A Year in Bharat

Not all peregrinations need proceed by land or in the air in present time. Heritage House has just published my latest book, Capitals, Aristocrats, and Cougars. The new book is a journey into the past—to the period 1911-1926 when major league pro hockey flourished in Victoria. The ‘time machine’ I relied upon to research the book was principally the pages of Victoria’s morning newspaper of the time, the Daily Colonist. The research was a fascinating, often surprising expedition revealing much I did not know and could never have predicted. Hockey will be the lure for most readers of the new book, but Cougars also dives into the cultural, social, and political backdrop against which the city’s hockey heroes thrilled their fans a century and more ago.

Now I have embarked on another peregrination into the past. Fifty-two years ago, as a callow 22-year-old, I managed to persuade CUSO—the Canadian University Service Overseas­­—to have me appointed as a teacher of English literature at a college affiliated with the University of Punjab. The campus of little Baring College is tucked away on the outskirts of Batala, Punjab, in northwest India. I spent a year in India, doubtless the most momentous, unforgettable year of my life. 

Now I have completed an initial draft of another book, my fifth, A Year in Bharat. It describes my adventures in the classroom, my travels throughout the country, my close encounter with the Dalai Lama, the friendships I formed with a cast of unforgettable, remarkable people. A good number of friends and others have read the manuscript and have had complimentary things to say about it. Once the launch of Cougars has been taken care of, I will look to expand Bharat in line with useful suggestions my readers have offered.

Mine is a normal, fallible, forgetful human memory. I could never have produced the new manuscript absent my dear, departed mother. Over the course of my eventful year in India, I wrote more than a hundred single-spaced typed letters to my family on the other side of the world in Halifax. Doris kept them all and returned them to me years ago. I stowed them away and mostly forget about them. Then, earlier this year, I disinterred the old letters and read them all. I decided the letters could enable me to produce a memoir of my long-ago year, one rich in stories readers might like to see. Working virtually every day over the span of several weeks from January through early March, I completed the manuscript. And felt happy with the result. Bharat ends with a contemplation of the people who loomed large in 1969-70, both those who are now gone and “those who may carry on somewhere in India, somewhere beyond my reach.”

But of course, ours is the age of the Internet and I decided to ask Dr Google to help me find important people from my India past who might not be beyond my reach. There was an early success: one of my faculty colleagues at Baring, Prem Kumar, was a young poet who had already published two volumes of Punjabi verse. I found Prem, not in India, but just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. We exchanged a flurry of emails and looked forward to a crossing of paths as and when pandemic protocols permit.

Among the important people who take their turn on the stage of A Year in Bharat is one of my MA students at Baring, a young woman named Rita Bhalla, whom the book describes as the most distracting of my students. More than once I refer to her as Lovely Rita Bhalla. Imagine my surprise one day in early April to open the Gmail inbox and find a message from Rita. She had learned about me and the manuscript from Prem Kumar. The emails have flown back and forth across the globe throughout the intervening months. Rita lives in Mumbai, has two daughters and has been generous in her efforts to discover the whereabouts of people we both knew a half-century ago. 

The India of 2021 is very different from the country to which I was introduced in 1969. I have myriad questions about her country—the prevailing tensions between factions, the impact of the pandemic, the difficulties faced by women. Et al. What I learn from Rita will surely enhance the next draft of A Year in Bharat.

I never know when I complete another book manuscript whether I will be able to persuade a publisher to take it, whether it will be a success, whether people will want to read it. I have the same doubts this time. But I already feel richly rewarded in the effort to produce Bharat, the memories the effort has stirred and—of course—by having in Lovely Rita the most prolific pen pal an old duffer could ever hope for.

This Old House

Big Bras d’Or’s greater metropolitan area features two dwellings near and dear to me. One is the cabin I built a half-century ago, relying on resources largely limited to a few hand tools and a strong back. The other is an old house I long ago dubbed Wuthering Heights, presumably because it stands imperiously by itself on a hill with a view to kill for. From the early 1980s, it was the place where my Boston friend Bob Nagel liked to spend his summers and hold court for his legion of friends. 

The history of the old house predated Bob by several decades. It was built some time about 1890. In 1938 a catastrophe befell a local family, one reflected on the face of a grave marker in a corner of the Big Bras d’Or cemetery. The headstone lists the names of five children of Archie and Amelia Dunlap who perished in a house fire. The children ranged in age from a five-year-old namesake daughter, Amelia, to Daniel, 14. The Big Bras d’Or community rose to the occasion, providing a new home for the Dunlap parents and their surviving children—the same house that in forty years or so would become the place where mirth and merriment would be routine adornments of a Bob Nagel summer.

The lost children’s mother had been one among the tens of thousands of English “home children” exported to Canada from 1869 to 1932, children who had the bad luck to be orphans or to have parents who lacked the means to look after them. On June 17, 1899, Amelia Thompson was one of 98 children who arrived in Halifax aboard SS Siberian. Amelia was seven years old that late spring day. She was given a new home by a Boularderie Island family.

In the fullness of time Amelia would marry Archie Dunlap and begin her career as wife and mother. There are other names on the Dunlap headstone, including that of Henry, who was born in 1914—when Amelia was 23—and lived only to age 6. Yes, there was great misfortune in the Dunlap home, but there were joys too. My friend Shirley, Amelia’s granddaughter, has fond memories of her grandparents and the happy hours she spent with them in the old house. She has a picture of Amelia taken in 1959 on the front veranda. In the image Amelia is sitting in her rocking chair, smiling.

In 2002 I took the lead role in building a new screened porch for Bob at the front of his house, just where Amelia had sat in her rocker years before. The porch supplies marvelous views of Kelly’s Mountain, the Great Bras d’Or and the Bird Islands, and it became the venue for countless festivities in the years from that time right through to 2015. Shirley was among the celebrants in many of them.

When Bob left us in 2016, his many Cape Breton friends grieved not just for their lost friend but also for the happy times they had shared with him on the porch. There are steel ships and wooden ships, he liked to say, but no ship like friendship. Passing from the dining room into the porch, friends walked under a sign: THESE are the good old days.

People come and go, and so do old houses. Eventually Wuthering Heights and the 147 acres in which it stands went up for sale. At age 130 or so, the building was showing its age: a crumbling foundation, floor joists in some parts of the main floor a fella was disinclined to trust. My bet was that Amelia’s place had only a slim chance of surviving. The new owner would almost certainly raze it and replace it with something new.

But I was wrong. Rather that demolishing the historical house, Dinao, the new owner, decided to save it. A good thing, I say: the house is not only shot through with history, it has ‘good bones’ too. Under Dinao's stewardship, crumbled bits of the foundation are now repaired, new windows are in place, and just this past while, a shiny new metal roof will emancipate Dinao and her friends from having to worry about rainy days.

On Saturday Jan and I led Lynn and Louise on a tour of the excellent trail Dinao and her friends have built from the woods behind her house all the way to the provincial park at Dalem Lake. The trail is a thing of beauty and a joy for outdoorsy folks who like birds, wildflowers and the great variety of mushrooms that flourish in the forest. Savouring myriad memories at the old house, we all rejoiced at what has become of Wuthering Heights.

Bob is not available to see Dinao’s work but I have no doubt that he would rejoice in the knowledge that the old place will continue to be rich in laughter and delight for years to come.

Black Point Plenitude

Not all infections are toxic. I typically have no issue with infectious joy. The most naturally joyful people I have had the good fortune to know are Lynn and Louise, my identical-twin cousins. When opportunity arises to spend a whole day outdoors with them, Jan and I do not hesitate to seize it. Let’s go to Grand River, they suggested, and ramble the barrier beach at the river’ estuary. Will we see shorebirds, I inquired. Oh yes, we will see shorebirds. They also promised that we would surely agree that the landscape we’d see would be ‘byootiful’.

Louise led us on a meandering route to Richmond County by way of vista points people who limit a Cape Breton journey to the Cabot Trail do not see: East Bay, Irish Cove, Red Islands, Loch Lomond. From Hay Cove we turned east to follow the gravel-road route through Mount Auburn and Lochside to a body of water that reminded the old Scots settlers of one they had left behind in the old country, Loch Lomond. With no other vehicle traffic to worry about, we could brake for chipmunks, stop to photo late summer asters at the side of the road, and pause to admire a rough grouse enjoying the sun in the middle of the road. Unfamiliar cemeteries are always a lure. We paused at the hillside cemetery overlooking the loch and found that many of gravestones marked the final resting place of people named MacLeod, a lovely Scottish name, I maintain. It is a moniker I have been reliably informed means ‘Son of Ugly’ in Gaelic, a secret I share with others at every opportunity.

At the Grand River estuary we had options: turn west toward aptly named Red Head or east to Black Point. By the look of the map, the latter looked to be the more promising option for those keen to see early-October shorebird migrants. We turned east.

The barrier beach skirting the south side of Black Point Lake has sandy sections. Footprints at the lake margin enabled us to know who the local travelers might be. Birds both big and small had left their mark, but no footprints were as numerous as those left by coyotes. I am drawn to places that are favoured by coyotes and largely ignored by people. We saw no other humans this day, just the way we each like it. There were birds on and about the lake: a dozen common mergansers, a bald eagle or two, a marauding merlin intent on making a meal out of one of the shorebirds assembled further ahead.

Nearing the narrow spike of land that juts into the Atlantic, we saw the first evidence we’d made the right choice, semipalmated plovers, ruddy turnstones, a couple of yellowlegs. But it was in the leeward side of the point that the shorebird show really took flight: literally hundreds of sandpipers exploiting the feeding riches among the beached kelp arrayed along the shore. We settled on a viewing strategy. Rather than taking a slow amble to see what birds might permit a close approach we decided on a ‘big sit’: let’s park ourselves in a sheltered spot out of the wind to see what might unfold. It was a serendipitous choice. In spades.

After a while it seemed the birds had forgotten that we were there—or no longer cared. Drawn to the feeding opportunities just beyond our feet, ‘peeps’—diminutive least and semipalmated sandpipers—came close enough that we imagined we must have become virtually invisible to them—just part of the foliage. There were others: black-bellied and golden plovers, both greater and lesser yellowlegs, two pectoral sandpipers and a single red knot. Others were present in their hundreds: the peeps, and especially, mostly-white sanderlings feeding along the beach. These frequently took flight to inspect whether feeding opportunities might be better a a bit further on the strand.                     

I have been a birder for much of a half-century but never before had I experienced close approaches by shorebirds anything like those we relished at Black Point. By the end of our big sit we had identified a dozen species of shorebird and I managed to get worthy photos of almost all of them.

My well-established habit is to rate events on a 10-point scale of delight. Rarely am I so overboard about a day in the great outdoors as to award a mark as high as 9, but at Black Point I couldn’t help it: given the landscape, the birds, the weather—and of course the joyful companionship—I had no reason to award anything but a 10.

Glories of White Point

In his alluring guide to the hiking trails of Cape Breton, Michael Haynes asserts that the trail to White Point, two hours north of Big Bras d’Or, provides some of the most dramatic coastal scenery of any trail in Cape Breton. When Naomi and Terry came for a weekend stay, I suggested that based on Haynes’s opinion, White Point would make a good destination for a day hike. Particularly since it would be a ‘lifer’—a first—for us all. The others agreed. For most of the drive north, windshield wipers were essential equipment; I began to worry that I’d given my companions a bum steer. But as we approached White Point village the rain eased and a break in the clouds delivered sunshine. Who could believe it? No turn in human affairs is more welcome than serendipity.

White Point made good on the Haynes assurances. The hike is not a long one but it proved to be every bit as glorious as its promise. In the early going thick spruce and fir skirted one side of the trail but soon enough the view north was obstructed by nothing taller than the abundant white granite rocks I guessed must be what gives the point its name. We passed an old French cemetery dating back to a time before the first Scots settler arrived two centuries ago. The cemetery’s ancient graves are marked by rough granite slabs offering no clue as to the identity of the persons who lie below them, nor any hint of the lives they lived.

The rocks turn from white to red at the point itself and are very much bigger than those we passed along the way. Water churned at the base of vaulting cliffs and in a stiff wind we took pains to avoid a fatal tumble. Despite the wind and falling hazard I was happy I had recommended White Point as our destination. Jan often maintains it is easy to measure my happiness in an outdoor outing by the number of pictures I take. On this day I took many.

In addition to its scenic charms, White Point provided rewards to gladden an old birder’s heart. Gannets coursed the shoreline, diving headlong into the littoral for choice selections from the seafood menu on offer. Double-crested cormorants lolled on a shoreline rock, resting or waiting for opportunity to unfold. An alcid—was it a razorbill or thick-billed murre?—appeared for just a moment, not long enough to permit a sure ID. A female harlequin duck, purportedly rare in Cape Breton, went about her business among the eiders riding the whitecaps close inshore. Lapland longspurs breed in the Arctic tundra; when we see them in Cape Breton at this time of year they are typically en route to their southern wintering grounds. Two longspurs, both disinclined to take flight, kept several steps in front of us as we slowly made our way to Burnt Cove. There were mammals to see too: seven grey seals turned their heads to assess what we crazy humans might be up to.

We saw evidence that White Point provides abundant wild food to suit migrant birds having vegetarian preferences: crowberries, cranberries, juniper berries. Even more abundant were the Michaelmas daisies flashing blue petals wherever we went. I wondered: what wildflowers would dominate the landscape were we to come in May? What birds? Would seals be conspicuous then too?

The break in the weather lasted just as long as was convenient to the hikers: rain returned just as we got back to the car. At nearby New Haven I spotted the community war memorial—one I had managed never to see before. I barked a command to stop the car. Terry complied. I contemplated the names listed on the monument—seven ‘heroes’ of the community who went to war and died ‘for King and Country’, heroes such as Private John Bird who died on the Somme in October 1916 and Private George Hawkins, killed in action at Passchendaele a year later. Bird had attained the grand old age of 23, Hawkins just 20 when he breathed his last. No serendipitous endings for them.

Just next door to New Haven is Neil’s Harbour. By mid-afternoon we agreed that after our collective exertions, some sustenance might be in order. At the tip of the narrow peninsula jutting from the village into the Gulf of St. Lawrence we made our way past rooftop lines of black-backed and herring gulls to an establishment called the Chowder House. What to order at a place called the Chowder House? Wouldn’t it have to be chowder?  We ordered four bowls and reached broad consensus that the house chowder here exceeded that any of us had ever found in a roadside diner. Windshield wipers beat a tattoo most of the way back to Big Bras d’Or. No one grumbled.

On the Importance of Community

Fifty years have flown past since I carved an opening in the woods by the shore and built my cabin at Big Bras d’Or using handsaw and hammer. In the half-century since 1971 I had never felt anything but wholehearted about returning to Boularderie Island. Not until this year, the second year of the pandemic. Cape Bretoners have enjoyed a relatively easy time with the corona virus. News reports suggested that some of them might be inclined to say that the come-from-away summer folks should stay away, and thus help keep Cape Breton Island relatively free of Covid-19. When Cousin Louise called two days before our departure from Victoria to report that she and her twin—neither having yet had their second vaccine shot—were too scared to collect us at the Sydney airport, my initial impulse was to cancel our flights and forgo ‘Bigador’ for a second straight summer. I changed my mind.

It is a measure of my antiquity that I have known five generations of the Squires family. Jack Squires begat Ted Squires, who begat Stuart and Kevin Squires. Their four sons and daughters have produced four members of the fifth generation. My friend Darcy, who I have known since he was born, turned 43 the other day. Most of the houses on Lakeview Drive are occupied by people named Squires. For that reason, I have an alternate name for Lakeview: ‘Squiresville”. Fifty years ago it was Ted Squires who lent me the ‘cat’s-paw’ tool I used to dismantle the derelict house that stood on the land. It was Ted who taught me the rudiments of how to frame my 20’ x 16’ cabin in the woods. When I had finished my little building, and installed a watertight roof over it, it was Ted’s approval I most wanted—and most valued when it was given.

Kevin was just 17 when I began pulling every nail and spike out of the old house. At age 24 I was much older. We became friends after crossing paths in our travels along Old Route 5 and have remained friends throughout the years. It is on Kevin’s land that ‘Leo’, my old Dodge Ram, spends the winter. So of course it was to Kevin I turned for alternative transport from the airport to Big Bras d’Or. He had no hesitation.

Jan and I soon discovered that we needn’t have fretted that Boularderie Islanders would be loath to have us back. In Victoria, most of our Ontario Street neighbours are strangers. Here, at an early gathering of people we have known for years, old friends were more welcoming than ever. I felt glad not to have aborted the flights.

After an absence of close to two years we found that ‘Bigador’ was not just as we had left it. Four-foot aspen saplings grew in the middle of the road. The ‘lawn’ by the cabin had turned into a tall-grass prairie. The propane-powered fridge refused to start. The 50-year-old range leaked fuel and took 15 minutes to boil water for morning tea and coffee. After two years of neglect the solar batteries functioned feebly. One by one we managed to remedy the problems. Then an even bigger infrastructure problem erupted. Driving to North Sydney for a dinner date at the Lobster Pound, the check-engine light flashed on Leo’s dash. Simultaneously the truck suffered a massive power loss. I pulled to the side of Highway 105. What to do? Well, the answer was clear. What else, call Kevin Squires. He came to the rescue, lent us his own Ram pickup, assured us he wouldn’t need it for several days.

Two weeks later, Leo is still in truck hospital. We are told the truck needs a new electronic control module but the repair folks say they can find no replacement, new or used, anywhere in North America. Once again it is a Squires who comes to the rescue. Stuart knows someone who can find me a new ECM. We now have confidence that Leo will get the necessary surgery, perhaps before we depart. In the meantime we are driving yet another Dodge Ram—Stuart’s.

I count many blessings here in the cabin on the margin of the Great Bras d’Or. The quiet is sublime. Robins provide entertainment as they feed on the berries of the mountain-ash just beyond our windows. The trail to Dalem Lake has never looked better. But perhaps even more important than all that, we feel part of a community and have friends we can count on when circumstance obliges us to call for help.

Echoes of Stornoway

Two centuries ago, my great-great grandfather, Donald ‘The Scholar’ Campbell, was one of the pioneer Scots immigrants who settled on the opposite shore of the Great Bras d’Or in a place that came to be known as New Harris. In a 1830 letter to his brother-in-law at Stornoway on the Hebridean island of Lewis, he rhapsodized about all the rewards of life in his new homeland and urged his wife’s brother to join him in New Scotland, and make sure to bring fishing nets while he was at it.

Boularderie Island today is populated by uncounted descendants of Donald Campbell. I am just one of Donald’s numerous great-great-grandsons. Two among the raft I know and care about are Jack Campbell and David MacDonald, two who had never been introduced to one another. I decided it would be a good idea to organize a pilgrimage by three great-great grandsons to the place where our ancestor built a home for his young family in the 1820s. And so it came to pass on a suitably sunny September Sunday. 

Jack had previously led me to the site of Donald Campbell’s homestead. The intervening years have left the site even more choked with windfall and dense undergrowth than it was before. Jack and David are even older than I am, both of them octogenarians. The going got rough; I began to wonder whether this might have been a very bad idea instead of a good one. I imagined having to call Diane or Sheila to report news both bad and good: the bad news is that your spouse is gone; the good news is that his final words were that he loved you more than ever. But we managed to make our way to the old foundation stones, contemplated the life Donald and his children might have lived at New Harris and emerged from the slog in the woods intact. I felt sweet relief; the phone call I rehearsed would not be needed. 

Jack and David found plenty to talk about. I was happy to be a third wheel as they reminisced about people long gone that I never knew. We agreed to extend the historical tour. We carried on from New Harris to New Campbellton, a community of consequence in the boyhood years of both men. Heeding Jack’s instructions, I turned the truck into a laneway, climbed a hill to an old house at the end of it. This is the house where I was born in 1937, Jack said. On the veranda sat a lady in a rocking chair reading a book. I got out of the truck to introduce myself. At the sight of someone as big and ugly as me, she might have reached for a shotgun and invited me to bugger off. But no, this is Cape Breton; once introductions were made she insisted we all come in for tea, cookies and conversation. It was impossible not to be smitten by our hostess. She spoke in a  lovely lilt and told me that she had acquired it at the very place Donald Campbell had directed his letter in 1830: Stornoway on the island of Lewis. You imagine. The ensuing conversation was lively, wide-ranging and very entertaining.

Jack was pleased to learn about the history of the old house. David, a novelist and short-story writer, described his early experience of the house and explained that one of his stories was inspired in part by this very house. Our new friend had us write our names in a notebook. I promised to let her know by email about David’s books and my own. We departed the old place feeling well rewarded for having taken the turn on the laneway to Jack’s birthplace.

That was not the end of the adventure. We carried on to the lovely hilltop cemetery at the end of another New Campbellton laneway, inspected the grave markers of people we once knew and some we never did, including one bearing the name of a young man who went off to war in 1915 and never returned to his New Campbellton family.

All three of Donald’s descendants awarded high marks to our day at New Harris and New Campbellton. When it came time to part, my cousins expressed eagerness about renewing acquaintance in the summer of 2022. I like to think it will come to pass.