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.