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.
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