On the Importance of Community

Fifty years have flown past since I carved an opening in the woods by the shore and built my cabin at Big Bras d’Or using handsaw and hammer. In the half-century since 1971 I had never felt anything but wholehearted about returning to Boularderie Island. Not until this year, the second year of the pandemic. Cape Bretoners have enjoyed a relatively easy time with the corona virus. News reports suggested that some of them might be inclined to say that the come-from-away summer folks should stay away, and thus help keep Cape Breton Island relatively free of Covid-19. When Cousin Louise called two days before our departure from Victoria to report that she and her twin—neither having yet had their second vaccine shot—were too scared to collect us at the Sydney airport, my initial impulse was to cancel our flights and forgo ‘Bigador’ for a second straight summer. I changed my mind.

It is a measure of my antiquity that I have known five generations of the Squires family. Jack Squires begat Ted Squires, who begat Stuart and Kevin Squires. Their four sons and daughters have produced four members of the fifth generation. My friend Darcy, who I have known since he was born, turned 43 the other day. Most of the houses on Lakeview Drive are occupied by people named Squires. For that reason, I have an alternate name for Lakeview: ‘Squiresville”. Fifty years ago it was Ted Squires who lent me the ‘cat’s-paw’ tool I used to dismantle the derelict house that stood on the land. It was Ted who taught me the rudiments of how to frame my 20’ x 16’ cabin in the woods. When I had finished my little building, and installed a watertight roof over it, it was Ted’s approval I most wanted—and most valued when it was given.

Kevin was just 17 when I began pulling every nail and spike out of the old house. At age 24 I was much older. We became friends after crossing paths in our travels along Old Route 5 and have remained friends throughout the years. It is on Kevin’s land that ‘Leo’, my old Dodge Ram, spends the winter. So of course it was to Kevin I turned for alternative transport from the airport to Big Bras d’Or. He had no hesitation.

Jan and I soon discovered that we needn’t have fretted that Boularderie Islanders would be loath to have us back. In Victoria, most of our Ontario Street neighbours are strangers. Here, at an early gathering of people we have known for years, old friends were more welcoming than ever. I felt glad not to have aborted the flights.

After an absence of close to two years we found that ‘Bigador’ was not just as we had left it. Four-foot aspen saplings grew in the middle of the road. The ‘lawn’ by the cabin had turned into a tall-grass prairie. The propane-powered fridge refused to start. The 50-year-old range leaked fuel and took 15 minutes to boil water for morning tea and coffee. After two years of neglect the solar batteries functioned feebly. One by one we managed to remedy the problems. Then an even bigger infrastructure problem erupted. Driving to North Sydney for a dinner date at the Lobster Pound, the check-engine light flashed on Leo’s dash. Simultaneously the truck suffered a massive power loss. I pulled to the side of Highway 105. What to do? Well, the answer was clear. What else, call Kevin Squires. He came to the rescue, lent us his own Ram pickup, assured us he wouldn’t need it for several days.

Two weeks later, Leo is still in truck hospital. We are told the truck needs a new electronic control module but the repair folks say they can find no replacement, new or used, anywhere in North America. Once again it is a Squires who comes to the rescue. Stuart knows someone who can find me a new ECM. We now have confidence that Leo will get the necessary surgery, perhaps before we depart. In the meantime we are driving yet another Dodge Ram—Stuart’s.

I count many blessings here in the cabin on the margin of the Great Bras d’Or. The quiet is sublime. Robins provide entertainment as they feed on the berries of the mountain-ash just beyond our windows. The trail to Dalem Lake has never looked better. But perhaps even more important than all that, we feel part of a community and have friends we can count on when circumstance obliges us to call for help.

Echoes of Stornoway

Two centuries ago, my great-great grandfather, Donald ‘The Scholar’ Campbell, was one of the pioneer Scots immigrants who settled on the opposite shore of the Great Bras d’Or in a place that came to be known as New Harris. In a 1830 letter to his brother-in-law at Stornoway on the Hebridean island of Lewis, he rhapsodized about all the rewards of life in his new homeland and urged his wife’s brother to join him in New Scotland, and make sure to bring fishing nets while he was at it.

Boularderie Island today is populated by uncounted descendants of Donald Campbell. I am just one of Donald’s numerous great-great-grandsons. Two among the raft I know and care about are Jack Campbell and David MacDonald, two who had never been introduced to one another. I decided it would be a good idea to organize a pilgrimage by three great-great grandsons to the place where our ancestor built a home for his young family in the 1820s. And so it came to pass on a suitably sunny September Sunday. 

Jack had previously led me to the site of Donald Campbell’s homestead. The intervening years have left the site even more choked with windfall and dense undergrowth than it was before. Jack and David are even older than I am, both of them octogenarians. The going got rough; I began to wonder whether this might have been a very bad idea instead of a good one. I imagined having to call Diane or Sheila to report news both bad and good: the bad news is that your spouse is gone; the good news is that his final words were that he loved you more than ever. But we managed to make our way to the old foundation stones, contemplated the life Donald and his children might have lived at New Harris and emerged from the slog in the woods intact. I felt sweet relief; the phone call I rehearsed would not be needed. 

Jack and David found plenty to talk about. I was happy to be a third wheel as they reminisced about people long gone that I never knew. We agreed to extend the historical tour. We carried on from New Harris to New Campbellton, a community of consequence in the boyhood years of both men. Heeding Jack’s instructions, I turned the truck into a laneway, climbed a hill to an old house at the end of it. This is the house where I was born in 1937, Jack said. On the veranda sat a lady in a rocking chair reading a book. I got out of the truck to introduce myself. At the sight of someone as big and ugly as me, she might have reached for a shotgun and invited me to bugger off. But no, this is Cape Breton; once introductions were made she insisted we all come in for tea, cookies and conversation. It was impossible not to be smitten by our hostess. She spoke in a  lovely lilt and told me that she had acquired it at the very place Donald Campbell had directed his letter in 1830: Stornoway on the island of Lewis. You imagine. The ensuing conversation was lively, wide-ranging and very entertaining.

Jack was pleased to learn about the history of the old house. David, a novelist and short-story writer, described his early experience of the house and explained that one of his stories was inspired in part by this very house. Our new friend had us write our names in a notebook. I promised to let her know by email about David’s books and my own. We departed the old place feeling well rewarded for having taken the turn on the laneway to Jack’s birthplace.

That was not the end of the adventure. We carried on to the lovely hilltop cemetery at the end of another New Campbellton laneway, inspected the grave markers of people we once knew and some we never did, including one bearing the name of a young man who went off to war in 1915 and never returned to his New Campbellton family.

All three of Donald’s descendants awarded high marks to our day at New Harris and New Campbellton. When it came time to part, my cousins expressed eagerness about renewing acquaintance in the summer of 2022. I like to think it will come to pass.

Back to Boularderie

Pandemics and peregrinations make poor bedfellows. At long last, after a Covid-induced hiatus of more than 22 months, Jan and I are back on Boularderie Island. We arrived August 16 to find five-foot high poplars growing in the middle of the road, and the facsimile of a tall grass prairie flourishing where the cabin ‘lawn’ used to be. The walking trails are choked with the proceeds of the windstorms that have come and gone since early October 2019. Otherwise the old place looks pretty much as it did before safe distancing, hand sanitizer and mandatory masks changed our everyday world. True, when we arrived neither the propane-powered fridge nor the stove were in working order, and the solar batteries no longer yielded the same reliable voltage they did before. It took a whole week but eventually the infrastructure issues were sorted out and we are once again enjoying the usual gamut of cabin amenities.

Jan and I were amazed to see how much has grown in two years. Maples and birches are the starfish of the woods: cut one down and a dozen shoots spring from the stump to take their turn in the sunlight. In the past I have occasionally missed a year in Cape Breton but never two, not until now. Left alone for two growing seasons, some of the maple shoots have grown to five feet. To restore my fields to something like the state the birds and I wish them to be in, I am kept busy with brush cutter and chainsaw. I need never complain there is nothing to do.

It is a significant anniversary at ‘Bigador’: fifty years have elapsed since I framed the original cabin way back in 1971. After half a century the cedar shingles are wrinkled and weathered, and there is peeling paint wherever I look but the roof is straight and the building seems as plumb as ever. As the years sailed past I have come to be more and more like my dear, departed mother in one telling way: I value peace and quiet enormously, and there is plenty of it on offer here on the margin of the Great Bras d’Or.

The sleeping porch remains sublime. Tucked in our bed after dark, often the only sound to be heard is the conversation of barred owls from the top of Kelly’s Mountain, two miles across the strait. On a moonless night the stars in our corner of the galaxy are still familiar. From my vantage point on the starboard side of the porch bed I can admire the red giant, Arcturus, splendid in the northwest. Familiar though Arcturus may be, I still marvel that, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, it has taken 37 years for the beams of Arcturus to reach my rods and cones. I need no reminding that the cosmos is very large and our nickel-and-dime galaxy just an insignificant fragment of it.

In Victoria my habit is to get up about 5 a.m. and forage through the virtual pages of the Guardian, Washington Post, and CBC for the latest installment of world gloom and grief. Here, change is forced upon me: the firs and birches surrounding the cabin do not provide Internet connectivity. If something of consequence is left unreported by the producers at CBC Radio news, I will know nothing about it. I am compelled to do without.

It is doubtful our return left our fellow inhabitants of the land shouting for joy. One evening a big white-tailed doe fled at our approach. From the droppings they leave behind, we know that we share the old place with coyotes, foxes, even a bear. The bear appreciates what we do: a bumper crop of blackberries and blueberries. In the fringes of the old orchard, branches heavy with apples hang low to the ground.

I am ordinarily here by the first of June or thereabouts when there is a richness of birds and wildflowers to appreciate. Late August is a doldrums time for both; I make do with what is on offer: a few migrant songbirds, and the less than entirely charming flowers that dominate at this time of year. We make the best of what we have, learning to identify the abundant goldenrods and asters. Now we can differentiate the rough-stemmed goldenrods from their grass-leaved cousins, the calico aster from the tansy ragwort.

There is always adventure to be had in our morning walk to Dalem Lake: a close encounter with wood frog or hairy woodpecker, the call-of-the wild yodel of a loon, terns enjoying the heck out of tormenting a bald eagle.

It is already five years since Bob Nagel established that he was not in fact a latter-day Dorian Gray. Bob’s successor as lord of the manor I took to calling Wuthering Heights is a lady, lovely young Dinao. I would have given favourable odds that the purchaser of Bob’s old house would raze it. But far from consigning it to ashes, Dinao has decided to save it. She is investing time and resources to make it livable the year round. In all the years I have know it, the ancient building has never looked so good. It gladdens the heart.