Bob Nagel, 1929-2016

A peregrination of the ultimate sort needs reporting: Robert Carl ‘Bobby’ Nagel passed out of this vale of tears last night in Boston. Cancer claimed him – and stabbed more than a few tender hearts while the dreaded attacker was at it. Many of us imagined that Bob was ageless and indestructible, that in the fashion of Dorian Gray, he had a portrait in the attic that none of us ever saw. But, no, it turns out that not even Bob Nagel could elude the ravages of time.

He was as much a part of the balmy months at Boularderie Island as lobster boils, occasional sunshine and summer rain. One wonders how a Cape Breton summer can ever be the same in his absence. He of course would want the laughter to flow unabated as it always did in his ambit.

The ancient memory bank overflows with vivid recollections. I was 24, Bob 41 when we first crossed paths, at his Uncle Wally’s place on the hill. It was something like love at first sight. We each had prodigious appetites for beer and wine, and equally strong inclinations towards outrageous conduct. He had had Dan Murdoch Patterson build a fine A-frame summer place for him on the hill that became a magnet for those fond of food, flowing wine and fun. On one memorable occasion I remarked on what a marvelous sight it was to see so many drunken MacKenzies gathered in one place. Aunt Margaret demanded that he ban me from the hill. He didn’t.

In the summer of 2002, sitting in the marvelous screened porch at my cabin above the Great Bras d’Or, Bob’s eyes lit up when I said you should have a porch like this, let’s build you one next year. We didn’t wait that long. We started the next day; in six memorable weeks the porch was completed and we had a fine new venue for appreciating Alexander Keith and beholding the timeless beauty of Kelly’s Mountain and the Bird Islands.

It had been long years since he had ridden a bicycle but we got Bob back on two wheels and soon enough he was doing his best to impersonate Eddy Merckx. In his 78^th year Jan and I talked him into doing a one-day two-wheel circumnavigation of Boularderie Island – a hundred kilometres on the nose. It was a piece-of-cake triumph for the old guy.  He knew all – I mean all – the Broadway show tunes; he sang each and every one of them on the ride and never once repeated himself. I recall them all but have an especially fond and vivid memory of Bob belting out ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ as we rode Boularderie’s perimeter blacktop. He got even more ambitious: he joined us for a 400-km ride through PEI and the Magdalene Islands. He triumphed again.

He had been an ordinary ticket agent for American Airlines at Boston but the force of his personality was so large that American persuaded him to take on a bigger role: its VIP greeter at Logan. He got to be on first-name terms with Red Auerbach, Cardinal Cushing, Frank Sinatra and many others. Those who worked with him at Logan tell us that Bob was legendary – and bad to the bone.

In a little over a week Jan and I will be back on Boularderie. It will be the strangest of experiences to be there when Bob Nagel isn’t. Doubtless he will come up in conversation again and again. He had many friends for whom the letting-go will not be easy. Perhaps the sharing of fond memories will go some way to helping Bob’s friends adjust, friends for whom his company was always a pleasure, always a joy.

Robert loved music and not just music of the Broadway show variety. He shared a passion for opera with Jan, a passion they managed to infect me with, a little. Many times, sitting in that porch or in Bob’s kitchen we would listen to the great arias by the great tenors: Pavarotti, Domingo, Carreras and the man I came to imagine was the best of them all, Bjoerling.

When I want to summon memories of the Best of Bob I will turn to Bjoerling, to Nessun Dorma, and recall what it meant to be Bob’s friend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUbA5y1hnFg

Travels in Tuscany

 Eighteen days in Tuscany compensated for last year’s dearth of European travel. Our UK friends at On Foot in Salisbury reprised what they did for us in Dorset and Garrotxa two and three years ago: they provided a diverting walking route, arranged the nightly roofs over our heads and looked after transporting our bags from flop to flop. They did a good job of it all. The On Foot walk is billed as ‘Renaissance Hilltop Towns of Tuscany’, a label both evocative and apt. We walked up to 19 km a day, had the world between towns much to ourselves and were given much to see.

Perhaps it was the time of year: Tuscany was a palette of green – myriad greens – rather than the dry browns I had expected of this land of vineyards, olive groves and sun. Apropos birds and wildflowers I had arrived in Italy with muted expectations but May in Tuscany proved a revelation: we had plenty of both. On the first day in the hiking boots we spotted the remarkable bee-eater – several of them – dressed in most of the hues of the rainbow.

The outlandish hoopoe has been a grail bird in our European walks for years. This time Europe delivered: at Pieve a Salti in the early morning after our first night on the trail, we spotted our lifer hoopoe. Jan literally jumped for joy but being a good Canadian she did so silently so as not to disturb our sleeping fellow guests. 

All of the hilltop towns along our way – Montalcino, Bagno Vignoni, San Quirico, Pienza, Monticchiello, Montepulciano – are old, particularly by North American standards: narrow streets, many-centuries-old churches, cathedrals and basilicas. Amazement at the art and architecture we chanced to see became altogether routine. 

I have been pretty much a teetotaller since the summer of 2014 when my arrhythmic heart decided it didn’t like the volume of beer, wine and scotch I was taking on board. A world-class beer-swiller at age 27, I slowly discovered that a body is somehow less robust, less tolerant at 67. Nowadays the heart is much better behaved given that I substitute acqua frizzante – ‘fizz water’ – for cold beer and too many glasses of red wine. For all that, friends still gasped when I suggested that, well no, I wouldn’t be indulging in the world class wines of Tuscany. 

Fortunately, Tuscan food is also highly regarded and no constraints applied to our enjoyment of that. We ate well, plentifully and in good variety. One Italian confection I regard as world-best is gelati, Italian ice cream. Often made on site fresh daily, the gelati of Tuscany were invariably smooth and chockablock with flavour. 

The older I get the more convinced I am that walking – plenty of it – is one of life’s essentials, equally beneficial to body, mind and soul. We continued to wear out shoe leather after the official walking portion of our time in Tuscany was done. We went to Lucca, another ancient Renaissance town, walked the pathways of the city’s old rampart walls, saw many more chiese and cattedrali – churches and cathedrals – and exploited the happy fact that Lucca is where Giacamo Puccini happens to have been born. Jan likes opera and has managed to infect me with a measure of the same inclination. We visited the worthy Puccini museum at Lucca then enjoyed a night at the opera with a soprano and tenor who sounded to my highly untutored ear as good as Callas or Pavarotti.

Our weather was mostly blithe. On the first day of the walk an electrical storm had briefly delivered torrential rain, then it was mostly blue sky and sunshine that characterized our days.  The rain returned with a vengeance on the Sunday we arranged to travel to Carrara. Heritage House is publishing Remembered in Bronze and Stone, my book about Canadian war memorials this fall. Since the marble quarries in the mountains of Carrara were the source of about a hundred stone soldiers gracing Canadian monuments, I was keen to go there. Despite the rain I am glad we did. The Carrara quarries still supply huge volumes of marble to the whole wide world. We saw just a few of the 180 currently in operation. Each of them is enormous.

We had spent a day and a half in Siena prior to the walk. There we had joined the multitude of other tourists ogling Il Campo, the public square Montaigne claimed was the world’s most beautiful, and the remarkable Duomo, its facade as remarkably, ornately beautiful as the trove of art treasures displayed in its interior.

On the Carrara day we carried on to Pisa where the famous leaning tower, cathedral and baptistery drew thousands of turisti, many of whom seemed to think nothing is more fun than to be photographed leaning at the same angle as the tower.  Torrential rain returned, scattering the tourists. Jan and I took shelter under the canopy of an outdoor cafe and ate pizza – what else should a foreign tourist eat on a rainy Sunday in Pisa?

We wrapped up our eighteen days where we had begun: Florence, or as the locals prefer, Firenze. Before we left home I had searched and found that a British war cemetery is nearby. War cemeteries are irresistible; the Florence War Cemetery at Girone is as beautiful and evocative as any I have seen – and just as effective at inspiring contemplation.

The art of Florence – much of it out in the open on public display – and the city’s architecture are as remarkable as all the brochures boast. We gawped at the Duomo and Brunelleschi’s impossible dome. We spent a gobsmacked half-day at the Palazzo Pitti where you can take up-close looks at half-a-millennium-old treasures by Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Caravaggio, Take-your-pick. The narrow streets and sidewalks of old Florence seem perpetually crowded. I took a few hundred pictures of landmark sites, the foreground always jammed with people. We sought relief in green spaces and found what we looked for in the Fabbricotti and Stibbert parks where I was happy to find more birds than people – blackcaps, redstarts, chaffinches, goldfinches, treecreepers, blackbirds and herons.

Eighteen days seems just about the right amount of time to have spent in Tuscany. Our time on the trail and in the old towns was a delight when it was live – and looks good in the rear-view too. We reveled in the unfamiliar and the contrasts from our everyday world but – perhaps this is as good as it gets – we are grateful to be home and freshly alive to the allure of our own little corner of the planet.

North of 50

Compelled by good and sufficient reason to forgo a whole season at the summer shangri-la in Cape Breton, we decided to seek silver lining. Jan and I loaded the Vibe with tent and gear and drove north. I have lived four decades on Vancouver Island but only rarely have ventured north of the 50^th latitude at Campbell River. Almost everywhere we went was thus necessarily unfamiliar.

We camped first at tiny Kitty Coleman provincial park. Though it is only early August fall migration was underway. Shorebirds – dunlin, least and western sandpipers, black-bellied and semi-palmated plovers, turnstones and their ilk crossed our path.

Jan has fond childhood memories of Miracle Beach PP; I have none. We went there to remedy the void. We waded the foreshore , taking close looks at sand dollars and bivalves. A gang of eighty peeps – the aforementioned western and least sandpipers – went about their foraging business on the shore. Out of the blue a merlin – a splendid little falcon killing machine – materialized, snatching one of the foragers. The entire gang flushed as one, voiced  sandpiper alarm and invective then quickly settled again, memories of their late, ingested companion already fading.

At Elk Falls PP we tramped the Beaver Pond trail, found a smattering of late wildflowers, watched wood ducks going about their business among the pond lilies, and sat to behold nightfall in the woods.

After a morning driving in the rain Port McNeill welcomed us with sudden sunshine. BC Ferries took us to Sointula on Malcolm Island where 120 years ago Finnish idealists did their best to establish and preserve a utopian community. At the Koti Niemi cemetery Finnish graves proliferate, both ancient and recent.

At Malcolm’s Bere Point regional park we set up our third campsite, walked to the eponymous point, found none of the orcas that are wont to use the point as a rubbing site, but felt compensated by the rollers, mainland vistas, and assorted waterbirds flying past.

Then it was off to another island, Cormorant, and Alert Bay, home to the ‘Namgis First Nation. Alert Bay offered us much, not least the U’mista Cultural Centre, where one exhibit offered wrenching first-hand accounts of the torments children endured – or tried to – at the local residential school beginning in 1930.

U’mistas’s  highlight exhibit brings together glorious artifacts – masks, headpieces, costumes et al – from a remarkable and famous 1921 potlatch. With great lack of wisdom and surfeit of insensitivity federal authorities seized the potlatch treasures and prosecuted the principals. Over the years the U’mista people have recovered some but by no means all of the prizes stolen 94 years ago. ‘Beautiful, remarkable and affecting’ was my comment-book entry describing the impact of this exhibit.

If you are drawn to totem poles Alert Bay is a dream destination. At the old ‘Namgis burial ground we admired and photographed a dozen or so, most of them striking and unusual. The ‘Namgis Big House replaces the original, destroyed in a malicious arson attack by a non-native in the late 1990s. More totems stand outside the Big House including one billed as the world’s tallest until a storm knocked off the top six feet or so.

As if that weren’t enough, Alert Bay delivered another reward: we walked the boardwalk and trail through an impressive and flowery bog at the island’s ecological park, where stands a group of ‘spirit trees’, long dead red-cedars. Though no longer leafy and green the trees are not just imposing and evocative to humans of a particular bent but also provide utility to woodpeckers, waxwings and warblers.

On Thursday we made our way in the rain to Port Hardy at the far north of the Island. Given the inclemency we sacrificed another night in the tent in favour of a hotel room with hot showers and comfortable bed.

We saw no sign that high-tech industry has made its way to the land north of the 50^th. Not at all. Fishin’, loggin’ and minin’ are still, clearly and conspicuously, the order of the day in these parts. We dined late with local folk at the Quarterdeck restaurant and pub where the seafood pasta was just fine and the impromptu floorshow that much better: a beefy, brawny, bearded, big-voiced fisherman held court with a friend, describing with great colour the gill-netting highlights of the week. Not a sentence did he utter that failed to include an f-bomb or ten. Our friend was certainly a cusser but a congenial, affable, good-natured one. Perhaps no church-folk were about: nobody seemed to mind in the least.

At Port Hardy there is little room to proceed north, except by boat. So we turned around and made our way back from whence we’d come. Comox proved a lure. At the Comox Quay which is nowhere near the water, we dined worthily on salad and soup and admired the town’s unique war memorial. Outside the gates of CFB Comox the air museum furnished a final, excellent reward. I like to imagine I know a bit about Canada’s war history but the museum availed plenty that was unfamiliar – a suitable capper to our trip into unfamiliar territory.