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