From a From-Away
It was the summer of 2001 and we were in the midst of one of those ridiculous quick peripatetic vacations to explore Maine and Nova Scotia. One of the short respites from our unrelenting motion found us next to a fast moving stream with some kind of large fish jumping out of the water. Some one had told us to take a look at Cape Breton in Canada and my wife had found an attractive web site describing the River Trail Cottages in a place called Margaree Center. We found the place but wondered why so many of the cottages were occupied. I mean they were lovely cottages and the proprietors were refreshingly laid back and trusting people but were people so moved by the land that they just came to look at it? Only later were we to learn that we had found our way to one of the best salmon fishing streams known to the world. Venturing forth from our cottage, we came across a large crowd of teenagers on a nearby bridge, hardly a tourist attraction, and the quaint – to us – country store and gas station at the nearby crossroads where we were later to learn one could get pizza that rivaled New York City’s finest.
There must be more. Further down a road called Highway 19 we discovered a town called Inverness where we found an unexpected kind of beach. Here we were apparently north of Maine, a familiar place often visited by us, to find a sand beach with shallow calm water warmer than either of us was used to outside of some southern coastline of the United States. Inverness beach was warmer for example than my once beloved Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York City. But there seemed to be not many tourists around and the town didn’t even have side walks. What a find. In the short time we had, we never did discover Shore Road or any other coastline treasure but returned several times to our great discovery – the beach at Inverness.
Finally, however, our sense of adventure took control and we decided that instead of turning left at the Irving Station in Margaree Forks we should instead go straight ahead toward some place called Margaree Harbour. We only had a day left and had heard of a restaurant at a place called the Duck Cove Inn. We went to eat and yes the food was great and the view divine but as is the nature of love, the fateful event during that drive was the river valley to our right as we made our way along that country road. I remember saying to my wife, as she nodded in agreement, that it seemed as soft as a feather bed. Come here my boy and lie down and rest in my soft folds. Relax in a way you have never known. I could hardly keep my eyes on the road. I was in love – love at first sight - and knew that I had to return.
But New Yorkers are a busy lot and then September 11 intervened – an event occurring not far from our home and from us, and later the war in Iraq and our protest against it, and it took until the summer of 2004 for us to find our way back to that country road, which we learned was called the Cabot trail, to what we had come to realize was a place called the Margaree Valley. Luckily my wife is one of those record keeping people and she had kept a telephone number allowing us to discover that a house was for rent for the entire month of August, 2004 in Margaree Harbour. We threw all else aside and grabbed it, setting in motion a fateful trip to the Co-op in Margaree Forks, which started us on the path to finding our own place in Cape Breton.
Why go to the Co-op in Margaree Forks? Well, my wife and I had met in a health food restaurant many years ago in New York City, where we still, for the time being, live in a neighborhood of Manhattan called Greenwich Village. People who eat in the health food restaurants commonly found in large cities believe there are benefits of eating organically grown foods, and chickens allowed to roam free of antibiotics and other such things. In fact there is evidence that the fatty acids in free range chickens are more highly unsaturated than the fatty acids in chickens that are unable to roam freely about. I need to tell you more about that sometime when I put on my chemistry professor’s hat. At any rate, we were told that free range chickens were sold in the Margaree Co-op and scooted over there only to discover that the shelf was empty. We were ready to leave when we decided to ask the store manager where they got those chickens. Well you can see now how we ended up bouncing along Coady Road looking for Kim and Glen Covey’s farm. No, it did not happen as simply as you are imagining. We did not come across Michael Coady’s real estate office and get sold a house. Long before coming to that spot our path was blocked by a herd of cows lead by a tall fellow who seemed curious about what this 1991 blue Volvo with New York plates was doing, especially considering that these apparent from-aways did not have the sense to pull to the side to allow the cows to continue on their way.
People from New York City might expect a fellow who is herding cows on a dirt road in a rural area to be a taciturn strong silent type. But this person was quite the opposite and we soon became engaged in a lively conversation ranging over all issues from the relative merits of Cape Breton and New York City to the different politics and world view of Canadians and Americans. Eventually we did pull aside and let the cows pass but I guess this encounter with a “local” did lead to our invitation to a party the next Saturday evening. It didn’t take long after my wife and I and our twelve year old daughter and fifteen year old son arrived to again fall in love, but this time not with the Margaree Valley, but rather with the most interesting group of people I had come across at one place in a very long time, a bunch of unique characters with unusually refreshing views. This was getting dangerous. You see my wife and I have this low threshold for imagining living in every place we visit. But we had vowed that no matter what, we would not consider going further than renting in Cape Breton. We shook on it. But the next morning I found myself looking over my wife’s shoulder intently interested in the real estate advertisements in the Oran and noting Michael Coady’s telephone number.
Well, we are now coming to the end of, what is for us, the summer of 2005. I have to lecture on September 1 to a room full of college sophomores. And to get to our home in New York where a short subway ride will take me to this lecture hall, we have a two day overnight drive ahead of us. So I have little time in this missive to tell you all the details of how my daughter and I were such a sorry entry in the “Anything that can Float” contest that we won a feel sorry for you prize, called “Most Optimistic Entry,” and got our picture in the Oran or how I cursed Michael Coady while nightly bats flew overhead as we cleaned the smelly leavings of numerous vile creatures from behind the walls and under the floor boards of the second floor of the house we’re trying to make habitable on Highway 19, only to bless him as we came to the end of that onerous task and realized the treasure we had in this old home and the surrounding land. And this is not even to mention the low point of the summer when a feral barn cat we had engaged to deal with the bats spent night after night in the ceiling complaining, the way cats do, about missing her barn and even one night urinating on my head as I tried to sleep on the floor below. I have no time to tell you about the several trips I made up here in the winter, once even carrying a sink purchased from a second hand store on 125th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan or how these trips gave me the confidence to realize that it was the right move to engage Jerald Miller and his big machines to move the house to the marvelous ridge overlooking that gorge and valley traversed by Collins Brook, that likely descendent of a powerful glacier that I imagine made its way through this region.
Adios to marvelous Cape Breton as we head back to New York City. I’d love for you to understand why I see both this area of Cape Breton and New York City as the same – both lands of texture, in one where the conflicting forces of land and weather and the survival of the residents come to a conclusion of breathless beauty and the other where the conflicts of large numbers of people of every variety trying to fit themselves onto a beautiful island come to a textural complexity, a cacophony of sound and sight, which is an attraction the world over. No overriding designer can control these conflicting forces that control the nature of New York City and Cape Breton – no shopping malls and suburban sprawl for these ecological marvels.
Frank Sinatra, that famous American singer, sang years ago about New York as a place where if you make it here you can make it anywhere and it seems he could have sang those words about Cape Bretoners as well, a people whose independent natures allowed finding the multitude of paths necessary for survival and success in this beautiful but difficult land. It was our attraction to this independent spirit that led us away from the coast to that free range chicken odyssey on Coady road that led us to South West Margaree. And although I have had to deal with comparing myself to these Herculean men who seem to know how to do everything and lift anything, and who don’t as often as I would wish appreciate the different kind of independent spirit necessary for success in New York City, I am thrilled with our connection to this place and am grateful to the friends we are increasingly making here.