World According to Bob

Friends and fans of Robert Carl Nagel will rejoice to hear that he thrives even as he rushes headlong toward his 85^th birthday.

The familiar endures: Robert carries on logging operations as if he were merely 40, rides his bike like there is no tomorrow, belts out show tunes at full volume.

He abjures water–‘fish pee in it’—drinks beer at lunch, cheap sherry in the afternoon, proletarian red wine at dinner time. He stands tall and straight as always.

Robert has a range of comely charms—a world-class overbite, a proboscis to cause Caesar envy, a Boston accent that would do the Kennedys proud—but of all the attributes that mark El Nagel this is Numero Uno: he manages to make just about everyone love him and want to do for him. Motivated by affection alone one friend repairs the busted water works of his old house, another mows his acre and a half of lawn, another installs a new water heater, yet another builds him a porch.

Who else is so cherished that even the local Member of Parliament makes time every July to cut Bob’s hayfield, bale the hay, then haul it away. Such universal affection cannot be explained, it just is.

I am just one among Nagel’s many victims. It isn’t that our tastes match or that we see eye to eye on every important political or social issue. Bob likes lamb and pork, I prefer haddock and cod. I am a pinko, Bob is most assuredly not. I revere the memory of Tommy Douglas, whereas Bob cherishes that of Barry Goldwater. It defies logic but none of that seems to matter a whit.

Summer is here so Nagel and MacLeod tend to share bits of every day in each other’s company. We laugh, we holler; I swill Alexander Keith’s, Bob savours Andres Rich Canadian Apera. Day follows day, the sun shines, laughter and frivolity fill his porch and mine. The world spins as it should . . .

Florence Patterson MacLeod, 1925-2014

This past week one of the good ones departed this mortal coil. I first savoured the kindness of Florence MacLeod 43 years ago, in April of 1971, when with no asset other than a strong young back I materialized at Big Bras d’Or to begin dismantling the derelict old house that had once been Florence’s own.

A good Christian lady, Florence took one look at me and decided I must be a harmless idiot who needed charity. There I was, rather like a Tibetan monk slowly building a mandala, pulling nail after nail out of her humble old house. Who but an idiot would think it a useful expenditure of time and energy to salvage whatever lumber might be serviceable from a derelict building whose roof leaked, a shelter only to deer mice and barn swallows. If a fellow wanted to construct a cabin down at the shore wouldn’t it be smarter just to head into town and buy the necessary sticks? Well, as mentioned, my assets excluded the ability to buy new lumber, hence my one-man salvage operation.

Florence was soon aware that I subsisted solely on Kraft Dinner; she took pity on me. She baked bread and tea biscuits and delivered them to me. In years to come, though I was no longer indigent, the bread and tea biscuits kept flowing.

Family and community were all to Florence. Many times I visited in her kitchen, took in the latest school pictures of grandchildren, heard stories about the old days and people who no longer walked among us. She loved to pick berries; many were the occasions, in August, I saw her gathering lush blackberries below the road in fields she had known and harvested for decades. 

Though I was never fortunate enough to see her in action, Florence clearly found reason to appreciate winter; she loved ‘coasting’, hurtling downhill on her GT Racer sled. She liked summer too: that was a time for gathering with friends, enjoying a chilled Alpine or three, reveling in all the laughter that seemed to avail itself on such occasions.

I have a picture of her on the cabin deck in the mid-1970s, stubbie in hand, reveling in a good time with my Mum and Florence’s late, lamented sister Sadie. The photo effuses fun and friendship.

Florence’s last years were not kind to her. Her mind failed sooner than her body; before long she could not remember who I was.  She died this past week in her 90^th year. I was asked by the family to accept a ritual role I’d never played before: pallbearer. We six stood at the front of the church, left side, as the choir led the congregation in soaring renditions of I Come to the Garden Alone, How Great Thou Art and Abide With Me. Even my unbelieving old heart stirred.

If in a fashion we live in the memories of others after we are gone, Florence will live for time to come: picking blackberries, walking down my road bearing a load of bread and tea biscuits, raising a stubbie to her friends’ good health, coasting hellbent down a snow-covered slope.

West with the Night

Serendipity flourished again. En route to a hike in the Baleine headlands with Lynn and Louise, the twins pointed out a bronze tablet hearkening back to a day in September 1936 when a young woman named Beryl Markham accomplished what no woman had ever done before—fly an aircraft alone across the Atlantic from east to west.

I had heard of Beryl Markham but had never known—or had entirely forgotten—that her historic flight in a made-for-her Percival Gull monoplane ended in a crash landing near Cape Breton’s easternmost point. I studied the tablet, contemplated the terrain in which Markham had landed her plane, and had to know more.

I was struck at how inconceivably brave it was of this 33-year-old woman to climb into the cockpit of a single-engine plane and fly it alone across the vast Atlantic. The Cape Breton regional Library proved yet again it is my friend: the library extricated a copy of Markham’s book, West with the Night.

A literary hero of mine, Ernest Hemingway, raved about West with the Night: “I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [Markham] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves to be writers.” Wow.

In West with the Night I read Markham’s cool yet hair-raising account of her 21-and-a-half hour flight across the ocean and felt fresh awe for what she’d accomplished. One paragraph particularly grabbed me:

Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind—such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.

In a world that seems increasingly short of singular initiative, courage and fortitude, I count myself lucky to have chanced upon the commemorative tablet and thus come into far-removed contact with a remarkable adventurer.