Ferdinand Among the Ladyslippers

My affinity for the world of nature goes back a long way. As a young fellow my enthusiasm for birds and wildflowers mystified HJ, my manly father, and induced him to give me a moniker inspired by a cartoon character, readers as long in the tooth as myself may dimly recall. Bred to do battle in the bull ring with matadors, toreadors and picadors, Ferdinand much preferred lolling among wildflowers. He had no interest whatsoever in fighting. My dear old dad decided to anoint me Ferdinand the Bull. I formed the impression my new nickname was not entirely complimentary.

In his own youthful years HJ was more drawn to brawling and fighting than he was to birds and flowers. Sadly, as late as his fifteenth year, the chip off the old block was not just the smallest boy in Miss Kell’s Grade 11 class at Riverview high school but the smallest person. For a while my year-and-a-half-younger twin sisters stood taller than I did. Any time I got into a scrape with the neighbourhood bully boys I invariably came out the loser. HJ asserted that I must be the milkman’s son, not his, but given that he had had the good sense to marry Doris Irene he knew better than anyone that for better or worse I was and still am no one’s son but his. The poor man.

In the sense that HJ intended, I am still Ferdinand the Bull. I still feel there is hardly a better way to spend an hour or three than to grab the binocular and camera, step into the gumboots and go for a ramble in my woods and bogs. Here at Big Bras d’Or I do it every day. I revel in close encounters with pileated and hairy woodpeckers, Blackburnian and magnolia warblers, song and white-throated sparrows. And let’s not forget red-backed salamanders and pickerel frogs, red squirrels and varying hares.

The succession of wildflowers is pretty much the same show I see every year at this time but I never tire of it. The early stars of my woods—bluebead lily, bunchberry and strawberry—have had their time in the sun and will soon be eclipsed by devil's paintbrush, lupine and the first fireweed. I am not jaded because the parade is one I’ve seen before. Not in the least.

Every year I have a small number of a certain wildflower—just a single clump, perhaps two—that I look forward to seeing even more than all the others. It has been a cold June here on Boularderie Island; the wildflower I count the showiest, the grandest of them all has been slow to bloom. Almost every day I go to the secret location to check on the progress of my floral friend. I photograph the group every time. Today at last, three weeks after my arrival here, Cypripedium acaule—the pink ladyslipper—is finally in bloom. I rejoice. Any number of events might have turned my little group into a casualty but, no, it has come through. The 2018 edition is every bit as resplendent as all the others that preceded it.

Except for its unusual beauty, pink ladyslipper is not a rare flower. Doubtless other pink ladyslippers are blooming in nearby woods not my own. C. acaule is an orchid, the flower family I count as my favourite. Its surroundings here at Bigador—the floor of a fir and spruce wood—is just the sort the flower generally prefers. The image I took today of my very own ladyslippers will do a better job than any words I might muster to convey just how exquisite C. acaule is. Decide for yourself.

I am glad the timing of Jan’s arrival in Cape Breton—later today—is perfect. It will be dark when she lands at our cabin in the woods, but ah, tomorrow morning I can hardly wait to introduce my mate to the latest crop of our fabulous floral friends.

Of Hermit Thrushes and Lightning Flashes

Bereft of internet hookup here in the Boularderie woods I am barred from following my Victoria habit: rising at 4 or 5 in the morning to fire up the desktop and gather the daily grief from the Guardian and Washington Post. Instead I get up—a hermit of sorts these days—to revel in the break-of-day airs of another sort of recluse, Catharus guttatus, the hermit thrush. Its song is sublime, described by Robie Tufts, author of the classic Birds of Nova Scotia, as the “finest heard in our northern woodlands . . . none can match the sweetness and aesthetic appeal of the bird’s pure, silvery, fluted notes.”  I agree entirely. One does not hear the fluted notes in the city: in contrast to house sparrows, starlings and pigeons, the sensible hermit thrush does not much like the company of people; it prefers the quiet of untrampled woods. The other day during one of my rambles about the place I spotted a thrush nest, containing a single blue egg. The blue of its egg is as beautiful as the bird’s song.

Alas, another pair of thrushes has built a nest close to the cabin this spring and with my arrival a week ago, their tranquility has been disturbed. To the extent I can, I leave them alone, do not try to find the nest. I try to step lightly and carefully, and keep noise to a minimum. I feel for the poor things. Before I arrived nature granted the pair a deed of title affording peace and quiet enjoyment of their surrounds. Then I came along to usurp their deed. The thrushes are not my only aggrieved co-habitants. Juncos have also built a nest—right under the edge of my deck. Despite the best of intentions, it is difficult as I come and go to avoid disturbing them. I do my best.

I am not always so benign. Not for the first time in my history here, I opened the outside privy to find a big squirrel nest in a corner of our humble comfort station. Peaceful coexistence between human and squirrel cannot be: I dismantled the nest—no one was at home—and restored the outhouse to human-only purpose. What natural law decrees that my prerogative supersedes the squirrels’? None. Only the law of the jungle—or the forest in this case. I outweigh the squirrel by about 600 to 1. I win—but not without a twinge of conscience.

Nature affords other distractions. Last night, only half asleep, I was jolted by an astonishing flash of light and the crash of something like a heavy artillery blast. When the gap between a lightning flash and thunderclap is no time at all, you know the bolt is very close overhead. I did not stir. Someone I never knew came to mind: my cousin Tena McAskill takes a minor by memorable part in my manuscript book, To Us He Was All the World. Tena lost a brother at Vimy in April 1917 then, a month later, her husband at Avion. It was not the end of Tena’s major misfortunes. In the summer of 1938 as she settled down to the midday meal a bolt of lightning entered her house through an open window and killed her instantly. Last night I hoped I might be luckier than my late cousin.

Though well into my eighth decade I am in a way still like a child: I still marvel at rainbows—and lightning too. A summer at Big Bras d’Or is typically generous with both. Everyone knows that lightning results from the clash of positive and negative electric charges within clouds, but who was it who held the thermometer in a bolt to determine that the heat in a flash reaches 22,000 degrees Celsius? I do not know. I can contradict with some confidence the claim that lightning never strikes the same place twice. The Empire State Building in New York sustains about five hundred strikes a year and was once struck fifteen times in the same number of minutes.

Tena McAskill was unlucky and so are about four hundred others each and every year. Last night when a second flash brightened the whole sky there was a delay of about three seconds before I heard the thunderclap. Three seconds is the time it takes sound to travel a kilometre. Unlike Tena on that summer day in 1938 I can look forward—at least for the time being—to more rainbows and more lightning flashes.

Buddy, Can You Spare Some Eiderdown?

The eleventh of June at Big Bras d’Or is a different entity from its Victoria counterpart. I arose this morning a few minutes before six, greeted by a morning sublime in every way but one. Though it is early-mid June in these parts just as it is in south Vancouver Island, my outside thermometer informed me that the temperature had dropped below zero. The inside thermometer related the same story. Environment Canada issues frost warnings, farmers worry about the consequences for apple and blueberry crops. As for me, I refuse to make concessions to the unseasonably cold weather. I insist on sleeping in the outside porch, albeit with adjustments: I take to bed wearing my Red Dragon hoodie and merino socks, cower under the duvet, two blankets and a quilt. Once ensconced abed I try not to move for fear of admitting cold air or blundering into a cold spot.

There are compensations. Victoria in June is no place for those putting a premium on peace and quiet. Half the streets in our neighbourhood are under construction; cruise ships—sometimes three at a time—disgorge thousands of visitors, streets are choked with traffic; it seems impossible to get out of our James Bay neighbourhood—or back in—except on foot. By contrast, most of the noise I now hear is the kind I prefer: bird song. The quietude is such that in last night’s wee smalls I heard a barred owl, from the top of Kelly’s Mountain, three miles away. Clear as a bell.

Cousin Lynn retrieved me from Sydney’s McCurdy airport Friday, more than a little debilitated from sleep deprivation and barely contained airplane claustrophobia. Given a 12:45 a.m. departure from Vancouver I had decided to rely on a crutch: I took a sleeping pill. It didn’t work. Somewhere over southern Saskatchewan I took a second. That didn’t work either. With a three and a half hour wait in Toronto, I got myself prone along the wall of a mostly empty waiting area. I managed a wink, maybe even three.

At Sydney I staggered off the plane into Lynn’s warm embrace. For three weeks I will be alone at the cabin: Jan is supervising the Ontario Street basement reno and will join me as June draws to a close. Well aware of the starvation hazards I might face without my better half insisting on feeding and watering protocols, Lynn had come with a grocery list. We filled it at the North Sydney Superstore.

At Big Bras d’Or I was elated to find the cabin just as I’d left it last October. Still in a drug-induced haze but with assistance from Lynn and Louise, I made good progress at opening the cabin. A hitch arose: I couldn’t find the keys to my outbuildings, where tools are stored and propane stockpiled. After an hour of intensive searching I resorted to an alternative: Kevin Squires’ bolt cutter. After breaking into two buildings, with two to go, I found the key ring—in my pocket. Once upon a time, as a boy, I might have felt slighted at being called a halfwit by my dear old dad; now I understand he was overly generous.

It is early days at Bigador but I have already counted close to three dozen bird species in the surrounding woods and on the waters of the Great Bras d’Or. We do not have that many in the Victoria backyard. The mostly frequently seen is the biggest: bald eagle. Smelt are spawning in Billy Lee’s brook and the eagles—many of them—are taking advantage. All day long they fly back and forth, young ones and adults both; occasionally one pauses at the top of the tall spruce at the edge of my bank. Warblers establish territories, announcing their claims by robust song: parula, magnolia, myrtle, black-throated green, Blackburnian and the irrepressible ovenbird.

It may be a tad on the cool side but the wildflowers seem not to care. Bluebead lily, bunchberry, strawberry, lily-of-the-valley—the ‘false’ variety—all bloom in their legions. I am commanded by Lynn and Louise not to deploy the lawn mower. Not just yet. What passes for a lawn here is festooned with purple and white violets—a broad expanse of them—and I am ordered on pain of punishment undisclosed to let them be.

It is my custom on arriving for another season at Boularderie to inquire about passages—who among the Boularderie Islanders I have known all these years have gone to their reward. This year the bell tolls not for my own kind, but for a dog. I am more than a little chagrined to report that Riley barks no more. Riley was one of my two favourite dogs in the whole world, both denizens of the same Boularderie hill. Riley, a diminutive border collie, was a model of congeniality and good nature. I have no difficulty in imagining the substantial grief that Cindy and Jim have endured in having to say farewell to the friend who delivered them abundant joy for fourteen years.

Apart from Riley’s departure I have no sad news to report. Bigador makes good on the promises that led me to abandon balmy Victoria in June. Well, okay, I do admit that with another frost warning from Environment Canada I do wish I’d brought an eiderdown parka to usher in the summer of ’18.