Ready for Rain

After what feels like weeks of relentless heat and humidity—humidex levels in the upper thirties, cascades of sweat from the slightest exertions—it is difficult to avoid wondering whether we have a new Cape Breton climate, one more evocative of the bayous of Louisiana than the boreal forests of our native land. With record wildfires raging in BC and Ontario we wonder how long Nova Scotia can escape similar peril.

Once when young and especially foolish, I sought the sun, preferred a brown-as-a-berry look to my native pasty whiteness, recklessly disregarded warnings about melanoma. Those days are long gone. Now what is relentless is the search for shade and our daily dips in the precious, cooling waters of the Great Bras d’Or. I cherish time spent in the screened porch, indulging nothing more athletic than turning the pages of a compelling Ian Rankin novel. The rain barrels have been dusty dry for days. We rely on Bob Nagel’s still-reliable spring for water, and waste not a drop of it. I am told there are people who still deny that H. sapiens has had any impact whatsoever on the planet’s climate. How can this be?

Given a summer that looks and feels very much like the ones formerly celebrated by the Beach Boys it is perhaps no surprise that we have become a destination again. I have already reported on the blithesome visit of pals Garth and Carole. Now we can add six more kith and kin to the summer guest list, with another seven on the near horizon. Elizabeth and Steve forsook Winnipeg in summer to grace us with their presence. Steve’s day on the Margaree—described in the preceding post—was just one highlight of their noteworthy five-day stay.

The Black Hole of Calcutta came to mind on a sweltering evening at St. Andrew’s Church in Sydney Mines where the four of us gathered with three hundred other swelterers to rhapsodize in the enduring musical talent of Sydney Mines’ own Barra MacNeils.  I marveled that the performers could put out so much energy on such a steamy evening. I also marveled that the audience—hardly any of them under forty—stayed the course without anyone collapsing from the heat. So far as I could tell no audience member had to be hauled away by ambulance; virtually everyone stood at concert’s end to accord the MacNeil brothers-and-sister a heartfelt and sweaty standing ovation.

On Friday, while the men sought close encounters with salmon on the Margaree River, the women—Liz and Jan—went to Goose Cove to take advanced instruction in the fine arts of paper eco-printing and hand-stitched book bindery. I felt duly impressed with the proceeds of the women’s concentration.

Once upon a time, more than four decades ago, the cabin slept as many sixteen people on a single summer night. To be sure, the sixteen were young, flexible and undemanding of five-star amenities. Nowadays we do a little better at seeing to it that friends and relatives get to sleep in relative comfort. Earlier this year the loss of my Victoria workshop was the price I paid for concurring that the basement space might be better purposed if we converted it to a combination rec room and guest bedroom. Now the Big Bras d’Or workshop is re-purposed too, though not fatally to its principal role as a place to make sawdust. The workshop now doubles as a guest bunkhouse. Liz and Steve seemed perfectly happy to take advantage of the new queen-sized bed that now graces the space when table- and crosscut-saws are removed.

We didn’t come close to breaking the old record but the compound did provide sanctuary for eight souls—nine if you count Cooper the little Italian greyhound (and count him we must)—when the Mahone Baysians—Naomi, Terry and the girls—joined the rest of us for the August long weekend. There are three Murphy beds in the cabin. All three were deployed. No outbreak of cabin fever occurred. Apart from the swimming and shade-seeking we took a chance on an evening bonfire—nothing burned that wasn’t meant to—and fought pitched card-game battles. Young Sara, not yet a teenager, helped to demolish me in a rousing game of Hearts. I learned another game—‘Hand and Foot’—and lost at that too.

Jan and I have only each other’s company for the next few days but soon enough another contingent of seven—niece Sarah and nephew Michael, together with their families—will get to savour the enhanced attractions of Shack-ri-La. I am ardent to show them off.

Margaree Magic

Deliver Steve Erickson, rod and reel in hand, to a storied salmon-fishing river and you will soon see you are in the presence of someone in Elysium. I joined Steve for a day-long adventure on the Margaree, a salmon river rivalled in the Maritimes only by New Brunswick’s magnificent Miramachi. Rising at 4 a.m., Steve and I spent an hour getting to Margaree Forks, an hour of edifying and wide-ranging conversation that boosted my opinion of Jan’s elder son even higher than it already was.

Mere days earlier, Steve had wrapped up a fortnight as fishing guide on the Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territory. One might have speculated that two weeks of non-stop fishing north of the Arctic Circle might have slaked the man’s appetite for fly-casting and mosquitoes but such speculation would be entirely wrong.

We arrived at Margaree Forks just past 5:30 and soon struck up amiable conversation with Scott, another angler waiting for the clock to strike six, the official start time for fishing the Margaree. No need to rush in any event, Scott advised, the Margaree’s salmon have not been rising to the fly. The weather hereabouts has evoked Louisiana more than it has Nova Scotia this summer: given inadequate rainfall and a run of too-hot weather the waters of the Margaree are low and warm. What’s more the salmon have “sore lips”: some have already been seduced by a man-made fly and are loath to make the same mistake twice.

The reward of catching a salmon on the Margaree is definitely not the feast one anticipates after landing a ten- or twelve-pound fish. Uh, uh. The fishing protocol is strictly catch-and-release. If you’re lucky enough to hook and land a salmon you may take a few seconds to pose for a photo before releasing your prize unharmed.

Starting at six sharp, Steve methodically worked the Dollar Pool where, on a July day nine years ago, he was the only angler to land a salmon. My key role was to play cameraman in the event that Steve hooked a salmon again but there was plenty more to occupy me. Above the high water line the banks of the Margaree teemed with wildflowers. Clearly I do not spend enough time wandering river courses: several of the flowers I spotted were new to me, so with one eye cocked on what might be unfolding at the river’s edge, I got nose to stamens with several flowers I’d never laid eyes on.

At the outside edge of the Dollar Pool there were salmon to see—plenty of them. But they had zero interest in Steve’s flies. Over and over again, as his well-cast ‘bomber’ fly floated over their heads, the salmon—perhaps fifty of them in one section of the pool—looked as disinterested as Donald Trump might be in a meeting of the local social justice league. If the fish had middle digits to raise, I thought, we’d see them in force. It was then, nearly six hours in, that I absolutely knew Steve’s efforts were futile: there would be no salmon in his immediate future.

We moved back to the shallow rapid that marks the forks—the junction of the Southwest Margaree and the river’s main branch. By now almost all of the other anglers had abandoned ship. I was on my knees looking at yet another unfamiliar flower when I heard Steve’s shout: he had a salmon hooked! It was in this moment that his expertise rose to the fore. The fishermen use barbless hooks; if he allowed the line to slacken the salmon could free himself from the hook and be on his merry way. After six hours on the river Steve had reconciled himself to going without a catch. The cast that did the job might well have been his last fruitless offering of the day. It was his last of the day, but one that ended in glory. The picture tells all. Behold the angler’s smile as he shows off his ten-pound beauty. His delight was infectious: I too was high as a kite, just about as excited as if Steve Nash suddenly showed up at my Boularderie door, keen for an afternoon of conversation in the cool of the cabin porch.

Here is the best part. Steve duplicated what he’d done nine years ago: his salmon was the only one we saw landed in our day on the Margaree. It couldn’t happen to a more stand-up guy.

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.