Farewell, With Generous Side of Cranberries

As if wanting to extend condolences apropos our imminent departure, Cape Breton availed sublime weather for our last days on the Island. On one of many fine days in the last week we played hooky from close-up duties in favour of heading out to the Simon's Point area near Louisbourg. It was here, in 1758 that General James Wolfe mounted the final, fatal attack on the French fortress. Craters caught my eye, great divots said to be relics of artillery blasts from the British siege.

On this day, however, it was not craters, but cranberries, that drew us to the coast with Lynn and Louise. Nature afforded a bonanza and in a couple or three hours we had collected several kilos worth. I did not spend every minute picking but paused from time to time to savour sun and sky and to inventory passing birds – gannets, yellowlegs, scoters and eiders. I felt luckier than a guy having a banner day at the slots in the neighbourhood casino.

Close-up duties seem to take longer with every passing year, partly attributable to the fact there is more to close up than was the case in the early years at 'Bigadore' but perhaps also because a 66-year-old worker is a pale shadow on his 26-year-old antecedent. Whatever, we managed to get all our tasks completed by 5 on Friday afternoon, bade farewell to the cabin then enjoyed a last supper with the twins at a good restaurant in Sydney, after which I bade a fond goodbye to the darlings, more than a little chagrined that eight months will pass before I get to benefit again from their boon companionship.

We flew across the country in four stages on Saturday. I am always mildly surprised – and ever so appreciative – when our airplane stays up as it should and delivers us to our destination in one piece. We arrived on Canada's left coast about 2 a.m. Nova Scotia time, feeling fresh gratitude that bro-in-law Marc and young Cai were on hand to receive us and ferry us to the James Bay digs.

By this time of year Victorians venturing outside customarily find themselves requiring rain gear and brollies but the cosmos remains kind: we have had sunny weather every day since Saturday – and we've capitalized on that happy circumstance. We spent a half day with pal Mary at Goldstream Park where the annual salmon spectacle is well under way: hundreds of chum salmon completing their last duty, spawning in the Goldstream gravel beds before they die and offer themselves up as carrion for the legions of gulls eagerly awaiting their expiration.

Yesterday evening we stayed up late to see a favourite singer-songwriter, David Francey, perform at Herman's in downtown Victoria. I confess to nodding off once or twice, no, not due to David losing his edge but because jet lag has not yet loosened its grip on me.

We give top marks to the summer of 2013 in Cape Breton but we're happy to be back at the winter shack, where plumbing and central heating provide soothing comfort to old bones. There of course is no television at the Big Bras d'Or cabin, something never missed when we are there. But Steve Nash is now the oldest man in the NBA and the new season is just under way. What's more, Game Six of the World Series is about to start. Gotta run . . .

Celtic Colours Glow Again

A well-regarded friend once came close to putting me off the road with the astounding disclosure that she doesn’t like CBC Radio – it’s for old people she asserted. My friend – let’s call her Pam to spare her from risk of vigilantism – also prefers rap music to opera and has zero interest in history. Well you know the old cliché: different strokes for different folks.

Wendy Bergfeld, Kyle Mischiek

Around the old Big Bras d’Or cabin CBC Radio enjoys far greater affection than Pam has for our national broadcaster. That regard is burnished bright after a week of Celtic Colours music at Knox church in Baddeck.  Each year during the locally cherished Colours music festival the local CBC program Mainstreet hosts daily sessions in the little church on Grant Street. Jan and are among the loyal coterie who year after year arrive early to grab a front pew and enjoy what unfolds – traditional music from far and wide and Mainstreet’s host Wendy Bergfeldt’s conversations with the artists.

This year’s lineup included musicians from Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Scotland and Ireland, North Carolina and Louisiana – and of course a host of Canadians too, many from Cape Breton. We sat close enough to read labels and count whiskers. This year, typically, the music was delivered not just by fiddle, guitar and piano but nyckelharpa, uilleann pipe and banjo too. We marveled at the depth and range of talent on display; I felt freshly unworthy at never having invested effort in learning to play anything, neither harmonica nor tin-whistle.

Tim Edey

There was something to like about all the music we heard; I was particularly drawn to England’s Tim Edey, Irishman John Doyle and South Carolinians Dirk Powell and Riley Baugus. And the young Cape Bretoners Maxim Cormier and Kyle Mischiek, the latter a hip-hop artist of all things who left many in the assembly misty-eyed with his evocation of Kenzie MacNeil’s Cape Breton anthem We Are an Island.

This year’s was gilt-edged because we succeeded in persuading good pals Garth and Carole to come to Cape Breton for their first taste of Celtic Colours. They brought high expectations and weren’t disappointed.  When we weren’t reveling in music we traveled about the Island, savouring the other seasonal colours – the scarlet and gold of Cape Breton’s autumn forests. En route to a Colours concert at St Peters we took back roads to evocatively-named places that were lifers for our friends: Little Narrows, Alba, Marble Mountain, Lime Hill.

There was disappointment at Dundee when we arrived to find that the community fishcakes-and-beans supper was sold out but the next day chef Richard Moore provided abundant consolation at the Lobster Pound in North Sydney, creating something special just for us, stuffed half-lobster that we all agreed was one of the best feeds any of us have enjoyed, ever.

Celtic Colours is a principal reason we stay in Cape Breton till late October. Perhaps it was inevitable: we felt a letdown Friday when Wendy Bergfeldt closed the final Mainstreet session and we bade farewell to Garth and Carole. The festival is done for another year. A senior citizen like myself, Garth is wont to say that our ‘window is closing’ so we’d better fill our remaining days as best we can. I live in hope that a year hence we’ll be enjoying a Colours afterglow like the one we’re savouring now.

No Crying at Teardrop Hill

. . . And then we took a hike of an entirely different stripe from the trails of Garrotxa. Maestras of untraveled and unknown Cape Breton highlands, Lynn and Louise led us on a route where the only discernible track is the occasional overgrown remnant of old pioneer roads abandoned since the national park was created in the 1930s. Never once in our recent Garrotxa tramp did we have to bushwhack; on Saturday with L & L at the head of the column we did nothing but.

In the early going we followed the Ruis des Plees Ferrees, crossing and recrossing it repeatedly wherever traversing seemed easiest. The forest cover here is almost entirely hardwood – yellow and white birch, red and sugar maple. In June these woods would be vibrant with birdsong; in mid-October, among the many-hued glories of autumn leaves, the forest was almost entirely silent. An occasional chickadee here, a hairy woodpecker there.

We came upon two waterfalls, a little one of just 5 feet in a short canyon, then a towering cataract of close to 50 feet, the second-highest I have seen in Nova Scotia. How many people know of it? The waterfall has no name on the large-scale map the twins use to discern new highland hiking possibilities. To get above the fall we scrambled up a steep, rocky embankment and were rewarded with a bird’s eye view through the Plees Ferrees valley all the way to Cheticamp and the Atlantic.

The mountain ridge we were targeting this day also goes nameless on the twins’ map but they call its western end ‘Teardrop Hill’ because of shape it is given by map contours. Where the river valley is deeply shaded by ancient hardwoods, the slopes above the big waterfall gradually open, until at the ridge top you find yourself in a wide open barren, most of the trees branchless and long dead but still standing. Here Louise spotted a moose; it fled as soon as it noticed us. The moose was no surprise: we saw moose sign everywhere, the occasional discarded rack and plenty – oh yes plenty – of moose-turd. Lots of bear-scat was available for inspection too. Judging from preliminary analysis beech nuts are currently a much preferred menu choice. We tried some ourselves – the nuts that is – and decided the bears show good taste.

What we didn’t see at any point on the twins’ away-from-it-all route was any other human or indeed any evidence that we weren’t the first people to have traveled here in a long, long time. Approaching the high plateau – 433 m above our start point according to the GPS – Louise mentioned that on high ground at this time of year they often see palm warbler, perhaps the most inappropriately named of all North American birds. Look for them not in palms but in scrub spruce of the boreal forest. Within moments we had two in a tree, flipping their tails as palm warblers are wont to do. Then after a pair of pine grosbeaks graced us with a close fly-past, a big bird flew low toward us until, spotting humans in this most anomalous context, veered off away from the ridge. A golden eagle.

Jan asserts that my HQ – happiness quotient to the uninformed – can always be measured in direct proportion to the number of pictures I take. The greater the number, the cheerier the old guy is almost certain to be. On Saturday there were plenty of reasons to count one’s blessings . The golden eagle was just the capper. The picture count? Oh, about 130, just a few of which in the Flickr photostream will paint you a picture.

Espana Produces a 5-Star Moveable Feast

As our three-week Spain adventure recedes in the rear view mirror, Jan and I find no reason to award anything less than an A rating to our experience of Catalunya and Barcelona in the northeast, Andalucia and Granada in the south.

The first chapter of our three-part Spain sampler was a week-long hike in the Garrotxa Volcanic Natural Park region of Calalunya northwest of Barcelona. We’d selected a UK company, On Foot, to look after arrangements other than the actual business of tramping 20 km and climbing 800 m on a given day. On Foot arranged our nightly domiciles, hauled our bags from place to place and – most important – provided detailed instructions and maps to guide us from A to B to C.

In our previous European junkets we traveled with companions – Mary & Mike, Lynn & Louise – but this time we traveled alone with only the On Foot instructions and a compass to get us where we wanted to go. Fortuitously, we managed not to disgrace ourselves by getting lost. We’d been warned by On Foot to expect afternoon thundershowers at this time of year. Not a drop of rain fell upon us. Our route afforded countless photo ops: impressive views of the Pyrenees on the near northern horizon, flashy wildflowers, startling local geology, occasional ‘lifer’ birds including the storied griffon vulture, the world’s highest-flying bird, a giant that makes mighty eagles look diminutive.

Much of the Garrotxa terrain is covered in oak and beech forest that provided welcome air conditioning in the heat of the day. We came upon churches and fortresses many centuries old.  Much of the time on the trail we had the world to ourselves, just as we’d hoped might be the case. Every day we wound up in a Garrotxa village, many of them conspicuously medieval. One of the great end-of-day joys for me was the opportunity to appreciate the spectrum of Spanish cervezas – at a price my friend Mike Whitney would particularly cherish: often less than two Euros apiece. More than once Jan’s carbonated water turned out to be costlier than beer. Elysium.

After seven days in hiking boots with daypacks strapped to our backs we moved on to Barcelona. The city was a tumult. Barcelona has a population of about three million and a flood of who-knows-how-many thousands of turistas at any time. In our three days there it was my impression that about half of them were on the street. Like perpetual Mardi Gras.

Sant Jordi (Saint George if you prefer) is the patron saint of Catalunya. Our first day happened to be the annual Sant Jordi holiday. That night we joined the legions at Placa Espana to watch a non-stop fireworks extravaganza, complete with classical musical accompaniment, the like of which we’d never experienced. I ventured that not only was their virtually no chance we would see a familiar face in Barcelona, that was absolutely no such possibility. The next morning who should pass right before my eyes but good pal Doug Hensby. No fiction writer would dare imagine such a preposterous coincidence.

Barcelona was a revelation. Emerging from the metro station on arriving downtown I was stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of a building. I didn’t know it in the moment but what had me slack-jawed was Casa Batllo, a diamond among the many jewels of Barcelona’s outlandish, ornate, some might say outrageous modernista architecture dating from the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries. I had never heard of Catalan modernism – or of its prime architect practitioners – Gaudi, Puig i Cadafalch and Domenech i Montaner – but I was instantly mesmerized . . . and diverted into a full day of gawking at a long string of the most celebrated modernista buildings.   

After Barcelona we flew to Granada in south-central Espana. My nephew Michael and family are in the midst of a months-long stay in Granada; Michael and Alice were generous in the extreme in showing us the ropes, not to mention the best of Granada’s tapas bars and ice cream parlours. Granada is only a tenth the size of Barcelona, the roof tiles are yellow rather than red, and it is in the surrounding mountains of the Sierra Nevada, not the Pyrenees, that you find Spain’s highest peaks.

We had another hike: Mike led us on a tramp through a narrow, towering gorge quite unlike anything I’ve ever laid eyes on across cable footbridges not designed for those fearful of heights, beneath rock-climbers scaling sheer cliffs. Just the sort of habitat preferred by one of our favourite European birds, the voluble, daredevil chough, gathered there in their dozens.

We went to the Mediterranean to gorge on an array of unfamiliar seafood on the beach and climb to the ancient hilltop fortress at Salobrena, one of those old oh-so-photogenic Mediterranean hamlets where streets are narrow and every house is whitewash-bright.

Once upon a long-ago time, when I was even more foolish than I am now, I went to Agra in India and declined to look at the Taj Mahal (strictly for stoopid tourists I reasoned). In Granada I made a point of not repeating the blunder: we spent a half day at the remarkable Alhambra, for seven centuries the stronghold of Muslim Moors and a present-day, UNESCO-recognized treasury of Moorish splendor. At a time when European Christians were locked in the dark ages, Moor artisans, astronomers and mathematicians worked wonders at the Alhambra. My feeble vocabulary is not up to the task of conveying a worthy account; perhaps the pictures I assemble on Flickr will perform a little better.

And then, poof!, our nineteen days in Iberia were over. We bade farewell to my Granada kin, flew to Barcelona for a final night before re-crossing the Atlantic October 4. European travel guru Rick Steves claims that intensified living is the great reward of travel. We couldn’t agree more. Spain was our sixth European sojourn in the last eight years. We’re already daydreaming about what comes next.

Iberia Idyll Imminent

At this juncture Peregrinations goes incommunicado for a time. On Sunday we depart for Barcelona and a 19-day adventure in Spain, including a week of hill-climbing in Catalonia and most of another in Granada. The hill portion features climbs of as much as 800 metres or so and distances of up to 22 km. Gulp. Let’s hope this summer’s constitutional hikes to Dalem Lake and the time we’ve recently spent slogging up some of Cape Breton’s steeper hills with Lynn and Louise has us ready for our latest European adventure.

The draw in Granada is not just the celebrated Alhambra but family ties too: nephew Michael is three weeks into a six-month sabbatical there with Alice, Ana and Rex. We’re keen to remove the rust from our ability to order cold beer in Spanish, and to look for new birds too. Maybe even one we’ve sought in vain before: the outlandish, garishly attired hoopoe.

If all goes according to plan, we should return intact to this side of the Atlantic October 4. No doubt Jan and I will think of something to write about soon thereafter.

Sixty? No Way!

Spare a thought for Jan this week. My Better Half reaches a major milestone Tuesday: half way to matching the longevity mark achieved by the famous Parisienne wit, Jeanne Calment, who towards the end of her 120-year span – or was it 121? –famously remarked, I only ever had one wrinkle, and I sat on it my entire life. Such a role model.

The rumour I hear is that the secret to some couples’ success is plenty of separation. Husband and wife do lots of stuff independently and thus avoid wearying of each other prematurely. Indeed some devotees of this recipe for marital bliss – perhaps with us in mind – have confessed to having no idea how a Fred-and-Martha who do most everything together can possibly stand it.

But there it is, in the seventeenth year of our liaison Jan and I still find ourselves toward the joined-at-the-hip end of the matrimonial spectrum. I count myself lucky that Hawkeye gets as big a kick as I do out of ogling a gang of migrant warblers through the business end of our hoary old Swarovskis, or slogging up a mountainside, or riding the bikes along a country road. How blessed we are that at a combined 126 years of age we can still do these things.

Heck, my wench even manages to share some enthusiasm for the vocational success of Steve Nash and Joey Votto while partaking in my exultation whenever the Boston Red Sox lay a beating on the despised NY Yankess. How lucky can a guy get? Another mystery that gets some folks scratching their heads is how she’s managed to stand living with me for nigh on seventeen years. While I don’t think I’m all that bad I do admit to being disinclined to ponder the question too deeply lest I scare the bejeezus out of myself.

On Tuesday a gang of her closest Cape Breton pals will mark Jan’s 60^th at one of our favourite eateries. I expect abundant affection, alacrity and amusement, and I know there are plenty more who’d wish they could be there. 

Wilkie Sugarloaf Sweetly Rewarding

Another blithe weekend day, another lifer mountain for ourselves and my constantly companionable cousins. With Lynn and Louise we gradually work our way through the remaining new-to-us mountain hikes inventoried in Michael Haynes’ 2^nd edition, Hiking Trails of Cape Breton. Saturday it was Wilkie Sugarloaf’s turn to shine in the sunny spotlight. Wilkie demands a steep 400 m ascent with nary a switchback to ease a pounding heart but rewards those who persevere with terrific vistas in every direction.

Along the way birds generously provided a regular pretext for pausing and deploying the binoculars, including one or two out of the ordinary: a boreal chickadee here, palm warbler there.

"Some say that on a very clear day you can even see Newfoundland," Haynes laments, "I have never been so lucky." On Saturday, as we approached the summit, our quartet was that lucky and we have the pictures to prove it. The rocky outcrop at the mountain top is too small a vantage point to accommodate a large assembly but sufficient to gratify a foursome hell-bent on appreciating all the visuals: south to Aspy Bay and North Harbour Beach, west to the North Mountain Range wilderness, north to Bay St Lawrence.

Three weekends in a row we have been treated to outdoor gems with L & L. All have been terrific, but I’m hard-pressed not to put the latest at the top of the heap. After descending the mountain we jettisoned footwear and took a barefoot meander along the long sandbar at North Harbour Beach. This is the place where John Cabot is imagined to have moored the Matthew in 1497 and gone for a beach walk of his own. A bust of the explorer marks the historic spot.

Our focus was less on old explorers than it was on shorebirds: we saw sanderling, least sandpiper, both of the semi-palmated species – plover and sandpiper – and most gratifying, two golden plovers on their way to the far reaches of South America, one already in winter dress, the other still molting out of breeding plumage.

One final highlight capped the day. I don’t know what provoked it, but suddenly there was a challenge: one twin threw down the gauntlet and before you can say Usain Bolt they are in a barefoot dash a hundred metres down the beach. To avoid getting myself in doo-doo I won’t disclose who won and who lost but you can take a look at my footage of the event. At the end, the one slamming her shoes into the sand is not Louise:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigadore/9709330517/

King Bob Rules Over Roberts Mountain

Over the Labour Day weekend incomparable Bob Nagel added more mustard to his already-over-the-top brand. The soon-to-be-84-year-old joined Lynn, Louise, Jan and me for a slog up Roberts Mountain near Pleasant Bay on Cape Breton’s northwestern shore. The mountain was a lifer for us all, even the peripatetic twins, who’ve hiked or skied just about everywhere in the Island wilderness.

Michael Haynes, author of our 2^nd edition, Hiking Trails of Cape Breton, describes the Roberts ascent as ‘a leg-burning trudge’ and cites a German mountain-climber as saying Roberts was the first place in Nova Scotia where he felt he was walking a real mountain. Whew. Was this a fit and proper destination for an octogenarian, even one as remarkable as the King of MacKenzie Hill? You be the judge.

Bob climbed the mountain and showed off while he was at it, singing most of the way to the summit. He even managed to deliver a selection of show tunes appropriate to the oxygen-depleted occasion: Did You Evah (‘Have you heard about Dear Blanche? Got run down by an avalanche’), High Hopes, Good Old Mountain Dew and, of course, Climb Every Mountain. How many 84-year-olds do you know who could serenade the troops whilst slogging his way up one of the steepest climbs Nova Scotia has to offer? My answer to the question is none. How many of us will, should we live to such a hoary old age, manage anything like the feat? I quake at the prospect.

The big hill provided rewards other than Bob’s inspiring performance. The peak is treeless and commands 360-degree views over some of Cape Breton’s finest vistas. Blueberries were at their tasty peak at this higher elevation; foxberries were on offer too. On this last day of August a hawk migration was under way: several kestrels – the continent’s smallest falcon – demonstrated their aeronautical skill at the summit while sharp-shinned hawks, up to a dozen of the little accipiters, did likewise.

Two moose spotted us at about the same time we saw them on the slope opposite the Roberts peak. They skedaddled. All in all, it was a good day for wildlife appreciators. Apart from the moose, we saw black bear and three white-tailed deer; we heard coyote too and had an eyeful of good birds: goshawk, pine grosbeak, gray jay.

After vanquishing the hill we paused at the Cabot Trail’s MacKenzie Mountain lookout to get some better perspective on the lay of the land. At this point Bob mentions to Ontario tourists that he’s just climbed the hill they are photographing. Before you know it they’re asking him to pose for pictures: another conquest for Herr Nagel.

Remember when Muhammad Ali shouted I am the Greatest? Ali offended many folks in the process but I was never one of them: to my mind he had earned the right to boast. Though he’s not nearly as pretty as Ali was at 22 I figure Bob has earned further bragging rights. After the weekend performance if he wants to crow about his latest achievement, hell, I’ll lead the cheering. Let the old coot fill his boots.

Earle’s Trove

 They speak to me, these ancient photographs. Old Dan MacKenzie – Bob Nagel’s grandpa – stands atop a loaded hay wagon, his grandchildren before him, scrawny horses awaiting the old man’s instructions. My dear old pal Sadie MacLean, when she was young, on a Farmall Cub tractor about to take her turn in a community ploughing contest. Bird Islands lightkeeper Dan Campbell and his wife Barbara Livingstone in front of the Ciboux light, about the time the Battle of the Somme was raging in 1916.

 Then there is Johnny MacKenzie proud as a peacock in three-piece suit, leaning on his shiny new Oldsmobile, somewhere in Boston. A studio shot of Bob’s three siblings, obviously taken before 1929 because Robert is not yet on the scene. A summer’s day quartet, one of them a MacKenzie soldier freshly returned from France about 1919, gallantry medal proudly displayed on his manly chest. A trio of long-gone relatives, rifles in hand, a freshly felled deer on the left fender of a rickety Ford.

Yes, the old pictures speak to me and set my imagination running. Did lightkeeper Campbell ever spot a German U-Boat from his perch on the lighthouse peak? Entrants in the ploughing contest were most certainly men; what did they make of Sadie trying to rob them of the blue ribbon? Who was the decorated soldier and what was the action that earned him his Military Medal? Who took the fatal shot that dropped the deer and what were the highlights of that day’s conversations?

The latest haul of archival photos comes compliments of Cousin Earle, the boy standing before the hay wagon. Peregrinations readers who also pay attention to my Flickr collections know full well how much I value decades-old pictures of long-gone kinfolk. I asked Earl whether he had any old pictures. Sure, he said. Not only did he let me see them while answering a string of who’s-who questions, but he let me take the whole works away so that I might scan as many as I liked.

I was once told that I should get used to the idea that the well of old pictures must one day inevitably run dry. I don’t buy it. I continue to draw water and have a notion there are a few good hauls left.

Wally’s Place Comes Back from the Dead

Wally would be ever so pleased. Just a couple of years ago Wally’s old house atop MacKenzie Hill was slowly melting back into mother earth. None of Wally’s own daughters had much interest in the home of their tender years. Passing it en route to Dalem Lake I often thought in a year or two the old place would be a collapsing ruin. Then, two summers ago, a wondrous thing occurred: people from away acquired the old house and since that time, over a period of three summers, breathed life back into it, investing long hours in patching, painting and preserving.

I care about Wally’s old house because the house and I go back a long way – fifty-four years if you must know. Back in 1959 when I was 12 a new job took my father, HJ, back to Cape Breton, his ancestral home. On Sunday afternoons throughout the year the whole family would travel out to Boularderie Island and Big Bras d’Or to visit relatives: old Jack Campbell, his son Donnie and family, Sandy and Jimmy MacKenzie at New Dominion, and most faithfully, Wally and Edith on MacKenzie Hill. So you know who’s who, Wally was Wally MacKenzie, who just happens to have been Bob Nagel’s favourite uncle; his wife Edith was my father’s first cousin, descended like him from a great-great grandfather, Angus Livingstone, the first Scots settler in this part of Cape Breton.

Wally and Edith had four daughters and some of them were particularly easy on the eyes. In winter there was snow to play in, in summer wide-open fields, excellent places to gambol with girl cousins. Nearby, Dalem Lake provided opportunities for cooling off on a hot summer afternoon.

Wally had a terrific big garden and the margins of his fields had hosts of berries: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. No kids had smart-phones back then, you couldn’t while away the hours sexting your pals but there were woods to explore, fields excellent for kite-flying, a barn to nose about in. None of us considered ourselves deprived.

Maybe I was a strange kid but I was interested in the older folks too. In Wally’s living room I liked to listen to the adults talk of the characters and mischief of their youth in the 1920s and 30s. Of the time they painted grumpy Jack Morrison’s pig, or when they moved Jack’s outhouse on a moonless night for the good clean fun of seeing him step into the muck. Of pretty Florence Livingstone and ugly Bella MacLeod, and Bella’s scandalous claim that the mark of Florence’s arse was imprinted on every cradle hill from the Slios a Brochan to Fife’s brook.

Of Edith-and-HJ’s fiercely Presbyterian grandmother, ‘Widow Bill’ Livingstone, who, when HJ was just 5, told him she saw the mark of the rope around his neck. Who could resist such characters and such stories? Not I.

The years, the decades, and a whole half-century passed away. Eventually, though he lived well past 90, even good old Wally had to go. After a few years Wally’s old place appeared exactly what it was: a vacant house. The old garden disappeared entirely. The lawn grew wild. Weeds took over, growing high as the windows. Foxes moved into the crawl-space below the bedroom addition.

Then, two years ago, Derek and Donna bought the old place, and went to work. They live and work in Calgary but are born-and-bred Cape Bretoners glad to have a summer place back on the Island. They put a new roof on this summer, installed a spiffy new kitchen window, applied another coat of paint, painted the shutters too. Best of all, the old house now hums with conversation, laughter, children’s voices. It pleases me no end and if that’s the case you can well imagine how happy Wally would be.

Morien Medley

Off we went with Lynn and Louise for a medley of human and natural history. We saw remnants of the Cape Breton ghost town, Broughton, and the Broughton cemetery, slowly being engulfed by forest. Broughton matters to me particularly because it was the 1916 training ground of the 185^th Battalion, the Cape Breton Highlanders, before they shipped out for the Western Front. One of the Highlanders was my cousin David Livingstone, fated to die in the last month of the Great War.

The twins knew I would want to see one Broughton gravestone in particular, that of the Ferguson brothers, Archie and Frank, both of whom served in a storied Canadian cavalry unit, Lord Strathcona’s Horse, Frank making the ultimate sacrifice, in April 1918.

Plenty of history is displayed in the attractive fishing village of Port Morien, not far from Broughton. In the early 1700s the first coal mine in North America was developed there to feed the blacksmith forges at nearby Louisbourg.  We chanced upon history of more recent vintage by way of a monument and display attesting that the first boy scout troop in North America was established not in New York or Chicago but at little Port Morien.  Who knew? The display features a 1910 photograph of the lads, all of them identified. I noted that some of the names matched those on the nearby village cenotaph. I committed myself to learning which among the 1910 boy scouts ended his days in 1917 on the slopes of Vimy Ridge or in the mud and gore of Passchendaele.

As for the natural history, well, we had plenty to crow about there too. At Broughton a lovely wood frog generously allowed me to get nose-to-nose for a glorious photo op. Nearby, the Port Morien sandbar is one of the premier places in Cape Breton to behold the wonders of the annual late-August shorebird migration. We saw eight kinds – plovers, yellowlegs, diminutive peeps and the lovely and charming sewing-machine-impersonator, short-billed dowitcher – not to mention a relative rarity, Hudsonian godwit, featuring a very long bill, upturned at the tip. Overhead, ring-billed and herring gulls nimbly picked flying insects out of the air as two osprey hovered for fish.

A bit further down the road, at Schooner Pond, we added two more shorebirds to the day list, Wilson’s snipe and whimbrel. The whimbrel reverses the godwit’s pattern: its bill is every bit as long as the godwit but turns down at the tip. Cape Breton is blessed: almost all of the whimbrels that migrate in autumn along the eastern seaboard funnel through the Island.

Circumstance afforded a beware-what-you-see refresher. Looking back from whence we’d come Jan spotted a chunky bird on a wire. I was galvanized. What was it? A night-heron? Strange owl? First-Canada-record common potoo? We retraced our steps far enough to discover that our extraordinary bird lacked feathers, wings and a heartbeat. It was a one-eyed ceramic insulator not in a hurry to fly anywhere. Oh well, of such reverses a birder is made.

Just beyond Schooner Pond Cape Perce provided consolation: good looks at gray seals and northern gannets and a sunset that had us reaching for the cameras and adequate superlatives. The day may have been deprived of a night-heron or potoo but never mind, It was enough to make an old fella grateful he can still get about without cane or supplemental oxygen.