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.    

Ready for Rain

After what feels like weeks of relentless heat and humidity—humidex levels in the upper thirties, cascades of sweat from the slightest exertions—it is difficult to avoid wondering whether we have a new Cape Breton climate, one more evocative of the bayous of Louisiana than the boreal forests of our native land. With record wildfires raging in BC and Ontario we wonder how long Nova Scotia can escape similar peril.

Once when young and especially foolish, I sought the sun, preferred a brown-as-a-berry look to my native pasty whiteness, recklessly disregarded warnings about melanoma. Those days are long gone. Now what is relentless is the search for shade and our daily dips in the precious, cooling waters of the Great Bras d’Or. I cherish time spent in the screened porch, indulging nothing more athletic than turning the pages of a compelling Ian Rankin novel. The rain barrels have been dusty dry for days. We rely on Bob Nagel’s still-reliable spring for water, and waste not a drop of it. I am told there are people who still deny that H. sapiens has had any impact whatsoever on the planet’s climate. How can this be?

Given a summer that looks and feels very much like the ones formerly celebrated by the Beach Boys it is perhaps no surprise that we have become a destination again. I have already reported on the blithesome visit of pals Garth and Carole. Now we can add six more kith and kin to the summer guest list, with another seven on the near horizon. Elizabeth and Steve forsook Winnipeg in summer to grace us with their presence. Steve’s day on the Margaree—described in the preceding post—was just one highlight of their noteworthy five-day stay.

The Black Hole of Calcutta came to mind on a sweltering evening at St. Andrew’s Church in Sydney Mines where the four of us gathered with three hundred other swelterers to rhapsodize in the enduring musical talent of Sydney Mines’ own Barra MacNeils.  I marveled that the performers could put out so much energy on such a steamy evening. I also marveled that the audience—hardly any of them under forty—stayed the course without anyone collapsing from the heat. So far as I could tell no audience member had to be hauled away by ambulance; virtually everyone stood at concert’s end to accord the MacNeil brothers-and-sister a heartfelt and sweaty standing ovation.

On Friday, while the men sought close encounters with salmon on the Margaree River, the women—Liz and Jan—went to Goose Cove to take advanced instruction in the fine arts of paper eco-printing and hand-stitched book bindery. I felt duly impressed with the proceeds of the women’s concentration.

Once upon a time, more than four decades ago, the cabin slept as many sixteen people on a single summer night. To be sure, the sixteen were young, flexible and undemanding of five-star amenities. Nowadays we do a little better at seeing to it that friends and relatives get to sleep in relative comfort. Earlier this year the loss of my Victoria workshop was the price I paid for concurring that the basement space might be better purposed if we converted it to a combination rec room and guest bedroom. Now the Big Bras d’Or workshop is re-purposed too, though not fatally to its principal role as a place to make sawdust. The workshop now doubles as a guest bunkhouse. Liz and Steve seemed perfectly happy to take advantage of the new queen-sized bed that now graces the space when table- and crosscut-saws are removed.

We didn’t come close to breaking the old record but the compound did provide sanctuary for eight souls—nine if you count Cooper the little Italian greyhound (and count him we must)—when the Mahone Baysians—Naomi, Terry and the girls—joined the rest of us for the August long weekend. There are three Murphy beds in the cabin. All three were deployed. No outbreak of cabin fever occurred. Apart from the swimming and shade-seeking we took a chance on an evening bonfire—nothing burned that wasn’t meant to—and fought pitched card-game battles. Young Sara, not yet a teenager, helped to demolish me in a rousing game of Hearts. I learned another game—‘Hand and Foot’—and lost at that too.

Jan and I have only each other’s company for the next few days but soon enough another contingent of seven—niece Sarah and nephew Michael, together with their families—will get to savour the enhanced attractions of Shack-ri-La. I am ardent to show them off.

Margaree Magic

Deliver Steve Erickson, rod and reel in hand, to a storied salmon-fishing river and you will soon see you are in the presence of someone in Elysium. I joined Steve for a day-long adventure on the Margaree, a salmon river rivalled in the Maritimes only by New Brunswick’s magnificent Miramachi. Rising at 4 a.m., Steve and I spent an hour getting to Margaree Forks, an hour of edifying and wide-ranging conversation that boosted my opinion of Jan’s elder son even higher than it already was.

Mere days earlier, Steve had wrapped up a fortnight as fishing guide on the Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territory. One might have speculated that two weeks of non-stop fishing north of the Arctic Circle might have slaked the man’s appetite for fly-casting and mosquitoes but such speculation would be entirely wrong.

We arrived at Margaree Forks just past 5:30 and soon struck up amiable conversation with Scott, another angler waiting for the clock to strike six, the official start time for fishing the Margaree. No need to rush in any event, Scott advised, the Margaree’s salmon have not been rising to the fly. The weather hereabouts has evoked Louisiana more than it has Nova Scotia this summer: given inadequate rainfall and a run of too-hot weather the waters of the Margaree are low and warm. What’s more the salmon have “sore lips”: some have already been seduced by a man-made fly and are loath to make the same mistake twice.

The reward of catching a salmon on the Margaree is definitely not the feast one anticipates after landing a ten- or twelve-pound fish. Uh, uh. The fishing protocol is strictly catch-and-release. If you’re lucky enough to hook and land a salmon you may take a few seconds to pose for a photo before releasing your prize unharmed.

Starting at six sharp, Steve methodically worked the Dollar Pool where, on a July day nine years ago, he was the only angler to land a salmon. My key role was to play cameraman in the event that Steve hooked a salmon again but there was plenty more to occupy me. Above the high water line the banks of the Margaree teemed with wildflowers. Clearly I do not spend enough time wandering river courses: several of the flowers I spotted were new to me, so with one eye cocked on what might be unfolding at the river’s edge, I got nose to stamens with several flowers I’d never laid eyes on.

At the outside edge of the Dollar Pool there were salmon to see—plenty of them. But they had zero interest in Steve’s flies. Over and over again, as his well-cast ‘bomber’ fly floated over their heads, the salmon—perhaps fifty of them in one section of the pool—looked as disinterested as Donald Trump might be in a meeting of the local social justice league. If the fish had middle digits to raise, I thought, we’d see them in force. It was then, nearly six hours in, that I absolutely knew Steve’s efforts were futile: there would be no salmon in his immediate future.

We moved back to the shallow rapid that marks the forks—the junction of the Southwest Margaree and the river’s main branch. By now almost all of the other anglers had abandoned ship. I was on my knees looking at yet another unfamiliar flower when I heard Steve’s shout: he had a salmon hooked! It was in this moment that his expertise rose to the fore. The fishermen use barbless hooks; if he allowed the line to slacken the salmon could free himself from the hook and be on his merry way. After six hours on the river Steve had reconciled himself to going without a catch. The cast that did the job might well have been his last fruitless offering of the day. It was his last of the day, but one that ended in glory. The picture tells all. Behold the angler’s smile as he shows off his ten-pound beauty. His delight was infectious: I too was high as a kite, just about as excited as if Steve Nash suddenly showed up at my Boularderie door, keen for an afternoon of conversation in the cool of the cabin porch.

Here is the best part. Steve duplicated what he’d done nine years ago: his salmon was the only one we saw landed in our day on the Margaree. It couldn’t happen to a more stand-up guy.