The King is dead, long live the Queen

It was only a matter of time. In my August 30 post I regaled loyal readers with accounts and descriptions of the feverish fun generated in the 2018 Cape Breton summer season once table hockey took over as the cabin's prime entertainment mode. Faithful readers will recall that I crowed about the success I have enjoyed as a player lo these many years. But having played a few games with my unconscionably competitive cousins Lynn and Louise, I also predicted that my long-standing unbeaten record stood on thin ice.

Perhaps an update is in order. The cabin's 'sunroom', normally the scene of Bananagrams bloodbaths in which Lynn demolishes all challengers was transformed into a kind of hockey rink. The twins—Lynn and her 40-minute-younger doppelganger—decided that table hockey promised an arena-full of far better fun: Bananagrams was cast aside like last week's wilted lettuce.

I acquired my first table hockey game, oh, about a hundred thousand years ago. I managed to get neighbourhood friends to play but they never brought the sort of intensity I felt the game warranted and deserved. I was the only brother in a family of four and though two of my sisters are, like Lynn and Louise, identical twins, none of my sisters delivered the sort of frenzy that truly exhibits what a terrific game table hockey is. Starved at home for worthy competition, I decided it was just not in the nature of girls to want to destroy a table hockey foe. It turned out I was wrong, but it took decades for my error to be revealed.

Lynn and Louise are monozygotes of an entirely different stripe. They took to the game like a murder of crows to freshly cast-out bread crusts. We decided the way to make the most of table hockey was to organize an honest-to-goodness tournament, complete with a round-robin component followed by a playoff round culminating in a 'gold medal' game. So that's what happened. In each game the first player to three goals wins. Over the course of the last three weeks six tournaments unfolded. In most of the first five—some involving three players, some with four—I lost a single round-robin game before bearing down in the playoffs. I qualified for the gold-medal game in all five tournaments and—fortune favouring the bold—managed to bully my way to the gold medal in every one.

Perhaps it is not strange that in every single game I played those who stood and watched invariably cheered for my opponent. Any goal scored against me delivered unrestrained joy and euphoria not just on the part of the scorer but from everyone watching. I began to feel distinctly unloved.

Last Thursday evening, my third last of the 2018 Cape Breton season, delivered Tournament Number 6. This one was a four-way contest, pal Kevin Squires taking the fourth spot. That Kevin has table-hockey experience was immediately obvious in our round-robin game but because he had not played in years I was confident that I would prevail in our opening game. My confidence was entirely misplaced: Kevin won, 3-2. The round-robin results determined seeding for the playoffs. The second and third seeds—Kevin and Lynn­—squared off first. Lynn won. I exulted in a 3-0 shutout of Louise in the 1-4 matchup. Beware exultation. Fiercely competitive, the final game between Lynn and myself went on and on and on. Eventually the score stood 2-2. Then disaster. Lynn's right defenseman beat my goaltender cleanly on a vicious shot from behind her blue line. The game was over, the gold medal Lynn's. I managed not to cry.

Defeat was bad enough but what's worse is that redemption—or possible redemption—is a long way off. I have a wealth of time to lick my wounds: I will have to wait 'til next year to seek vengeance in another table-hockey slugfest. Until then Lynn can boast—and she most certainly will—that she is the defending gold-medal winner in the famed, ferociously antagonistic Bigadore table-hockey league.

What can I do? Perhaps it was the great Vince Lombardi who said, Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser. Yes, I am a loser but I don't intend to be a good one. I have another table hockey game, in Victoria. I will dust it off and over the winter get ready to deliver vengeance in the summer of 2019.

Not to Mention Sandra Bullock Too

Any time I manage to organize a ramble with pal Peter Goodale I can expect that in addition to all the predictable rewards there will be payoffs of the offbeat, unpredictable variety. Such was the case on Tuesday. Motivated by the disclosure that Peter had never been there, I proposed we do the hike from storied Gabarus—a short gull flight across Gabarus Bay from historic Louisbourg—to the ghost village of Gull Cove, then on to Gabarus Cape and its commanding views over Cape Breton’s east coast and the open Atlantic. Take my word for it: Gull Cove and Gabarus Cape are worthy destinations, particularly on a day like the one we savoured yesterday--sunny, not-too-cool, entirely blithe. Best of all, we had it to ourselves; no other humans crossed our path.

One of the rewards of any outing with Peter—what should I call it, the sidebar attraction—is an almost guaranteed bonus. In Gabarus we took a short road to a construction site where Bud, the sibling of someone married into the Goodale clan, has been busily engaged in moving and underpinning a 150-year house with a fancy new foundation. Peter and I enjoyed excellent conversation with Bud and also had a tour of the old house interior. In the kitchen I tried but was unable to count all the layers of wallpaper that had their years in the sun over the past fifteen decades and are now exposed by Bud’s renovations.

For me the highlight of this particular sidebar was having Bud tell us that Sandra Bullock once sat here in conversation with the elderly matriarch who ruled the roost at the time. Now as it happens I am one among the millions of men who have taken quite the shine to Ms. Bullock and her movie appearances over the years. It seems that a few years back Miss Congeniality was in the midst of a film shoot in Cape Breton when someone told her about the charms of Gabarus. She went there and in the course of events found herself in the old lady’s kitchen. What must have been especially delightful for Ms. B was discovering that the senior citizen seated across the kitchen table had no idea who she was—didn’t recognize her, didn’t know her name, didn’t have the foggiest clue that she was in the presence of a beloved, world-famous actress. What a relief it must have been for someone who hardly ever gets to be anonymous.

We tore ourselves away from the scene of Sandra Bullock’s Gabarus kitchen moment to our trailhead. There, an old cemetery affords a final resting place for some of the folks who lived at Gull Cove a century and more ago. Nowadays no one at all lives at Gull Cove, no one, that is, of our own species. All that remains of the once thriving village are old house foundations. Whenever I see such a place I default to contemplating the transience of human affairs, the ephemerality of life. Such was the case yesterday.

Gull Cove is evocative but to put no fine point on it, the place is also beautiful, a landscape of open fields, sea cliffs and rocky headlands. Even without a binocular you can make out the buildings of the national historic site at Louisbourg. We crossed an expanse of cranberry barrens to Cape Gabarus, an excellent place to stop for a picnic of sardines, cheese and crackers. I felt septuagenarian gratitude that I am still able to walk that far under my own steam without having to rely on supplemental oxygen or require air ambulance evacuation.

While taking on replenishment at the Cape one can contemplate lovely little Green Island where a gull my gentle reader may never have heard of—the black-legged kittiwake—nests in greater numbers than anywhere else in the Maritime Provinces. If that is insufficiently alluring there is intriguing geology to contemplate and something else: the power of nature. Yesterday was quiet and calm but the beached lobster traps pitched inland far from shore and the occasional skeleton of a seabird wrecked by Atlantic storm demonstrate that some days at Cape Gabarus are anything but quiet and calm.

I can make no promise that an expedition to Gabarus and the trail to its eponymous cape will deliver the opportunity to hang out in a place redolent of Sandra Bullock but I can promise that the hike to Gull Cove and splendid Cape Gabarus is plenty enough reward all by itself.

All That—and Solomon Gundy Too

It is always serendipitous when a guy operating a blog dubbed Peregrinations has a worthy peregrination to tell his handful of readers about. We went to the mainland to join good pals Carole and Garth in seeing how much trouble we might get into at the opposite end of Nova Scotia. A principal target was Shelburne County where in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolutionary War thousands of Americans who had sided with the mother country against their tea-partying American fellows decided to relocate to Nova Scotia, still a loyal part of the Empire.

Among the loyalist throng were some three thousand black people, virtually all of them slaves or descendants of slaves, whose support of Britain in the conflict against the folks led by Washington and Jefferson was rewarded with the promise of a better life in Nova Scotia. At Birchtown, main destination of the black loyalists, we visited the Black Loyalist Interpretation Centre and learned the extent to which the promise turned out to be a hollow one. Within just a few years, after enduring great hardship, many of the blacks accepted another dubious proposition—another relocation—this time to Sierra Leone in Africa.

On a sunny Wednesday we went to Cape Sable Island—as far removed-from-Cape-Breton part of Nova Scotia as you will find—to look for birds. The Hawk, perhaps the premier birding destination in all of Nova Scotia, afforded a few turnstones, whimbrels and ‘peeps’—even a rare Caspian tern—but the principal rewards of the Cape Sable junket had nothing to do birds. Garth and I both like to initiate conversation with total strangers. At the Hawk we relished an impromptu chat with a local lobsterman who edified us in spades about the particulars of lobstering in this corner of our fair province. In Clark’s Harbour I was amazed to find a bronze soldier atop the community war memorial. If you’d asked me if I knew all the bronze and soldiers of Nova Scotia I’d have said Yes, absolutely. I’d have been wrong.

History abounds in this part of Nova Scotia. At Barrington we connived to visit not just one museum but four, including the 1765 Barrington Meeting House, built in the aftermath of the Acadian expulsion by transplanted American Quakers and Planters. In the adjacent graveyard the visitor gets to contemplate death’s-head headstones dating back to the same period.

Having learned about one story of man’s inhumanity at Birchtown we headed to Pubnico to immerse in another. We spent an edifying half-day at La Village historique acadien, Lower West Pubnico. The village represents the life that the Acadiens had managed to rebuild for themselves more than a century after the infamous expulsion—Le Grand Dérangement—of the mid-18^th Century. Our interpreters, all dressed in period costume, were uniformly terrific: Harry the Blacksmith, Sherman the Boatbuilder, Marcel the Fisherman, et al.  What’s more they all seemed to share the same name—d’Entremont—tenth-generation descendants of the original main man among the pioneers of Pubnico.

Something impressive met the eye in Lower West Pubnico: the great fishing fleet moored at Dennis Point. The lobster boats are nothing like the pipsqueaks tied up at the Big Bras d’Or wharf near the summer cabin. The Pubnico boats—ship might be the better term—are huge, 28’ wide, more than 60’ long. As if that were not enough, Dennis Point also afforded an opportunity to spend a half hour aboard Bluenose II, which just happened to have dropped in for the day.

On Friday we forsook Shelburne County for its Lunenburg counterpart. Lunenburg town, one of Canada’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, offers plenty to impress the eye and engage the grey matter of someone keen on history. And something to please the palate too. Niece Naomi gave us a hot tip: Saturday happened to be the day the annual blueberry festival unfolded at Parkdale in the northern reaches of the county. We went there, and for a lousy fifteen bucks a head got to pig out on an array of down-home Lunenburg County cuisine: Sausage and Sauerkraut, Pudding & Cheese, Hodge Podge, Smeltz Potatoes, Solomon Gundy—and more. Dessert was blueberry pie or blueberry grunt, take your pick. One of our quartet managed to inveigle our young attendant into delivering three desserts. Holy doodle!

The Parkdale feast was the capper of a trip festooned with great grub. I fear when I step on the scale back at the cabin I will not like the number staring me in the face. But what the heck, austerity, restraint and responsibility are not the sorts of attitudes to take into a September road trip with Garth and Carole. A year ago Gaspe was great; Shelburne-Lunenburg was superb this past week. What do we do next year? I know: let’s board a coastal supply vessel for a journey among the southern outports of Newfoundland. Who can say what seafood specialties await?

Table Hockey Hubris

Others might nominate the Canadarm, or the Avro Arrow or the stubby beer bottle but I say, no, the greatest Canadian industrial product of all time is the good old made-in-Canada table hockey game. No contest. I acquired my first about age twelve. It was a terrific tonic. I may have been a bum at baseball and helpless at real, on-ice hockey but I proved to be something like an ace at table hockey.

I had friends willing enough to take me on but none of them could match the intensity I brought to table hockey: one by one they grew tired of losing and would suggest we do something else: stick six-inch firecrackers in country mailboxes, start a grass-fire, throw snowballs at passing cars. Over a period of four or five years I might have worn out three of these wondrous games. At 17 I went off to university, got distracted by other endeavours and forgot about table hockey for a good long time.

Then a few years ago, during a visit to my antique-dealer friend Diane Bradbury, there it was – a table hockey game just like the one I used to play sixty years ago. Six metal Montreal Canadiens, six Toronto Maple Leafs just like the ones of my early teens. It was for sale . . .  amazingly still in its original cardboard box. I snapped it up. Trouble is, after years of neglect in someone’s attic or damp basement, the playing surface was warped and uneven, which made it impossible for the stamped-metal Leafs and Canadiens to show their best stuff. I devised a solution for leveling the ice but it wasn’t until this summer that I got around to actualizing the fix – a combination of a dozen inch-and-a-quarter posts and hardwood levelers all glued together on the underside of the playing surface.

The fix worked perfectly: the playing surface is now as even as the day it came out of its Ontario factory in 1959 or ’64. Suddenly I was back in business – The Table Hockey Terror. Yes, Jan beats me like a drum at cribbage; yes, I am Cousin Lynn’s roadkill at Bananagrams 11 – the toughest of all the Bananagrams varieties – but it turns out that like riding a bicycle, playing table hockey is a skill that can be revived even after years of inactivity.

With the game restored to something very like its original glory I first humbled Jan, then nephews Michael and Rex. Next up was the longest-suffering of my friends, Stephen, a pal since we were both seventeen. Let’s play a five-goal game I proposed – first to five goals wins – and I’ll spot you a 4-0 lead. He agreed. I won. But take my word; table hockey is infectious, irresistible. Stephen couldn’t help himself – he wanted more. The game even delivered revelation, bringing out a side of my old friend I had never seen. Ordinarily a man possessed of the finest decorum and refinement, table hockey soon exposed that Stephen is something else previously unseen – a trash-talker. I ate it up. He got better, much better. I reduced the handicap. The trash talk intensified. I still won.

On Monday we took the game to our friend Carl’s birthday bash. He too was a boy who played table hockey in ages past. It was his birthday: would I go a little easy on him? No. I was merciless.

But there is trouble on the near horizon; I see it plain as day. Also attending Carl’s event were Lynn and Louise, my identical-twin cousins. I introduced them to Bananagrams 11 years ago and for a while – just a short while – I managed to win. Soon enough Lynn reduced me to a stomped-on doormat. I introduced the twins to astronomy and wildflower identification. It didn’t take long before I was eating their dust in both endeavours.

On Monday I spotted the twins no lead whatsoever and managed to beat them both. But we all know what comes before a fall. I watched in fascination as they played each other with absolute intensity, sweat flying off each determined face, each utterly determined to beat the other. I know with complete certainty that it is only a matter of time – and not much of it – before my undefeated streak will come to an end and one of the darlings – Louise or Lynn? – will exult in victory over the Table Hockey Terror. They will come up with something new – a trick I have never thought of – and make me a loser yet again. I dread what I know is certain. What then? To what do I turn? Canasta? Snakes-and-Ladders? Bingo?

Dave Stirling, Naturalist Extraordinaire, 1920-2018

 
David Stirling, the walking embodiment of what the word naturalist is all about, has departed this world. David died at Victoria August 11, nine months into his 98^th year.

The initial glue in my friendship with Dave was birds and birding; in time the friendship grew to encompass much more, but birds provided a very good start to a friendship that endured forty years. We met in the late 1970s. I was a fairly recent arrival in British Columbia and had noticed soon enough that the birds of south Vancouver Island were in many cases very different from the ones I’d grown used to in my native Nova Scotia. I fell for birding, and fell hard. To the extent I could I devoted every daylight hour on the weekend to discovering the birds of the Island. I made three great friends—Harold Hosford, Ron Satterfield and Dave Stirling—every one of them a serious birder of long standing, and sought to learn all I could from these three wise men. All three would remain my friends ever after.

Before long I fell victim to a peculiar kind of madness, the birding Big Day, an event in which three or four otherwise sensible people embark on a crazed rush to find as many kinds of birds as can be squeezed into a 24-hour period. It was in early May, about 1980, that Dave and I teamed up for our first-ever Big Day. We managed to list a hundred species in the inaugural try. Dave thought a hundred was a pretty good result. I thought we could do better.  Before the next effort I told the late Peggy Goodwill—operator of the Rare Bird Alert at the time—that Stirling, Bruce Whittington and I would mount another Big Day effort the next day. I also told Peggy that we would get 120 species. Dave was appalled, both at my brazenness and at the difficulty we would have in reaching that number. We got 121.

The next time, Stirling and Hosford joined me for another three-man effort. It was a glorious start: by about 1 p.m. in the afternoon we were already at 126 species, with nearly nine hours of daylight left. Visions of 135 species, 140—maybe even more—danced in my head. Then an insurrection erupted: Dave and Harold demanded we stop for lunch. I was horrified—and resisted. To no avail. We stopped for lunch. They each ordered a beer, then another. After the second beer the Big Day went right off the rails. They decided that half a Big Day was plenty enough: they quit on me. Great as my regard was for them both, I fired them on the spot. In future years Ron Satterfield and Bruce Whittington took their place and that trio eventually pushed the Big Day tally to the mid-130s. But to this day I remain convinced that had Harold and Dave persevered we would have set a south Island mark for the ages.

As time passed the parameters of my friendship with Dave expanded greatly. We had more than birds in common: we both liked travel, books, history and politics. Not everyone does, but Dave and I also liked to argue, especially about politics. We would meet a few times a year—often at Swan’s pub—to talk about our favourite things. Dave would call me a pinko, a leftie I would call him something else. I like to think that over the years each of us forced the other to sharpen his arguments but I doubt that any of our many political rows resulted in either of us changing the other’s mind. Happily, we remained friends.

Dave grew up in the wilds of the Athabaska country of northern Alberta. He lived his boyhood in a log cabin with his parents, brother and sisters. The family survived on what they could gather, grow, trap and hunt. Young Dave spent most of his days outdoors, summer and winter. It was in those days in the wild of the Athabaska that he became a lifelong naturalist.

While still a teenager, in 1939, a war broke out. Dave enlisted in the Canadian Army. With three square meals a day, a comfortable mattress, and a roof over his head that did not leak, he decided he must be about as lucky as anyone could possibly be. He liked his time in the Army, and the officers liked what they saw of Private Stirling: he was offered a chance to take officer training. He graduated from Sandhurst and earned his lieutenant’s commission. Best of all, he survived the war and returned to Canada unscathed.

In the mid-1950s he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime, crossing Australia by motorcycle with his wife Ruth. After that he arrived in Vancouver Island and played a key role in establishing B.C. Parks interpretation programs. He gave any number of young people an opportunity to learn about the natural world and to pass on what they’d learned to park users. For many of these young folks, their experience under Dave Stirling was life-altering: their summers as park interpreters would set them on a life course in natural history and science.

Dave eventually retired but his love of nature, adventure and travel never diminished. Even into his 90s Stirling traveled the world in search of beautiful wild places—and new birds. He continued to build his life list.

I made a point of seeing Dave just a day or two before departing in June for my summer place in Cape Breton. He had failed a good deal but I was struck that his love of nature remained as strong as ever. We spent an hour in the shade of his front deck, looking skyward for birds and other things that pass more slowly: clouds. Among all the other facets of nature that fascinated and absorbed him Dave left ample time for studying and contemplating clouds.

A core bias of mine is that whether we’re aware of it or not, we all feel a duty to make something of our human possibilities. In my life I have known only a few people who have done as worthy a job of meeting that duty as did David Stirling.