Cruising Cumberland County with Cultured Companions

Nay, though it was the blithe days of August, we forsook Big Bras d’Or, put ourselves in the hands of cultivated mainland friends and soaked up history and culture in Nova Scotia’s Cumberland County.

In 1968 my longest-suffering friend, Stephen, worked as an archaeologist at Fort Beausejour, just across the present-day New Brunswick border. By contrast, I had never laid eyes on Beausejour. I feel culpable at having to confess that lamentable fact.

Without really having been intentionally designed for the role, this summer has been steeped in the history of the French Acadian people and the dreadful expulsion the British powers-that-be forced upon them beginning in 1755.

I have been schooled in this: we cannot judge 250-year-old actions by modern-day standards and values but I learnt something from a recently acquired 1897 history of Annapolis County, that even then – in 1755 – more than a few British officers and administrators knew what they were perpetrating was entirely wrong. The exhibits at Beausejour enhanced my sense of what the peaceful and productive Acadians had built in the century before 1755 – and what was lost when their communities were razed and the people dispersed across the seas.

The Sackville NB wildfowl park provided relief after Beausejour. In thirty-five years of birding I had never seen such concentrations of yellowlegs – sandpipers told, well, by their bright yellow legs – and further concentrations of phalaropes, grebes and ducks.

I have become a strange sort of aficionado: these past few years I prowl old graveyards, not for the necrophilic allure they might offer to specialists, but for something else: white bronzes. White bronzes are grave markers made of zinc. They were all the rage from about 1880 to the early 1890s then faded out of fashion. White bronzes leap off the page when seen in a cemetery of the right vintage. They are impervious to weather and climate and really have only one enemy: vandals. They are ornate, stylish and – to my eye – quite beautiful. We found four at Sackville, each providing food for thought by way of the sad, mortal inscriptions often inscribed upon them.

Led by Stephen and Sheila, we did a walkabout among the fine old homes of Amherst NS, and hung on every word as our friends sought to edify us on the differences between Gothic Revival and Queen Anne building styles.

Cape Chignecto Provincial Park at the edge of the Bay of Fundy was a ‘lifer’ for us all. We walked the dramatic headlands between the Three Sisters rock formations and Squally Point, taking pictures hand over fist. How was life to be endured, I wondered, before the invention of digital photography.

We dined regally at the Cape d’Or lighthouse and the Wild Caraway near the end of the road in Advocate Harbour. At our Advocate digs there was a beautiful infestation: numbers of migrating eastern bluebirds whose kind I had encountered only once before in Nova Scotia. I exulted.

Having inflicted ourselves on Stephen and Sheila for three days we took our act to Pancake Hill near Port Greville. If Stephen is my longest-suffering friend he is only marginally so: George Perry is a close second. Staying with George and Joan, we walked the trails, birded, stuffed ourselves on a bumper crop of wild blackberries, enjoyed terrific conversation, compared notes on the effect aging has on the speed of a man’s fastball, sought recommendations on the books we should put at the head of our reading list.

We capped the time away with a return engagement at Truro, a visit with Doris Irene, my dear old Mum. It was she who taught me the abiding reward of counting one’s blessings. In the sunny summer of 2016 there are plenty to count. Who knows how well we’ve earned the good fortune that follows us like a loyal dog these days but we’ll continue to savour it with gratitude.