A Celebration on the Barrens

Our good friend P., known to his kids sometimes as S., had a birthday yesterday, a big one.  P. turned 50, and we were very glad to be a part of celebrating him on his big day, for he is a very special good guy.

His choice to celebrate the day was to walk on the Barrens.  This is the great hike from Duncan's Cove to Ketch Harbour out along the granite headlands next to and high above the Atlantic.

It was a blowy day, and we agreed that the sky colour was bright grey.  The sea, as follows naturally, was also grey, though less bright, but highlighted with the bright whiteness of foam around the rocks, spray where the swells were breaking over shoal water, and the driven whitecaps.

In the rock cleft the water was crashing and booming.

It was a colourful group that stopped for a snack.

P. had a celebratory drink.

There was talk of dwarves and wood elves when we made our quiet way through the magic forest.

Two of us tried hard to levitate.

It was great to come around the point and see Sambro Island light in the distance.

And later, after food and gifts and songs, there was a fabulous cheesecake to finish us all off.  Happy day, P., and thanks so much for sharing it with us!

Chebucto Head

One of the things I particularly love to do is to go with Lorraine when she is looking for a location. We drove to Bayswater Beach a couple of days ago to look at a possible site there. Although we decided to look closer to home (this spot was on a small island out in the bay) and didn’t go for a swim, it was great to spend some time just sitting on the sand and watching the silvery ocean and the small waves that curled their fine edges and broke all along that beautiful beach.

This evening we decided to go and check out Chebucto Head. We were looking for the right angle and slope of land, and I ended up standing on some granite bedrock with the sea behind me while L. tried a few shots to see whether this location would work for the project she has in mind. What I love about it is being in a place, especially toward sunset, and feeling the quiet that is in it. I don’t have to think or make any decisions; my part in the process is to help look and to sometimes make a suggestion, but mostly I just have to be there in that place.

So I stood on that rock and noted the kinds of growth that survived on this exposed headland at the mouth of the harbour. I saw that the cranberries were beginning to ripen with a subtle cranberry blush where they were hanging on their tiny plants. The other interesting berries there were the grey-blue ones on the low ground juniper that grew around the rock outcrops and the occasional clumps of red bunchberries. Near the rock I was standing on were pitcher plants growing in the wet spots. I stuck my fingertip into one of the leaf vessels, felt the liquid in it, wondered if it was just water, and thought about how such a plant had evolved (I have since learned that the liquid in the plant’s pitchers is called phytotelma, which translates as “plant pond”).

Chebucto Head did remind me of Newfoundland, and not just because of the pitcher plants. There were a few alders out on the headland that had found a roothold there and just grew along the ground instead of growing up. It made me think of the stretches of tuckamore we walked through on the west coast of Newfoundland where the prevailing winds and salt spray keep the growth close to the ground – I remember an adult tamarack we saw there that was more than five metres across and no more than 20 centimetres high, complete with needles and cones and spread out along the ground.

As the sun began to set, I remembered an evening in Labrador where we walked through a high boggy area near the sea. We knew that people had been picking cloudberries around there, but finding our first ones was a small miracle. We would see one perched on its upright stalk and notice the next one a few metres away and kept on eating and sighting them in the twilight as we grazed our way to the edge of the bluff. There is nothing like the delicate texture and sweetness of ripe cloudberries (aka bakeapples) fresh picked on a Labrador evening.

All this is why I love these opportunities – it is all about being there at that time and all the other times we have been present in some special place in the evening quiet. You don’t need to be a photographer to do it, though scouting for locations is always a good motivator to get you out there looking and a good enough pretext to fall back on should you feel you need one; all you really need is just to be there.

Surf

Yesterday the surf was up. We could hear it crashing over on McNab’s as soon as we opened the door. Lorraine had commented on it earlier when she saw the waves breaking across the harbour and out on Thrumcap Shoal, and it had been building on Sunday, but you didn’t realize the full extent of it until you went outside and listened. The roar was distant but constant.

From what I can tell from the weather maps the large swells were comng from a disturbance offshore, probably the one that dumped huge amounts of rain on New York City. It looked like an intense low, and our easterly wind (usually a storm wind) was just a fresh and strong flow from that system. So we had a good day, sun shining, wind blowing, surf crashing, and not too cold (though it was one of those five degrees cooler along the coast forecasts).

Lorraine and I decided to head to Sailor’s Point, the lookoff at Herring Cove, to walk to the cairn and clear our heads after too much time indoors and inside our computers.
I have to admit to a love for the moment when these big rollers finally meet the granite headlands and rocky shores.
Standing next to the edge does clear the head.
There’s the small spruce, the scatter of juniper with its grey berries, and the rusty ground cover in small pockets of the grey bedrock.
And I am constantly amazed at the bright whiteness of the water when the waves crash and the spray flies into the air.
There is nothing like it.

New Moon (not the movie!) and Subungual Hematomas

Last night just after sunset I saw the decade’s first new moon among the trees behind our house, a beautiful sharp sliver of silver like a bright fingernail in the dark sky. The rest of the moon’s sphere was barely visible, looking like a soft charcoal ball hanging there, but what I ended up focusing on was that shining fingernail of light. There is always something special about catching the new moon, because it is there for such a short time that first night and because the clear western sky provides some sense of promise, though I’m not always sure what that promise is.

When our granddaughter E., who is just past two and a half, visits, or when we go to her house, she always shows me her fingernails. They are tiny and delicate, and sometimes they have colour on them. Lately it has been pink and green, alternated, though much of that nail polish has disappeared by now, and she did explain to me that one little patch of turquoise is marker. Then she asks to look at mine.

She is particularly interested in my two middle fingers, not because they are the “rude” ones, but because the nail on each has been injured. The injuries are called subungual, because they are under the nail. This does not make us ungulates (from ungula, meaning hoof, claw, talon), like the hoofed intruders mentioned in my last post, but it does suggest a connection between us and them, though we did evolve nails instead of hooves. E. checks them both out carefully and sometimes asks me if I need a band-aid (I don’t). I appreciate her interest because I have been fairly interested in them myself, especially in the one on my right hand.

The left one was pretty straightforward. Somewhere in the process of moving the firewood from the pile in the yard into the shed back in September, it got injured. I don’t even know how or when it happened, I just noticed the purple colour under my nail one day. There was no pain that I was aware of and nothing to do with it I figured, except to wait for it to grow out, which it is doing.

The right one was a more serious or significant event, though it didn’t seem that it should have been. I was working with my brother Ken laying stones in crusher dust to build the walkway. The day was cool and the dust was cold and wet, which may perhaps have softened up my nail for the injury. At any rate I was laying a flat piece of ironstone (I still know which one), not too big and not too heavy, but my finger underneath it, specifically the nail of that finger, was pressed hard onto a lump of gravel hidden under the crusher dust, and it hurt!

If you have had it happen, you will know what I mean. You end up with bleeding under the nail and pressure from the blood there. It took me two days of a seriously throbbing finger to realize that I needed someone to do something about it (read the instructions here), so a nice doctor put a small hole in my nail and pushed out a bunch of blood through that hole.

It was much better, and I believed (naively, I expect) that I might keep the nail. I kept it clean and hoped. A few weeks later I realized my hope was in vain as a small gust of wind caught the nail when I took my hand out of my jacket pocket and blew it right off my finger. I retrieved it, because I thought the little slit in it was pretty neat, but then decided that keeping it might be a little perverse, especially since my body was already hard at work making a new one, so I threw it away.

Now I am waiting and watching as the new nail slowly grows in. The rounded end of my finger reminds me of someone in my class back in junior high who chewed his nails so severely that they bled and only the nail beds seemed to remain. It still feels weird not having a whole nail there, but presumably that will change, and the new nail will grow in as if nothing untoward happened out there in the walkway. If it does, E. will be able to check and see a whole new nail there, perhaps even before she turns three!

Moving Rocks II

It is a fresh winter day with a gusty norwester, wind chill of minus ten, blue harbour, white-capped waves, and darker squalls moving across the water. B’s small boat is plowing its way in to the Cove, probably with fresh lobster aboard, and the Hapag Lloyd container ship, Dresden Express, is just sailing in, bright spray splashing off its bow bulb, with the pilot boat just behind, likely glazed with ice the way waves are flying over its bow. It’s a sunny cold December day of blue skies and white puffs of travelling cloud with occasional flurries of snow rushing through.

Yesterday provided me with the bit of mild weather I needed to complete a few of those leftover tasks that winter will prevent. The dirt pile next to the walkway has been leveled, with the extra soil wheeled to some low-lying spots that needed filling, and all of the squills and grape hyacinths are now planted. Our granddaughter A. helped me move dirt and get rid of the rocks with a small scoop and plastic bucket, until she discovered the physical joy of tree climbing in our small but strong magnolia. We also checked out the possible site of a small treehouse I have been thinking about building in among the pines; she had some good ideas!

But the walkway is really the story here because I can now call it finished, at least until spring when we develop a herb garden next to it, do some encouragement of lawn at its upper edges, and figure out what to do about the two large red pine stumps on one side of it.

The process of building it, like my progress at moving the firewood into the shed, was slow. In fact, when I look at my post of June 30 about moving rocks, I can see that I had already started to dig out the path for the walkway and get some of the rocks organized for it. Besides figuring out and excavating where the walkway would go, I had to move the huge rock that was to become the first step from the driveway to the walk. I did that with sheets of plywood, pipe rollers, and Stephen’s big pry bar, but needed the assistance of our friends L. and E., who had come early one Wednesday for a walk before dinner, to help me maneuver the rollers and push it up the slope to its position at the near end of the driveway.
There was plenty of digging and leveling, cutting roots back, wheeling gravel, prying out two huge rocks that turned out to be in the way and much bigger than I anticipated, and stopping often to measure and align. It was good to work on it, but the fun part really started with building the wood borders out of treated 4x4’s fastened into the ground with pieces of rebar and figuring out the proportions and angles that would work. Once the borders were built I could start on the bed of crusher dust and begin the work of laying rocks, a process that took a lot of placing and re-placing, shifting and leveling, and calculating as I moved toward the driveway whether I had enough rocks to finish the job and how they would all line up.

Now it is done, and the dirt piles are leveled.
My mother has navigated it with her walker and pronounced it good, and various people have told us that they liked the look of it, so now I just have to wait for a decent snowfall and see how easy it is for shoveling.

Moving Rocks

The weather has been unremittingly cool and damp for at least a week and a half, perhaps longer. Today while I was working outside moving rocks and cutting brush, the sun actually broke through the fog and cloud, or almost broke through, enough to cast the semblance of a shadow, enough to make you look up to see what it was. It was only for a minute or so, but it reminded me of an old Nova Scotia weather joke: What day is it when the sun shines after two days of rain? Monday, of course! And it reminded me of my old friend Andrew Smith, with whom Albro Hawkins and I travelled to summer school about thirty years ago, when we had another stretch of weather like this and the sun finally came out. Andrew nudged me then and said, in that lovely lilting Cape Breton accent of his, What is that strange light in the sky?

Yesterday it rained hard, so today when it didn’t I decided to get a few things done outside, a few of the innumerable tasks that lie in front of us. Our contractors have torn off the old deck and are framing the new one, which will extend over an area of flagstones, so it seemed like a good time to move the rocks out of their way because we will use them for our new walkway and a patio area. The biggest of them was the one that formed a step up onto the old deck, a real beauty of a rock, and I knew I couldn’t move it easily. Lorraine reminded me that our friend and neighbour Stephen has a good long pry bar (she called it a come along) that he uses for moving rocks when he is repairing or constructing his walls and rocked garden areas. Stephen not only loaned me the pry bar and some steel pipe rollers to move really big rocks, but also offered the use of his dolly which he said that Red, who lives between our houses and also has a dolly, told him was very useful in moving rocks for his rock work.

It was really gratifying to get the pry under the rock step, which was much thicker than I expected, and to budge it even a little. It was set in sand which made it hard to get a purchase on anything to be able to move it out of there, but I was able to lift it enough to get one of the pipe rollers under it and to persuade Andrew, who is young and strong and working on our house, to push on it as I arranged rollers and pried and lifted. It was great to move it to where I wanted it, right next to the large hosta (see above), and to dig out other rocks, disturbing various colonies of ants that rushed around collecting their eggs from their tunnels in the sand, and pile them there as well.

Late in the day the sun really did come out, and for the first time in almost two weeks we felt light and bright and not quite so closed in; in fact, it seemed, at least for a time, that things could dry out a little. Of course night began to fall and the wall of fog that was sitting on the horizon slid right back in to restore the balance of dampness that characterizes our weather here in June. Tomorrow is July 1, Canada Day, and maybe the sun will shine then. Until it does, our large flat rocks will lie there next to the lush hosta, wet and heavy, waiting for us to get to the task of building a walkway, a step, and a patio.