PEI Vacation

We have just returned from a week on PEI at John B’s Waterfront Cottages on Tracadie Bay with our two sons and their delightful young families and our dear close friends from Istanbul, K&A, with their equally dear and close three year-old boys. It was one of those vacation times that was magical, because of the outstanding people -- five children under five and six young adults all in their thirties -- we spent our time with, because of the fine weather, and because of the beautiful setting.

Here are a few impressions:

• brilliant green of beach grass
• dark red sand
• clear warm water that fills the bay
• boats out in the channel running from the wharf to the mussel lines and back
• voices of small children
• a heron circling slowly and moving on
• the shape of sand dunes on Blooming Point and the sea’s horizon beyond
• young eagle in early morning circling just above the cabins
• blue sky white clouds
• kids in crocs, sun hats
• icy freshwater spring bubbling up down the beach
• a couple of 24 hands and T. pegging 12 in an evening of cribbage with our two sons
• blown bubbles that floated from the steps over the beach and the bay
• a colony of sandcastles around a constructed inlet, driftwood bridges
• bare feet
• reading to a child on your lap
• one of the ospreys diving and disappearing, then lifting off with a fish, shaking itself, and flying to the nest calling
• glass of crisp cold pinot grigio
• rain in the night on the cottage roof
• conversations, explorations
• terns calling and diving out in the channel
• sun’s set
• small starfish and tiny yellow snails as you snorkel over the eel grass
• dinner together with the ones you love, laughter
• herons in the morning or evening, standing, or gliding on long curved wings to the next spot
• the games of young children on the beach, under lawn chairs, in the cottages
• finding rocks to skip across the calm water
• going to bed, getting up, knowing that there is nothing that you have to do
• everyone shouting “PEI” with right fists raised

Dead birds

Yesterday Steve, who is working on our house and is consistently the first to arrive in the morning, walked out on our new deck and told me we had had some casualties. I went to look and found two birds, a cedar waxwing and a fox sparrow, lying on the deck near the rail. It wasn’t the first time we have found birds on the deck outside our tall living room windows – in fact, years ago we had some small victims that were stunned only and revived on our safer upper deck to fly away, as well as some that were already dead when we found them – but it was the first time it happened since we moved back into our house almost a year ago.

Steve said he couldn’t figure out how the two birds got killed and we both wondered whether the glass panels in our new railings and not the windows had been the cause. It could be that they both had flown down from the shad that grows next to the deck and crashed into the glass, but whatever happened I had two small and beautiful birds lying on the deck first thing in the morning.

I have picked up a few dead birds over the years, including a gorgeous yellow-shafted flicker that broke its neck after hitting the car in front of us and, amazingly, a sharp-shinned hawk that was lying on its side on a path through the blueberries at the bottom of our property. What always strikes me in these instances is the birds’ lightness, an almost unbearable lightness, you might say, of their hollow bones and the slight bodies under their ruffles of feathers. There is always pathos in the grounding of these small and wonderful flying beings.


I photographed the cedar waxwing and looked at it even closer than the camera can show. I marvelled at the delicate yellow that shifted to a paler shade under the belly and at the compact yellow tips at the ends of the grey tail feathers. The small black mask and black eyes and the swept back crest feathers were also wonderful to see. But most remarkable to me were the bright red waxy spots on the secondaries. They are pretty much impossible (for me, at least) to see on a bird in the wild, but on our kitchen counter I could see and touch these red spots and wonder what in evolutionary development could have given rise to such wonderful touches of colour.

The delicate dead birds are gone, but bird life does go on. I heard today the small lisping trill of waxwings in our shad and watched them pecking at the berries, just as I know they pecked at the blossoms earlier. A cardinal sang from a bare branch high up in one of our maples, crows cavorted on Irene’s roof next door, and the robins scolded me when I walked up the lane. It makes me happy to live with birds around and I’ll hope each day not to find any more small corpses out on our deck. The bird in the hand, after all, is not worth more than the two (or more) in the shad bush.

Sir Paul McCartney comes to Halifax

Last Saturday night Sir Paul McCartney played a concert in Halifax on the Commons. It was the only Canadian stop on his current tour which takes him down the east coast of the US to play six venues, including New York and Boston and ending in Dallas toward the end of August. It’s not a strenuous tour schedule, but I guess if you are Sir Paul you can do it at your own pace. Our next door neighbours, Red and Sharon, bought tickets for the concert, as did our friend Heather, but we decided not to even though Lorraine was President of the Calgary Beatles Fan Club in 1963 and had a special affection for Paul, as he was known to all of us back then.

We didn’t buy tickets, but we were fortunate enough to receive an invitation from Robin to attend his party “Baby let me drive your balcony”, said balcony facing the Commons close to the corner of Cunard and Robie where the stage was set up. We decided to go since, after all, it was an event and a party, and, after all, Lorraine had been President and a big fan, and, after all, I had had a Beatles haircut for a short time in my undergrad years, and, after all, we knew those old songs so well. There was a crowd at Robin’s, both an art crowd (we were part of this group) and a social worker crowd, many of them colleagues and friends of Robin’s partner, plenty of food and drink, and a great view from the balcony of the traffic jamming up, the long tractor trailer support units, two policeman looking elegant on two lovely horses (though Jackie reminded me that they are often used in crowd control, which did put a different spin on the image), the back of the stage, and a sea of people waving and swaying.

The concert was a good one, with a huge crowd and a set list that had enough favourites sprinkled through it to keep everyone we could see in the main audience pretty happy – and it kept us happy enough too. There was a limit of six on Robin’s balcony so people had to do rotations there, but there was no restriction on Robin’s bed which was next to his open window. It gave a great view, so we could watch Paul’s torso from behind through a gap in the backdrop as he moved around on stage – he’s not a dancer like Mick but he does sway some and step back and forth – and the sound was great. Every song was played note for note, pause for pause, syllable for syllable, and harmony for harmony like the originals that were burned in our memories, so Jackie, a social worker I seem to see about once a decade, and I were able to sing along without missing a beat. Her sad story was that her parents had refused to let her attend a Beatles concert in Paris in 1964 with her high school because they were worried what might happen to her, but her happy story was that Sir Paul had built this concert around the Beatles songbook, and now, 45 years later, she could hear him sing almost as he would have sung back then with John, George, and Ringo.

One crowd favourite with a local flavour was the Celtic ballad “Mull of Kintyre”, which you can watch here, a great version complete with our own pipe and drum band, the 78th Highlanders. An easy one for Sir Paul was “Hey Jude” because he got the audience to do most of the singing, which they didn’t mind at all. And “Yesterday” was rendered with the same aching nostalgia it has always evoked, which did not stop any of us from singing along. Jackie and I agreed that “Helter Skelter” simply felt wrong without John (though I've since learned that the song is all Paul), and we talked seriously – Jackie is an old “leftie” – about class analysis, honouring blues roots and people of colour (not many in the audience we could see), and the fact that Sergeant Pepper’s was played as a straight thank you and good-bye at the end, with not a hint of the irony of the original.

Our political commentary was halted at one point by an amazing fireworks display, which put the whole thing into concert spectacle context as we all stared out the window and said, Oh wow! It was a time, as people say around here, a fine time, and we all shared something, some recollection of a Beatles time or place, that made it worth going for. Thanks for that, Sir Paul.

One day of summer

The day before yesterday was the first warm day we have had in June or July, and it wasn’t even that warm. The northerly flow of drier air has pushed the fog offshore, and the skies are a clear blue, but the forecast still said, the way it often does in summer here, High 25 except 19 along the coast. The morning was still and cool and the harbour completely flat and there was promise for the day, but anyone who lives along this coast knows about the afternoon wind, the southwesterly that comes up as the land heats up and the warm air rises over the land and the cooler ocean air has to rush in to fill the gap. It turns the bays and harbours a deeper blue and flecks them with whitecaps and darkening gusts that scud across the water. And it keeps the warm days cool, often cooler than you want them to be.

While it was still morning, before the wind came up too much, I drove to my mother’s so I could do some banking for her. Then I took her out for a drive, the first time she had been out for about two weeks, because she had had a bad cough and was worried about pneumonia, and she hung her white cardigan over the edge of her walker. I told her she probably wouldn’t need it, and she didn't, since of course this was a summer day, our first this season. We ended up at the Point Pleasant Park look off, in a Handicapped zone because she always keeps her little sign handy to hang on the mirror. The harbour was blue, the day was warm, she had some of my ice cream cone (caramel apple crunch, a “new flavour” at Pinky’s), and we watched people with their animals and a few boats sailing. By the time I took her back so she could get her lunch the wind had come up some more but it still wasn’t too cold.

In the afternoon Lorraine and I drove to see my brother and his wife in East Chester. My brother and I decided to go out in their sea kayak even though the wind was high and waves were roaring across the bay from Big Tancook and breaking against the remains of the old wharf. After we came out from the cove, the waves hit us and the bow of the kayak sometimes crashed hard coming down off one of them and sometimes water came rushing over the bow and pooled around my sprayskirt. What struck me, happily, was how warm the water was. I hadn’t expected this, especially after the weeks of fog and cloud and rain, but my brother pointed out, which I had forgotten, that it didn’t get very cold at night during that time. The other factor, of course, was that the afternoon wind was blowing the surface water, which was warmer and lighter, into Mahone Bay and into the cove. So after we went out to the end of Graves Island, and he saw two dolphins but I didn’t, we carefully turned the kayak, rolling around on the edges of the waves, and surfed our way back to the cove. We hauled the kayak and I told him I’d like to swim. So we did, and it was almost warm, a real delight. We checked the debris brought in by the wind, mostly seaweed and kelp and jellyfish, one a beautiful grape-coloured specimen that flowed over the edges of my hand, and then carefully picked our way through the breaking waves and up the rocky beach.

Over dinner we all joked about this day being summer, and now that it was ending we were glad we had been able to enjoy it, because tomorrow we would move into fall, or into more of that indeterminate season of fog, rain showers, 100% humidity, and highs of 17 (if we were lucky). However, we were wrong, and the next day, yesterday, was in fact the second day of our summer, high hot sun in a blue blue sky. As for today, it was neither here nor there, but our fingers are crossed and our swim bag is packed because there is a small hope that the weather pattern may have finally changed and the magical season of summer may stay. If it does, we’ll be ready and waiting!

Places to walk by the shore

Two are pre-eminent.
They are Sailor’s Point and Chebucto Head.
Both have large granite bedrock that slopes down to the sea.
The meeting of the sea and the rock has always drawn me.
I can watch and listen for hours.
Higher up lichens grow in grey or charcoal flakes on the rough surfaces.
Near the water the rocks are bare.

Things grow wherever they can.
There are pockets of black soil
and pools of dark water.
Blue flags bloom here in wet places.
Tiny cranberry flowers remind me of wild cyclamen
first noticed on the acropolis at Olimpos,
swept back petals, the flowers both delicate and brave.
A small boggy area near the lighthouse is festooned with pitcher plants.
Harebells grow between rocks.
The alder bush held down by winter winds spreads out along the ground.
No trees grow in these barrens.
The dog rose fills a sheltered spot, gentle scent.
Blueberry, huckleberry, bayberry line the paths.

You walk on rocks
or on patches of granular gravel.
There is a horizon, a line so sharp tonight it feels unreal.
The sea is moving slowly.
It slurps and bulges and sometimes crashes.
The air is clean and clear.
One buoy sends its faint hoot,
another clangs in the gentle swell.
You walk and watch.
You breathe.
And you listen.
Sailor’s Point and Chebucto Head.

Me and Canada Day

Today is Thursday, the day after Canada Day, the 142nd birthday of this country. On Tuesday, the day before Canada Day, our local CBC station ran a story about a man who has been a landed immigrant in Canada even longer than I have. As I remember from the news account, he landed in Canada some time in the spring of 1946, probably at the Pier 21 Immigration Shed (now an Immigration Museum), the same one I arrived in about a year later. He was the son of a Canadian serviceman and his Scottish war bride, and, like me, he always thought he was Canadian – a citizen of Canada, that is – until he applied for a passport and found he wasn’t.

I landed at Pier 21 on March 16, 1947 and my card indicates “ADMITTED NON-IMMIGRANT"; a month later my parents received a card dated April 15, 1947 that said “LANDED IMMIGRANT”, and that is the status I have had ever since. I believe that the man on the news has applied for his citizenship. By my reckoning he should have had it long ago since his dad was a Canadian, but perhaps he didn’t ever apply for it. My situation is a little different. It is my mother who was and is Canadian, as were her mother and maternal grandmother, and I couldn't inherit her citizenship because I was born before 1949 when that law changed. My father was British, though he himself became a Canadian some time after immigrating, and I travel on a British passport, since Bermuda, where I was born, no longer issues its own passports. Last October, after sixty-two years as a landed immigrant of Canada, I decided I should make my association with this country more permanent and official and I applied to become a Canadian citizen.

So, I am looking forward to being a real Canadian and will certainly post an account of that occasion here when it does occur (the CBC story talked about a 12 to 14 month processing period for applications, so it may not be soon!). However, I did my best to celebrate my adopted country’s birthday yesterday. I went for my first Canadian outdoor swim yesterday afternoon at Caribou Park Beach, even though the wind was pretty fierce out of the north, the air temperature was about 18 degrees, and the water felt about the same. I ate, with my Canadian wife and Canadian friends, a large and fine bowl of lobster bisque (lobsters landed at the Caribou government wharf on an inlet of Northumberland Strait) made with Canadian Carnation milk. I toasted, albeit with an Italian pinot grigio, the joys of my adopted country and thanked these fine Canadians for sharing their celebration with me. I joined them for a very Canadian driftwood bonfire on their beach and applauded the small but spectacular fireworks display. And I slept in my MEC sleeping bag, soundly and proudly Canadian.

So, Happy Canada Day – may there be many more – and maybe next July 1st I will sing O Canada, our home and native land, (you can listen here) as a legitimate citizen of this large and mostly fine young country!

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.

Water Ways

On Sunday at the home of good friends I saw a photograph of a train near Brandon, Manitoba crossing a bridge over water. I was told that this bridge was not over a river. It certainly looked like a river to me, but I learned that it was one of the sluices or floodways that help keep Winnipeg and its environs from being flooded in spring. I said that I loved the various words we have for watercourses or for places where water has flowed. I was thinking in particular of sluice with its fluidity of sound, as if you can hear the water right in the word itself, or rills, a lovely word, both noun and verb, for small stream or streaming. We can regret the loss of the word fluence, meaning stream, now listed as obsolete (even though we still like to say confluence); there is something to be said for its sound, the fluency or flow of it.

There are of course the places where water has flowed but are now dry. I immediately thought wadi but said arroyo, not quite sure if I pronounced it properly. Then I wondered about gulches, gulleys, and gorges, but it was wadis I came back to. We drove through them in Syria last month, maneuvered the car carefully down rough banks, across the stone or gravel bottoms, and up the other side to more flat desert. It was not always clear where the water had come from to form these now dry watercourses in the desert, impossible even to imagine water having been there, and especially enough water to flow through, roll boulders, and wash out the edges of roads. There are places on the way north from Palmyra where the water in the wadi cut the road away so sharply that it left a gravel bank more than a metre high, topped with the broken edge of the remaining asphalt. But there was no water and no flow when we were there.

I lived for a few months in a small cabin off the Redrooffs Road north of Sechelt many years ago. At the main house on the property there was a pond with a wooden sluice at one end. It was wonderful to walk around the pond on a still evening with cedars and Douglas firs reflected in it and to cross the small bridge over the sluice. This was British Columbia, the spring rain was abundant, and the pond was brimming over. As the water flowed across the flat boards of the sluice, its surface curved a little before it fell in a clear sheet the full width of the sluice way into a stream bed strewn with boulders and rushed down toward Sergeant’s Bay. It was the curve that always took my attention, the physicality of that water’s flow just before it fell, a place where surface tension, its sinuous pull, became something you could see and understand.

On Sunday we went with our friends' dog for a walk around Sullivan’s Pond. Some men were sailing their remote controlled yachts on the still water, and one sloop in particular, on a close reach, pushed a curving bow wave and left a perfect wake trail as it sped toward the other side of the pond. There were ducks and green grass and blooming rhododendrons, but the best thing for me was the sluice with a small bridge over it and the sensuous flow of pond water curving over its edge before it fell into the stream that fed into a culvert and took it under the downtown area and into the harbour.

I thought of Ghassan and the square tank he loaded into the bed of his ‘77 Chev pickup to haul a load of water from the oasis to Atala’s encampment to replenish their tank and wondered what either of them would think of this smooth sluice of fresh water that flowed down and away, collected by no one, all day and all night, and of the green everywhere, so full and lush, so perfect for grazing sheep and camels.

A Blue and Green Morning

We have woken up in many different locations over the past few weeks and spent our days in a variety of light conditions, the most wonderful of which has always been the sunset light out in the desert that surrounds Palmyra and its oasis. At that time there is a hyper real quality to the world as every rock and pebble is illuminated and the world is gold with a hint of rose. Your skin glows with the colours that were flattened at midday by the high white sun. The dust-coloured Bedouin tents where Atala and his family live stand on the rise, and the camels come walking home. It is a time and a light worth waiting for every day.

Sunsets in Nova Scotia can also be wonderful, especially with the length of twilight time and the magic light of the gloaming, but it was the early light this morning that captured my attention. The wind was light out of the northwest, the air was dry, and the harbour was quiet and blue. It was an early summer northern light, clean, clear, and beautiful.

Decades ago I went to a Bergman film that was set on an island somewhere in Scandinavia. The film was black-and-white and one thing I remember most clearly from it was the whiteness of the summer light and the pale children playing on a pebble beach – it made me reflect on the thin evanescence of northern summers. Our summers here, farther south than Bergman’s landscapes, are still not lengthy, even though the holiday period from school’s closure in June through to Labour Day seemed limitless and infinite when we were kids, so we need to cherish every moment that suggests the presence of summer.

This morning there was nothing thin about the early golden light. The new foliage on the summer trees was brilliantly green, a goldfinch stopped fortuitously next to an orange azalea bloom, the cardinal sang from its usual pine tree, and the sky was a deep and shining blue. Everything was illuminated. It was a "large day", a blue and green morning in Nova Scotia.

Dawning

Today is June 5, the day my parents were married 68 years ago, and the day before Allied troops landed at Normandy in 1944. It is also the beginning of our second full day back in Canada after five weeks in Turkey and Syria, though I do hear those names in my head always as Türkiye and Suriye, the way I say them when I am over there.

The sun came in our bedroom window this morning at about 5:30, illuminating the contours of our duvet and the wall hanging we bought in Cairo on the Street of the Tentmakers a few years ago. We were already awake, perhaps because of our jet lag readjustment, and it made me think about all our days of waking up over the last few weeks in Syria. There, in Aleppo and in Palmyra, we slept with our hotel windows open and heard almost every morning the wake up call from nearby mosques at about 3:40. We didn’t pray and we did usually go back to sleep, but we were for that short time consistently enthralled by the melodic beauty of the calls that came from close at hand and farther away, each one echoing the other. It made me think about the synchronicity of watches and how these tiny intervals between the starts of the calls gave a wonderful contrapuntal element to the sound.

The call to prayer, whatever the time of day and whatever the vocal ability and lyricism of the muezzin, is the most compelling evidence of the fact that I am in Türkiye or Suriye, two places where the call is particularly lovely, and it is one of the things I miss most when I am in Canada. When we attended an Iftar celebration at St. Mary’s University Gallery during Ramazan last fall, it was the small and quiet call by one of the Santamarian Muslims there that thickened my throat and brought tears to my eyes; for those who do not know it, it is impossible to explain the emotional resonance the call can carry.

It is time to start our day here, but there are so many things to do – finishing unpacking our bags, hanging out laundry, washing more things, sorting through mail, priming the bathroom walls, contacting Steve about installing our Damascene lamps, the list keeps going – that I feel like getting back under the duvet or hopping in the car and going to Coastal Coffee to hide away from it all.

We are not conscious of suffering from jet lag, but we are still in re-entry mode, both physical and cultural. This morning I am not in Turkey or Syria, there is sunshine and cool air coming in the window, boats and ships are quietly active in the calm harbour, and we have time to reflect a little as we begin to engage with this new day. So we’ll stay out of the bed, make our own coffee, and get started on this life, our Ferguson’s Cove life, with the sound of northern birds in the morning our wake up call today.