And to all a good night

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

The deep thinker Kierkegaard had that just about perfectly right. As I stumble my way through the final weeks of my seventh decade I find walking more vitally important than ever. I’ve always been a walker-hiker-rambler but as I approach the opening salvos of  decade number eight I am ever more struck by the insight of the sage, Robert Carl Nagel: You don’t wait ‘til your seventy to start looking after yourself. All around me are folks whose knees and hips seem to be crumbling faster than the fond hopes of those who went into U.S. balloting stations November 8 expecting that their fellow citizens would be governed by their better natures. I seek to walk my troubles away.

Some of the best walking Jan and I enjoyed in 2016 was in the hills of Tuscany in May. Apart from the obvious attractions – the regional food and drink – we reveled in a plethora of wildflowers and beautiful birds. We ate up history, culture and ancient architecture. We made new friends. We wore ourselves out, happily, and rationalized that with the daily caloric burn we could reward ourselves with all the gnocchi and gelato we could load on board.

A year ago health issues deprived me of an entire season at the summer Shangri-la in Cape Breton. Jan and I made up for it in 2016. At Big Bras d’Or we typically start our day with a seven-kilometre walk to and around Dalem Lake, relishing the ever-changing scene delivered by the passing seasons.

We enjoyed occasional bike expeditions, entertained visitors at the cabin, exploited Lynn-and-Louise’s willingness to take us into wild, untrampled parts of the Cape Breton highlands. Now we are back at the winter base camp on south Vancouver Island, where there are more hills to explore and other kindred spirits to explore them with. We wear out boot leather with good friends Mike, Mary and Judith – and count ourselves lucky that we’re still able to do so.

The past year delivered a happy event of another, less sweaty sort. On November 12 I launched my book, Remembered in Bronze and Stone, a contemplation of Canadian war memorials. Published by Heritage House, the book is available in stores right across the country. It is early days but the response to the book has been highly gratifying. It makes an excellent Christmas present. No, really.

2016 was a banner year. Mostly. True, not all the passages wrought by time are ones that bring joy. Dan Livingstone departed this mortal coil in March. In June it was Bob Nagel’s turn. Then the great Ron Satterfield took his leaving in August. Though I never knew them personally I also grieved the departures of Muhammad Ali and Leonard Cohen. Happily, life affords plenty of joy to offset periodic stabs of grief. Even with D. Trump in the White House, the sun will likely still shine; warblers will return in May; satinflowers, shooting-stars and calypso orchids will yet bloom in the warmth of another island spring. We shall make a point of reveling in them all. Perhaps everything will be all right.

On my own behalf and Jan’s too: Happy Holidays and our best wishes for a healthy and productive New Year.

Fifty Years in the Making

A peregrination of a different and very exciting sort reached journey’s end yesterday. Before a crowd of eighty at the Victoria Public Library’s main branch I launched my book, Remembered in Bronze and Stone. Though the actual writing of the book took only a couple of months in 2015, in a very real sense Remembered is a book half a century in the making. The book  is dedicated in memory of my great-uncle, Harrison Lincoln Livingstone. In 1964 Harrison acquired a big, beautiful piece of land in Cape Breton: five hundred acres, five miles of shoreline, an island all his own. The acquisition of the land ushered in a period that was the happiest of his long life.

The unhappiest period of Harrison’s life surely occurred in the years 1915 to 1918 when he was a Canadian soldier in the battlefields of Flanders and France. In the spring of 1965, the first spring after he’d acquired his Shangri-la near Marble Mountain I went there with him to take the first steps at rehabilitating the ancient, near-derelict house that had been the lifelong home of the bachelor who lived there all his days and had sold the land and house to Harrison in old age.

In the front room of the dark old house there was a wooden puncheon – a very fragrant one – packed with pickled herring. How long it had been there? The attic was literally knee-deep in the detritus accumulated over decades by old Johnny MacKenzie. Among the 1930s-era issues of Maclean’s magazine and myriad other markers of decades gone by there was a weathered leather jacket. It fit me perfectly. I wore it on campus for a few years as I completed a degree at Dalhousie University then commenced a master’s at the same learned institution.

Apart from cleaning up the house, I helped Harrison cut trails through his land and reduced dense groves of red alder to firewood. Together we found a little forgotten cemetery engulfed in forest of spruce and fir.

Harrison and I were on our own at Marble Mountain: no television, not even a radio I can remember. We only had each other. Circumstances were just right for the momentous event that soon took shape. I managed to get Harrison talking about his experiences in the trenches and battlegrounds of the Great War. His accounts were both horrifying and appalling and at the same time riveting and unforgettable. It was there and then, in the spring of 1965 at Marble Mountain, that my life-long fascination with the Great War was seeded.

In 2005 Jan and I, with good friends Mary and Mike, made our first circuit of the Western Front, by bicycle. We saw the battlefields, visited the graves of six Cape Breton relatives killed in the war. Upon returning home I began in earnest to gather artefacts of Harrison’s war and that of his brothers, cousins and friends: images, documents, memories. I built an online inventory of these items and shared them through the Internet.

In 2010 while on a war history mission in Westville, Nova Scotia, I chanced upon something that literally stopped me in my tracks: the community war memorial. In a green space beside the town post office was a bronze soldier standing on the town cenotaph. The soldier, wearing no helmet, his rifle strapped across his back, stands at the battlefield grave of a comrade. It is a mute essay in loss, regret and contemplation. It was, simply, the finest community war memorial I had ever seen.

At the base of this compelling figure was a mark identifying the sculptor and the year he produced his work: Emanuel Hahn, 1921. A new mission was born: I decided I had to learn more about Hahn and the life work he had accomplished. The following year Jan and I embarked on an ambitious plan: we mapped a journey across Canada aimed at delivering us to other memorials featuring a bronze or stone soldier, not just those conceived by Emanuel Hahn but the whole works: all the memorial soldiers we could arrange to see. We followed the 2011 transcontinental journey with another in 2012. This time a west-to-east quest along a different route, to other soldiers on other monuments. Further, regional journeys occurred in 2013 and 2014.  Eventually we managed to see, study and photograph a big majority of Canada’s stone and metal soldiers.

In the spring of 2014 I gave a presentation on the country’s war memorial statuary to the west coast branch of the Western Front Association. It was wonderfully well received. I was urged to write a book. I dodged the task for a while. Who would be interested in such a book? Who would publish it? Then in 2015 a new imperative arose: health issues compelled me to forgo an entire season in Cape Breton. My friend Ron Caplan said I had to make worthy use of the time I would otherwise be in Cape Breton. I had to write the book. I did. Though the treatment I underwent was sometimes distinctly unpleasant, I wrote. I never felt more alive. I completed a manuscript.

It took three months but I found a publisher who liked the manuscript and wanted to publish it. The publisher, Rodger Touchie, and his able staff at Heritage House did a marvelous job: they turned my manuscript into a finished work I consider beautiful – and while they were at it commanded the attention of media far and wide, CBC Radio from Victoria and Vancouver to Cape Breton, stories in print media in Victoria, Vancouver and Halifax.

Yesterday was the official book launch: eighty attended, I spoke about my book. People lined up to acquire a copy. I signed at least fifty.

The past week has been the best and worst of times. Leonard Cohen departed this mortal coil. Somehow, unbelievably, D. J. Trump was elected leader of the free world. And yesterday, at Victoria’s main library, a journey commenced fifty years ago at Marble Mountain in Cape Breton reached its destination.

Going Where No One Goes

My mum, bless her tender heart, saw to it that she raised a son who counts his blessings. I consider myself lucky that she did so. Being mindful of one’s good fortune, it seems to me, makes good things all the more golden.

For the first time since we teamed up two decades ago Jan and I are, only for a while, doing our own thing as summer turns to autumn. After three months at the summer shack it was time for her to return to her musical passions on the west coast and to Victoria’s myriad charms and attractions. A year ago health problems cost me the entire season at Bigador – I felt robbed – so I am hell-bent on making up the loss this year: I am intent on spending my full four-month entitlement here – and reveling in Cape Breton’s October allure for the next two weeks.

Yes, I miss my mate but I am determined to confound those – my dear old Mum in particular – who fear that left to my own devices I may starve or accidentally burn the cabin down or perhaps chainsaw off a leg. When I last glimpsed Jan beyond the security line at Sydney’s McCurdy airport I admit to having felt more than a little sentimental but I quickly decided that the best way to fend off lonesomeness is by maximizing busyness and productivity. I do the pre-breakfast Dalem walk just as I did in Jan’s company. I conduct selective tree-cutting, make firewood, enjoy small projects around the Bigador compound. I don’t waste time. If the rain stays away I spent almost all the daylight hours outdoors; after dark I produce a proper supper; CBC Radio is my constant companion.

One of my top blessings is that despite my advanced age and lack of personal charm, Lynn and Louise continue to allow me to join them on their expeditions into the untraveled Cape Breton hinterland. I describe my twin cousins – with no exaggeration or lazy bias – as the most formidable backcountry people Cape Breton has to offer. 

Do you want to join us for an off-trail ramble in the hills above the Cheticamp River canyon, they asked. Absolutely, I answered. The collected me early Saturday morning and by mid-morning we were at the trailhead on Cape Breton`s opposite coast. ‘Trailhead’ is perhaps a misleading term: the twins don`t much like prepared trails. As soon as it can be arranged they like to get away from the road well traveled and head for places no one ever goes.

Saturday morning was a case in point. For a short time we followed a route that had been a formal national park trail until it was decommissioned at some point in the 1980s. Soon enough, as a steep hill loomed to our right Lynn spotted a grazing cow moose. I managed to get an excellent shot of its butt end before the cow realized our presence and skedaddled. We followed the big beast up the slope, through mature forest, over and around fallen logs.

Moose signs proliferated as we approached the summit: moose trails, moose-browsed trees, pressed-down spots marking places where cow or bull had chosen to bed down for the night, frequent piles of moose pellets. What there wasn’t was any sign of human presence: no beer cans, candy wrappers, or old campfire sites. 

We climbed to the summit of the twins’ mountain, a mountain that has no name on topographical maps so I cannot tell you it. At a rocky promontory overlooking the Cheticamp River gorge and the village of Cheticamp on the distant horizon, I asked Lynn and Louise to make an educated guess: when was the last time a person other than themselves had been in this spot? They gave the question careful consideration before Lynn ventured this: perhaps the 1930s. How marvelous it was to imagine that she might be right, that we could briefly visit a spot sufficiently remote that no one else had trod in eighty years. 

Which is not to say we were devoid of company. Selecting another promontory overlooking the deep Cheticamp Valley we settled in for a hawk watch. Only a few songbirds remained in this place on the first day of October, most of their kind having departed for points south but we did see birds, big ones: several bald eagles, a merlin, and two individuals of a species the twins could not remember ever having seen before in Cape Breton – peregrine falcon. Yahoo.

I am grateful to Doris Irene, my friend and mother, for bestowing upon me a constitution decent enough that I can still bushwhack up trackless mountains in my seventieth year – and of course a clear sense of how lucky I am that that is so.

Meandering Meat Cove Mountain with the Magnificent Monozygotes

I know of no finer elixir than the one that results from saying Yes when the monozygotes – Lynn and Louise – propose a hike to some out-of-the-way Cape Breton destination we have never laid eyes upon. On Saturday we followed their lead to the root of an ancient Appalachian mountain behind the present-day hamlet of Meat Cove. Meat Cove is as far north as you can get by road in Nova Scotia. Beyond Meat Cove there is only St. Paul’s Island: to get there you need a boat and resistance to seasickness far stouter than my own.

The trailhead to Meat Cove Mountain lies beyond the end of the blacktop, not far from the absolute end of the road. The initial steep climb leads through a mature forest that features hardly any conifers but an abundance of oaks, poplars, birches and maples. En route up the hill one finds no culturally modified trees – there are no stumps to indicate that the giants of this forest have ever been felled by sawyer and saw.

What awaits those who slog right the way to the ridge beyond through the leafy woods is a very grand landscape: 360-degree views east to the big headland at Cape North; south up the steep valley of Meat Cove Brook; west along the treeless, windswept ridge of Meat Cove Mountain and hilltops beyond; north to St. Paul’s, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and – on a clear day – the mountains of southwestern Newfoundland.

The weather availed us was sublime in every way but one. We had sun, warmth, terrific seeing in every direction. We also had wind, and much of it. I had no anemometer with us – Jan’s smart phone is not quite that smart – so no one is able to challenge my assertion that the gusts we encountered sometimes reached Force 8 on the Beaufort scale.

From time to time we were drawn to shelter in the lee of a boulder or tight knot of krummholtz to savour the vistas and ingest granola bars and hard-boiled eggs. At this altitude berries were legion – blueberries and foxberries in particular. With such a surfeit I wondered where the black bears were. Was it too windy even for them?

The summit of the mountain is a long, wide-open ridge with plenty of geology to consider: steep, rocky drop-offs, ranks of hills to south and west, deep green valleys on either side of the ridge. The terrain put me in mind of the open mountain ridges I love to hike on the continent’s opposite coast. 

At such a place in mid-September I expect to see migrating hawks. The wind might have kept many more close to ground but we did in fact see hawks – northern harriers, bald eagles, sharp-shinned and red-tailed hawks – and imagined how much better the hawking might have been on a calm day. Perhaps there are no calm days. We passed the occasional brave three-foot spruce or fir that might have stood its ground sixty years or more whose shape suggested it is constantly buffeted by powerful nor’westerlies. 

Strong winds or not, in the later afternoon I felt reluctant to leave the mountain – when might I get here again? – but descend we did, only to climb another, lower peak close to the village where we looked in vain for pilot whales but did manage to see gannets and a big sunfish lazily going about its business just offshore.

On this second hill we crossed paths with an American, Peter from Kansas City, with whom I struck up a conversation about the state of the world, particularly that part of it currently contemplating the opportunity of electing D. Trump President of the USA. The conversation was so congenial that we swapped cards and vowed to meet again for further dialogue three years hence when Peter plans to return to Cape Breton – provided of course that we and our world survive what US electors decide on November 8.

If there was a disappointment on this day it was a minor one. It turned out that the village canteen was closed: we were thus denied the snow crab roll we’d all anticipated as our reward for climbing Meat Cove Mountain. So we went to Neill’s Harbour where – oh joy! – we found five-star steamed mussels and snow crab sandwiches on offer. Some days it seems nothing can go wrong.

Communing with Ghosts

On a blithe and beautiful late-summer Friday we took a trip down memory lane.

I have a fascinating old photograph now close to a century old. In it my great-uncle Harrison Livingstone stands on the platform of the Shenacadie rail station together with several other passengers. He holds what appears to be a large bed roll on his right shoulder, a lantern in his left hand. He looks young, healthy, happy. Two of the fellow passengers are young women wearing headbands, having the look of those who would come to be known as ‘flappers’ in the 1920s. The photo is undated but there is a strong likelihood it was taken in the late spring of 1919, the year my uncle returned from the Great War. 

A half-century ago Harrison told me that the day he came home from the horrors of the Western Front, to Cape Breton by train and to Big Bras d’Or, his Boularderie Island home, on the old sidewheeler Marion was the happiest day of his whole life. Given what I have come to know about his experiences in Flanders and France, it is no surprise that he might have felt that way.

Jan and I went to Shenacadie in the hope – perhaps a foolish hope – of beholding the Bras d’Or Lakes as he’d have done on that euphoric late-spring day 97 years ago. The old wooden Shenacadie rail station is of course long gone. We found a gravel road that led down to a straight stretch of the old rail line. Nowadays tall weeds flourish between the rusted rails. Apart from an occasional annoyed query from a squirrel as to what business we had there, silence was complete. In this place there is a broad widening to one side of the tracks. It is there I imagined Harrison stood in 1919, charged with joy, as he awaited the arrival of the Marion to deliver him on the last leg of his journey home.

From Shenacadie we carried on to Marble Mountain where Harrison was the laird of five hundred acres and where he spent the final, very happy two decades of his long, rich life. Back in 1965, when Harrison was 68 and I 18, the age at which he became a soldier of the Great War, we took the first steps at refurbishing the old house he had acquired. We cut trails through his woods to access the outer reaches of his wonderful Cape Breton estate.

One morning our trail-cutting work revealed something special: we chanced upon a small cemetery engulfed by forest. At the time the scene moved me considerably: gravestones long forgotten, long ignored among the firs and spruces towering above them. When we landed at Marble Mountain last Friday I asked my cousin Laura – Harrison’s granddaughter – and her spouse Anthony whether they’d ever come across the old graveyard. Yes they had. Indeed, just an hour earlier they had visited it, still hidden away in Harrison’s woods. I asked them if they’d be willing to lead me back there. Now. They were. They did. With Anthony in the lead we clambered over and around fallen trees and made our way to the old graves. 

Cemeteries – especially lost cemeteries almost the whole world has forgotten – move me significantly. Such sites are ideal places to contemplate the transience of things, the ephemerality of human endeavour.

There are only a few still-legible stones still standing in Harrison’s lost cemetery. Some stones are toppled, not by the usual cause – vandalism – but by natural forces. In the head-on collision of a little grave-marker and a big storm-felled conifer the marker will always be the loser.

Sketchy though they may be, the stories hinted at by the old markers can touch an observer afflicted with a somewhat tender heart. Stories such as that of Mary Campbell, beloved wife of John McKenzie who departed her life in the summer of 1816, aged 22. Or the story of Catherine McRae, who had emigrated with her husband John McDonald from Lochalsh, Ross-shire in 1828, and who left McDonald a widower on Christmas Day in 1863. Or that of another John McDonald who died en route to Halifax in July, 1858, aged 23. All of them Scots pioneers in this part of Cape Breton.

We pondered the stones and imagined lives lived two centuries ago, lives of which lichen-encrusted stones avail only the barest details. Anthony and I managed to raise one of the old toppled stones and wrestled it back onto its base: just a small gesture of solidarity with fellow humans who trod this pioneer neighbourhood in the years before there was a Canada.

Of Orion, Ovenbirds and Old Route 5

Even without consulting the calendar we know it is mid-September. The night sky is altered: Orion hangs fetchingly over our road at 5 in the morning. The traffic on Old Route 5 is sparse. Most telling, our favourite morning eatery, Jane’s, has switched to autumn hours, no longer availing the depraved eggs-bacon-onion breakfast we both love so well.

On the trail to Dalem Lake it is the time of year when every few footsteps delivers a faceful of spider web. Red maples flaunt the first scarlet leaves that will be legion on Kelly’s Mountain a month from now. The forest is riotous with mushrooms of every hue: brindle, red, purple, yellow, white. Birds no longer sing in the woods but at night, from the sleeping porch, we hear them in the night sky discussing which way to negotiate their perilous journey to Panama or Hispaniola. 

We cross paths with itinerant troupes of warblers intent on getting out of Dodge while the getting is good: magnolias and myrtles, blackburnians and black-and-whites, ovenbirds, parulas. Paying attention, we are occasionally rewarded with a bird out of the ordinary: a migrant rusty blackbird, a member of his clan shyer than his gregarious relatives from the redwinged and Brewer’s branches of the tribe.

We still swim. At Dalem the loons that raised a family this season in Dalem’s marshy edges still yodel their oh-so-Canadian anthem of the northern woods. Curiosity pulls them closer when we’re in the water. What are the strange beasts, they wonder, crooning a song of their own: If you should survive ‘til a hundred and five . . .

Out on the Great Bras d’Or we hear telltale wing-whistles: scoters have returned from their northern breeding grounds, readying for fall and winter. Among the hummingbirds it is the young of the year who are the laggards at the feeder. The rubythroat mums and dads who raised them have already fled for warmer climes. Do we do the youngsters a disservice by continuing to ladle out the sugar water they like so well? 

I look for dead and dying birch and maple to convert to firewood for the Drolet woodstove that provides so much cozy comfort on evenings no longer hot and humid. Pal Derrick organized a posse to help transform his own small mountain of eight-foot cordwood into stacks of stove-length bits. A decade older than most everyone else in the work party, I was intent on not embarrassing myself. Operating a chainsaw for eight hours, I was keen not to flag, not to give near-septuagenarians a bad name. ‘Turns out I didn’t. Afterwards Donna told me that her friends assumed I was an honest-to-goodness lumberjack, a logger. I do not lie.

It took longer this year – is it because we were absent in 2015? – but the snowshoe hares are finally used to us again. They no longer flee when we emerge from the cabin in the morning but remain, ruminating on the nature of things as they carefully chew the grass availed just outside our door. We hope the bunnies will not be dangerously tamed five or six weeks from now when we are replaced by men in plaid jackets carrying shotguns.

Bald eagles were plentiful when we arrived in June then disappeared for the superior fishing offered by the Bird Islands in summer. Now the eagles are back. No matter how compelling the book either of us happens to be reading in the front porch, we pause to look whenever an eagle alights on one of our tall spruces and lingers to study the passing scene.

Only two weeks remain before an historic event unfolds: for the first time ever Jan and I will depart Cape Breton separately this year. I was robbed of my CB time a year ago and aim to make up the loss by remaining here well into October. Jan and Doris – my beloved Mum – are united in a fretful worry: that left to my own devices I will through sheer half-wittedness starve or chainsaw my leg off or burn the cabin down. Oh ye of such little faith, how do they imagine I coped in those antediluvian, pre-Janice days when I did manage to find my way across Old Route 5 without someone to hold my hand?

Cruising Cumberland County with Cultured Companions

Nay, though it was the blithe days of August, we forsook Big Bras d’Or, put ourselves in the hands of cultivated mainland friends and soaked up history and culture in Nova Scotia’s Cumberland County.

In 1968 my longest-suffering friend, Stephen, worked as an archaeologist at Fort Beausejour, just across the present-day New Brunswick border. By contrast, I had never laid eyes on Beausejour. I feel culpable at having to confess that lamentable fact.

Without really having been intentionally designed for the role, this summer has been steeped in the history of the French Acadian people and the dreadful expulsion the British powers-that-be forced upon them beginning in 1755.

I have been schooled in this: we cannot judge 250-year-old actions by modern-day standards and values but I learnt something from a recently acquired 1897 history of Annapolis County, that even then – in 1755 – more than a few British officers and administrators knew what they were perpetrating was entirely wrong. The exhibits at Beausejour enhanced my sense of what the peaceful and productive Acadians had built in the century before 1755 – and what was lost when their communities were razed and the people dispersed across the seas.

The Sackville NB wildfowl park provided relief after Beausejour. In thirty-five years of birding I had never seen such concentrations of yellowlegs – sandpipers told, well, by their bright yellow legs – and further concentrations of phalaropes, grebes and ducks.

I have become a strange sort of aficionado: these past few years I prowl old graveyards, not for the necrophilic allure they might offer to specialists, but for something else: white bronzes. White bronzes are grave markers made of zinc. They were all the rage from about 1880 to the early 1890s then faded out of fashion. White bronzes leap off the page when seen in a cemetery of the right vintage. They are impervious to weather and climate and really have only one enemy: vandals. They are ornate, stylish and – to my eye – quite beautiful. We found four at Sackville, each providing food for thought by way of the sad, mortal inscriptions often inscribed upon them.

Led by Stephen and Sheila, we did a walkabout among the fine old homes of Amherst NS, and hung on every word as our friends sought to edify us on the differences between Gothic Revival and Queen Anne building styles.

Cape Chignecto Provincial Park at the edge of the Bay of Fundy was a ‘lifer’ for us all. We walked the dramatic headlands between the Three Sisters rock formations and Squally Point, taking pictures hand over fist. How was life to be endured, I wondered, before the invention of digital photography.

We dined regally at the Cape d’Or lighthouse and the Wild Caraway near the end of the road in Advocate Harbour. At our Advocate digs there was a beautiful infestation: numbers of migrating eastern bluebirds whose kind I had encountered only once before in Nova Scotia. I exulted.

Having inflicted ourselves on Stephen and Sheila for three days we took our act to Pancake Hill near Port Greville. If Stephen is my longest-suffering friend he is only marginally so: George Perry is a close second. Staying with George and Joan, we walked the trails, birded, stuffed ourselves on a bumper crop of wild blackberries, enjoyed terrific conversation, compared notes on the effect aging has on the speed of a man’s fastball, sought recommendations on the books we should put at the head of our reading list.

We capped the time away with a return engagement at Truro, a visit with Doris Irene, my dear old Mum. It was she who taught me the abiding reward of counting one’s blessings. In the sunny summer of 2016 there are plenty to count. Who knows how well we’ve earned the good fortune that follows us like a loyal dog these days but we’ll continue to savour it with gratitude.

All That – and Civility Too

One of the rewards of a summer season at Big Bras d’Or is the opportunity it avails to hang out with young people. We are pleased that even as our best-before date recedes further and further into the dim dark past, nieces and nephews – great-nieces and great-nephews too – seem to feel that a few days at the cabin with Uncle Butt and Auntie Jan is a reward worth the long drive required to collect it. The gratification is that much greater when the young folks – not yet flung into the hormonal cauldron of the teen-aged years – are engaged, civil, considerate and polite.

 

Naomi came for three days with the girls, Hannah and Sara; their stay was a delight from start to finish.

We climbed Coxheath Mountain on a hot day. I would have considered my fitness pretty decent but the steep climb soon reduced my legs to limp spaghetti and had the ancient heart pumping only a little slower than a hummingbird’s. Meanwhile, the youngsters scampered up the hill as if it were a mere pimple. I felt the passage of time.

We paused to study fellow travelers – a toad here, redbelly snake or strange caterpillar there – and appreciate the panoramic vistas availed at the top. I did not object when someone suggested we stop at the summit to rest and ingest granola bars.

Back at the cabin, by popular request, I built a typical Uncle Butt-style bonfire. Cousins Lynn and Louise joined the family circle. We waited patiently for a bed of coals to evolve, tossed water-soaked corncobs – still in their husks – onto the coals then savoured the proceeds rolled in butter. No one grumbled about the payoff.

The cabin porch provides an excellent front-row seat for the annual Kelly’s Cove fireworks display. The show was more dramatic and longer-lasting in 2016 than ever before. After dark the girls sought and got the opportunity to whip the old folks at card games. Naomi and young Sara prevailed at ‘Golf’ (I finished last); Naomi and Hannah won at ‘Hearts’ (I was not in the running). I relished the girls’ savvy and speed and the remarkable range of delighted facial expression Sara displayed at beating the tar out of her old uncle.

It all ended too soon. On the last morning – how strange is this? – the kids wanted a tour of the St. James cemetery to see the tombstones of their ancestors. One by one they contemplated the markers, starting with their great-grandfather, proceeding all the way to the final resting place of their 5Xgreat-grandfather Angus Livingstone, first Scots settler in this part of Cape Breton.

You imagine – a long weekend with kids who were nothing but fun the whole time, and what’s more, genuinely wanted to learn all they could about their forbears. 

Naomi dear, feel free to bring them back whenever you want.  

But Doesn’t the Outhouse Need Shoveling?

At a time when it sometimes seems that significant kith and kin are falling like autumn leaves I am driven to shift the focus to subjects likely to induce a smile or outright laugh. Our Cape Breton summer proceeds swimmingly. Both figuratively and literally. 

The waters of the Great Bras d’Or are typically frozen solid in the cold dark heart of winter; how can it be that by early August the same waters are a blithe, bonny place to go for a swim? On sunny summer afternoons we install our ‘In the swimmin’ hole’ sign by the cabin door and head down to the shore.

There is always plenty to contemplate down there: the clean lines of a passing sloop, the views of Kelly’s Mountain and our splendid salty strait, the feathered neighbours – kingfishers, spotted sandpipers, gulls, bald eagles – demanding to know what business we have in their back yard, the 300-million-year-old Carboniferous fossils strewn along our very own beach. Visitors rhapsodize: how lucky we are to have such a paradise to call our own. I am disinclined to debate the claim.

Guests might imagine that Bigadore actually is a paradise but is any utopia truly, utterly perfect? Doesn’t the occasional fly alight in the butter dish? Isn’t it a nuisance when a squirrel chews through a kitchen screen to break into the cabin? Doesn’t a nocturnal raccoon knock over the garbage can from time to time? Isn’t the outhouse in need of shoveling out once or twice a summer?

Alice brought Randy for his first taste of this particular paradise. We stayed up late savouring meaty conversation. In the morning Randy brought out his shiny new drone, took marvelous aerial photographs of the cabin and its surrounds. I was as impressed as a 10-year-old. Michael – the man who at age two-and-a-half gave the old place its enduring name – ‘Bigadore’ – arrived with another newcomer, his squeeze Elaine, for a weekend, together with the children. We looked for salamanders under logs, pointed out some of the more fascinating flowers of summer, kept a list of birds seen and heard.

Adele, Jan’s lovely young niece, came for a week and incited only one aggravation: frustrating my quest to identify a single vice in her. Surely even the most virtuous folks have a wart or two, don’t they? 

The national historic site at Louisbourg is a major tourist draw, one that loses much of its lustre after the twentieth visit. But it was a lifer for Adele so we went again, and managed to find novelty outside the fortress walls – a guided tour of the battlefield where New England invaders successfully besieged the Louisbourg defenders in 1758. At Baddeck we introduced Adele to twin delights: fresh east coast lobster and a street festival featuring the finest, liveliest Cape Breton music.

Opportunities of the sporting-life variety are generously availed at Bigadore. Jan and I play cribbage at breakfast, and never take it easy on one other. We try to keep ourselves fit for cutthroat bananagrams with the monozygotes. For those not in the know that is the version of the game in which four players seek to lay down their thirty-six letter tiles at lightning speed. Two-letter words are verboten, at least one eleven-letter word is required. In this league a game hardly ever takes longer than two minutes. The twin cousins, Lynn and Louise, are pitiless, Lynn a particularly brutal assassin, sometimes delivering the coup-de-grace in less than 60 seconds. More often than not she outscores the rest of us combined. The humiliation guarantees I cannot get too big for my britches.

The woods through which we walk on our early morning constitutional to Dalem Lake thronged with birdsong in June and early July. Now they have fallen largely silent. At 6:30 in the morning it is easy to imagine that we have the whole world to ourselves. From the porch we begin to notice small gangs of silent warblers mobilizing for the expedition to their winter domicile. Terns holler from the strait as they too begin their southward journey. How long will it be before we spot the first scarlet leaves of autumn?

Today the next eagerly-awaited visitors – Naomi and the girls – take their turn in our little paradise. We’ll roast corn and marshmallows in the coals of a bonfire, pick blueberries on Bob’s hill, aggravate the kingfishers down at the shore, behold Andromeda and the Milky Way in the clear night sky, ponder how it came to pass we could be so lucky.

Ron Satterfield, 1921-2016

How often I asserted he was the man for whom the expression ‘salt of the earth’ was coined. He was that rarest of humans: a friend who never, ever disappointed. And now he is gone. Ron Satterfield departed this mortal coil, well into his 96^th year, August 12. His wonderful old heart had skated on thin ice these past few years, yet his demise – imminent and inevitable though it may have been – packs a great wallop.

Our friendship germinated in birding and birds but as the years and decades went by it flourished in diverse soil: nature, history, human folly, the successes and failures of the Blue Jays, a shared antipathy to Stephen Harper.

Ron was a terrific birder and naturalist, someone who knew the wild world and, more important, cared deeply for its welfare. 

He was 60 when our friendship took root. He was an expert birder, I was a Johnny-come-lately who felt he’d wasted his first three decades by not being a birder. He indulged my ardor to tap all I could from his deep well of bird lore. 

Soon enough I was infected by the peculiar madness of the birding Big Day – an all-out effort to list as many species as could be found in a single 24-hour period. For years in the early-mid 1980s, often in the company of Bruce Whittington, Ron and I would head out shortly after midnight on an early May morning to listen for owls then welcome the sunrise at Munn’s Road, counting the singers – warblers, thrushes, sparrows, et al – voicing their joy at the dawn of a new day. 

We got better at it. At first we thought a century – a hundred species – represented a pretty good effort. Not for long: soon the three friends pushed the count to 110, 120. Eventually we counted it a bust if we failed to reach 130 or 135 before the big day was done. I was a hard taskmaster. No breaks were allowed. Lunch was permitted but only on the fly and only after we’d hit a hundred species. Ron was a quarter-century older but he never wilted, never grumbled, never quit. Indeed, years later, after we’d come to our senses and given up the Big Day game, Ron reveled in the memories, made it clear that those times were some of the best of his life.

Though not invested with degree-granting authority I bestowed an honorary doctorate on Ron, often introducing him as ‘Dr. Satterfield’, convinced the award was entirely apt.

He was an identical twin, his brother Harold – ‘Har’ to Ron – the best friend of his life. Each was pretty much a wild child: they spent every available hour outdoors. They were sometimes truant, the classroom never able to match the lure of the fields and waters of Victoria’s Foul Bay and Ross Bay neighbourhoods. 

When the Second World War broke out Har and Ron joined up early. Initially an army man, Ron soon took to the air as a recruit in the CATP, the Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Flying Ansons and Cornells he survived a crash; more than a few of his comrades did not.

I loved hearing Ron’s wartime stories. Some of the memories he was least proud of happened to be the very ones I found most endearing. He did not always fit the officers’ template of an ideal airman: he occasionally ‘went over the fence’ for an unauthorized leave in whichever town or city happened to be closest to his base. He was not always the best turned out or most fastidiously shaved of his comrades but at graduation time he finished near the top of his class. Flight-Sergeant Satterfield regretted that he was never shipped across the Atlantic to do his bit for King and Country in the dangerous skies of Europe. He remained in Canada, flew young airmen on training runs, supported the efforts of the CATP. 

When the war was over he returned to Ross Bay, went to work as a carpenter, married a young woman, Joy, he had known her whole life, raised a family of four, found the time to become a master birder.

He never stopped walking. Though his range diminished as he negotiated the years of his tenth decade Ron left his Fairfield home almost every morning, pushed his walker along the margins of Ross Bay, always with binocular in hand. He never stopped taking an inventory of the regular birds he found on the bay and always kept an eye peeled for rarities. He made countless friends, all of whom stopped to exchange pleasantries whenever they were lucky enough to cross his path.

It is trite to say of the passing of a fellow mortal that the world is a poorer place for his parting. In the case of Ron Satterfield the words are no mere reflex. Ron was one of the finest people I ever knew and one of the truest, most loyal of friends. There was no one like him. I will miss him hugely.