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?