Early Days at Big Bras d'Or

Conventional wisdom holds that nature abhors a vacuum. We arrived in Cape Breton the first day of summer and quickly noticed some of the consequences of having missed last year’s season at ‘Bigador’. The premises are never exclusively ours. Inside the cabin we found abundant markers that deer mice had enjoyed the run of the place these past twenty months. Steady vigilance must be applied against opportunistic squirrels: turn your back for half an hour and one is likely to chew its way through a screen to see what delectables might be found inside.

In the corner of the sun room what at first appeared to be an out-of-season snowdrift turned out to be wood dust: the pile of tailings left by the colony of carpenter ants that have been busily excavating the cluster of two-by-fours we rely upon to support roof and walls. In early days a warm evening produced a wonder of nature: rather like Old Faithful at Yellowstone, a geyser of winged ants poured out of the corner, hundreds of them, their mission to establish outpost colonies elsewhere. Pandemonium ensued as we sought to impose our will on their intentions.

The space between the cabin and the shore was open when we left in October two years ago.  Now it was chest high with the maple, birch, rose and mountain-ash that flourish like hacked-up starfish when no one is available to keep them under control. 

Like the fellow who built it 45 years ago, the cabin is ‘getting on’. Faded and peeling paint is twice as evident when you’ve been away for two years rather than the customary one. Here there is rust, there a bit of rot. There will be no basis to claim a shortage of things to keep us occupied as summer proceeds.

Thus the first week in our little private shangri-la afforded projects generously. Bleach and Lestoil helped deal with the proceeds of the mouse inhabitation. Live-and-let-live is policy I generally endorse but, take my word for it, carpenter ants cannot be allowed to follow their bliss in a cherished building. Ant-B-Gone may deal a fatal blow to the colony; if not, something else must.

I fired up the Stihl brush cutter and went on full frontal attack against the burgeoning maple and poplar. I took wire brush and scraper to peeling paint, retrieved brushes and rollers and applied fresh stain to the deck and outside bench. The old place looks considerably brighter already.

Fortunately there is more to cabin life than toil. We start most days with a six-kilometer walk from the cabin to and around Dalem Lake. Black-throated green warblers, ovenbirds and hermit thrushes offer morning vespers as we wend our way. Back from the lake, neighbours – Derrick and Donna, Jim and Cindy – put on the kettle for tea and brief us on what’s been going on in the months our backs were turned.

Serendipity flows: the Squires brothers, both Kevin and Stuart, delivered welcome-back tribute: lobsters fresh out of the salt water. We went over Kelly’s Mountain for the 2016 edition of the Englishtown mussel fest, met up with old friends and had our year-first taste of Cape Breton fiddle music. 

Among the reliable features of summer at the cabin are the ultra-competitive bananagrams games we play with the monozygotes, identical-twin cousins Lynn and Louise. We play a version allocating 36 tiles to each player; our rules prohibit two-letter words and oblige competitors to play one word comprising eleven letters. It ain’t easy. Lynn ordinarily trounces everyone in sight and gets the job done in less than ninety seconds. In a bananagrams world she is Einstein. Before the first bout Jan and I speculated whether Lynn would surpass the combined score of her three adversaries. Something historic happened: she didn’t. It was Louise who outscored the rest of us, 11-9. Why shouldn’t the second twin prove as lethal as the first.

And so it goes: the early days of summer dependably deliver anticipated attractions. We sit in the porch like Fred and Martha feasting on the view over the Great Bras d’Or and Kelly’s Mountain. Bald eagles – sometimes several at a time – course the shoreline. Lobster boats pause at their painted floats to collect the day’s bounty. A white-throated sparrow belts out his own special arrangement of Oh Canada, Canada, Canada. The song of the wild is a loon yodeling his northern melody from the water in front of us. Can there be a better backdrop on the eve of our country’s 149^th birthday party?

Friendly Manitoba Makes Good

The license plates proclaim Friendly Manitoba. Our latest visit with Steven and Elizabeth validated the claim, in spades. Our hosts have no rival when it comes to making decrepit relatives feel welcome. Liz literally jumped for joy at the sight of me, affection I occasionally recall a six-year-old manifesting but never in someone well beyond the age of majority.

Ardent for a ‘lifer’ – some place we’d never seen before – Steve introduced us to Beaudry Provincial Park, an expansively beautiful green space stretched along the broad, splendid Assinniboine River. We had the big park to ourselves, people-wise, but among the tall cottonwoods and aspens we had an abundance of fliers to appreciate, not all of them mosquitoes. Bird song flourished: yellow warblers, red-eyed vireos, wood pewees and least flycatchers. 

The person most of you know as Jan demonstrated the aptness of the moniker I typically apply to her: Hawkeye. She spotted a barred owl in a cottonwood, a freshly killed red squirrel in its talons. The owl cooperated in my effort to get a photograph. I ventured that the squirrel would be delivered to the owl`s downy young as soon as we cleared the scene – and I admit to hoping that young squirrels weren`t awaiting the arrival of a parent that would never return. Do not expect kindness of the wild kingdom.

We spent much of the Sunday at the new, imposing Human Rights Museum at the Forks in downtown Winnipeg. If you prefer your museums to entertain rather than edify, the dinosaur museum at Drumheller might be your better option. After five hours intensively contemplating discrimination, subjugation and genocide I felt hard pressed to agree that human kind has made great progress in bringing about a world in which most of us feel inclined to treat others as we desire to be treated ourselves.

I have occasionally been heard to say that the more I see of people the better I like warblers. The antidote for a day immersed in the subject of man`s inhumanity to man was a different sort of day, one spent among the pelicans, yellow-headed blackbirds and downy young coots at Oak Hammock Marsh. It was a glorious Monday: blue sky, plenty of sunshine and a force 8 gale to keep the mosquitoes away. On a gravel prairie road we looked for bobolinks and admired a handsome male harrier quartering the fields for voles. It wasn`t just birds that staged a fine show: we spotted yellow ladyslippers and red prairie lilies; I ventured into the grass to take pictures. 

Back in the car I pulled a wood tick off my knee, then another, then three off my ankle. Soon enough my tick count reached thirteen, a lifetime high. Steve was unimpressed: a fly fisherman of considerable ability and great determination he is not a stranger to tick counts of 30 or more in the Manitoba wilds. Ticks trouble me only if I find one buried in my armpit three days after I departed the woods, but I understand that other folks are less sanguine about them. I was reminded of the demand once made by Jan’s mother at hearing we’d found a tick on her daughter’s head during a happy ramble in the great outdoors: If you like nature so much, take her to a museum!

Steve has a new smoker-barbecue device, by Traeger, which he understandably holds in high regard.  It turns out that Steve and the Traeger are a happy match: the lad is a backyard master chef. My vegetarian inclinations fell by the wayside. We dined regally on beer can chicken the first night, ribs the second, Arctic char the third. Jan and I awarded highest praise to all three efforts. 

The kids’ neighbourhood is a throwback to a bygone era: neighbours drop by bearing beer and good cheer. They take a seat, join in the feast and launch congenial conversation on a range of au courant  topics: the upcoming Brexit vote, the pros and cons of mosquito fogging, Donald Trump. Liz described Terry, the man next door, as the perfect neighbour: he mows their lawn while he’s at his own, minds Vincent the cat when they’re away for the weekend, and never makes a racket. Liz maintains she likes her neighbours even better than her friends. We sat around the patio firepit on the final night, enjoying fire, food, ambience and conversation. I understand completely why Terry likes to drop in on the folks next door. If we lived down the street we’d be there all the time too.

Bob Nagel, 1929-2016

A peregrination of the ultimate sort needs reporting: Robert Carl ‘Bobby’ Nagel passed out of this vale of tears last night in Boston. Cancer claimed him – and stabbed more than a few tender hearts while the dreaded attacker was at it. Many of us imagined that Bob was ageless and indestructible, that in the fashion of Dorian Gray, he had a portrait in the attic that none of us ever saw. But, no, it turns out that not even Bob Nagel could elude the ravages of time.

He was as much a part of the balmy months at Boularderie Island as lobster boils, occasional sunshine and summer rain. One wonders how a Cape Breton summer can ever be the same in his absence. He of course would want the laughter to flow unabated as it always did in his ambit.

The ancient memory bank overflows with vivid recollections. I was 24, Bob 41 when we first crossed paths, at his Uncle Wally’s place on the hill. It was something like love at first sight. We each had prodigious appetites for beer and wine, and equally strong inclinations towards outrageous conduct. He had had Dan Murdoch Patterson build a fine A-frame summer place for him on the hill that became a magnet for those fond of food, flowing wine and fun. On one memorable occasion I remarked on what a marvelous sight it was to see so many drunken MacKenzies gathered in one place. Aunt Margaret demanded that he ban me from the hill. He didn’t.

In the summer of 2002, sitting in the marvelous screened porch at my cabin above the Great Bras d’Or, Bob’s eyes lit up when I said you should have a porch like this, let’s build you one next year. We didn’t wait that long. We started the next day; in six memorable weeks the porch was completed and we had a fine new venue for appreciating Alexander Keith and beholding the timeless beauty of Kelly’s Mountain and the Bird Islands.

It had been long years since he had ridden a bicycle but we got Bob back on two wheels and soon enough he was doing his best to impersonate Eddy Merckx. In his 78^th year Jan and I talked him into doing a one-day two-wheel circumnavigation of Boularderie Island – a hundred kilometres on the nose. It was a piece-of-cake triumph for the old guy.  He knew all – I mean all – the Broadway show tunes; he sang each and every one of them on the ride and never once repeated himself. I recall them all but have an especially fond and vivid memory of Bob belting out ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ as we rode Boularderie’s perimeter blacktop. He got even more ambitious: he joined us for a 400-km ride through PEI and the Magdalene Islands. He triumphed again.

He had been an ordinary ticket agent for American Airlines at Boston but the force of his personality was so large that American persuaded him to take on a bigger role: its VIP greeter at Logan. He got to be on first-name terms with Red Auerbach, Cardinal Cushing, Frank Sinatra and many others. Those who worked with him at Logan tell us that Bob was legendary – and bad to the bone.

In a little over a week Jan and I will be back on Boularderie. It will be the strangest of experiences to be there when Bob Nagel isn’t. Doubtless he will come up in conversation again and again. He had many friends for whom the letting-go will not be easy. Perhaps the sharing of fond memories will go some way to helping Bob’s friends adjust, friends for whom his company was always a pleasure, always a joy.

Robert loved music and not just music of the Broadway show variety. He shared a passion for opera with Jan, a passion they managed to infect me with, a little. Many times, sitting in that porch or in Bob’s kitchen we would listen to the great arias by the great tenors: Pavarotti, Domingo, Carreras and the man I came to imagine was the best of them all, Bjoerling.

When I want to summon memories of the Best of Bob I will turn to Bjoerling, to Nessun Dorma, and recall what it meant to be Bob’s friend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUbA5y1hnFg

Travels in Tuscany

 Eighteen days in Tuscany compensated for last year’s dearth of European travel. Our UK friends at On Foot in Salisbury reprised what they did for us in Dorset and Garrotxa two and three years ago: they provided a diverting walking route, arranged the nightly roofs over our heads and looked after transporting our bags from flop to flop. They did a good job of it all. The On Foot walk is billed as ‘Renaissance Hilltop Towns of Tuscany’, a label both evocative and apt. We walked up to 19 km a day, had the world between towns much to ourselves and were given much to see.

Perhaps it was the time of year: Tuscany was a palette of green – myriad greens – rather than the dry browns I had expected of this land of vineyards, olive groves and sun. Apropos birds and wildflowers I had arrived in Italy with muted expectations but May in Tuscany proved a revelation: we had plenty of both. On the first day in the hiking boots we spotted the remarkable bee-eater – several of them – dressed in most of the hues of the rainbow.

The outlandish hoopoe has been a grail bird in our European walks for years. This time Europe delivered: at Pieve a Salti in the early morning after our first night on the trail, we spotted our lifer hoopoe. Jan literally jumped for joy but being a good Canadian she did so silently so as not to disturb our sleeping fellow guests. 

All of the hilltop towns along our way – Montalcino, Bagno Vignoni, San Quirico, Pienza, Monticchiello, Montepulciano – are old, particularly by North American standards: narrow streets, many-centuries-old churches, cathedrals and basilicas. Amazement at the art and architecture we chanced to see became altogether routine. 

I have been pretty much a teetotaller since the summer of 2014 when my arrhythmic heart decided it didn’t like the volume of beer, wine and scotch I was taking on board. A world-class beer-swiller at age 27, I slowly discovered that a body is somehow less robust, less tolerant at 67. Nowadays the heart is much better behaved given that I substitute acqua frizzante – ‘fizz water’ – for cold beer and too many glasses of red wine. For all that, friends still gasped when I suggested that, well no, I wouldn’t be indulging in the world class wines of Tuscany. 

Fortunately, Tuscan food is also highly regarded and no constraints applied to our enjoyment of that. We ate well, plentifully and in good variety. One Italian confection I regard as world-best is gelati, Italian ice cream. Often made on site fresh daily, the gelati of Tuscany were invariably smooth and chockablock with flavour. 

The older I get the more convinced I am that walking – plenty of it – is one of life’s essentials, equally beneficial to body, mind and soul. We continued to wear out shoe leather after the official walking portion of our time in Tuscany was done. We went to Lucca, another ancient Renaissance town, walked the pathways of the city’s old rampart walls, saw many more chiese and cattedrali – churches and cathedrals – and exploited the happy fact that Lucca is where Giacamo Puccini happens to have been born. Jan likes opera and has managed to infect me with a measure of the same inclination. We visited the worthy Puccini museum at Lucca then enjoyed a night at the opera with a soprano and tenor who sounded to my highly untutored ear as good as Callas or Pavarotti.

Our weather was mostly blithe. On the first day of the walk an electrical storm had briefly delivered torrential rain, then it was mostly blue sky and sunshine that characterized our days.  The rain returned with a vengeance on the Sunday we arranged to travel to Carrara. Heritage House is publishing Remembered in Bronze and Stone, my book about Canadian war memorials this fall. Since the marble quarries in the mountains of Carrara were the source of about a hundred stone soldiers gracing Canadian monuments, I was keen to go there. Despite the rain I am glad we did. The Carrara quarries still supply huge volumes of marble to the whole wide world. We saw just a few of the 180 currently in operation. Each of them is enormous.

We had spent a day and a half in Siena prior to the walk. There we had joined the multitude of other tourists ogling Il Campo, the public square Montaigne claimed was the world’s most beautiful, and the remarkable Duomo, its facade as remarkably, ornately beautiful as the trove of art treasures displayed in its interior.

On the Carrara day we carried on to Pisa where the famous leaning tower, cathedral and baptistery drew thousands of turisti, many of whom seemed to think nothing is more fun than to be photographed leaning at the same angle as the tower.  Torrential rain returned, scattering the tourists. Jan and I took shelter under the canopy of an outdoor cafe and ate pizza – what else should a foreign tourist eat on a rainy Sunday in Pisa?

We wrapped up our eighteen days where we had begun: Florence, or as the locals prefer, Firenze. Before we left home I had searched and found that a British war cemetery is nearby. War cemeteries are irresistible; the Florence War Cemetery at Girone is as beautiful and evocative as any I have seen – and just as effective at inspiring contemplation.

The art of Florence – much of it out in the open on public display – and the city’s architecture are as remarkable as all the brochures boast. We gawped at the Duomo and Brunelleschi’s impossible dome. We spent a gobsmacked half-day at the Palazzo Pitti where you can take up-close looks at half-a-millennium-old treasures by Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Caravaggio, Take-your-pick. The narrow streets and sidewalks of old Florence seem perpetually crowded. I took a few hundred pictures of landmark sites, the foreground always jammed with people. We sought relief in green spaces and found what we looked for in the Fabbricotti and Stibbert parks where I was happy to find more birds than people – blackcaps, redstarts, chaffinches, goldfinches, treecreepers, blackbirds and herons.

Eighteen days seems just about the right amount of time to have spent in Tuscany. Our time on the trail and in the old towns was a delight when it was live – and looks good in the rear-view too. We reveled in the unfamiliar and the contrasts from our everyday world but – perhaps this is as good as it gets – we are grateful to be home and freshly alive to the allure of our own little corner of the planet.