Echoes of Culloden

Another back road supplied another opportunity for reflecting on the past. Forsaking the Trans-Canada at Sutherlands River, we took NS 245 to the ‘Highland Heart’ of Nova Scotia. Just across the border between Pictou and Antigonish counties we came to Knoydart and spotted an imposing gate and interpretive panel drawing attention to a monument in honour of three men—a MacPherson and two MacDonalds—who fought on the losing side in the Battle of Culloden, April 16, 1746.

The battle transpired 273 years ago on a faraway Scottish moor and produced a disastrous result for Scots Highlanders, but Culloden retains great resonance—even reverence—for people of Highland heritage who care about their history. There is a place called Culloden in Ontario, another in Prince Edward Island. In Nova Scotia’s Digby County the village of Culloden is situated on the margin of Culloden Cove.

The Knoydart monument, a stone column about ten feet high commands a fine view from Knoydart Point over Northumberland Strait, the low profile of Prince Edward Island visible on the far horizon. The 1746 battle was the culmination of an intensive effort by supporters of Charles Stuart—“Bonnie Prince Charlie”—to restore the Stuarts as kings of Scotland.

The monument, built by Ronald St. John MacDonald, a great-great-grandson of one of the men it honours and one-time dean of the Dalhousie University law school, contains rocks taken from the Culloden battlefield. The battle veterans are buried nearby in unmarked graves.

On the east face of the Knoydart monument—aimed more or less in the direction of the mythic Scottish moor—Dean MacDonald installed a tablet honouring his ancestor and the other men of Culloden. It ends with lines that make up in fervour what they may lack in subtlety.

Let them tear our bleeding bosoms

Let them drain our dearest veins

In our hearts is Charlie, Charlie

While a drop of blood remains

Culloden was a catastrophe for the Highlanders. The English victors were ungenerous in victory, clan customs, language and dress widely suppressed. Combined with the infamous clearances in which Scottish lairds evicted their poor crofters in favour of sheep, the suppression led to the great emigration of the later 1700s and early 1800s.

I have something in common with the Dalhousie dean: I too have relatives who fought on the losing side at Culloden, men in my 5Xgreat-grandfather’s generation, all of them Livingstones—men affiliated with the Argyll Stewarts of Appin. Jan and I have visited Culloden, seen the spot where the ancestors fought and died, studied the list of kinsmen who perished. One of my long-ago uncles was the last in a string of men who carried and protected the Stewart battle banner. One by one the flag-bearers fell until, the battle ended, the Livingstone took the banner out of harm’s way. You can see it today in the national museum in Edinburgh, ancient blood stains and all.

The significance of Culloden was impressed upon me by my great-uncle, Harrison Livingstone, who cared quite a bit about family history. My first book, Remembered in Bronze and Stone, is dedicated in his memory. When that book was published I made it clear to my publisher that I wished to be identified as author by my full name, Alan Livingstone MacLeod. Google “Alan MacLeod” and you will see any number of people by that name, but try the full name and you will find only one.

Along Highways 245 and 337 in Pictou and Antigonish counties there are communities named for the places in Scotland the Scots pioneers departed in order to make a life in New Scotland: Lismore, Knoydart, Moydart, Morar.

A few miles down the road from Knoydart the traveler finds Livingstone Cove. It is there about the turn of the nineteenth century that my Livingstone ancestors landed in the new world. A commemorative tablet advises the visitor that Malcolm Livingstone and sons made a living from farming, fishing and lobstering.

I took a photo of Livingstone Cove from the side of the road leading down to the community wharf where the small fleet of Cape Island lobster boats is moored. In the foreground of the picture is a group of red flowers. The English forces at Culloden were led by an English prince, William of Cumberland. English gardeners are fond of another red flower they call Sweet William in his honour. In parts of Highland Scotland and in other places where Highland Scots settled after the famous battle the same flower is less reverently known as Stinking Billy.

Communing with Robert Service and Sam McGee

Given my enthusiasm for the adventures Jan and I had savoured along Cumberland County back roads, Garth offered a proposal too good to reject: let’s head out on a back road that will make yesterday’s potholed blacktop look smooth and serene.

My pal retains great affection for the backwoods “camp” he has known since about age 5, the little cabin, now about a century old, that supplies never-to-be-forgotten memories of the hunting and fishing expeditions Garth shared with his dad and brothers all the way back to the late 1940s. I proposed we make the four-wheel-drive Ram pickup our vehicle of choice. Just as well.

We took an unmarked road off Nova Scotia highway 366 that just happened on this day to be a hive of activity: heavy-duty trucks and bulldozers engaged in offloading yards of gravel topfill. A kilometre along the road I lost a staredown with the driver of a big truck heading the opposite way. Being smaller than the other guy I was obliged to retreat about half a kilometre. That minor trouble remedied, we managed to resume our journey, sometimes having to drop the truck transmission into bull low to get through two-foot moguls of dumped gravel.

It was only when we reached the far shore of Long Lake that Garth confessed we had overshot the turnoff to our destination. Another retreat safely negotiated, we made our way over five kilometres of mud and mire that made it clear the Ram had been the right vehicle choice. Along the way we paused long enough to allow a mother ruffed grouse to get her young brood out of harm’s way. Warblers and white-throated sparrows sang from scrubby woods beyond the road edge. Given the road condition our slow progress posed no threat to the numerous swallowtail butterflies going about their business. A rusting, long-abandoned old road grader gave my friend comfort we were where we needed to be.

We passed the front gate of a Boy Scout camp, two privies on the opposite side of the road, one equipped with classic crescent moon window in its door. Himself a long-ago scout of some distinction, Garth explained that, yes, a navigation badge was among the great array he had accumulated as a lad.

Perched on a foundation of large logs, the front deck of the one-room cabin commands a fine view of Long Lake. My first sight of the little cabin evoked thoughts of Robert Service. The notion is not original: at the cabin’s west end a finely made metal sign catches the observer’s eye. A buck deer at one end of it and leaping trout at the other straddle the words Strange Things Done, a snippet from the Yukon bard’s beloved ‘Cremation of Sam McGee’: There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.

Through the cabin window we could see all the comforts a fellow could possibly need for a week in the woods: bed, table, woodstove, ample pantry shelf. We burdened a couple of chairs on the little deck, Garth reminiscing about the satisfaction he and his Dad savored apropos his boyhood duck-hunting prowess. A chopping block with two axes stands in one direction, the one-hole outdoor privy in another, a boat and canoe in front of us at the water’s edge. A red-eyed vireo proclaimed his territorial imperative to one side of the deck; to the other a robin paused en route to its nest, with the fat green caterpillar it would soon supply to a clamorous nestling.

We both could have happily lingered far longer but we had places to go and our women to meet so we tore ourselves away, departing by way of a trail through the woods to a neighbouring cabin, its woodshed festooned with deer antlers, moose rack, kerosene lantern and rusting metal Coca Cola signs.

I understand perfectly well why the old cabin is near and dear to my friend’s heart. I know plenty of people who find a city’s amenities the ones they need to make life sweet. On a sunny July day, a shack in the woods by the side of a trout-filled lake, with nothing but bird song to disrupt the quiet, seems perfectly fine to me.

Anna of Central New Annan

One of the opportunities I like to exploit on a road trip is the ability to exchange the busy expressway for the benefits of the road less traveled. Jan and I went to the Nova Scotia mainland, principally to see Doris, my dear old Mum, and to hang out with good pals Garth and Carole at Amherst Shore.

My claim in this context is simple: back roads offer infinite prospects for discovery and edification. Nova Scotia collector roads 256 and 246 in Cumberland County feature four communities named for Annan, the town Scots emigrants forsook in the early 1800s for a life in New Scotland. The motorist driving west on 256 first encounters Central New Annan. One might imagine that East New Annan is situated east of Central New Annan but, no, it lies to the south. West New Annan is indeed west, but not as far west as the final namesake community, Annandale.

At Central New Annan my eye was caught by a commemorative cairn I initially thought might be a war memorial, something I seldom pass by without taking a look. But no, the monument, right by the 1866 Wilson School, commemorates not local boys obliterated in the battlefields of Flanders and Picardy, but a young woman who grew to worldwide fame on the basis of her astonishing height.

Born in 1846 at Middlebrook, Colchester County, Anna Swan moved with her family to Central New Annan at age three. Anna’s beleaguered mother managed to survive her daughter’s birth despite the fact that the newborn entered the world at sixteen pounds. On her fifteenth birthday young Anna was already seven feet tall, not nearly the full height she would ultimately reach.

In a time before it became socially unacceptable to gawk at people of unusual configuration, Anna Swan became a celebrity: the world’s tallest woman, a circus star of the first magnitude. At seven feet, eleven inches, Anna soared a full four inches over the tallest man ever to play NBA basketball. She weighed 330 pounds and walked about on feet more than fourteen inches long. One of the striking surviving images of Anna in her circus career is one in which she holds a diminutive young man in the palm of her right hand.

In her early 20s she had journeyed to Halifax to see a traveling circus where two things of consequence occurred: she was hired on the spot by the circus promoter and, what’s more, met her future husband. The spouse-to-be was Martin Van Buren Bates who at 7’ 7 1/2” was three inches and change shorter than the future Mrs. Bates. Named for the eighth U.S president, Martin was dubbed the Kentucky Giant. He was a soldier hero of the Confederacy who despite being two feet taller than every other Confederate soldier in action beside him managed to survive the war without being picked off by a Union sharpshooter.

In a celebrity wedding for the ages, Martin married the woman of his dreams at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in June 1871. The bride was 26, the groom 34. Many thousands of Londoners sought to attend the colossal event but there simply wasn’t room to accommodate them all. Among those most impressed by the remarkable nuptials was Queen Victoria herself: she gave each of the newlyweds a diamond-studded gold watch of extra-large dimension.

Their circus freak-show days behind them, the happy couple opted for a quiet farm life at Seville, Ohio. There the husband built a monumental house for himself and his bride. The ceilings were fourteen feet high; the eight-foot doors barely high enough to allow Anna to pass through without stooping. Anna gave birth twice, each event ending in grief. An eighteen-pound daughter died at birth in 1872. In January 1879 Anna gave birth to a son. At 23 pounds, nine ounces, the boy remains the biggest newborn in history. Sadly, the infant giant lived only eleven hours.

Anna died suddenly and without warning in her sleep August 5, 1888, just one day before her 42^nd birthday. To honour his remarkable wife Martin Bates commissioned a grave marker featuring a statue in Anna’s likeness. The grave, shared with her short-lived children, is in Mound Hill Cemetery, Seville.

Nine years after Anna’s passing, in 1897, Martin married again. This time he chose a bride of normal stature. Despite the hazards accruing to someone of extraordinary height, Martin lived into his 82^nd year. Meanwhile, Anna occupies a final resting place far removed from the Nova Scotia hamlet that nurtured her tender years. I feel gratitude to the good folks along Nova Scotia Highway 256 who have seen to it that young Anna Swan of Central New Annan is not entirely forgotten.

The Tao of Woodsplitting

I have begun the sweaty but satisfying task of splitting the hummock of birch firewood piled by the woodshed. Apart from delivering what Jan asserts is a more buff-looking right arm, I find that woodsplitting lends itself to useful meditation. While it is important to be mindful of where one aims the 10-pound splitting maul, headspace is left available to contemplate the book I’m currently reading or to imagine the life and times of the ovenbird singing his head off just behind me or perhaps to conceive a new item for the blog. There is also the satisfaction of replacing what is consumed when cold or damp impels us to get a fire going in the cherished Drolet woodstove. Assembling an impressive new stack of firewood for the old woodshed is one of the simple pleasures of a season in the Boularderie woods.

In itemizing all the simple pleasures afforded by summer at Big Bras d’Or one item that moves closer to the head of the list is one I culpably undervalued in my younger years: the community supper. Last week pals Shirley and Carl MacRae were kind enough to allow me to tag along to the legendary Gaelic College codfish dinner. For a lousy fifteen bucks I got to weigh into a big plate of salt cod, whole potatoes, turnip, carrots, with garnish of green tomato chow, cottage cheese and homestyle bread.  Better still, I got to converse with auld acquaintances and chat with folks previously unknown. Best of all, I got to hang out with Jessie Ross, a livewire 102-year-old still of sound mind and body, still living independently in her own home.

Many folks might argue that living to 102 is extraordinarily lucky—who knows, maybe such folks are right—but my own view is that the feat of remaining engaged, positive and upbeat well into one’s second century is a mark not merely of good fortune but of remarkable resilience, even bravery. Jessie took her first breaths at about the time Canada—according to national myth—came of age on the slopes of Vimy Ridge. What combination of circumstances would enable me to be happy at 102? I cannot imagine them. Whatever, Jessie is just such an individual. At the end of our conversation I asked my new friend if she would be willing to submit to a hug. Absolutely, she replied, I don’t get very many of those any more. I departed the event feeling benefited by much more than the plate of codfish and fixings.

Jessie brought to mind the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment who lived exuberantly well into her 123^rd year, outlasting most everyone she ever knew, everyone in her own generation, her own children and—by about a half-century—the man who had bought her Paris apartment on the agreement that she could live there for the rest of her days. From far-flung Victoria, I fell in love with Jeanne when I read something she’d said near the end of her forty-four thousand days, namely that she’d only ever had one wrinkle—and sat on it her whole life. What a grand old gal! Perhaps Jeanne was ready to go by the end but I can’t help but imagine that even after so long a life she must have felt it had all gone by so amazingly fast.

Meanwhile in the here-and-now of Bigador, I happily report that just as Air Canada was about to deliver Jan to McCurdy airport, sunshine supplanted rain. The notion that my better half is the woman for me is verified by this: not just a bringer of better weather, she willingly agreed to head straight from the airport to a certain mosquito-plagued bog near Frenchvale. There we install gumboots, bugshirts and Deep Woods Off for a squishy walkabout among the showy lady’s-slippers I know where to find nowhere else. How gratified I was to see the site unmolested, the orchids as prolific as ever. For good reason, I anoint Jan with the nickname Hawkeye. While I was entirely distracted by the flowers, she found birds too—American redstart, parula, swamp sparrow—and told me where to aim the long lens for a shot of the sparrow. It is a joy to have her at hand once again.

As for the woodpile, well, the newly split product must wait until the well-dried stack at one end of the woodshed has done its appointed duty in the Drolet. Because the stacking of firewood is just about as meditatively rewarding as the splitting of it, I look forward to benefits yet to come.

In Praise of Books and Birch

Perhaps it only seemed as though we were embarked on forty days and forty nights of rain. But with the rain barrels in constant overflow, legions of mushrooms erupting off the cabin deck, sunshine but a distant memory, the mind wandered to Noah and idle thoughts about life aboard the Ark. When not entirely invisible, Kelly’s Mountain was shrouded in mist and fog. Rain banged on the cabin’s tin roof, drowning out the barred owls of the mountain. Sodden shirts and socks hung from the drying rack over the Drolet, disassembled boots and insoles crowded at its base. I lack the vocabulary needed to describe the importance of the stored light and warmth supplied by the birch burning in the woodstove. I felt enhanced gratitude to find unread books on the cabin’s library shelves.

After a month of so-so weather I had read sixteen books, one every couple of days. I happily stumbled on undiscovered territory. Thanks to the books-for-sale rack at the treasured North Sydney library, I discovered a great Canadian novelist, Fred Stenson. I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of Fred ‘til I found a copy of The Great Karoo available for a buck.  My eye was caught by an image on the dust jacket of mounted Boer War-era soldiers, and a blurb from David Adams Richards, a gloomily great Canadian novelist I do know. “A truly magnificent novel”, Richards asserts, “by one of Canada’s greatest living writers”. Resistance was futile. I read Karoo in a go and was—to resort to cliché—blown away. The novel tells a compelling story of Canadian soldiers—and their horses—ensnared in the South African war at the turn of the 20^th Century. That bit of serendipity led to another, then another. The Florence library branch had a copy of The Trade, a saga of the Canadian fur trade era, 1821-1850. The Trade proved equally compelling, so I asked the lovely ladies at the North Sydney branch to fetch me another Stenson, Who by Fire. It is set in more modern times and relates another gripping story, of an Alberta family ransacked by the gas-extraction industry. Instantly a literary hero of mine, it is hard to imagine after Who By Fire that Stenson, himself a loyal Albertan, is much loved by oil patch executives.

Having journeyed to 1900-era South Africa and the time of the fur trade, I next traveled to the crazed days of the Klondike gold rush. Drifting Home and Klondike were two of the not-yet-read books on the cabin shelves, by irrepressible Pierre Berton. Drifting Home describes two pilgrimages, one the account of Berton’s 1972 expedition down the Yukon River with his family; the other a journey in time to Berton’s boyhood in Dawson City with recollections of his remarkable father. Klondike delivers a cast of hundreds of cheechakos and sourdoughs caught up in the 1898 gold frenzy, a cast reflecting the full spectrum of human triumph and folly.

I sometime walk out of the North Sydney library with twenty pounds of books that may have cost me all of five or ten dollars. At some point in recent years I had found a stash of books by Ronald Wright I had not got round to reading. The silver lining of rainy days at Bigador is that the omission is now remedied. Henderson’s Spear is a terrific read, about a daughter’s search for a father, a Korean War fighter pilot who disappeared in the South Seas in 1953. That led to A Scientific Romance, a novel that delivers the astonished reader on a journey five hundred years into the future to a world devastated by human-induced climate change. Finally I moved on to Wright’s A Short History of Progress, a survey of ancient civilizations brought to ruin by their own blunders, a cautionary account of what needs doing if modern civilization is to avoid the greatest of calamities.

Of course not every hour can be spent reading in front of the warming Drolet. To limber decrepit knees and sore back, I install raingear and head out in the drizzle for Dalem Lake, keeping a lookout for a bird or rain-dappled flower to photograph. Walking my potholed road I needn’t strain my neck to check for birds overhead—I can see what’s there in the mirrors availed by the still puddles along the way. The forecast calls for several more rainy days. What happens when a fella runs out of books?

[This post written July 3.]