Not-so-Doggish Days of August

Until our departure August 11 the summer of 2011 was so miserable we hadn’t used the old swimmin’ hole at all, not even once. This year’s version of the blithe season couldn’t be more different. We swim virtually every day, sometimes twice. Our nightime dips with bioluminescent diatoms have been especially gratifying: the galaxy brilliant in the moonless sky, another galaxy stirred to life by our motion in the water. How do the invisible one-celled geniuses do it? I have no idea. Fill a glass with seawater and you see nothing at all, but at the shore, in the dark, the water comes alive with transitory lights. It is enough to fill even the most jaded old heart with something like wonder.

Bananagrams bellicosity continues. These days we like to play a four-way sprint with Lynn and Louise requiring each player to lay down 36 tiles as fast as possible while deploying at least one 11-letter word. I know lots of two-dollar words of that length – some even usable in polite company – so at last I have a battlefield in which I can hope to compete with assassin Lynn. Oh what fun.

Carole and Garth graced us with a visit to Bigadore. Agreeably rhapsodic about the physical beauty around us, our friends were also generous in their compliments about the country carpentry manifest in the cabin itself. As reported in the previous issue of Peregrinations Garth inspired a domestic renovation:

a new screen window in the forty-year-old outhouse. Pretty pleased with the outcome even without Garth’s blessing, I was all the more gratified by my pal’s enthused seal of approval. We sat in the porch, talked baseball, drank beer, reveled in Jan’s seafood chowder, agreed that life is pretty good even as we drift into senescence. A no-holds-barred funfest in a certain porch produced the inevitable result: two more Bob Nagel fans. In good conscience I couldn’t allow the visit to be too perfect: I exacted a small measure of revenge for the posthole-digging labours Garth dragooned me into providing during our June stopover at Amherst Shore: I put him to work helping fall and remove a tall poplar that had worn out its welcome by the cabin. Now, alas, our pals are departed for further adventures in Newfoundland; the cabin is quieter and less jolly than it was.

Nature affords its plenty. Blueberries flourished below the cabin in a fashion unseen in years. Up the way, closer to our boundary with Old Route 5, the blackberries are still prolific and super-sweet. Jan makes the most of the abundance of tasty chanterelle mushrooms growing in the shade of the spruce and fir. The branches of summer apples droop under the weight of a heavy crop, dropping their bounty on our road.

Meanwhile, along where the perimeter trail meets our little interior bog we see coyote scat and the footprints of deer and bobcat. What nocturnal adventures transpire in the woods behind the cabin as we lay snoring in our bed? I’ve heard good things about Lee Valley Tools’ motion-activated ‘critter camera’. Maybe I’ll get me one.

But Do Flying Squirrels Really Fly?

We of course count a good measure of riff-raff among our cast of beloved friends but oddly enough we have a few cultivated pals too, two of whom paid us a visit. A visit with Stephen and Sheila to our favourite antiques purveyor, Diane at the Den of Antiquity, turned profitable, availing a handsome old floor lamp complete with faded botanical-themed shade. The lamp will provide marvelous light some imminent rainy evening as I read my next Scandinavian police procedural.

Accomplished and celebrated gardeners, S & S identified a favoured bush below the cabin as Nemopanthus mucronata, false holly, and showed us how to enhance its allure through careful and caring pruning. We indulged Stephen’s keen desire, hordes and heat notwithstanding, to hike the ten-kilometre Skyline Trail in CBHNP. Alas, the moose we’d hoped to see stayed sensibly cool in the shade, hidden and unseen. Consolation came by way of a terrific feed of snow crab at the Hometown cafe in downtown Cheticamp.

My previous dispatch alluded to Bigadore’s infinite capacity for generating absorbing projects. Jan liked the yellow proceeds of the cabin floor-painting project so much that she led us on a painting tear. After replacement of rotted pieces and application of a blue-grey solid stain the deck rails now look qualified for an appearance in Better Shacks and Shanties. As for the deck itself, well, rain now beads nicely after the latest application of Thompson's WaterSeal. Now Jan has her eye on the cabin itself. Many moons have passed since the cedar shingles benefited from an application of stain. It seems that is about to change.

Anticipation builds: the inaugural visit of pals Garth and Carol is anticipated in a few days. Such is the power and magnetism of Garth’s personality that it extends even to the hoary old outhouse. Garth professed astonishment when I disclosed in June that, no, the Bigadore privy has no window. I simply cannot have my friend disenchanted with his trips down the trail so with Jim Troke’s borrowed reciprocating saw in hand I aim this week to undertake an outhouse renovation. By the time Garth enjoys his first interlude in the privy he will get to behold a relaxing woodland vista through the new picture window.

Our ongoing saga, Adventures with Wildlife, delivered another intriguing chapter. It is claimed that the northern flying squirrel is just about as common in Nova Scotia as the omnipresent red squirrels that like to defeat all our efforts to squirrel-proof the bird feeders. But the flying squirrel is strictly nocturnal and I could boast of only one past sighting, in British Columbia years ago. Then, on Friday, one turned up in a remarkable place, my workshop. My authoritative The Mammals of Canada makes no mention of the flying squirrel’s preference for sharing human habitation, but there it was, comfortably ensconced in its den of leaves in a corner of the shop. I photographed it in situ then waited to show Buddy to Lynn and Louise, who were very impressed. Long-term cohabitation with a pooping, peeing, perhaps-procreating flying squirrel is, however, something I don’t choose to maintain; I evicted my little pal by gloved hand. It cussed mightily and tried in vain to bite the hand off but seemed none the worse for having been given the bum’s rush.

The deer mouse is a lovely little creature when seen its outdoor element; I am less endeared of it upon finding little turdlets on the kitchen counter in the morning, or freshly gnawed fruit in the peach basket. It would be pleasant to have some non-lethal way of removing the little darlings once they’ve decided to share housekeeping, but I haven’t yet discovered an effective one so I rely on the tried-and-true devices provided by Home Hardware at $1.99 a pair. Lately my mice seem possessed of higher IQ: somehow they’ve mastered the art of tripping the trap without fatal consequence. I check the traps in the morning only to find them bereft of both mice and peanut-butter bait. I await loyal readers’ thoughts on what to do next.

Finally, mention of a minor milestone. We sold the Bigfoot camper in May so never again will Peregrinations report on fresh adventures in ‘Leo and the Taj’. Leo, the ’98 Dodge Ram, made what I expect will be his last transcontinental journey in June; henceforth it will be a strictly Nova Scotia resident. Until Friday Leo had known only one license plate, issued by the British Columbia Motor Vehicle Branch. Now the truck wears another, touting 'Canada’s Ocean Playground’. If while traveling Nova Scotia roads you catch up with and pass a vaguely familiar old fart rambling along in a weather-beaten green Ram be sure to offer a friendly wave.

Yellow is the Colour of My New Shack Floor

It’s more than two weeks since we bade farewell to Iceland. Our fortnight just south of the Arctic Circle looks choice in the rear view mirror but Boularderie Island’s diversions have us living in the present.

It had been two years since we laid eyes on Boston pals Dennis and Nancy but only two minutes for riotous, familiar connexion to restore itself. We rode the bikes in a generous (rare this summer) rain squall, took a short hike to a lifer destination, Gun Creek Falls, by the New Harris Road, and did as tourists do in touristy Baddeck.

Apart from customary barred owl duets, yipping choruses of coyote squads have become a regular feature of the cabin’s night-time soundscape. Cape Breton coyotes are atypically large and aggressive. A couple of years ago a pack attacked and killed a young woman in the national park. The animals are in the news again this morning in the wake of aggression at nearby Cape Dauphin. We are given to understand that the beasts are not purely coyotes at all, but coyote-wolf hybrids. That struck me as an acceptable circumstance if it resulted from natural processes, but I’m now told by a usually reliable source that the animals are not natural at all but were selectively bred by the provincial lands-and-forests department as a kindness to a multi-national lumber corporation keen to ‘control’ deer populations in its Cape Breton timber holdings. As a result of Cousin David MacDonald’s graphic account of the effectiveness of a pack’s hunting-and-killing methods I’m inclined to ensure that we are accompanied by stout hardwood walking sticks on our morning walks around Dalem Lake.

Other faunal changes attract my notice too. In 41 years here at Bigador I had never seen a pickerel frog, a handsome leaper adorned with splashy rectangular spotting on his coppery brown back. Suddenly they are everywhere, jumping prodigiously across our path, getting themselves flattened on the roadway by inattentive night-time drivers. Nor had I ever seen the striking star-nosed mole, larger than other moles, with feet that remind me of an armadillo’s and a most remarkable starfish-like snout: I counted 22 nose-tentacles on the one we found freshly dead on Bob Nagel’s road the other day. Now I hear the neighbour’s cat has brought home two more of the strange beasties. Other habitués of the old farm are conspicuous these days not by unprecedented appearance, but sudden disappearance. In past years varying hares routinely entertained us as they grazed contemplatively on the grass in front of the cabin. Now they are gone, victims of what – hunters? Marauding coyotes? Who can say?

The summer of 2012 is as extremely different from its 2011 predecessor as it possible to imagine: one hot sunny day after another. The old swimming hole below the shack went entirely unused a year ago. Now it provides a welcome mid-afternoon respite from the swelter.

Never at Big Bras d’Or is there a need to complain about having nothing to do. Apart from Nature’s abundant distractions, there is no end of pastimes and projects to be seized. The thrum of the generator regularly violates the stillness. Construction tools, paint brushes and rollers are taken frequently in hand. On our way through Quebec in June we stopped at Wilfred Laurier National Historic Site to see its representation of the boyhood home of Canada’s great Liberal prime minister, the gentleman who graces our five-dollar bill. A distinctive feature of the old Laurier house is its floor, painted sunnily yellow. I decided I just had to have a yellow floor of my own. Now I do: the original cabin plancher now beams brightly jaune.

While I was at that I remedied a 41-year-old irritant. Back in ’71, the year I built the cabin, my only wealth was a young back and plenty of energy. After dismantling the derelict house that once stood further up the way I used the proceeds to frame the cabin. By the end of the floor construction phase I was down to the dregs, a pair of long, ugly, irregular, too-thick boards. With nothing else available I used them, with the result that the finished plywood-surfaced floor always featured a high ridge along its centre spine.

Now I’m happy to report the spinal ridge is gone: I sectioned out a 13’x2’ section of floor right to the joists ; its replacement is beautifully level – and spectacularly yellow. If you’re planning on paying a visit in the next while ensure you bring your sunglasses: no matter how cloudy it might be out-of-doors you’ll need them once you step inside.