As Regards the Mighty Mosquito

At Big Bras d’Or it is still mosquito high season. Black flies are pretty much behind us, no-see-ums are near their peak, deer flies are ascendant too; horse flies are just around the corner. But, ah, mosquitoes, well, they have flourished these past six weeks and they continue to impress us with their ability to proliferate and make their pesky presence perfectly plain despite our best efforts to minimize both their numbers and their impact on the inside of our screened sleeping porch.

It occurs to me that it is high time I give our buzzy neighbour his—forgive me, her—just due. Now please don’t misunderstand: my mission here is not to praise the most successful of our insect biters—no, definitely not that—but to acknowledge that if you think about it for a few moments longer than it takes to swat a mosquito charged with your precious lifeblood, you have to acknowledge that in the mosquito, Mother Nature has designed herself a pretty effective fellow traveler on Planet Earth.

I dare not venture which species of mosquito rules the roost on both sides of our porch screens these days: Canada boasts more than seventy species of mosquito of which 27 breed in Nova Scotia. At the first light of day these late-July mornings it is commonplace for us to count as many as a hundred mosquitoes gathered on the opposite sides of each of the screens separating our sleeping nook from the great outdoors. If only they were all on the right side of the screens but, no, at 5:30 in the morning we typically realize that as many as one in ten of the winged fellows are on the wrong side of the screen, many of them swollen with my blood or Jan’s.

Mosquitoes are equipped with a marvelous array of blood-finding tools: terrific eyesight, heat detection apparatus, first-rate flying skills. Step outside and mosquitoes find us straight away.

Every single one of the blood-loaded biters in our porch are females. Only females bite; they do so not because they are sadists bent on tormenting our kind but because it is essential to the continuation of their kind. The females cannot produce eggs without first having a blood meal. In the mosquito’s world only the females feed on blood. The males? They don’t trouble us at all: they are vegetarians, they feed on plant juices. Honest.

You need superior close-up vision to discern the distinction, but you can separate the males from the females by eye. The male boasts feathery antennae; the female’s are simpler, only sparsely hairy. We collect rainwater in three big barrels arrayed under the downspouts. It does not take long for the females to realize that the deep pools of the barrels are a good place to lay their eggs. We use rainwater for washing only—not for drinking or cooking—but mosquito larvae, called “wrigglers” for obvious reasons, turn into mosquitoes; we add a little bleach to the rainwater and hope to thereby control the local population. Our impression is that the measure is not especially effective.

I cannot tell you how many species of mosquito inhabit our planet; the number is many times greater than seventy. In North America there are tree-hole mosquitoes that carry out their procreative duties not in rain barrels but in tree cavities. There is even a snow mosquito of northern forests that makes its first spring appearance when the woodland duff is still well covered in snow. The female lays her eggs in pools of meltwater; no surprise, the larvae take longer to hatch than the species of Aedes that do their egg-laying in our rain barrels.

They are only doing what they’re supposed to, Bob Nagel would point out—quite correctly. We can hardly vilify them for doing precisely as Nature meant them to. But why would Nature have perpetrated such a game plan? Well, for one thing, mosquitoes provide excellent dining for the breeding warblers we cherish at Bigadore, the nighthawks that announce their presence as afternoon turns to evening, and to the bats that, sadly, are not nearly as evident in these parts as they once were. Without mosquitoes all these creatures would be in trouble.

Before my gentle reader leaps to the conclusion that myriad mosquito bites have driven me completely bonkers, relax: I will continue to burn mosquito coils at night, spray the screens with Raid, throw bleach into the rain barrels, and yes, go on a killing spree each and every morning I find two or three dozen gravid females on the inside of the screen, but I can’t help it: my resentment is tempered by more than a little grudging regard for the myriad features that make the mosquito a summer foe we can never defeat despite our best, most focussed efforts.

Not Wooden Ships – the Other Kind

There are wooden ships and steel ships, Bob Nagel liked to observe, but there is no ship like friendship. Bob’s old chestnut came to mind this week as Jan and I were favoured with a visit from bosom buddies Carole and Garth. The friendship goes back only seven years but in truth it feels as though we have burgeoned and reveled in one another’s company for far longer than that.

If I shovel out the outhouse and whipper-snip the tall grass meridian of the road to the cabin, if Jan and I combine to produce a first-evening feast comprising her best lobster chowder and my most pungently impressive Caesar salad, you can safely surmise that we are particularly ardent that arriving friends shall feel royally welcomed.

But in my tiny mind the proof of friendship is neither the shoveled-out privy nor the four-star chowder but something else: let’s call it the R factor. If Relaxed is the best descriptor of a gathering of friends, you know you’re on to something good. With G & C we do not fret that our friends must cope without running water, wide-screen TV, or a guest suite featuring king-sized bed and step-in Jacuzzi. We relax.

He has seen it before but Garth’s first 2018 sighting of Kelly’s Mountain and the Great Bras d’Or from the vantage point of the screened porch inspired a question: Do you know how lucky you are? Oh yes, indeed I do.

Good ol’ Bobby Nagel had a sign on his kitchen wall – These are the Good Old Days – that was a constant reminder we should always endeavour to appreciate the Here and Now. Hanging out with G & C, I seem never more present in the moment, never more grateful for my current-time good fortune. Which is not to say that any facsimile of a three-ring circus characterizes a visit with G & C. We make do with simple pleasures: wide-ranging conversation, recollections of past adventures, the sight of gannets dive-bombing for seafood right in front of the cabin, Venus resplendent in the evening’s western sky.

On Tuesday we moved the old kitchen table to the porch and spent three happy hours playing bridge. Only one of us, Jan, is an accomplished player but the rest of us like the game a lot, want to get better at it, and revel in the play of a hand in which we do nothing remarkably stupid. Typically the men square off against the women and that generally means that the men always lose, luck being a smaller element in bridge than it is in any other card game I can think of, but this time, wonder of wonders, the men prevailed. Holy doodle.

The days were blistering – sunny and hot from Monday through Wednesday. The route to the swimming hole can be a bit of a challenge for folks not blessed with the dexterity and surefootedness of a mountain goat. Carole decided to let discretion prevail over valour and stayed in the relative cool of the porch but Garth decided that a bracing dip in the Great Bras d’Or was worth the small challenge of getting there.

After a summer at Big Bras d’Or my pal Mike Whitney likes to inquire whether the season featured any new and exciting skinny-dipping developments. Mike will not be impressed with what I have to report on this front for the summer of 2018 to date. On Tuesday, while the women folk went off to Hank’s Farm for local produce, Garth and I decided to cool off au naturel. Before getting down to birthday suits, we looked around to ensure no one was within sightlines. We did so not out of bashfulness or sense of decency but out of a desire not to appall innocent bystanders with the sight of what happens to the human body by its eighth decade.

Jan abides by a hard-and-fast rule when it comes to accepting the hospitality of friends. Like fish, she maintains, company goes bad after three days. The rule has a corollary: Leave them wanting more. It is a rule we live by on our visits with Garth and Carole at Amherst Shore on Nova Scotia’s Northumberland Strait. Nonetheless, I hoped that I might find some way to persuade our friends that in this case the exception should apply, not the rule. Alas, it was not to be. After two nights and parts of three days our buddies took their leave. Garth’s departing words told all: leave them wanting more. Dammit.

In Search of Donald Campbell

Offer me the opportunity to do a bit of time travel and I am powerless to resist. My cousin Jack Campbell—my third cousin if you care to know—is, like myself, the great-great grandson of an early Scots pioneer in these parts, Donald Campbell—my father’s father’s mother’s father. Donald arrived in Cape Breton from the Highlands of Scotland sometime in the later 1820s. He built himself a homestead on a grant of two hundred acres close to the shore of the Great Bras d’Or—at a place that would be named for a Hebridean island and come to be known as New Harris. We’re mounting a little expedition to snoop about the site of Donald’s old homestead, Jack explained, would you like to come? Hell, yes, I would.

The site is not far from the north end of the big green bridge now spanning the Great Bras d’Or between New Harris and Boularderie Island. The crew—Jack, his son John, and Dave Oake, the lucky man hitched to my cousin Denise Campbell, together with yours-truly—mounted the expedition on Wednesday, in clear but distinctly not cool summer conditions. Our party scrambled over terrain now choked with windfall and leg-lacerating blackberry canes: not perhaps everyone’s cup-of-tea but perfectly fine by me.

Now a still-nimble octogenarian, Jack has visited the site more than a few times, beginning as long ago as the late 1940s. This time he came equipped with air survey photo, land grant map, GPS and a couple of extra special items meant to entice his crewmates: the bowls of two old clay pipes he’d found at the site years and years ago. One bowl is marked “Garibaldi Pipe”, the other bears no words but is decorated with features strongly suggesting an Irish origin—Irish harp and shamrocks. Who was the smoker who jettisoned the broken pipes in days long gone? Wouldn’t it be grand if we could feel confident they once provided late-evening comfort to our dear old great-great-granddad?

Virtually nothing would now be known about our ancestor but for a vital relic from the year 1830 that tells more than a little about Donald Campbell. A remarkable letter, written by Donald himself, survives, a letter revealing a good deal about his feelings for his new Cape Breton homeland, the activities that occupied him as a pioneer, the priorities he stressed as he contemplated his near future.

The letter was penned to Donald’s brother-in-law, Hugh McKay, of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. In it, Donald revels in his independence, his freedom from the demands he would face if he were still a simple Scots crofter beholden to a Highland laird.

One of the details emerging from Donald’s letter is that his wife Barbara was pregnant. The child was born in 1831, a sister to Jack’s great-grandfather Angus and—in the fullness of time—my great-grandmother.

“Thank God I am well pleased for coming to this country”, Donald wrote, “as I find myself quite easy, having occupied land called my own free from all burden whatsoever. I go out and in at my pleasure, no soul living forces me to do a turn against my will, no laws, no factors here, no rents nor any toilsome work but what I do for myself.” Donald Campbell clearly wanted Hugh McKay to join him in Cape Breton but he hedged his bets: “Fishing is plentiful here, any person having plenty of fishing materials is sure of fishing well here . . . but if you have not the spirit to come send me one of your herring nets.”

Donald’s letter is wonderfully evocative of a place and time now long gone. The letter, close to 190 years old, is pretty much all we have left of our ancestor. The year of Donald’s birth, the year of his passing, the whereabouts of his burial place—none of these things are known. Nor do we know whether Hugh McKay sent his brother-in-law the much-desired fishing nets. Donald’s descendants hope he did.

We managed to make our way to the homestead site, a depression indicating a long-ago cellar, stone piles once part of a foundation or wall nearly two centuries old. If the site once so easily yielded bits of two broken clay pipes, what else might be uncovered if a keen crew were to return with a few tools—picks and shovels, let’s say; a buck saw, maybe even a metal detector? Perhaps in dispatches hence I will be able to supply answers to my loyal readers.