More Bad Weather On The Way

That's the song that's playing right now on Steve Martin's bluegrass CD, "Rare Bird Alert" (Apparently, the actor has been playing banjo since he was a kid; if you like bluegrass, definitely pick up that CD). It's appropriate for this post since we've cancelled our trip to Halifax. Rainfall warnings and wind warnings! 50 mm and 100 km gusts! I'm not wimpy but I'm also not stupid.
Despite the fact my mother and I were heading into the city to attend a reading and book signing by our favourite author, Scotland's Ian Rankin, this is no weather to be out on the 104. I don't mind driving in rain but out on the highway with the transports kicking up blinding spray for metres and high winds rocking our vehicle left and right...not my idea of a relaxing Sunday, even if the weather makes me feel like I'm in the Shetland Islands.
Ach, I cannae believe I'm missing a chance to hear that Edinburgh accent!

Good Morning For Some

The promised snowfall didn't happen, at least not in my neck of the northern woods, and the sun is shining and the air is crisp. A perfect fall day as we head into the last weekend of October.
Okay, maybe not perfect: Hunting season opens today so for the deer, it's a month of horror. I'm not a hunter and I have an aversion to killing anything that isn't a fly or an earwig. I can't imagine killing something as elegant as a buck or cutting up the body into pieces but I don't have a problem with killing an animal for food or to protect livestock (as beautiful as foxes are and as lovely as it is to watch them hunt in a field, protecting our chickens comes before a fox's life). Still, I don't like hunting season, don't like a lovely, lush summer coming to a deadly end right before the hardships of winter.
It likely doesn't help that I grew up watching Disney movies. Singing mice, dogs who are friends with foxes, an entire animal kingdom that talks, really. What's worse, my mother used to throw out one particular quote from one particular movie. I grew up hearing, "Mother, Mother, where are you? Your mother is dead, Bambi." I was 23 years old before I actually watched Bambi and my roommate came home to find me sobbing on the couch.
Egads. Who warped me more, Walt Disney or my own mother?

In Conversation With...John Eaton

(First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, October 12)

The wind is raging around the Great Room in Thinkers’ Lodge. As waves pound the point of land where the building sits at the mouth of the  Pugwash harbour, the room’s  massive, floor to ceiling window taunts the weather to do its worst. Yet not even a draught is felt in this nearly-two hundred year old house. The man sitting in an armchair by the window is responsible for the warmth and loveliness of not only this room but the whole house. 

“A lot of people assume I’ve been coming to Thinkers’ Lodge all of my life or that this was the summer home for my family,” John Eaton says. “I’d never been here before 2005.”

John’s grandfather is Cyrus Eaton, the man who would make Pugwash world famous for peace. Depsite being born (in 1883) and raised in Pugwash Junction, Cyrus built his family’s summer home in Deep Cove on Mahone  Bay, so when John thinks of Nova Scotia, that place comes to mind, not Pugwash. 

It was wanting to follow in the footsteps of an uncle who was a minister that Cyrus Eaton ended up in Cleveland in 1905 where he found his true calling in business and built an empire  out of utilities, steel, and railroads. When fire ravaged the village of Pugwash in the late 1920’s, Cyrus returned to clean up the waterfront, build the seawall, and buy the Pineo estate (which in 1955, became Thinkers’ Lodge). Through an act of the legislature, the non-profit organization, Pugwash Park Commission, was created in 1929; the bylaws require that two of the three commissioners should be members of the Eaton family. 

In 2005, John received a call to join the Pugwash Park Commission. 

“I said, That sounds interesting, so they sent me a package of information. I felt I owed it to myself to educate myself about this. At that time, I had lived in California for more than 25 years.”

John was born and raised in the United States, where the shadow of his commanding, energetic and intelligent grandfather threw a longer, darker shadow. 

“As I became a little more aware as I got older, one of the things that was inescapable was that in the United States, my grandfather was very controversial,” John says. “He was an advocate of talking to the people you disagree with. He felt we should be talking to the leaders of the Soviet Union, to the leaders of Eastern Europe, and China, and then after 1959, to the leaders of Cuba. It was rather easy to paint Cyrus Eaton as some kind of Communist sympathizer, if not worse. You couldn’t avoid that, living in Ohio. You couldn’t avoid being teased by your classmates, you couldn’t avoid seeing a billboard that said, ‘Cyrus Eaton, go back to Russia where you belong’. It was something you grew up with.”

So where was John in 1957 when his grandfather hosted the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs at Thinkers’ Lodge in Pugwash,  Nova Scotia? 

“In 1957, I would have been 9 years old. While my grandfather  would have been here, I was probably down in Deep Cove, completely oblivious to what was going on. We didn’t have radio or television down there and I certainly wasn’t reading the newspapers. I was busy being a kid, fishing off the end of the dock and playing capture the flag.”

So that phone call in 2005 came as a bit of a surprise because, he says, “I knew Thinkers’ Lodge still existed but I didn’t know how it was run.” 

John agreed to join the Commission because he “felt the tug of family, the tug of history. I owed it to myself to contribute. Then I got up here and I was a little bit shocked at the physical shape of the lodge. Never having been here, I didn’t know what to expect. But I should have known better. You can tell from the weather right now that this is a building that has to deal with the elements.”

What surprised John most was meeting locals who told him they’d never been inside the lodge; it was assumed to be “off-limits”. John knew that had to change as they moved forward. For the past three years, the Commission has worked on the restoration of Thinkers’ Lodge, aiming to have it completed for the official opening of the lodge as  a Parks Canada National Historic Site. 

John is quick to point out that Thinkers’ Lodge isn’t going to be off-limits to the public. 

“The challenge is to tell the story without overwhelming the place. The intention is not to turn it into a museum; the intention is to be continually in use for workshops and seminars and conferences. The hope is not only to build on the legacy of Thinkers’ Lodge but to help the economy of the north shore and the village of Pugwash,” he says. 

Like all commissioners, John is a volunteer. He calls the past three years, during which the entire Thinkers’ Lodge has been fixed up, overhauled and upgraded, a labour of love. 

“This place is going to be here for years to come. The legacy will be here. That [restoration] was the first step and now the goal is: Do you think we can hold an event that will be as famous as the one in 1957? Probably not but it’s important to remember  that if they ever get rid of nuclear weapons and they need to find some place where that movement started, in terms of physical places in the world, this is it.

“We want Thinkers’ Lodge to be an inspiration to people who perhaps don’t realize ‘big things can happen in small places’,” John says. 

As the conversation winds down, the wind is still beating futilely against the window, kept out by the solid walls, a new furnace, and the inspirational power of peace. 

by Sara Mattinson

Fuzzy Predictions About Winter

The fuzzy caterpillars, and the meteorologist's grandmother, are predicting a mild winter.
Before you get excited about "nice" winter weather, a few words of reality from my husband who has worked for the Department of Transportation's maintenance division for 32 years: A mild winter can be a messy winter.
We'll get winter whether the fuzzy caterpillars predict mild or harsh. This is Nova Scotia, Canada's ocean playground. In our beloved maritime province, pecipitation happens. According to my husband, who likely has seen everything in 32 winters, all a "mild winter" means is that it won't be very cold. No minus-32 degrees on the night of the big dance in January, no solid ice in the rivers for fishing and snowmobiling. If you're not into ice fishing or snowmobiling (or snowshoeing or cross-country skiing), sure, those milder temperatures are nice but like I said, around here, precipitation happens so what doesn't fall as snow...falls as rain. I'm about to use the f-word: Freezing rain.
Remember the massive ice storm of 1997?
Where were you for the ice storm of 2009?
Already, my husband is hinting that my Christmas gift this year won't be a snowblower...but an electric start generator.

A Second Growing Season?

My younger sister and her family live in Georgia, in the country about an hour south of Atlanta. They have two growing seasons there; the first one begins in March and the second one in July or August. Imagine! Twice the opportunities to grow tomatoes and peas and zucchini and pumpkins (is that why American Thanksgiving falls in late November?).
We may be catching up here in northern Nova Scotia. When we can let the chickens out of their fenced pen to roam around our one-acre yard, it means it's time to clear the annuals out of the flower gardens. Yet many of my annuals - sunflowers and zinnias excepted - were still in bloom. They seemed worn out, likely tired of coping with the temperature extremes of warm days and cold nights, or perhaps they are simply weary of treading water after all the rain we've had, but they are still in bloom. In fact, my osteopernum were not merely in bloom - they were reblooming. The plants looked so strong and healthy, you would have would have sworn it was July. I didn't have the heart to rip them out of the ground.
Here's the thing: although I believe in global warming and know it's humans paving the ground and spewing poisons into the water and atmosphere that has caused it, it's tempting to enjoy the prospect of a second growing season. Think of all the hard work that goes into creating and maintaining flower gardens (as well as vegetable gardens but those are my husband's domain); if those gardens could last two months later, that's more time to take pleasure in the sights. If that's the case, however, I'm going to have to plant more late-season bloomers like asters, helenium, and sedum.
And perhaps if we can offer a second growing season -- and no cockroaches -- I'll be able to convince my sister and her husband and their four kids that northern Nova Scotia is as good a place to live as southern Georgia.

From the October 19 issue of The Oxford Journal

Our phone stopped working late on a Saturday afternoon. We reported it the next day by using my in-laws’ phone and were told “there was a pattern” in our neighbourhood and we weren’t the only report of phones not working. This made my in-laws’ phone an oasis of dial tone in the middle of a wasteland of ringers gone silent.

By the time we went to bed on Sunday night at ten o’clock, the phones still were not working. I try not to be cynical, try not to see anti-rural intentions in everything but I wonder: If this had happened in the city or a large town, if a hundred households had been affected and not merely ten, would we have gone more than 24 hours without phone service?

Last winter, we awakened in the middle of the night to discover a fire in our flu. As we leaped out of bed and pulled on clothes, my husband said to me, “Call 9-1-1.” I automatically reached for the phone. For most of us over the age of 30, when we are inside a house, the automatic reaction is to reach for the home phone. When you call 9-1-1 from a house, your name and location is registered; no matter how to react in  crisis (I tend to freeze), you know that by using that phone, someone knows where to send the help you need.

In a real fire, if I had picked up the phone to find it dead, would I have had the presence of mind to think ‘cell phone’, to locate my husband’s in the dark while trying to gather together the dog and cat and my mother who was sleeping upstairs? If my brain shuts down and I can’t operate on habit, I’m in trouble. 

This phone habit is more than just a link to friends and family, the vet and take-out pizza; it’s a life-line. On that peaceful Sunday without the phone ringing, what if my mother had fallen down the stairs? What if I had? What if my husband had fallen off the garage roof again - and this time, I’d noticed? Although our voicemail would pick up messages, not hearing a dial tone when I picked up the receiver out of  habit to make a call had me pondering the bigger, scarier picture. 

Going more than 24 hours without a working phone because we have the good fortune/bad sense to live in the country is a greater disconnect than we deserve. Perhaps the isolation experienced by rural dwellers, who may not receive decent cell phone coverage, should classify phone service as an essential service. 

Take it from me: the only thing better than hearing a dial tone when you jam that receiver against your ear is hearing a voice tell you that fire trucks are on the way, now get out of the house.

Bridal Falls, Wentworth

Courtesy of Shaun Whalen Photography