"island tales," next Thursday night

This event was scheduled long ago, before we ever dreamed we'd be leaving the island. But maybe it's not bad timing after all. Sometimes things have an odd way of working out.

island of surprises

Except for the usual suspects, I really don't expect to see anybody around here. So I was surprised when two strangers turned up yesterday: Paul Wolfe and Scott Cunningham, who had kayaked over from Carleton Village and were planning to paddle around the island.Scott (right) is the author of Sea Kayaking in Nova Scotia: a guide to paddling routes along the coast of Nova Scotia (Halifax: Nimbus, 2000). He also runs Coastal Adventures, which offers all sorts of guided trips around the province.
Paul was his partner in adventure today.
Scott is updating his information for a new edition. So this was a working visit for them both.

After Paul and Scott took off on their circle tour, I checked out the copy of Scott's book he gave us. It's probably safe to say that I will never kayak around McNutt's Island, though if I did I'd certainly consult this book first. It tells you all about the winds and the currents here, and what to watch out for.

But I was curious to see what Scott had written about the island itself. He was remarkably accurate in a few succinct paragraphs. Of course the main road is in better shape now than it was ten years ago. Then Scott described it as a narrow trail fighting a losing battle with alders and white spruce. He could not have known of the glorious McNutt's Island road crew, which will never, no never, ever surrender to the forces of spruce, appearances sometimes to the contrary.

But some things don't change. The sheep still have the run of the place, the ruins of Fort McNutt and those weird hieroglyphics still have the power to fascinate, and McNutt's Island is still at the end of a road -- or sea -- less traveled.

road crew reinforcements

McNutt's Island does have a road crew. It's an assortment of people, mostly Lyndon or Skipper or Mark or Cliff and since we moved here, Greg, who go out with a chainsaw and open up the road again whenever a tree falls across it, which happens now and then, especially after a high wind. The road crew is not the least bit organized and maybe because of that it does excellent work.

But sometimes even the most dedicated road crew needs reinforcements. There are places where huge crowds of alders jump up off the side of the road when they see you coming and wave their branches in your face and generally act all wild and crazy. They have gotten out of hand. They had to be cut down to size.

Ken Taylor, captain of Browneyed Girl, got the ball rolling when he brought his bush cutter to the island and spent days and days clearing the road's edges, starting at the government wharf.
Then Randy VanBuskirk brought his dad's big rig over
with the help of his friends Wade Pennell (right) and and Lee Rodgerson (left).
I can't imagine what it took to put this scary monster on Randy's boat and then get it off again, twice. Its fearsome blade does a terrific job of cutting back whatever is in its path, and Randy is constantly adjusting its angle so it misses nothing.
After these big-time reinforcements the road will be back in the hands of the sturdy regulars and their simple tool of choice.

island destination

We're having a string of glorious days here. Everybody who had been thinking of visiting McNutt's Island aboard Brown Eyed Girl decided that yesterday would be the perfect day to come. We kept getting emails and phone calls from various people arranging for a picnic lunch, or a ride to the lighthouse, or afternoon tea. We had never made so many lunches at one time, or had so many people for tea. I think it was a dozen picnic lunches and a dozen for tea. I only have six teacups with matching saucers, but nobody seemed too upset with mugs.

By the time they gathered back here for tea beneath the oak tree, they had explored the lighthouse grounds, admired the wild sheep, looked at birds, examined the old guns and discovered the ghost barracks at Fort McNutt. After tea they hiked off again to the government wharf to meet Brown Eyed Girl for the trip back to Shelburne.

Brian and Stephen won the prize for the most adventurous mode of transportation. They kayaked across the western channel from Carleton Village, then kayaked completely around the island before arriving at our dock for lunch. It took them about three hours to go all the way around the island.

It's funny to think about McNutt's Island becoming a bit of a tourist destination. It's so off the beaten track. Because of that, though, it does appeal to a certain kind of intrepid and cheerful soul.

biking the island

A few intrepid adventurers have been exploring the island this summer. Brown Eyed Girl drops them off at the government wharf, then they walk to the light, or sometimes stop by our house to get their lunch and hitch a ride to the lighthouse in the McNutt's Island Express.

Today Sheldon and Laurel Scott and Ella McLeod and Brian Nickerson brought their mountain bikes with them on Brown Eyed Girl.

I think they had a lot of fun riding to the light and exploring the guns and the ghost barracks. After they stopped by here again they were going to ride down the lower road to the sheep pens at the head of the cove, and maybe go around to see the old cellar remains. You can cover lots of this big island when you're on a bike.

a fresh eye

Bernard Nickerson came to the island yesterday from Shelburne, bringing with him his camera and his eye for the terrific picture.I wish I knew where this wasp nest is.
And this little bird is a wonder.
Even more beautiful jellyfish floating past, in remarkably serene waters.

You can see more of Bernie's perspective on south shore Nova Scotia at his flickr site, including a whale spotted in the harbour during the return trip to Shelburne yesterday on Brown Eyed Girl.

Thanks to Bernie for sharing his McNutt's Island photographs.

a trip home

Here are a few sights of a trip yesterday from Fort Point to McNutt's Island.Sandy Point Lighthouse stands on the eastern side of Shelburne Harbour, opposite Fort Point. It marks the beginning of the inner harbour and the Town of Shelburne.McNutt's Island comes into view as you pass the conspicuous boulder at Fort Point.
View of McNutt's, from the northwest.
A view of the island's eastern shoreline, looking south along the eastern channel and out to sea.Shelburne Harbour Boat Tour's Brown Eyed Girl is coming home, too. Yesterday she sailed from Lockeport to Shelburne.
The captain of Chopper I.
The Fish House.
Coming into the dock. We are currently flying the flag of Queen Elizabeth. You are only supposed to fly it when she is in residence. She's not actually on McNutt's Island, but she is somewhere in Canada this week. So we are stretching a point here and hoping the flag police are distracted by bigger crimes elsewhere.

Dock Street, Shelburne on an autumn afternoon

I was waiting for the Shelburne Museum to re-open one afternoon last week, so I walked down Dock Street and took some pictures. Shelburne really does have a lovely Historic District. Dock Street is several blocks long, and runs parallel to the harbour.
Shelburne didn't even exist until ten thousand or so refugees arrived here in 1783/1784. There was nothing at Port Roseway before then except a few settlers here and there, eking out a living in this wilderness.
A decade after it was founded, Shelburne's population had fallen from more than ten thousand to three or four hundred people. There are several good explanations for Shelburne's rapid decline, and it isn't necessary to choose just one of them. They all played their part.*
Visitors in the early 1800s told of grass and stumps left in the streets and livestock wandering through the remains of empty houses.
The people who stayed, though, made a life for themselves. They grew vegetables in their garden plots.
They built ships. They fished.
It's hard to realize how quickly Shelburne was built, from nothing, in a few years, and then how quickly the town emptied out.
It became a village, in the midst of the forlorn remnants of its brief glory.
What remains today is a serene beauty.

* You can read the story in Stephen Kimber's Loyalists and Layabouts: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of Shelburne, Nova Scotia 1783-1792 (Doubleday Canada, 2008).

New perspective

Sometimes it helps to go away from a place so you can see it more clearly. I had been wanting to search the local archives in the Town of Shelburne for information about McNutt's Island. I was looking for material I couldn't get online.

And it worked out that I could spend a few days there this week. I visited the resource centre at the Shelburne County Museum, on Dock Street. I picked up some leads and hope to return next week for more poking around.

While I was at the resource centre I met people who were at work on very interesting things. Susan Gilson and Philip Neville were in town filming interviews for a Council of Nova Scotia Archives project called Routes to Your Roots. They chatted with Jeannie Peterson, a volunteer, and with Finn Bower, who is the museum's Curator. (Left to right: Finn, Jeannie, Philip, Susan.)

I saw a bunch of pigeons on top of the cooperage on Dock Street. I spent a terrific day at the Shelburne County Archives and Genealogical Society, too. I'll write more about that visit next week.

McNutt's geography: geocaching

Geocaching is a popular world-wide activity that involves the outdoors, a GPS, clues and hidden treasure (sort of). It's a bit like a scavenger hunt, or a game of hide-and-seek. A sense of adventure is really the main thing that's required!

One spring day a year ago we heard that the geocachers were coming to McNutt's Island. A small group had come over earlier to place containers or other indications of a cache around and about. The larger group arrived one sunny day to follow the clues and find as many of the caches as they could. You can read about it at the web site of The Atlantic Geocaching Association.

The caches are still on the island -- somebody told me that there are about forty sites -- and every now and then small groups of geocachers come over to search for them. When they find a cache, they open it up and sign their name in a log. Then they put it back exactly the way they found it, for the next person. I think at some of the sites they are supposed to take a picture of themselves there and send it in. And that's really all there is to it. This seems like an enjoyable way to experience a new place. Though at two thousand acres this is a big island and if you wanted to find all of the caches you would be doing a lot of hiking.

I wonder if I have seen a cache on the island and not realized what I was looking at. It could be...

Purloined lace

I've never seen Queen Anne's Lace here on the island, even though it grows all along the roadsides just across the harbour.So when we visited Le Village historique acadien in Lower West Pubnico late last summer I took a dried flower head out of the garden there and shoved it in my pocket. All afternoon I felt the dry crumbly texture of the seed pod coming apart every time I touched it, hidden in its secret place. By behaving in a nonchalant manner I got away from there without being apprehended.

It was about the same time that I was starting the little wildflower garden next to the house. I came home and planted the stolen seeds there.

There's no evidence for it, but some people think Acadians may have lived on this island in the seventeenth century, or at least may have used its rocky shores for drying fish. More certainly they were across the harbour to the west. So --even though it's a wildflower that will grow just about anywhere, and does -- the Queen Anne's Lace that's growing in the garden reminds me of the ghostly presence of Acadians along south shore Nova Scotia.

Brown Eyed Girl

Brown Eyed Girl stopped at the government wharf this afternoon to pick up two island visitors. The boat dropped them off this morning and they hiked to the lighthouse, then came by our house for afternoon tea. Brown Eyed Girl makes a second trip from Shelburne in the afternoon, when she takes her passengers all the way around the island, and then picks up anybody she has left off here in the morning. This is the first summer for Ken and Sherri Taylor's Shelburne Harbour Boat Tours. I think they are happy with how well the summer has gone for their new enterprise. We are glad that it offers people a way to visit McNutt's, or to see it up close from every angle.

Schooner Amistad in Shelburne Harbour

Amistad arrived at the town dock in Shelburne today. She's a powerful symbol of courage and resistance to injustice.

Amistad is a replica of the ship which was carrying enslaved Africans out of Havana in 1839. The Africans rose up and took over the ship.
If you don't know the story, Steven Spielburg's movie Amistad is a great way to learn about it. They are showing it in town this afternoon. And there are several other excellent events surrounding the Amistad's arrival. In case you are near Shelburne, you can find out about the week's activities here.
Amistad will be travelling to Cuba later this month, then replicating her historic voyage from Havana to Long Island. There's lots of information about the trip at Amistad's web site.

Today in Shelburne the townspeople marched out to greet her. These are the Third New Jersey Volunteers. That's our solicitor, second shako from the left.

It's always a bit head-spinning for us Yanks, since we think of New Jersey as being on the American side in the Revolution. But in Nova Scotia when we refer to the Third New Jersey Volunteers we mean a regiment of British Loyalists, or as they would have been referred to in the newly independent American colonies, traitors. Head-spinning. But we are on the Nova Scotian side of things now.

Actually, people in Shelburne dress like this a lot. If you are going to live in Shelburne you might as well go ahead and invest in some eighteenth century clothes. You will need them.

There is an organic connection between Amistad and Nova Scotia, and particularly with Birchtown, here in Shelburne Harbour. In 1792 a large group of former American slaves, who had won their freedom and a Nova Scotia refuge by actively supporting the British cause in the Revolution, left Nova Scotia and sailed to Sierra Leone, which was then also the site of a British slave-trading outpost. There they established Freetown and a new community of freedom in the midst of an active slave trade. Over half of those new settlers to Sierre Leone came from Birchtown.

Nearly fifty years later, the Africans aboard the Amistad were enslaved near Sierra Leone and taken to Cuba to be sold.

If you imagine a skein of connection between the American colonies (later the new United States), Nova Scotia, England, Sierra Leone and the slave embarkation points along Africa's west coast, and Cuba and the West Indies where slaves were needed for the sugar plantations, then back to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland for cheap salt fish to feed the slaves, you have the bare outlines of a vast global economy based on slavery. Both the Nova Scotian settlers of Sierra Leone and the enslaved Africans who took control of Amistad were courageous people whose personal actions furthered the end of a system so deeply entrenched that many thought it would be impossible to eradicate.

A wonderful book on the end of slavery is Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005). Hochschild is a great story teller, worthy of his huge subject.

Island signs

McNutt's Island is a place of many signs. Some signs are quite useful, such as this:

...and this:
Others are less useful ...
Some signs have a mysterious air...
Some explain to you where you are in the world:
...or where you are at this exact moment. With signs like these, you can just throw away that silly GPS.
Some signs are new:
And some have been here since the days of the Loyalists: