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.