a narrow escape on mid-summer's day

We celebrated mid-summer's day with a visit to a secret bog we found in the spring. I wanted to see whether orchids grew there, too.They do. We found dragon's mouth aplenty,
and also another one: grass pink. They are small shy orchids and you have to look carefully to find them hidden in boggy shaded places, among the bayberry and holly. Come further in! they whispered shyly to us, and so, spell-bound, we did.
Many enchanting sights appeared as we walked deeper and deeper into the bog. The flower of the northern pitcher plant was just emerging.
Blue iris, winking like jewels.
The magical northern pitcher plant. Here you can see its charmingly sinister basal cups filled with water, where poor unsuspecting creatures are lured in and drowned, while the bog fairies hover nearby and laugh. ( Nobody ever said bog fairies were nice. )
After wandering around the bog and almost getting sucked down into the netherworld, we went a different way out. Then we got so lost. Because ferns had overgrown the trail we found last spring; more trees had fallen; everything had been turned around and rearranged and obscured, the better to lure poor unsuspecting creatures like us. Though, really, we ought to know better by now.
Luckily for us the mosquito repellent Greg had bought at the Dollar Store has an actual compass embedded in its top (also a whistle, though who would have heard us? And it was a very soft whistle. But still: good thought.)
Without the mosquito repellent compass we might still be wandering around in circles in the forest. We saw this osprey nest from several different angles, that's all I'm saying.
Eventually we came to the eastern passage. Really, I can't imagine how we got here.
Then more slogging through deceptively smooth-looking fern covered fields and broken deadfall where I'm sure I heard the sounds of elvish snickering
until at last we crossed the path that leads to the main road, and -- just like that -- we found ourselves transported from the realm of mid-summer magic back to reality.

Almost spring meander

Another calm and sunny day. We wanted to explore an interior bog-like place that shows up on the Google Earth satellite picture of the island. Actually, from looking at that satellite picture you can see that huge swaths of the interior are bogs.

But the interior bogs are secret places, ringed all around by forests so that you can't see them from the road.
We walked along a forest path that was made either by a deer hunter or a surveyor. In either case they went to a lot of trouble.

Or it could have been made by the gnomes, since one of their houses lies along it.

Then we walked into the bog. This particular bog is well along in its transition to a forest. Long, long ago it would have been a glacial depression, then a pond. Now the spruce are moving in. Bayberry is well established, and the ground around those bushes is fairly firm.

But there are many places where it would be impossible to walk without getting sucked down to the nether world. And we saw lots of northern pitcher plants and sphagnum moss, both bog species.

I felt surprised to find myself standing inside this large open space that can't be seen from the outside. It made me wonder how many more places like this there are on the island. But unless there's some sort of trail or path into them, they really are very hard to reach.

Deer season

This evening the deer family is in the lower orchard. They aren't easy to see, since they are the colour of fog, or of wet bark of old apple trees, or of rain-darkened boulders. They blend in. I can see them, though, because their movement attracts my eye. In this I think my eye has become more discerning during the past two and half years. I notice movement better now, and maybe shape: the patterned flicker of grass where a snake is passing; the cupped curve of a nest. My eyesight is terrible, but experience has begun to compensate. I have learned that if I notice something I ought to pay attention. Maybe that's the whole difference, right there, between now and then.

The deer remain mysterious, but they have begun to come into focus for us. One of the books that came with the house was The World of the White-tailed Deer, by Leonard Lee Rue III (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962.) The book belonged to Howard T.Walden 2nd, who was Elizabeth Hyde's father and a well-respected nature writer, especially about fly fishing. His penciled underlinings and notes are a conversation between the reader and the writer. Maybe, too, they are notes on an inner dialogue inspired by his reading the book and remembering the deer he has seen in his life. It's like catching a few words from a distant thought, or like the hint of a deer as it leaps away, some foggy evening sixty or seventy years ago.

Rue tells me that deer stay in a three-generation matriarchal family composed in its simplest form of the older doe, the younger doe and the younger doe's offspring. He also says that they inhabit a one-square mile area for their entire lives, and move outside that area only in extreme conditions. That explains why, all fall, we have only seen this one family, and another solitary deer as well. There are other deer on the island, other families, but they inhabit other places.

The hunters were here only for the first couple of weeks of deer season. After that, they turn their attention back to the final touches of getting ready for lobster season, and the island grows quiet again. We call them the hunters, but really they are our same friends who have camps on the island and come over now and then during the summer. Their interest in the deer gives them an intimate connection to the island. Once a year they cut deep into the forest where nobody else ever goes, and build their secret places, and watch and wait. Because they take the time and because they pay attention they see more than the rest of us, I think.

Some of their wives tell them,"Fine, go off to McNutt's and hunt. Just don't kill anything." They do, though, and I think it's probably a good thing. There's not much killing of deer that takes place, but what does probably helps the herd as a whole. If there are too many deer on the island they will starve over the winter. Already the hunters are concerned about what they saw during this hunting season: deer smaller and thinner than they have seen in years past. It makes sense. This summer was not abundant for growing things. For a few weeks the hunters host the deer at lavish feasts of apples and carrots. But even so, the deer may be going into the winter with little reserve.

A walk to the northern end of the island

The other day I took a walk along the main road to the northern end of the island. It's an easy walk, about five kilometers round trip from our house. The island was so silent that I could hear the flutter of wings in the trees along the road.

Several chickadees were flitting and darting amongst the trees.

It seemed that some of them were watching me as I stood on the road watching them.

I came upon some of the elusive northern sheep. They were so silent that I only happened to glance over and see them in the woods, looking at me. They quickly disappeared.

A curious deer came out into the road to stare.

A red squirrel was not at all shy about making eye contact, and chattered at me behind my back after I walked on.

And across the marsh at the Horseshoe I watched Chopper returning from a trip to the mainland.

Momentary beauty

The red maple trees are flowering all over the island. At some places along the main road you can find stands of them, bright red flowers covering their tall arched branches.  Deeper into the forest they peek through the spruce trees. Their flowers precede their leaves, so this is the time when the red maple can be seen and identified most easily. By the end of May they will have subsided into the general greenery of early summer.  This is their moment of glory.   

McNutt's Geography: Forest Map, 1912

This 1912 map, Forest Distribution in Nova Scotia, is from the Commission of Conservation Canada. We inherited it with the house. According to the map's legend, McNutt's Island is categorized as Not examined. That's why you see it here as a blank white space of outlined island. 

If it had been examined it would probably be pink (for farms) along the western edges and in the northern part, golden (for barrens) along the southern cape, and dotted green (for culled coniferous forest) everywhere else.  But, instead, no forestry expert got in a boat and came over here to look.  

This question of forest types is vexing, but only because I wish for some neat category in which to place the island. I have read that Nova Scotia's forests as a whole are considered part of the Acadian Forest. But the description of the Boreal Forest seems to fit McNutt's better: where black spruce and hackmatack (tamarack) dominate, growing on saturated, acidic soils.  Or perhaps it is mostly Forested Sphagnum Bog.

I wonder how island conditions -- the fog and the rain and the wind and the waves -- affect this particular forest.  Trees along the shore have toppled because the waves have washed away the bank where they sat. The few spruce near the lighthouse, which is so wind-swept, are small and twisted like those of an old Japanese print. The wind blows off the sea and across the island in mighty gusts and gales that have the power to uproot enormous spruce and flatten entire forest patches. The same wind has carved the big yellow birch tree into the old wrinkled creature you see today.   

The forest is not all spruce and hackmatack. It has paper birch, alder, quaking aspen and maple. Various small hardwoods I do not yet know.  Near the government wharf the road travels through a forest of paper birches. It is ghostly until the summer, when it becomes enchanted. In spring the pink and white blossoms of serviceberry and wild cherry and rhodora emerge briefly, then disappear. When the blossoms have finished the trees subside into vague anonymity, nothing special anymore. There are wild hollies, with red berries.  And apple trees, planted by old settlers or by birds or by wind.     

This Forest Map tells me nothing about what kind of forest is here. It just sends me outside, to look around and see for myself. What kind of a map is that, I wonder.       

Forest bog

The island's main road begins at the government wharf and ends at the Atlantic. It was first carved out of the forest in the 1780s, when Cape Roseway Lighthouse was built. When Fort McNutt was a defence post during the Second World War, the military engineers rebuilt the road and added drainage pipes.  So as you are walking from the wharf to the lighthouse you can see rust-red streams running from the eastern side beneath the road to the western side, then on down the forested slope toward the shore. 

But really the waters are more like rivulets than streams.  They meander through mosses and boulders and spruces and sometimes eddy into pools, but mostly they just saturate the moss and make a very soft spongy ground. 

Occasionally you can see a glinting through the trees and undergrowth further in, and know that the water coalesces there, where you see it reflecting the sunlight. It's very difficult to walk into the forested bog without getting lost.  But you can stand on the road and peer into it, and imagine yourself walking deeper and deeper into the woods, your boots squishing and sinking in all that soaked moss.   

 

Regeneration

I have been watching the skeleton forest north of our property since we moved here. You can read posts about it under the forest label.  Greg has taken down the spruce that used to hide the stone wall boundary and to some extent the forest beyond the wall. Now it is possible to see the slow regeneration taking place within the forest.

Bright green patches of young spruce have established themselves in the midst of all the dead wood.  Now, in early spring, you can see the faint pink of small hackmatack and alder, a medium sized maple or two, and the distinguished structure of a tall birch before it has leafed out.  The maple and the birch survived the wind storm that toppled their less deeply rooted neighbours, the spruce, several years ago. The hackmatack and alder are among the first deciduous trees to establish themselves after such a destruction. 

The land in this forest is one big bog, though it's hard to tell that because of the dense tangle of uprooted trees, old trunks and fallen branches. It's almost impossible to walk through this area. You can do it, but it involves inching your way from fallen log to fallen log, holding onto dead branches that you hope are not going to break off in your hand, and never knowing whether what's beneath your feet will suddenly give way. Beneath the forest are springs and streams and a layer of moss-covered humus, and everywhere a great variety of lichen and fungus.  

Though the forest still looks dead, I guess, to someone just glancing at it, I no longer see it that way. I see it as deeply alive and a source of endless admiration.  

 

Unwinding the spruce

But what does Greg do all day? That lazy fellow. You mean aside from the baking and cooking, the trips to town, the hard cider making, the propane tank replacing, the snow shovelling, the pumping out of Chopper's innards after a big storm, that sort of thing? It's an easy answer. He cuts wood.

Early in the morning he leaves the house, whistling, with his axe upon his shoulder. He goes to the woods where he begins to cut. And there he remains until lunch time -- dinner, they call it around here. And there he remains until supper. And now that the light is longer, there he remains again in the evening. Now and then, I imagine, he rests with his back against a tree and talks to the friendly forest creatures who gather around him, their shyness overcome by his growing familiarity.

In between felling trees and carrying off tree rubbish to an undisclosed place where it becomes a valuable ecological habitat for small mammals, he splits logs. So you see Greg's life is truly simple. He might sometimes wish that it were more varied, but for now it is not.

He has carved out his wood cutter's role entirely by himself. And by adhering faithfully to his vision and purpose he has accomplished great things. When we first saw this property -- uninhabited for more than decade -- it was overrun with spruce. A few spruce -- even a spruce forest in its proper place -- can be a beautiful thing. Spruce growing up randomly and impulsively and even you could say compulsively out of every nook and cranny is not. We did not know, for example, that there were two unbroken parallel boundaries of old stone walls along the outer edges of the property. Nor that apple trees hid near those walls. We did not know about the old farm's springs and wells and bogs. They were all obscured by spruce, standing, or lying, where they ought not.

Michaelangelo was said to have viewed his sculpting as a process of revealing the essence of the raw stone he carved. Greg is a forest Michaelangelo. As he topples the spruce trees he reveals the essence of the place. His most recent project has been to disentangle a crowded patch of trees and so make space for a grove of hackmatack, a noble tree.

We did not know the potential hackmatack grove was there, in a bog near the lower road, until Greg began to cut down the spruce that crowded that corner. We didn't know the bog was there either, beneath criss-crossed logs and fallen branches. Bogs have a wonderfully mysterious quality, with their hidden watery places and their soft mossy ground which you must tred upon with care. Hackmatack have an affinity for bogs and so do we.

Greg labouriously cut the spruce and pulled out the litter. One dead spruce had fallen so that it was caught in the high branches of a gigantic hackmatack. He hoisted it on his shoulders and walked around and around the hackmatack, unwinding the spruce until he could pull it away. His life is simple, but not without its challenges.

Early every morning the wood cutter leaves the house, whistling, his axe upon his shoulder. And now we can see the hackmatack, and the stone wall that runs all the way down to the shore.

Lull between two woodpiles

Our wood pile is in a lull. At the beginning of winter we revelled in how much wood we had, a wall of wood, split and stacked, long, high and wide, of spruce and apple and birch. We were rich in wood. But by the other day it was almost gone. I don't know how this happened so quickly. It reminded me of when you think you have plenty of money and then all of a sudden you see you don't. How did that happen, exactly, you wonder.

It's not that we don't have wood. We have a huge pile Greg has made since December, a wall of wood, split and stacked, long, high and wide. But it is the wood for next winter's heat, not for now. It must dry and age until then, when it will be ready. It will be of great use next winter. But it is of no use at all right now.

We can scrounge our way through this lull. There are plenty of standing dead trees around. Come to think of it, we are rich in standing dead trees. Greg can cut one down and chop it up and we can burn it right away, since it's pre-aged. And down by the sheep corral there's a huge pile of well-seasoned slab wood -- the remnants of Skipper's lumber milling over a year ago.

It's another lesson in living hand-to-mouth, an aspect of late winter when the wealth of harvest is running out faster and faster. Still, the temperatures are rising. Soon we'll be in and out of the house all day, too busy with spring projects to pay attention to the fire in the woodstove, which is how winter finally ends.

Snow blowing sideways

Our local weather station at Baccaro Point is calling for flurries today, with a high of -1 centigrade. The flurries are flying across the island on a westerly wind at fifty five kilometres per hour. For comparison, we don't travel across the harbour if winds are above twenty five kilometres, and winds above sixty three kilometres are classified as gale force.  The wind is plenty strong today, and since it's coming from the west our west-facing house takes the brunt of it. It's on a day like this that we realize how many cracks and crevices our wrinkled old wooden house has.  I wonder if it would seem so cold inside if we could not hear the actual wind howling into the house. But we do hear it. It's just what days like this mean for us: we live close to the weather, like everybody who has lived on this island before us. 

On the up side, the sun is also shining, if weakly. This past week Greg began his north side clearing project, taking down the spruce trees that stood too close to the house and blocked our view of the dead forest.  On sunny days like today the standing dead trees -- snags, they are called -- are luminous when the sun strikes them, like ivory, or old bones.  Greg's clearing has also revealed the tumbled-down stone wall that bounds the north side of the property. We plan to restore that wall. But not today. 

Today the snow is light and airy, flying about. From inside, it feels as if our little blue house is in a snow dome that's being shaken energetically.     

 

The names of things

You lack the names of things when you go to a new place.  I have been like a toddler the past two years, asking over and over, what's that? Or like a sneaky toddler, not asking outright but listening hard to add to my store of island words.   

There is a word that Robin taught me the first summer we were on the island. The tufts of wool that are caught in the branches when the sheep brush against them on their endless circuit around the island: rovings.  Rovings are not just useless remnants hanging randomly on island brambles, like you might think. There's a great deal you can do with rovings. You can collect them, which would be wool-gathering. You can card, spin, weave or knit them, or if you are lazy and skill-less like me and not actually needing to make clothes since there is such a thing as Frenchy's, you could put the rovings in a basket and look at them fondly now and then. 

We inherited many amazing and wonderful things with our island house: three chipped and crazed china plates with rabbits running in an endless circle around the edge; a daguerreotype of two young women; an ancient padlock. But of all the treasures we inherited, the very most wonderful is an anchor made of wood and weighted with a stone. And this kind of old  home-made anchor is called a killick. Peter gave us this word.

The standing dead trees we see everywhere are called snags. This is a word I found by reading Ode to Dead Wood, from The Canadian Wildlife Federation website. Here you can learn just how valuable our snags are -- and we have so many! Like rovings, snag is a word that fits snugly with the object itself.   

Then there are the fragrant white flowers that bloom all around the house in early summer. I thought they were narcissus, but Skipper called them June lilies, a more apt name for them. Lucy Maude Montgomery writes about June lilies on Prince Edward Island, so they must be June lilies throughout the maritime provinces.   

Another name I learned from Skipper was conspicuous boulder. It's a navigational term that refers to, well, conspicuous boulders, like the huge ice age rock that teeters at Fort Point, or like The Sloop, which is the name of the conspicuous sloop-like boulder that defines the southwest corner of McNutt's.  

Wherever we go, necessary and useful words are waiting there for us. So vast is our ignorance that we don't even know they exist until we need them.  Then they come out of nowhere, where they have been waiting,  and light on our palms like butterflies, slowly opening and closing their wings.

Skeleton forests

"McNutt's Island used to be so beautiful," a friend told me today.  I was startled.  I feel so enveloped by beauty here that at first I could not think what he was talking about. Then I realized. He meant the dead spruce trees.  They are everywhere. Along the island's western side there are huge swaths blown over by the fierce storms that hit the island several times a year. I think Hurricane Juan did the most damage, several years ago, and since then the remaining trees have been more vulnerable. Dead trees sprawl along the roads, their branches broken off at crazy angles. They teeter threateningly above the paths, only half-fallen,  sharp branches pointed at your eyes, dripping with Old Man's Beard. You pass beneath them, quaveringly.

Compared to deciduous trees, spruce grow up quickly and begin to die quickly.  And they have a shallow root system. There's not much that holds them to the earth.  So they become like dominoes -- one falls into the next, and together they take down a few more.  Add to their speeded-up life cycle the strong winds that rake the island, and you have the conditions we see all around us.   

Just beyond our northern stone wall there is a wide swath of devastation that extends from the shore all the way to the lower road. It is a skeleton forest of trees driven mad -- indeed driven to death -- by hurricane winds. Trunks white as bones lean against each other, starkly angled, austere.  The ground is an impenetrable mass of rotting trunks and branches.  

I understand what our friend was telling me.  When we first moved here I thought the dead forests were ugly, too. But I don't anymore. His comment helped me realize how greatly my own perspective has changed during the year and a half that we have lived on the island. 

Now I see the dead forests as an aspect of the island in its cycle of growth and decay. Out of the destruction something new emerges. Tiny spruce trees, no bigger than your hand, are everywhere. When you look closely you find a subtle world of mushrooms and fungi and lichen and moss colonizing the dead wood --  a world of colour even now in the dead of winter.   

McNutt's Island really is, at heart, a wild place. Storms blow, and patches of forest fall, and the island is always in the process of dying and being born.  It really is quite beautiful, on its own terms.  

It's New Year's Eve and silence has fallen on the island. Our friends have returned to the mainland. All day the lobster boats were back and forth in the harbour on calm waters, bringing in their traps before the big blizzard that will hit Nova Scotia tonight.   Tomorrow morning we'll wake up to an island transformed by snow, and everything will be new again.   

 

The forest

Except for the harbour that lies below our house to the west, the forest surrounds us. It does not crowd against us anymore, though it did when we first came here. Now you can see east -- past the back orchard and the vegetable garden -- to the empty lower road. You can see the far stone wall to the south, where Greg cleared the trees last summer. But beyond these boundaries the island is a pointed vertical dark forest of spruce, and the ground beneath the forest is moss-covered bog and boulders, cross-hatched with fallen trees and branches and scrubby undergrowth.

The forest is the island's default position, and everywhere it is not something else -- our newly cleared places, an old field, a ruin, a summer camp, a road, a rocky shoreline -- it is forest.

Ten feet inside, you are clambering over dead logs that give to the touch, or treacherously collapse when you are half way over. Your feet get caught in mucky bog that emerges and disappears without warning, layered with twists of wicked dead branches, ingenious traps for trespassers.

The only paths are those made by the sheep and the deer and the ATVs. The paths of sheep and deer are narrow, and you must rely on what they had in mind when you travel there. They may not go where you think. The ATV paths are easier to follow, with their secret signals of a hanging buoy or a beer bottle stuck over the end of a branch. They lead to deer blinds deep within the forest: gnomish huts and treehouses, empty eleven and a half months each year. You stare, then retrace your steps.

Twenty feet inside, and when you look back you don't know where you are anymore. There are no landmarks to give you a sense of orientation or direction. Look back toward the main road you so foolishly left. It has disappeared. On its other side, the same forest blends into the one you are standing in, so there's no perspective, really, to grab hold of. Still, there are wonders to behold: silently trickling streams that eddy into tiny rock-edged pools, deep and mysterious, where nobody ever goes. The gothic verticality of thousands of narrow spruce spires, delicately draped with an airy gray-green lichen called Old Man's Beard. The weak winter light filtering through the forest. The silence.

Once, last summer, Greg and I unaccountably wandered apart, each going in slightly different directions a few yards off the main road. I felt an alluring pull that drew me deeper and deeper into the forest. It was irresistible, an ancient druidical enchantment. I walked further and further, until suddenly my boot sank down a good foot into a bog, followed by my other boot. I was being sucked into the bog, forcefully. I was only able to fall forward flat on my face and from that position slowly extricate my feet, then reach in to pull out my boots, then crawl backward until I returned to solid ground.

I laughed while I was lying there spread out flat against the bog, deep in the forest, beyond hearing or seeing. I laughed at first with surprise, but then with an inexplicable joy. I could have lain there, filled with such gladness, forever. I think the forest is somehow dangerous that way.

The forest is the stuff of fairy tales, of being lost and finding your way again. Strange things can happen there, just beyond the known world of stone walls and vegetable gardens and apple trees, and beyond the great wood pile that Greg has made by going into the forest day after day and felling the trees, and cutting them into logs, and splitting them, so that we can be cozy and warm all winter.