It is well established that your occasional correspondent is strongly convinced that ‘Bigador’ is the best, most beautiful place the world has to offer. Consider its frequent sublime quietude, its natural bounty of flora and fauna, its night time vistas of the Milky Way and naked-eye view of the rather more distant Andromeda galaxy, whose light has traveled 2.3 million years by the time it reaches the rods and cones of human eyes. Just for starters.
Most of the friends who visit from the west coast and see Bigador for the first time typically rhapsodize at the cabin’s view of the Great Bras d’Or and Kelly’s Mountain and demand to know, “Why would you ever leave this?’ My standard answer comprises a single word, winter.
For me part of its ineffable charm is that Bigador affords a small facsimile of a pioneer experience; it lacks almost all the amenities that make life bearable for most of my fellow North Americans. Yes, we have a good kitchen stovetop and propane-powered fridge but the facilities include no running water, no flush toilet, no reliable Internet connection, no electricity apart from the meagre allotment supplied by a single solar panel and pair of batteries.
There is no mall across the road, no recreation centre, no swimming pool. We do have a fine swimmin’ hole down at the shore, but one has to scramble down a steep bank to get there and swimmers must sometimes share the water with a jellyfish or two, or the crabs that have made the bottom their home long before we ever showed up. Apart from a refreshing dip, the shore provides other attractions. Numerous Carboniferous fossils for an observer who needn’t work hard to see them. Kingfishers, the occasional sandpiper, gannet, and all the gulls and cormorants one could ever want to see.
To get groceries we must rely on the truck to take us to the Sobey’s in North Sydney, but there are opportunities in the woods and fields for foragers such as ourselves—chanterelle and bolete mushrooms, rhubarb, blueberries, blackberries, all in their season. There was once a thriving apple orchard on the old place. Their feral descendants abound, some are good eating as-is, others provide the base ingredients for apple sauce, apple jelly, apple whatever-you-like.
Most folks who come to see us during the summer seem to like what is on offer—or not—over the course of a several-day visit. A good number are repeat visitors. They have come after time, charmed by the same features that have lured me for half a century. But of course a stay of a few days is not the same as one of three months.
Recent events remind me that some folks are entirely unimpressed by my shangri-la—not for a week, or a day, or even an hour. No, I have to concede on inquiry, the cabin has not a single bedroom with a closable door affording privacy to someone ardent to have it. Instead, there is an array of ‘Murphy’ beds that can provide a restful, restorative night as long as one is not overly troubled by the occasional snore or the passage of a fellow guest headed for either of the two important out-buildings, one of which features the same composting toilet as graces the summer place of our highly regarded former governor-general, Adrienne Clarkson. If it is good enough for Adrienne shouldn’t it be fine for all the rest of us too?
Several years ago I built a workshop that has afforded me many hours of woodworking delight. In recent years the workshop has taken on a second duty. It is now serves also as the ‘Tom Sawyer Bunkhouse’. In its bunkhouse role the building’s centrepiece is a queen-sized inflatable mattress no one has ever grumbled about. And yes, it has a closing door that provides all the privacy a person could want, as long as one discounts the squirrels that run about on roof or deck, and walls festooned not with restful photos but a wide array of tools—clamps, saws, jars filled with screws and nails, et al.
Yes, there are spiders outside—and sometimes in—as well as snakes, toads, sow bugs, and other creatures not everyone embraces. Visitors who live their lives in cities are sometimes horrified to discover that they have to share the place with mosquitoes, black flies, no-see-um, deer flies, horse flies, and other biting delights that are, as Bob Nagel liked to observe, simply doing what they’re supposed to.
I admit to some regret that a few—just a few—of my fellow travelers see none of the charms that have seduced me all these years, but I still insist that Bigador is the best, most beautiful place I have ever experienced. Don’t bother trying to change my mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment