Not to Mention Sandra Bullock Too

Any time I manage to organize a ramble with pal Peter Goodale I can expect that in addition to all the predictable rewards there will be payoffs of the offbeat, unpredictable variety. Such was the case on Tuesday. Motivated by the disclosure that Peter had never been there, I proposed we do the hike from storied Gabarus—a short gull flight across Gabarus Bay from historic Louisbourg—to the ghost village of Gull Cove, then on to Gabarus Cape and its commanding views over Cape Breton’s east coast and the open Atlantic. Take my word for it: Gull Cove and Gabarus Cape are worthy destinations, particularly on a day like the one we savoured yesterday--sunny, not-too-cool, entirely blithe. Best of all, we had it to ourselves; no other humans crossed our path.

One of the rewards of any outing with Peter—what should I call it, the sidebar attraction—is an almost guaranteed bonus. In Gabarus we took a short road to a construction site where Bud, the sibling of someone married into the Goodale clan, has been busily engaged in moving and underpinning a 150-year house with a fancy new foundation. Peter and I enjoyed excellent conversation with Bud and also had a tour of the old house interior. In the kitchen I tried but was unable to count all the layers of wallpaper that had their years in the sun over the past fifteen decades and are now exposed by Bud’s renovations.

For me the highlight of this particular sidebar was having Bud tell us that Sandra Bullock once sat here in conversation with the elderly matriarch who ruled the roost at the time. Now as it happens I am one among the millions of men who have taken quite the shine to Ms. Bullock and her movie appearances over the years. It seems that a few years back Miss Congeniality was in the midst of a film shoot in Cape Breton when someone told her about the charms of Gabarus. She went there and in the course of events found herself in the old lady’s kitchen. What must have been especially delightful for Ms. B was discovering that the senior citizen seated across the kitchen table had no idea who she was—didn’t recognize her, didn’t know her name, didn’t have the foggiest clue that she was in the presence of a beloved, world-famous actress. What a relief it must have been for someone who hardly ever gets to be anonymous.

We tore ourselves away from the scene of Sandra Bullock’s Gabarus kitchen moment to our trailhead. There, an old cemetery affords a final resting place for some of the folks who lived at Gull Cove a century and more ago. Nowadays no one at all lives at Gull Cove, no one, that is, of our own species. All that remains of the once thriving village are old house foundations. Whenever I see such a place I default to contemplating the transience of human affairs, the ephemerality of life. Such was the case yesterday.

Gull Cove is evocative but to put no fine point on it, the place is also beautiful, a landscape of open fields, sea cliffs and rocky headlands. Even without a binocular you can make out the buildings of the national historic site at Louisbourg. We crossed an expanse of cranberry barrens to Cape Gabarus, an excellent place to stop for a picnic of sardines, cheese and crackers. I felt septuagenarian gratitude that I am still able to walk that far under my own steam without having to rely on supplemental oxygen or require air ambulance evacuation.

While taking on replenishment at the Cape one can contemplate lovely little Green Island where a gull my gentle reader may never have heard of—the black-legged kittiwake—nests in greater numbers than anywhere else in the Maritime Provinces. If that is insufficiently alluring there is intriguing geology to contemplate and something else: the power of nature. Yesterday was quiet and calm but the beached lobster traps pitched inland far from shore and the occasional skeleton of a seabird wrecked by Atlantic storm demonstrate that some days at Cape Gabarus are anything but quiet and calm.

I can make no promise that an expedition to Gabarus and the trail to its eponymous cape will deliver the opportunity to hang out in a place redolent of Sandra Bullock but I can promise that the hike to Gull Cove and splendid Cape Gabarus is plenty enough reward all by itself.

All That—and Solomon Gundy Too

It is always serendipitous when a guy operating a blog dubbed Peregrinations has a worthy peregrination to tell his handful of readers about. We went to the mainland to join good pals Carole and Garth in seeing how much trouble we might get into at the opposite end of Nova Scotia. A principal target was Shelburne County where in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolutionary War thousands of Americans who had sided with the mother country against their tea-partying American fellows decided to relocate to Nova Scotia, still a loyal part of the Empire.

Among the loyalist throng were some three thousand black people, virtually all of them slaves or descendants of slaves, whose support of Britain in the conflict against the folks led by Washington and Jefferson was rewarded with the promise of a better life in Nova Scotia. At Birchtown, main destination of the black loyalists, we visited the Black Loyalist Interpretation Centre and learned the extent to which the promise turned out to be a hollow one. Within just a few years, after enduring great hardship, many of the blacks accepted another dubious proposition—another relocation—this time to Sierra Leone in Africa.

On a sunny Wednesday we went to Cape Sable Island—as far removed-from-Cape-Breton part of Nova Scotia as you will find—to look for birds. The Hawk, perhaps the premier birding destination in all of Nova Scotia, afforded a few turnstones, whimbrels and ‘peeps’—even a rare Caspian tern—but the principal rewards of the Cape Sable junket had nothing to do birds. Garth and I both like to initiate conversation with total strangers. At the Hawk we relished an impromptu chat with a local lobsterman who edified us in spades about the particulars of lobstering in this corner of our fair province. In Clark’s Harbour I was amazed to find a bronze soldier atop the community war memorial. If you’d asked me if I knew all the bronze and soldiers of Nova Scotia I’d have said Yes, absolutely. I’d have been wrong.

History abounds in this part of Nova Scotia. At Barrington we connived to visit not just one museum but four, including the 1765 Barrington Meeting House, built in the aftermath of the Acadian expulsion by transplanted American Quakers and Planters. In the adjacent graveyard the visitor gets to contemplate death’s-head headstones dating back to the same period.

Having learned about one story of man’s inhumanity at Birchtown we headed to Pubnico to immerse in another. We spent an edifying half-day at La Village historique acadien, Lower West Pubnico. The village represents the life that the Acadiens had managed to rebuild for themselves more than a century after the infamous expulsion—Le Grand Dérangement—of the mid-18^th Century. Our interpreters, all dressed in period costume, were uniformly terrific: Harry the Blacksmith, Sherman the Boatbuilder, Marcel the Fisherman, et al.  What’s more they all seemed to share the same name—d’Entremont—tenth-generation descendants of the original main man among the pioneers of Pubnico.

Something impressive met the eye in Lower West Pubnico: the great fishing fleet moored at Dennis Point. The lobster boats are nothing like the pipsqueaks tied up at the Big Bras d’Or wharf near the summer cabin. The Pubnico boats—ship might be the better term—are huge, 28’ wide, more than 60’ long. As if that were not enough, Dennis Point also afforded an opportunity to spend a half hour aboard Bluenose II, which just happened to have dropped in for the day.

On Friday we forsook Shelburne County for its Lunenburg counterpart. Lunenburg town, one of Canada’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, offers plenty to impress the eye and engage the grey matter of someone keen on history. And something to please the palate too. Niece Naomi gave us a hot tip: Saturday happened to be the day the annual blueberry festival unfolded at Parkdale in the northern reaches of the county. We went there, and for a lousy fifteen bucks a head got to pig out on an array of down-home Lunenburg County cuisine: Sausage and Sauerkraut, Pudding & Cheese, Hodge Podge, Smeltz Potatoes, Solomon Gundy—and more. Dessert was blueberry pie or blueberry grunt, take your pick. One of our quartet managed to inveigle our young attendant into delivering three desserts. Holy doodle!

The Parkdale feast was the capper of a trip festooned with great grub. I fear when I step on the scale back at the cabin I will not like the number staring me in the face. But what the heck, austerity, restraint and responsibility are not the sorts of attitudes to take into a September road trip with Garth and Carole. A year ago Gaspe was great; Shelburne-Lunenburg was superb this past week. What do we do next year? I know: let’s board a coastal supply vessel for a journey among the southern outports of Newfoundland. Who can say what seafood specialties await?

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?