Lure of the Great Bras d’Or

Yesterday evening Jan produced another four-star lobster chowder for a small gang of friends. A mere two decades ago she wouldn’t have been able to separate a ‘canner’ from a ‘market’ crustacean to save her bacon but she has come a long way – not just as chowder-maker but purveyor of homestyle salt cod fishcakes, green tomato chow and Astrakhan apple jelly worthy of the best Cape Breton kitchens. She is no longer quite the come-from-away she was back when.

Bereft of Netflix and wide-screen TV to divert our friends, we gathered afterwards in the front porch for conversation and to watch the world pass ever so slowly beyond the mosquito-barring screens. On a blithe, calm evening when warbler and sparrow song is the only ambient noise we have to contend with, no one complains about the amenities or what is on view.

Folks who know the Bras d’Or Lake only by passing acquaintance are often unaware that the lake – or lakes as Cape Bretoners often prefer – isn’t a lake at all. Lakes, even the great ones familiar to Ontarians and Americans resident in New York, Ohio and Michigan, are composed of fresh water. The Bras d’Or is salt. If the Bras d’Or were part of the Norwegian landscape, natives would likely call it a fjord. I am not a Norwegian but fjord is exactly the label I pin to the water we behold from the cabin porch when occasion necessitates a description of its features.

Because it is saltwater no one should be surprised that one of the commonplace sights from the cabin porch these days is that of gannets diving headlong into the water for a feed of the freshest seafood. Before the gannets appeared in numbers this season the principal fishers were bald eagles, more than just a few of them. American visitors to the cabin have their breath taken away by the sight of ten, twenty, even thirty eagles going about their business on an early summer day. Sometimes one or two alight in a spruce right in front of us: you don’t need a long lens to get a decent shot to show the folks back home. Belted kingfishers and spotted sandpipers nest in the bank below us. Cormorants, herons, gulls and terns all take their turn in the passing parade.

Once in a while – not all that often -- a noisy sea-doo comes by spewing noise and fumes but mostly it is quiet out there: sailboats and kayaks cause little disturbance. I do admit to missing the ore-carriers that used to pass by once or twice a week on their way to Little Narrows for a cargo of gypsum. Gypsum quarrying has stopped these past couple of years so the low-pitched thrum of the big engines is a thing of the past.

A century and a half ago, right next door in Old’s Cove, ships of a different sort – ones made of wood and powered by sail – were built in George Old’s yard, one of the busiest in all Cape Breton. If I were the sort of person who owned a metal detector and was fond of fishing for ferrous material I have no doubt I would find relics of the shipbuilder’s industry hidden below the surface sand and mud of the cove that still bears old George’s surname.  My own great-great-grandfather Sandy Livingstone was a shipbuilder too but his yard was a bit further on, a couple of kilometres down the way.

The water off the cabin is not especially deep, no more than 18 metres but St. Andrew's Channel on the opposite side of Boularderie Island is another: there the fisherman's sinker descends up to 280 m. before touching bottom.

Last night the waters of the Great Bras d’Or were calm as could be. It isn’t always so.  Frequently there is wind, sometimes a lot of it, often out of the west. Sometimes we have to batten down the hatches and if wind is accompanied by rain the porch is, I admit, a less convivial place to carry on a conversation.  But on an evening like yesterday’s I argue there is no better place in all Christendom to commune with friends and to share observations about the things that really matter in this wicked old world.