Here and Now on the Opposite Coast

Ordinarily when I depart Cape Breton I leave a piece of my heart at Big Bras d’Or. For reasons unknown this year is different: despite having had one of our best summers there I managed to let it go. I spent ten happy days with kin and kith in Halifax without pining for paradise lost and now, a week after returning to the left coast, I am fully here in Victoria enjoying the south Island’s grey, wet November charms.

Occasionally people say Jan and I are spoiled rotten in our three lives -– the Cape Breton summer idyll, the exotic travels in Leo and the Taj, the winter hiatus in Canada’s banana belt. Maybe we are.

Last weekend rain foiled plans to make our first ’09 fall foray into the Sooke Hills wilderness with stalwart pals Mike and Mary. Yesterday provided a second chance. For me, Remembrance Day is the only holiday that retains all its intended significance. Only two options are worthy of the occasion: either stand at the cenotaph for an hour with hundreds of other rememberers or go for a long hike with Mary & Mike. Either way I wind up contemplating casualties of war.

Yesterday we paused at the eleventh hour for the prescribed two minutes to remember. Our trips to the Western Front amplify the capacity to conjure the scale of loss generated by the Great War: from the innumerable Flanders cemeteries with their acres of gravestones, to the monuments -– Menin, Vimy, Thiepval -– honouring the tens of thousands without a known grave, to the faces in sepia photographs of young great-uncles and cousins once or twice-removed, dead long before I was born, but nonetheless vivid in the mind’s eye.

Mike and Mary deliver good influence. With them we go places I’m not certain we would know if left to our own devices. Not for them the well-beaten path. The Sooke Hills comprise a vast park reserve. In theory, a dozen years or so after the reserve was established, the park is still off-limits to hikers. We go anyway, sometimes over familiar ground, sometimes into undiscovered territory. Yesterday we had both. Sugarloaf Mountain is one of our favourite destinations. We hiked there, then scrambled into new terrain through the tangled understory of towering red-cedars, hemlocks and Douglas-fir to behold the mountain from a new perspective. Along the way there were plenty of distractions to justify a pause for the catching of breath: diverse mushrooms, strange lichens, noisy flocks of red crossbills.

Life at the winter base camp is good. I have old friends to see and projects to start. Eager to follow Mike and Mary into less-travelled corners of the Sooke Hills, I have a new pair of hiking boots and I’m keen to get started on wearing them out.

Alan

Farewell Big Bras d’Or

And then there were none. The final Big Bras d’Or days brought greater stillness and dwindling hours of sunlight. The solar panel could no longer keep our batteries charged. We relied on the old-fashioned method of lighting the cabin after sundown: kerosene lamps. The Drolet kept us semi-warm at night as ice formed on the rain barrels and wash basin outside.

Fall colours peaked then began to fade. Furred and feathered co-tenants adjusted to the changing season. On consecutive nights barred owls called within a few feet of the cabin. Can they be courting already? Squadrons of scoters mobilized on the Great Bras d’Or, their maneuvers given away by the whistle of wings. Bald eagles returned in numbers from their hiatus at the Bird Islands. Hares lived up to their ‘varying’ label. Now their feet are white, the colour they will soon be overall -– all the better to hide in snow from those who would have them for lunch. A pair of squirrels set up their winter abode in the woodshed, objecting loudly when I stacked the last of the year’s birch and maple too close to their boudoir.

It takes a while to put the buildings to bed for the winter. I fell off the camper roof when the ladder skidded off the deck on a wet day. Casualties included bruises and contusions but no broken bones. I count myself lucky. By noon hour Saturday the cabin was shuttered and we were gone.

We went to Black Rock at the mouth of the Shubenacadie River on Cobequid Bay and stayed with Nancy and Donnie. We played Scrabble during a driving rainstorm, then when the sun came out we did too. One of the nature guides in the Nelson library got me thinking of slitherers. Have you ever seen a red-bellied snake, I asked. No. On our walk to the river we found one, sunning itself on the gravel road, the first I’d ever laid eyes on.

Now we are in Halifax hanging out with kith and kin. Doris is a little underweight for my liking but I’m grateful that my dear old mother outperforms most 86-year-olds when it comes to walking, laughing and cussing out wayward sons. Yesterday my kid sister Kathleen had a second surgery for breast cancer. The markers are all good and she is a fit, feisty flyweight. I feel confident.

In the city we look for city diversions. We dined with pals Stephen and Sheila at the Old Triangle pub in the heart of the old town. Cape Breton fiddler Dave MacIsaac provided the evening’s musical entertainment. Reels, jigs and strathspeys are not to all tastes: Stephen looked about as happy as if he were having a double root canal without anaesthetic. Jan and I are keen for more. Tonight we’re off to see and hear the great Lennie Gallant.

We are here another week before heading to the winter base camp. Victorians will have us to kick around again November 3.

Alan

Bob’s Birthday Bash Knocks ‘Em Out

Bob Nagel turned 80 the other day -- the youngest 80-year-old you are likely ever to meet. Several of the many Canadians who love him made pilgrimage to Boston and surrounds to mark the great occasion with all the ceremony it warranted.

Keen to make the most of our time in ‘the Boston states’ our contingent drove all the way from Cape Breton to Bob’s Roslindale neighbourhood in one day, more than 1,400 km in 14 hours, much of it in driving rain. But Thursday was sunny and blithe and Robert led us on a walkabout in old downtown Boston that was illuminating as it was irreverent. We country mice gawked at the modern skyscrapers, wandered old cemeteries among the graves of John Hancock and Paul Revere and dined as the Bostonians do on scrod and Sam Adams beer.

Eleven of us rented a sprawling house at Chatham on Cape Cod. We followed our various notions of bliss during the day then gathered in the evenings to revel, dine on fresh local seafood, and beat each other senseless in super-competitive, go-for-the-throat Bananagrams battles. (If you don’t know Bananagrams, do yourself a favour -- get yourself a game; abundant fun is guaranteed while you give your grey matter a vigorous workout.)

We liked the offerings of the Cape Cod National Seashore: Great Island, Marconi Beach, White Cedar Trail. The Cape’s strange flora and fauna -- forests of pitch pine and oak; fiddler and horseshoe crabs, and a host of unfamiliar birds -- impressed the heck out of Cape Bretoners accustomed to fir, spruce and beached lobster shells.

We departed Cape Cod early Monday, intent on spend the night at Bar Harbour ME to hike Acadia National Park bright and early Tuesday morning. Tipped by Kathleen and Jon, we stopped en route at Wiscasset –- which calls itself the prettiest village in Maine –- to pig out on the world-famous lobstah rolls dispensed by the good folks at Red’s Eats. Wiscasset is just about as charming as its boast and Red’s rolls were prodigiously tasty on the last day before the diner closes its doors for winter.

Alas, we woke on Tuesday in Bar Harbour to a driving rain and learned it would last the entire day. After prowling some of the shops to spend our last Yankee dollars on tee-shirts and tourmaline baubles we lit out for Canada where the forecast was for better weather Wednesday. And so it was. We went to Alma NB at the doorstep of Fundy National Park. We dined at Saprano’s pizzeria which just happens to occupy a building I know well: it was my Aunt Kitty’s home for decades. We sat in a corner booth which was a bedroom in years gone by and the place I was conceived in 1946.

It turned out a good thing that rain had washed out the Acadia hike. Fundy was sublime: we hiked the Coppermine Trail and ogled the vistas at Wolfe Point and Herring Cove. We marvelled at the scale of the Fundy tides and paused to gawk at old covered bridges. And we saved the best for last. I had promised Lynn and Louise they would love the geological marvels at Hopewell Rocks. And they did. Jan and I were knocked out too. On our first visit a few years back we arrived at high tide and thereby missed much of the spectacle. This time the tide cooperated, allowing us to walk the entire wondrous length of the beach. Sometimes it pays to give a place a second chance.

Alan

Acadian Ramble

I am hard pressed to imagine a better bet for a good time than to go for an all-day outdoor ramble with Cousins Lynn and Louise. We had a date with others on Saturday but when that fell through we hitched our star to the twins’ and let them lead us wherever they might. We wound up in the highlands national park where excitement began right away. Some workmen at the visitor centre showed us a creature the size of a hummingbird with the wing action of a bat. It was a moth – a big, gloriously handsome one – I reckoned as being one of the sphinx moths but with no field guide in the cabin library I shall bow to those who know better.

The four of us set out on the brookside Acadian Trail where the hardwoods – yellow birch, beech, sugar and striped maple – are already showing their autumn colours. Have you ever tried beech nuts, the darlings asked. We hadn’t, so we did and thus discovered why the local squirrel population seemed so full of vigour and good cheer.

Given a choice the twins always prefer the road less travelled: we departed the trail at its high point and followed our leaders on a wildlife track into open upland scrub. Abundant moose and bear scat had us all peeling our eyes for the producers. The sun remained behind clouds in the early going and given the chill wind, falling leaves and the gold-and-russet hillsides there was no denying that summer’s gone. We followed the perimeter of Burnt Hill encountering occasional bands of robins, jays and sparrows on their way south.

The sun broke through conveniently, at the northwestern extreme of our amble. We’d climbed to the top of the world, a local highpoint, and could see forever, or at least far enough to count the wind generators 85 km away at East Point on Prince Edward Island. At about the same distance we picked out the Magdalen Islands we’d last seen up close in 2006. By now, with the sun powering strong updrafts along the face of the ridge, a gang of freeloaders delivered a sky show. Ravens rode the thermals and showed off a typically wide repertoire of somersaults, spins and tumbles. Squadrons of bald eagles sailed past. We looked carefully at them all in hopes of finding a golden eagle among them. None materialized but a screaming red-tailed hawk and young hang-gliding goshawk provided consolation. As did a kestrel, smallest of our falcons, bulleting past our noses.

En route back down the mountain with the sun setting behind Northumberland Strait, mushrooms grabbed our attention. Legions of mushrooms, a feast for mycologists, in several varieties. Through the woods were pathways cobbled not with stones but big white mushrooms, hundreds of them, winding their way as far as we could see. What was responsible, or who? Fairies?

We spent all of the daylight, none remaining by the time the circuit was done. With that eight hours worth of fun behind us, we demanded more. The Acadian village of Cheticamp, just south of the national park, is a fishing port. At the Hometown Kitchen we all opted for fresh haddock; none of us was disappointed.

We returned in the dark, pausing at the Margaree to admire the reflected glory of the moon and Jupiter in still river pools. Back at Bigador it seemed too early to call a halt to fun. We fired up the Drolet, moved the table in front of the stove and played Bananagrams, a word game we’ve taken to with a passion since Kevin Squires introduced us to it a few weeks back. The twins are hooked now too. We’ve felt spoiled rotten many days these past three months or so. This day just might have taken the cake.

Alan

Allure of Early Fall

Fall is canning season at the cabin. One of Jan’s specialties is chow, an eastern specialty she had never heard of till venturing to Nova Scotia a dozen years ago. Now she is a master chow-maker herself, and you don’t have to take my word for it. My mother, herself an artisan, will attest that Jan’s brand is second to none. A batch starts with ten pounds of green tomatoes, five of onions. I help to chop; otherwise I just stand back and watch the show unfold.

Now is also prime time for unhurried forest rambles. We wandered the Big Hill Road on a sublimely quiet sunny day. It may have been a real road long ago but nowadays it is a barely discernible track flanked by a pioneer’s old moss-covered stone wall. In spring these woods are alive with birdsong. The woods are far quieter in early October but not silent. Kinglets chittered occasionally. A soft chuck alerted us to a small group of migrant hermit thrushes pausing to refuel on their passage to Guatemala. A ruffed grouse flushed when we approached too close. In Victoria a gang of Canada geese wouldn’t get a glance; here they are a little more unusual so the flotilla on Dalem Lake warranted a look.

We stopped for a little lunch hoping to reencounter the barred owl we chanced upon a year ago. No luck this time so we amused ourselves identifying the hardwoods visible from where we sat: American beech, paper birch, red maple, trembling aspen. The trees are turning colour, none more splendidly than the maples, some already as red as a Mountie’s dress tunic. Dragonflies went about their business around the lake edges – big blue brutes and exquisite carmine damselflies. Two kinds of caterpillars – the lime-green variety and the orange-and-black one – of the sort we call ‘woolly bears’ regularly crossed our path. Each of them looked intent on getting who-knows-where. A real bear has been seen in the neighbourhood of late – just across the road two days ago – but we didn't encounter Bruno.

Mushrooms are abounding in the woods, most of them beautiful to look at. Some are as tasty to the palate as to the eye but we gather only those we are sure of, so we can live to tell about it. There is more. We disclose to no one the whereabouts of a choice patch of cranberries near the lake. It is already plain we shall have a bumper crop this year, ready for gathering in a fortnight. They will wind up across the country, in Victoria, garnishing our winter porridge.

Alan

Warm in the Autumn Woods

Late-September Big Bras d’Or is seductive enough that we feel inclined to leave the truck where it is, wandering only as far as feet permit. More distant adventures must be 4-star to entice us away.

We traveled to scenic Broad Cove to see Alex and Geraldine McKinnon, friends my mother recently and happily added to her stable. Doris was confident I would find plenty of common interest with Alex and promised we would like them both. She was right. Alex took me to see the fine memorial display at the Inverness Academy where a long school corridor is lined with photographs of soldiers from the Inverness area who fought in the world wars. His grandfather and father served together in WWI. His father, Murdock, fighting in the Machine Gun Corps near Cambrai, suffered a shrapnel wound October 11, 1918, one day after my cousin David Livingstone was killed in action whilst commanding a machine gun battery in the same unit. I have no doubt they knew each other.

The next day I savoured a magical history tour with Cousin Julia Moore, a granddaughter of Capt. Rod Livingstone, the only survivor of four Black Brook soldier-brothers who went to Flanders. Jan and I were able to show Julia her grandparents’ grave at Glace Bay’s Greenwood Cemetery; she had never seen it before. Julia is gift of the Internet: we share an enthusiastic interest in exploring our Cape Breton family roots. She was steered to me by someone familiar with my Great War archival photographs on Flickr.

The three of us visited Cousin Sarah Mae Livingstone MacPherson, a niece of the Black Brook brothers. A visit with ‘Sadie’ is always a reward in itself but there was a bonus: Sarah Mae gave me a book David sent to his sister Annie at Christmas 1916, shortly after his brothers died at Ypres and the Somme, and less than two years before he too would be killed at Cambrai.

It was a cousinly week. I last saw my father’s niece Deborah Bartlett in the early 1960s when she was a child of about 10. Visiting from Ontario, Deb came to see us at the cabin; we entertained each other recollecting childhood memories then went off to Baddeck to revel in a feast of mussels and lobster.

The early days of fall are a revel of a quieter sort. Most days at Bigador we have to ourselves, or share only with our joint tenants, the rabbits, squirrels, jays and eagles. I completed the task of splitting the small mountain of birch and maple built earlier in summer. The woodshed is full again. Cool evenings are unproblematic: with plenty of firewood the reliable Drolet warms the cabin as we curl up with a good book, listen to CBC Radio or try to thrash one another in a vicious game of Scrabble. Jan wins most of the time; I comfort myself with the notion it was I who taught her to compete like a sewer rat.

Alan

Arrivals and Departures

Buoyed by the blithest summer weather in memory, ‘The Resort’ continued to attract visitors well into September. Some nights the cabin sheltered as many as eight. Kathleen and Jon spent four convivial days with us around the Labour Day weekend, sharing Bigador’s abundant amenities with nephew John who came with Naomi, Hannah and Sara. We introduced the youngsters to some of our favourite cohabitants: red-backed salamanders, garter snakes, snowshoe hares, et al. We showed the little darlings some of the Carboniferous fossils cluttering the beach below the cabin. We flew kites – as many as three at a time – in Bob Nagel’s fields and waved farewell to the Bobby Labonte delta flier after it shed its tether and vanished eastwards, hell-bent for the Atlantic.

For the first time in years Jan celebrated a birthday at the cabin rather than the more exotic locations she has grown accustomed to: the WWI Western Front, the Scottish highlands, the Magadalen Islands. We have a fine new restaurant in North Sydney, The Black Spoon, that would shine as brightly in Vancouver’s west end as it does here. It made a fine venue for Jan’s birthday dinner.

I made more time than usual for reading this summer. I sometimes irritate Jan by saying life’s too short to waste time on fiction but lately I have read almost nothing but. Sublime Sebastian Faulks has rewarded me particularly well. I found Charlotte Gray in a Halifax used bookstore. Bob Nagel spotted On Green Dolphin Street among the books being discarded at the North Sydney Library. Jan found the only copy of The Girl at the Lion d’Or available in Vancouver bookstores and brought it back in August. I relished them all. With no other Faulks works at hand I reread Birdsong and found it even more astonishing and rewarding than at the first reading a decade ago.

On Saturday a superb new war memorial monument was dedicated at Big Bras d’Or. Along with an honour guard, decorated old soldiers, and a host of local people with relatives remembered on the monument, dignitaries included local politicians and Nova Scotia’s Lieutenant-Governor. Many of the soldiers named on the monument are my relatives, seven of whom died in the First World War. The monument pays worthy tribute to their memory.

I am not alone in feeling that the passage of time accelerates the older one gets. Bob Nagel, beloved by all, arrived at the end of June but summer flew faster than ever and he departed for Boston Monday. His second last evening was balmy and clear. We sat on Bob’s back deck under the glittering Milky Way. An occasional meteor flashed across the night sky while a pair of barred owls serenaded each other in the woods beyond his field. Big Bras d’Or is never the same without Robert but late September brings compensations: fine cycling weather, waves of migrant songbirds, the first taste of fall colours.

Alan

Treasure Abounding at Gooseberry Cove

The kites no longer fly; the ‘Bofors Gun’ rests; the 11-year-old has returned to the eagerly awaiting arms of his mother and adoring sisters. Cai and Marc departed early Friday morning for the long flight back to Victoria. We endeavour not to miss them. Perhaps the lad departed feeling fairly happy about his two weeks in Cape Breton. On the last day we added another adventure to the various entertainments of his CB fortnight: a fossil expedition to the Carboniferous coalfield cliffs of Point Aconi. The boys – the young one and his young-at-heart dad – collected fossil ferns and a sack of Cape Breton coal to show off back in Victoria.

One of the principal delights of a Bigador summer is a day-long ramble in some spectacular, lightly-travelled part of Cape Breton with Lynn and Louise. By now they must surely know every corner of the Island. Saturday provided the latest gem in the long string of coastal wonders. The Darlings led Bob and Jan and me to Gooseberry Cove north of Louisbourg. Numerous ancient shipwrecks lie silent among the dangerous shoals of these waters. Scuba divers periodically find treasure of the sort to get Long John Silver drooling. We found treasure too, though not the kind to tempt your ordinary pirate. The rocky headlands showed an array of late-summer flowers while migrant whimbrels sounded their alarms as we walked the craggy cliffs and gannets patrolled offshore. We relished a diverse and hearty picnic lubricated with a flagon of Bob’s trademark Canadian sherry. Oh what fun.

We took an indirect route whence we came, stopping at Port Morien beach to look at the array of shorebirds and waterbirds gathered there. We crossed paths with Monique Vassallo who distinguished herself by finding an extraordinary rarity – an African Reef-Heron – in Newfoundland a few years ago, then duplicated the feat by finding the same bird in Cape Breton a year later. I do not lie. Then it was off to the Dock Y’ur Dory in Port Morien where Jan and I rejoiced at choosing the fishcakes and beans – simply the best we’ve ever had in a restaurant. (Jan’s own of course are in a class by themselves.)

The others indulged my wish to stop at Greenwood Cemetery in the Passchendaele neighbourhood of Glace Bay to look for the grave of a Livingstone relative, the sole survivor of four brothers who fought in WWI. It turns out the cemetery is huge. We drove through slowly scanning with binoculars for likely-looking headstones. Serendipity: at one pause Lynn said, might this be it? Indeed it was, right in front of our noses.

It is hurricane season here on the eastern seaboard. Last weekend Bill failed to live up to his notices. This weekend it was Danny’s turn. With much less fanfare Danny was even more generous, dumping five inches of rain on us overnight, two more than his predecessor. The rain barrels are splendidly full again. Finally the weather has cooled a little, the swimming hole unvisited the last few days. But we bank on further balmy days as August – how soon it passed – gives way to September.

Alan

Oh to Be Eleven Again

Jan returned from a joyous week with Lexi in Burnaby. I showed off some of the new homemaking skills I’d mastered during her absence and claimed I hadn’t missed her. It was a lie but only a white one: I don’t want her thinking I can’t survive future pilgrimages to see her beloved granddaughter.

An 11-year-old boy followed close on Jan’s heels. Not an everyday boy, mind you. Not for him a boyhood squandered in front of a computer screen. Cai is Jan’s nephew, the son of younger brother Marc. He knows how to rebuild lawnmower engines and a few other things too. He is restoring his own 1931 Model A Ford, five years before he’ll be legally licensed to drive it on a public road. At Big Bras d’Or he drove – in Bob’s field – my big standard-shift Ram pickup without a hitch. Mention was made of a potato cannon. What’s a potato cannon I inquired. Before you know it Cai and Mark are building one in my workshop out of bits of ABS pipe and a barbecue igniter. The fuel is automotive starter fluid, a combination of ether and naptha. A couple of aerosol squirts in the combustion chamber produces a loud bang and a 20-inch muzzle flash. It sends a potato a long way out over the Great Bras d’Or. Or an apple, of which we have an infinite supply on the old farm. I call the artillery Cai’s Bofors Gun.

The lad photo-documented the raising of Kevin Squires’ roof and took a turn at sawing boards from a big poplar log at Stu Squires’s mill. Cai knows what happens when you drop a Mento candy into a two-litre jug of Diet Coke. He showed us: an instant 12’ geyser. One day Kevin took us all for a boat ride to Otter Harbour. My great-uncle Harrison claimed it as the most beautiful spot in all of Cape Breton Island. I am disinclined to argue. Cai showed the most impressive Tarzan-like form on the swing rope that launches the bold into Otter’s tiny hidden harbour. On the way home the boy took the helm of the lobster boat. No one worried. Bob Nagel labelled the lad a genius and predicted a brilliant future in engineering or, better still, rocket science.

Nephew Michael arrived with Alice and 6-year-old Ana and Rex, just 2. Rex reminds me of his father at that age, only better-looking and even livelier than Michael was when he liked to empty my toolbox twice a day, and ‘Bigador’ was the best he could do at pronouncing Big Bras d’Or.

Darling twin cousins Lynn and Louise came out to watch the Perseid meteor show with Bob and me from the vantage point of the porch roof. Conditions were ideal: a perfectly clear sky on a windless night. There is much to like about ‘The Darlings’, no feature more compelling than their abundant and boundless joy in life. Joy abounded again as we all joined the bioluminescent diatoms in the swimming hole below the cabin. Imagine swimming among a glowing galaxy of microscopic stars. Maybe, just maybe, I marvelled as much as The Darlings but their rhapsody was punctuated by irrepressible yelps of wonder and amazement.

Now Jan and Marc and Cai are off at the Miners Museum in Glace Bay which claustrophobia dictates is off-limits to me. Hurricane Bill has arrived in Cape Breton and is lashing the cabin roof with an astonishing tattoo of rain. So far the rain gauge shows three inches. Weather-wise we have been spoiled rotten here for weeks so I have no objection whatsoever to the precipitation. Indeed I am as happy as can be, wealthy as Warren Buffett with every rain barrel overflowing. Sometimes the simplest pleasures seem the best of all.

Alan

Thoreau He Isn’t

At the midpoint of eight Janless days I am happy to report that speculation I could not survive left to my own devices has been exposed as groundless slander. Jan is on the west coast indulging her helpless passion for 15-month-old granddaughter Lexi. To judge from the euphoric tone I hear on the telephone the visit is matching if not exceeding all expectations.

No one has volunteered to fill the temporary shack chatelaine vacancy; I make do without a fair-sex presence. I’m even able to identify an advantage or two. I am not insistent on the three-square-meals-a-day rule my better half touts. I vowed to shed 12 pounds during the hiatus. By the end of yesterday’s exertions I was already down by 10.

I spent another long day with Bob Nagel cutting birch and maple to improve his view of the Bird Islands. I now have a small mountain of firewood, enough to fill the woodshed ten times over. How to initiate the daunting task of splitting such an intimidating lode? I decided to tackle the job methodically, using the 6-lb maul on 20 rounds at a time. In the first effort 20 led to 40, then 60, then eventually a hundred. If I keep it up perhaps I’ll have completed the task by October and have a brawny right arm to boot.

For my money the first half of August has always been the best of the best in a Big Bras d’Or summer. Nothing dissuades me from that opinion this season. Bob’s blueberry bonanza is at its peak. The black flies and mosquitoes are abated. Recent days have been just enough cooler to make a long bike ride endurable. The water temperature at the swimming hole below the cabin is just the way I like it. Shorebird migration is under way. The Perseid meteor shower, always a grand show on a starry August night, unfolds in just a couple of days.

Friday brings Jan back to Bigador, together with brother Marc and nephew Cai. I’d like to claim that living alone in the woods suits me as well as it did the great Thoreau; in truth I shall not grieve civilization’s return to the Big Bras d’Or cabin.

Alan

Whisky Disappoints, Water Just Fine

Cape Breton delivers its reliably infinite variety of summertime diversions and distractions. I spent a day logging with Bob Nagel at his place. I got a load of firewood out of it, Bob a better view of the Bird Islands. He turns 80 in October but I was the one, not remarkable Robert, left arm-weary and back-sore by the day’s exertions.

Old friends Stephen Archibald and Sheila Stevenson paid us a visit. We went to Glenora to have a look at the whisky distillery, stopping on the way at MacDonald House museum. The old house commands a spectacular view of lovely Lake Ainslie and conveys a sense of lives lived by the Scots settlers 120 years ago and more.

The Cape Breton distillers are not allowed to call their product ‘scotch’. Just as well. The distillery tour disappointed: it turns out that distilling operations run only three months a year, from November to February. The malted barley is imported from Saskatchewan, the yeast from South Africa. The product does not evoke the single malts of Islay or Speyside: the folks at Lagavulin needn’t fear their Cape Breton competitors.

It finally feels like summer in Cape Breton. The mid-afternoon temperature on the deck yesterday reached 106 Fahrenheit. The old swimmin’ hole below the cabin is just the way we like it. We enjoyed a long, leisurely dip in optimal conditions: temperature ideal, slack tide, no chop, the world all our own.

Alan

Of Foundlings, Pesto Sandwiches and Role-Model Robert

Two young men came out of my woods one day while I was reading sublime Sebastian Faulks. They were at the neighbour’s place, set to cut firewood but decided they should make sure they were on the right side of the property line. Instantly I knew they must be ‘from away’. Indeed, Josh and Eric are Ontarians, Josh recently settled in Sydney. Suddenly I saw an opportunity for symbiosis: the lads want firewood, Bob Nagel wants a better view of the Bird Islands. I introduced one to the others, symbiosis flourished. In ways we are different as night and day. They were raised with religion, are strangers to beer and are models of courtesy and consideration. I am opposite in every way. But we get along anyway, have socialized several times since, met their ‘better halves’, Danielle and Joelle and Josh’s kid sister Leah, and enjoyed terrific wide-ranging conversation every time. We look forward to more.

Pal Judith came for a five-day visit. She has a grumbling knee that interferes with long-distance hiking and biking desires but we defied it. Bob joined the ladies for the annual Big Wave Poker Run. The Big Wave is the yearly festival marking the end of lobster season; the poker run gives locals and tourists the chance to board a lobster boat and enjoy a two-hour tour of the Great Bras d’Or while collecting a poker hand. None of my dearhearts came close to winning the $2,400 payoff but they had fun all the same. Good times continued. Despite the absence of a water-warming spell of hot weather we went down to the swimming hole and took our first plunge of the season. Judith comes to Bigadore for fun, frivolity, affection – and pesto sandwiches. Not necessarily in that order. She got her pesto sandwiches and, I hope, the rest as well.

We loaded Leo with the bikes and went to Mabou to ride the rail trail with Judith and Bob. Eight years ago we got Bob on a bike for the first time in decades. He doddered like an oldster. Then he acquired his own wheels and now rides like he never stopped. He’s pedalled long-distance with us in PEI and the Magdalens and once rode 100 km with us on a single day. He turns 80 in October. I dream of being his faint facsimile 18 years down the line.

Alan

Sunshine Returns to CB, Banishing the Blues

At last sunshine came to Big Bras d’Or and banished the blues. We and our guests rejoiced. Steve went to the Margaree River for a day and landed a 12-pound Atlantic salmon. He was the man of the hour: the only successful salmon fisher that day on the storied Margaree.

We enjoyed two musical extravaganzas. On Saturday the Baddeck Ceiildh featured Dwayne Cote, a Cape Breton fiddler I knew nothing about but who just happens to be the best I’ve ever heard. On Thursday at the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou we tucked into fresh Atlantic seafood while listening to Mike Hall, another fiddler extraordinaire. Our server was a delight too: think Eartha Kitt in her youthful prime.

The cabin has been the scene for several ceilidhs of our own. We feasted on lobster one evening, then Steve and Jan shared a morning of lobstering with Captain Kevin on ‘Small Change’. For the most part Steve released the speckled trout he caught at Dalem Lake but on Thursday he kept enough to provide a tasty appetizer prior to the main event of steamed mussels.

The cosmos gentled us: having made a long-sought appearance the sun lingered, for days. We took a bike ride with the kidz and The Great Nagel along the Calabash to Southside Boularderie. For Jan and me it was the first time on two wheels in six or seven weeks. We noticed we’d slipped a notch or ten in bike fitness but aim to make it up in short order.

Steve and Liz were terrific company for ten days but Air Canada took them away today, back to Winnipeg. Our faces are a bit long but it’s only five days ‘til Sakamoto makes another return to Bigador. The merriment rolls on.

Alan

Drizzle Dampens but Doesn’t Drown Downhome Delights

Ah Nova Scotia. The name means ‘New Scotland’ in the Gaelic. It is well named. A few years back we spent 28 days touring the islands and highlands of Scotland by bicycle. It rained 24 of the 28 days. Cape Breton clobbered that record last year: in a 28-day run beginning July 15 it rained 26 days. To date 2009 looks like it might run the table. I only vaguely remember the look of Kelly’s Mountain and the Great Bras d’Or washed in sunshine. Slugs are legion. Earthworms flee their inundated surrounds. My woods impersonate a Louisiana bayou. Still, we find ways to laugh. Bob Nagel is in residence together with nephew Dennis and niece-in-law Nancy. Thrown in with my sister Kathleen and bro-in-law Jon, they make merry mayhem.

Our Drolet woodstove exchanges heat and light for the birch, maple and apple I toss into its maw. ‘Stored sunshine’ I call it. Jan’s son Steve and his bride Elizabeth gave up their Winnipeg sunshine in order to share ten days of Cape Breton drizzle with us. We enjoy their company and try not to feel guilty about the weather. We are ten days into our 2009 Cape Breton summer and try mightily not to let the weather sour our days. Rain or shine, there are plenty of projects to keep me occupied: a new queen-sized wall-bed in the sleeping porch; a new deck for the camper, now serving double duty as guest house; view-improving forestry on the banks overlooking our beach.

En route to Cape Breton we visited Bob MacRae, the nephew of the great WWI 25th Battalion raider-warrior, Max. Bob couldn’t have been more generous in sharing his trove of Max relics and memories. Then he and Helen compounded the generosity by insisting on providing us lunch at Stellarton.

In Sydney we enjoyed an extended lunch with newly discovered cousins Julia and Rod. They are grandchildren of one of the WWI Livingstone soldiers and shared more relics, photographs and memories. I eat it up.

Steve and Elizabeth are with us for a few days yet. The rain does not interfere in our ability to enjoy Big Bras d’Or lobsters, Millville eggfests or Baddeck musical ceilidhs. We will prevail.

Alan

Great War Ghosts, Orchid Quests, a New Way to Do Lobster

I spent Friday morning prowling the NS Archives building in Halifax for 25th Battalion Great War ghosts. My best find: a 1915 W G MacLaughlan photograph of ‘C’ Company before its embarkation for England: 250 faces posing at the Armoury, all of them eager to face the Hun in Flanders. Some of them mere boys who would never see their native land again.

Friday afternoon we joined Kathleen and Jon for a search of the Hants gypsum hills for ram’s head ladyslipper. Jon spotted a clump hiding under a conifer, the blooms long past their best-before date but now the Nova Scotians will know where to look next May. We made do with admiring the carpets of gypsum ragwort –prettier than it sounds – flourishing in the carbonate.

Feast days follow one after the other. Saturday featured a novel way to dispatch lobsters. The execution weapon, a cleaver. That might seem cruel but would you prefer a cauldron of boiling water?

Environment Canada’s five-day forecast needs just one icon at the moment: the one with heavy rain pouring out of a dark cloud. Indoor activities are indicated but I need to wander in some creekside woods so we’ll don the raincoats and take our chances. I haven’t had a trip bird since we hit Halifax.

We’d planned on firing up the Cummins to head for Cape Breton Tuesday but opening up the cabin in a deluge has never seemed a lot of fun. Given the lousy forecast maybe we’ll emulate Captain Cook and overstay our welcome with the natives.

Alan