Communing with Robert Service and Sam McGee

Given my enthusiasm for the adventures Jan and I had savoured along Cumberland County back roads, Garth offered a proposal too good to reject: let’s head out on a back road that will make yesterday’s potholed blacktop look smooth and serene.

My pal retains great affection for the backwoods “camp” he has known since about age 5, the little cabin, now about a century old, that supplies never-to-be-forgotten memories of the hunting and fishing expeditions Garth shared with his dad and brothers all the way back to the late 1940s. I proposed we make the four-wheel-drive Ram pickup our vehicle of choice. Just as well.

We took an unmarked road off Nova Scotia highway 366 that just happened on this day to be a hive of activity: heavy-duty trucks and bulldozers engaged in offloading yards of gravel topfill. A kilometre along the road I lost a staredown with the driver of a big truck heading the opposite way. Being smaller than the other guy I was obliged to retreat about half a kilometre. That minor trouble remedied, we managed to resume our journey, sometimes having to drop the truck transmission into bull low to get through two-foot moguls of dumped gravel.

It was only when we reached the far shore of Long Lake that Garth confessed we had overshot the turnoff to our destination. Another retreat safely negotiated, we made our way over five kilometres of mud and mire that made it clear the Ram had been the right vehicle choice. Along the way we paused long enough to allow a mother ruffed grouse to get her young brood out of harm’s way. Warblers and white-throated sparrows sang from scrubby woods beyond the road edge. Given the road condition our slow progress posed no threat to the numerous swallowtail butterflies going about their business. A rusting, long-abandoned old road grader gave my friend comfort we were where we needed to be.

We passed the front gate of a Boy Scout camp, two privies on the opposite side of the road, one equipped with classic crescent moon window in its door. Himself a long-ago scout of some distinction, Garth explained that, yes, a navigation badge was among the great array he had accumulated as a lad.

Perched on a foundation of large logs, the front deck of the one-room cabin commands a fine view of Long Lake. My first sight of the little cabin evoked thoughts of Robert Service. The notion is not original: at the cabin’s west end a finely made metal sign catches the observer’s eye. A buck deer at one end of it and leaping trout at the other straddle the words Strange Things Done, a snippet from the Yukon bard’s beloved ‘Cremation of Sam McGee’: There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.

Through the cabin window we could see all the comforts a fellow could possibly need for a week in the woods: bed, table, woodstove, ample pantry shelf. We burdened a couple of chairs on the little deck, Garth reminiscing about the satisfaction he and his Dad savored apropos his boyhood duck-hunting prowess. A chopping block with two axes stands in one direction, the one-hole outdoor privy in another, a boat and canoe in front of us at the water’s edge. A red-eyed vireo proclaimed his territorial imperative to one side of the deck; to the other a robin paused en route to its nest, with the fat green caterpillar it would soon supply to a clamorous nestling.

We both could have happily lingered far longer but we had places to go and our women to meet so we tore ourselves away, departing by way of a trail through the woods to a neighbouring cabin, its woodshed festooned with deer antlers, moose rack, kerosene lantern and rusting metal Coca Cola signs.

I understand perfectly well why the old cabin is near and dear to my friend’s heart. I know plenty of people who find a city’s amenities the ones they need to make life sweet. On a sunny July day, a shack in the woods by the side of a trout-filled lake, with nothing but bird song to disrupt the quiet, seems perfectly fine to me.