cover broke and the long-unseen sun showed itself for the first time in a fortnight. Jan proposed that we head out, binoculars in hand to see if we could find thirty bird species in our own woods before noon. By mid-August fall migration is underway and we soon found a little flock of songbirds taking a feeding break on their southward journey. Together with our three of local breeding warblers -- Magnolia, Blackburnian, Black-and-White -- we found Black-throated Green and several American Redstarts. Every one a jewel. A gang of twenty White-winged Crossbills noisily announced themselves and provided a good look. The song of the Hermit Thrush, beautiful and evocative, has only one rival, its near relative, Swainson’s Thrush. We heard the former and had a close look at the latter. Yellow-bellied and Alder Flycatchers boosted our list by two. A Brown Creeper, not frequently seen in our neck of the woods, brought us to an even thirty, right on target.

Sunshine endured right through the afternoon. Feeling like lottery winners we stayed outside, took our first saltwater swim in eleven days. Good fortune persisted. Lynn and Louise call our place The Resort. It lived up to the billing for their arrival later in the afternoon. We stayed outside savouring the sun and a glass of Viognier. The Darlings hosted a four-star feast at the Spaghetti Benders Restaurant just up the road. Back at the cabin clear skies continued. Open starry nights have been a rarity of late but this night’s was the exception – and just in time for the annual Perseid meteor shower. Hail the cosmos.

--Alan

Laugh, and a Few Pals Laugh with You

Laughter is the best antidote. To foul weather, break-in artists, failing infrastructure -- take your pick. Big Bras d’Or in the summer of ’08 manages to make even Scotland’s weather look good. Last year during our September ride through the Scottish islands and highlands we were spared rain on only four of 28 days. No wonder, I asserted at the time, my ancestors fled that gloomy sunless land. Hah! Over the past 25 days our part of ‘New Scotland’ has delivered only two rain-free days. Mea culpa, Caledonia, I take it all back.

So what to do in the face of bad weather? You laugh. And one of the most efficient routes to a laughter-fest is to invite The Darlings, Lynn and Louise, out for supper. My tiny perfect cousins have only one rival as geysers of relentless good cheer and that would be irrepressible Mary Ellen Sanseverino, but no one, not even Mary, matches them as merrymakers. On the weekend we called on the darlings to share a scallop feast with us at Bob’s -- and lift the clouds for a spell while they were at it. Lift they did. So what if some of us stayed up way past our normal bedtime. Who cares if a few woke up the next morning feeling slightly tattered after one too many glasses of wine. Good Presbyterian girls they are, marooned in a nest of atheists, wonderful singers who somehow manage to turn a dusty hymn into something as cheerful as a rollicking Irish pub song. Arrange some time late in a convivial evening to get them singing ‘Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling’.

Pity the poor unfortunates who never get to wake in the Maritimes to CBC Radio’s ‘Weekend Mornings’. A phone-in musical request show that delivers a sense of our part of Canada, this one-of-a-kind program features a studio stallion and frequent spins of Wilf Carter, Hank Snow and Stompin’ Tom but also regularly introduces us to bright young songwriting lights. Some of us arranged to have light-of-heart, light-in-the-loafers Randy Campbell call in a special request for our beloved Bob. Not the parvenu David Lee Roth version, but the gold-standard Bing Crosby arrangement of ‘Just a Gigolo’. Those of us tuned in Sunday morning fell off our chairs from all the laughing.

Keep smilin’.

--Alan

Nova Scotia Farewells

So long anticipated, so soon over. Long-distance pedaling pals Mary and Mike are back on the road again after a four-day stay with us at Big Bras d’Or. They departed for Newfoundland Saturday morning after four days resting the saddle sores. The third of the 3M transcontinental cyclists, Mark, departed a day earlier. On the one fair weather day nature provided during their stay we gave the hiking muscles a small workout, tramping from Lighthouse Point in Louisbourg national park to Western Head.

Saturday featured another sort of departure. We laid the ashes of my cousin Ted in the family plot at St. James cemetery. That farewell featured a reading of Yeats’s Lake Isle of Innisfree and some lines from Burns’s Tam O’Shanter. The family’s less-than-perfect arrangement of Danny Boy was offset by a fine rendering of Flowers of the Forest from young piper Michael MacMillan.

Four kinfolk braved the lousy weather with us over the long weekend – sister Kathleen, bro-in-law Jon, nephew Michael and his bride Alice. At times we defied the bad weather and went looking for orchids at Big Harbour, Frenchvale and Petersfield Park. The later stop delivered our quarry, the lovely Helleborine, Epipactis helleborine.

In the absence of the real sun over so many days we take comfort from the little ‘stored sunshine’ afforded by our essential, cherished Drolet woodstove. That and an occasional wee dram of scotch mist keep the drears at bay.

--Alan