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.