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.