Labrador's Siren Song

These totemic stones are the hallmark of Labrador's Inuit people.

We answered the siren song of Labrador. How could we not? It beckoned to us from across the Straits of Belle Isle, dark, forbidding, barren. But how could we not take the ferry across to this remotest of places?

Even though it is part of the Province of Newfoundland-Labrador, it stand apart and alone. There are only 22,000 humans who live in this triangle of rock that is 293,000 square kilometers. And 16,000 of those folks live in two towns – Goose Bay and Labrador City. The huge majority of humans are Inuit and Innu.

What Labrador has in the extreme is 750,000 caribou – the largest herd on Earth.

There are very few roads: one comes in from the eastern edge of Quebec and is gravel for 300 kilometers. The other is the road we traveled from the ferry. The boat dropped us off in Blanc Sabon, Quebec, and we drove the only tarred road east to Red Bay.

This place feels so remote. We stopped so I could photograph a pastoral scene of a dinghy tied off in a lake, with a lonely house on the shore. The silence grabs at you and announces itself. There is utter quietness. Perhaps an osprey screes overhead. But it is perfectly peaceful.

The snow lies still in the crevices of the hills and it is CLEAN and white. For there is no pollution here. No people, no pollution. It's simple.

Jo and I made our way through tiny fishing communities – mostly descendants of the Scots, Irish, English and French. The little settlement of Red Bay, where the road changed to gravel, was a whaling outpost, settled by the Basques of Spain in the mid-1500s. We visited a Canada Parks interpretative site and discovered the government had found the remains of a Basque sailing ship of around 3,000 tons capacity at the bottom of Red Bay. The archaeologists spent years excavating under water, using hot-water suits that allowed the drivers to stay down twice as long as if using dry suits. Hot water was pumped down to them and circulated through their suits to remove some of the chill from the near-freezing water.

And then we discovered Paul Comparelli and his daughter, Jo, who had just arrived from British Columbia after driving his Russian-built Ural motorcycle and sidecar across the gravel road.

Paul is a bit of a character. He loves his bike, even though he says it is a piece of crap. He says he has had to rebuild almost every piece of it. Formerly it was all-Russian. Now it has Taiwanese tires, Toyota alternator, Italian brakes, and a couple of German tires, too. He says he only get about 10,000 kilometers out of a set of tires, so he carries a spare tire and a spare wheel and tire, as well as all their gear. His original Russian tires gave him 2,000 kilometers, he said.

They stay in motels along the way and he decried the $151 a night it cost him to stay the previous night in a Labrador hotel in the back of beyond. Paul and Jo came over on the ferry to Newfoundland and were planning to scoot south and head for a motorbike rally in Pennsylvania in another week.

Viking Sagas

They tell of the Sagas, when men were men and women were to be feared.

When Clayton Coulbrooke was a small boy, living in L'Anse aux Meadows at the very northern tip of Newfoundland, his mother would tell him to play outside. He and his buddies would climb over the old Indian ruins, he thought they were, and pretend to be killing Indians. In the little brook that ran through the land, he said he would take a pitchfork to catch the salmon as they ran up the stream.

It was 20 years later that a Norwegian couple, came to his village by boat (for there were no roads here then) and began excavating the ruins. They dug for several years but were hard put to find the definitive item that proved this was no Indian mound but a village settled by the Vikings.

But Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad persisted and she had her “Eureka” moment. She came upon a small bronze pin, used by the Norsemen and women to fasten their clothing. By this time (1974), Clayton was old enough to be a helper and a digger on the site and he remembers Anne finding the pin. “She tried to put into a context we fishermen would understand,” he said. “She said it was like landing the biggest salmon.”

That pin is the lynchpin to the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows. Clayton walked with us on the boardwalk over the bog, explaining each of the indentations in the peat ground. He showed us the largest home and workshop, built and used by Leif Ericsson, he believes.

Leif was the son of Eric the Red who left Norway and settled in Iceland. Later, because he was a bit of a troublemaker – well, actually he killed a few fellow Norsemen – he was told to clear out of the settlement in Iceland and he sailed his open boat to the west and found Greenland which he named with a fetching name to try to entice other Norse lads to come over and join him. They did and the Sagas report he got into more trouble and set out and sailed a bit farther west, across what is now the Davis Straits to Labrador. He was blown south and seems to have made a landing on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

There were a handful of women who made the journey, all described in The Icelandic Sagas. Several voyages were made 500 years before Christopher Columbus sailed his ocean blue. The belief is this lonely outpost was only a way-station for the Norsemen for about 10 years. They pushed south to a place where grapes grew, hence their reason for calling the new land Vinland. There is no possibility that grapes grew in this cold, inhospitable piece of rock. Quite amazingly, though, butternuts (the size of walnuts) have been uncovered here in the houses. They can be found down in what is now Connecticut. In addition, a special kind of flinty stone which is only found here has been located in Saybrook, Connecticut. There is no proof, however, that Leif and the boys made it all the way down there. It is possible that the indigenous Dorset people, now extinct in these parts, traded their chips for butternuts. Who knows?

We sat in the rebuilt houses whose six-foot-thick walls of peat kept the chill out and listened to the re-enactors tell of the early days. The women sat by the fire and knitted on a single needle while Bjorn told the stories of the journey. I asked him about the women, their role, and what mark they made. He smiled and told me about one who was an illegitimate daughter of Leif who became a leader in her own right. She was one tough chic, by the sound of it. When trouble brewed between the 25 men and the five ladies after three years in the settlement, this woman ordered her husband to slay the ladies. He wouldn't do it (would you if you were sitting out at the end of the world on a piece of rock with a bunch of stinking men?) so she took up her sword and slew them all by herself.

We visited the forge and learned that the Vikings made iron nails from the ore that is found about a foot down in the peat. They smelted 10 kilograms of ore into 1 kilo of iron at 1200 degrees C and used their new nails to replace their rusty nails on their open sailboats. Only a single “new” nail was found on the site of the forge. But numerous broken and old nails of Norse iron ore were found at the boat shop they built.

The site is the only authenticated site for Norse presence in the new world. I met up with Clayton after the tour and complimented him on bringing the site alive. He beamed and said, “You've made my day.”

Later in the evening, we returned to the peat houses for a Sagas and Shadows program in which other re-enactors recounted the sagas by firelight and entertained us with the long-ago stories. The little hut was filled to overflowing from folks who came from across the world - China, Japan, France, Spain and even one from Newfoundland.

An Iceberg Inundation

This massive iceberg has drifted into entrance of the harbor at Griquet, NL

Mr. Taylor is a thin, spare man. He's a bit deaf. But he is Newfoundland-friendly, which is to say he made us feel welcome in his little cove at Griquet.

I met him on the stony beach and bid him good day. “And good day to you, sir,” he replied. I complimented him on the beauty of his little cove but he said it was beautiful until the storm came through last fall. “Then all the wharves were washed out... even some of the houses were moved inland by the waves,” he said.

We talked about the storm and he told me his wharf was in ruins. His boat sat high on the stones. “But a boat is no good without a wharf,” he said grimly.

Mr. Taylor told me he was a retired fisherman. “I caught the cod,” he said. And he added “When times got hard and the cod disappeared, I caught crab.”

We talked about the enormous iceberg that occupies the entrance to the cove. Jo and I had seen it on the way in with the motor home. Now we were back in the car for a photographic visit. “It's been here a week,” Mr. Taylor told us. “I think she be aground out there.”

He had seen us wandering among the rocks, looking for a good angle to shoot the massive berg and he, being nosy, I suppose, thought it worth his time to come on down to the beach and meet with the folks from away. As always, the little encounter enriched our stay.

We drove down a dirt road and came upon a young boy squatting beside a box on which were 20 pairs of mittens, knitted caps and socks. We asked him if these were his work and he told us “Nah. It's my Nannas's.” He also told us he had taken the boat out to the nearby icebergs and had bags of the pure ice in the Igloo cooler beside Nanna's socks. Quite enterprising, I thought.

The bergs are quite astonishing. We had planned to take a boat to go in search of them. But they are so numerous and so spectacular hiring a boat seemed pointless. So we just drove down the coast to St. Lunaire and then to Quirpon and photographed to our heart's content.

They are utterly spectacular great blue-white behemoths. Some are serrated on the top. Some are flat-topped like an aircraft carrier. CBC Radio alerted us a couple of days ago to a iceberg on the east coast of Labrador that is six times the size – wait for it! - of Manhattan. It broke away from the Greenland iceshelf and is slowly drifting south along the Labrador coast. This is all tied to global warming, of course. I doubt we will see this monster because they move pretty slowly. But it would be a spectacle.

Climbing North, Ever North

Gros Morne National Park on a better morning.

Gros Morne National Park looms grimly through the mist of a damp day on Newfoundland's west coast.

Gros Morne is a National Park as well as being a World Heritage Site. It's because in the early, early years of this planet's gestation glaciation laid bare the bones of the Earth and a rare chapter of the Earth's history is exposed – an ocean floor upturned, the deepest layers on top – a wondrous example of plate tectonics. Now I don't normally get that excited by plate tectonics – and I am not exactly orgasmic over this park. But it is interesting and – particularly – it is photogenic, always a plus for me.

We came to Gros Morne on a dreary, drizzling day. It was difficult to see much of the plate tectonics. But the gloomy scenery is quite reminiscent of Scotland on a summer's day. Low strands of clouds rolled down the mountains to the sea. Fisherman pushed their sturdy little wooden boats through the placid water to collect their catch.

We'd come here to Newfoundland on the short ferry – a seven-hour ride that began at 4 on Monday morning. We'd parked the rig at the ferry terminal on Sunday afternoon and settled in to wait. There seemed no point in going to a campground and leaving at midnight! At 11 at night, however, strange clicking sounds emanated from our refrigerator. I was asleep but Jo woke me. I checked the voltage in the rig and it told me we were at a dangerously low 9.4 volts, hence the protesting fridge. I turned it off, then started the generator, all the time trying to figure what was going on to cause this. I brought the batteries back up to 13 volts by 3:30 when we boarded the ferry, an enormous vessel named Atlantic Vision. She is is 700 feet long and her job seemed mostly to carry dozens of tractor trailers across to the island. She can carry 702 passengers. We drove aboard on one of the lower levels while trucks boarded on a ramp above our rig.

We spent the crossing dozing in and out of sleep, arriving in Port aux Basque at 10:30 in the morning. We drove for an hour and decided to call it a day at a campground. Then, I set about pulling my batteries out of the rig. I have an automatic battery filler because of the inaccessibility of the batteries and because of their weight when moving them. When I pulled this apart, however, I found the filling system had failed to pump water into one of the cells in the rear battery. I topped everything off, figuring I probably have fried that battery.

Then we took a hike through the woods along the river at the campground. At every turn in the trail was an inspirational saying that amused and calmed our nerves. We were in bed by 8 p.m. and slept for 12 hours.

Newfoundland is a wonderful mixture of green mountains – similar to Vermont – but much lonelier. There are fewer people on this island – 522,000 – than in the state of Vermont – but it must be 20 times larger than that state. Moose seem to be doing quite well, however. Four moose were introduced to the island in the early 1900s and they've been working hard so there are now more than 200,000. Don't even ask about the inter-breeding in this population!

Lots of signs warn us to save a life – our own!

Thursday dawned bright and crisp and clear – 42 degrees. Not a cloud visible. The Gulf of St. Lawrence is a rich azure and visibility seems to reach forever. We drove the only road north. This route did not exist before 1968. Before that time the little fishing villages we pass through were isolated and could only be reached by boat. We came through the national park and were able to see Tablelands which was invisible and much closer yesterday. Now the rugged rock structures stand bold on the water's edge. Off to our right is a fjord with rocky escarpments rising 2,000 feet from the water. You can take a boat ride through the fjord if you are willing to hike 3 kilometers each way through the bog.

As we climbed farther north, we found people growing potatoes in little garden patches in peat alongside the road. There were numerous scarecrows and the rich peat made for ideal gardening. These patches seem endless miles away from the little settlements.

Now the gulf between Newfoundland and Labrador is narrowing. It's possible to see the low, dark Labrador coastline in the distance. As we go even farther north, that will eventually be just a few miles across the straits.

We came to rest at Torrent River where Atlantic salmon make the run up the river to spawn and rest before doing their return visit to the ocean. These guys are quite different from the Pacific salmon we watched spawn and die in Alaska last year. They are capable of making the freshwater-saltwater transition up to five or six times in their lifespan. Just like the Pacific salmon, though, they have a hard-wired instruction that demands they return to their natal stream.

We visited the Torrent River Fishway and met an informative young woman with a Newfoundland accent that was a struggle to understand. There was a definite hint of Irish in it, along with colloquialisms that defined her as a Newfie. But as she spoke we learned of the fight to bring the river back after loggers virtually destroyed the spawning grounds of the salmon.

Now 5,000 fish make the trek upstream each year. Happily, we were there for the journey. A fishway - or fish ladder - encourages the salmon to make their way around the massive 100-foot-high waterfall they'd try to climb. This takes them through a 34-step-program where they can climb and rest, climb and rest.

When our guide took us underground, we came into a large room with two 10-foot-wide windows that let us view the salmon as they reached the next to the top ladder. Some of them were 40-inches long. Some were 20 inches. A few were showing the wear and tear of the journey and had sustained cuts and gashes on their flesh.

Our guide said the fish gather in great schools in the straits offshore. They know they must make it back to the stream of their birth. But there is a great gathering in which fish seem to line up for each of their birth streams. Then they depart and head inland. Each river is lined with fishermen who are using fly rods only. The salmon will not eat once they enter the fresh water, our guide told us.

So why would they be tempted by the fly on the rod? "We think it is more an annoyance to them than anything, ya-know," she said. "They kind of lash out at it and sometime get caught. But, mostly, they don't get caught and manage to make the journey home where they spawn and linger, still not eating, for weeks before they decide to make a dash for the ocean again. They come down the waterfall backwards (tail first), our guide told us. Then they gather offshore and head out for as far away as Scotland, France and Spain before returning the following year.

In the evening, we drove over to a beautiful little village named Port aux Choix where we wandered a quiet path through a place called Philip's Gardens on the top of a cliff. Lichen, ferns, junipers, bunchberries, wild strawberries, buttercups by the millions - maybe billions - welcomed us in the warm evening air. It was a perfect way to end the day.

Back at our campground, we met our neighbor, an accountant/home builder (interesting combination, I thought) from St. John's, Newfoundland. He was settling in around his campfire outside his new 43-foot motor home. He told us he had bought it in Orlando, Florida, and had recently driven it north to his home. Now he was out on a 2-week fishing trip and decided to park on the banks of the Torrent River.

Miners of the Deeps

Getting a feel for life in the mines, all these visitors have cricks in their necks.

The miners went down to the sea in Cape Breton. And they continued on down, 600 feet below the sea floor before their carts carried them six miles off the coast to the coal face. That's where they worked for 12 hours a day.

We went down the dripping wet, dark mine shaft on a dreary, foggy Saturday, recreating their daily toil. We were clothed in hard hats and a black smock and our guide was an old miner, Sheldon Gouthro. He'd spent 32 years working under the sea – miners of the ocean deeps, he said they were called.

Sheldon prepared us before the journey down. We were at the Miner's Museum in Glace Bay. Our shaft had been created to give us a genteel taste of that early hell. We paid for the privilege. Sheldon told us the collieries in Cape Breton produced millions of tons of coal until the shafts took the miners so far under the Atlantic Ocean that it became prohibitively expensive - not to mention unsafe – to get the coal out and pump safe air into the mines. They all have been closed for 35 years now in the Glace Bay area.

We started out slowly enough, walking down a slope in a tunnel that was six feet high. My hard hat scraped the roof which was coated with dripping water. When we turned a corner and went through a barrier (used to channel the fresh air below), the tunnel dropped to five feet. There were seams of coal all around us. Sheldon reminded us the lighting is new. Back in the day there were no lights – except for the lamps on the miners' heads.

This colliery recreated conditions in 1932. It was grim. The men would slowly make their way to the face back then, hauling in their own water and lunch bucket and tools. They had to pay for their own powder to blow out the coal seam. The only thing they didn't have to pay for, according to Sheldon, was the canary in a cage. The mine owner provided the canary so he could protect his investment. The canary would sing – a good sign – and the miners would hold it as high on the roof of the tunnel to where the methane gas would rise.

If it kept singing, they would set about extracting the coal, digging with picks and shovels, loading the carts that were pulled by pit ponies – small horses that had been rounded up on Sable Island offshore. They'd been wild for 200 years and their growth was stunted. The miners loved those ponies, Sheldon told us. They were sent down the mine and they stayed there until they died.

The men would return to the surface after their 12-hour shift. They would make their way home to the company-owned houses on which they paid rent. All their food and clothing was bought at the company store. If – or when – they were injured in the mine, the company would send an inspector to the house and tell the miner to find a replacement for himself in the mine or he and his family would be thrown out of the company-owned house. As a result, sons as young as nine years old would be sent down the mine. No girls or women were allowed down there because the miners believed a woman in the mine was bad luck. From what I heard, I would say it was good luck for the women that they weren't allowed down.

This journey was a powerful journey for us. My back was killing me as I stooped for more than an hour in shafts that got as low as four feet 10 inches. We pulled off to the side on our way back to the surface and Sheldon sat us down around a bed of flowers. There was a rose bush, some succulent plants and a number of colorful flowers. He said a German miner, early in the 20^th century, had received permission from the mine owner to grow flowers down in one of the mines and the miners had helped him by using their helmets to carry down the topsoil. The bed was fertilized by the horse manure from the ponies. The recreated bed of flowers was illuminated by fluorescent lamps but I don't know how the early flowers were able to get light.

Through a Curtain to France

These French-speaking maids gather around a window to chat between chores in Louisbourg, NS.

Louisbourg likely is unknown to most of you. It now is a quaint little fishing village on the outer edge of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. Back in its day - that would be 1713 to 1758 - it was a money-making machine for those who lived here. They mostly were French, Spanish, Portuguese fishermen. And they relentlessly fished the cod: 30 million pounds of it every year.

This was the capital of the French colony of Ile Royale back then. It was the most eastern part of New France and included Ile Royale (now Cape Breton Island, Ile St.-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and the Magalene Islands. Today, France can lay claim only to the St. Magdalene Islands, just south of Newfoundland.

England liked the cod just as much as France. And even though she was battling the Scots back in 1745, she was a powerful nation that could battle on two fronts (do you begin to see the Iraq-Afghanistan-U.S. linkage?) back then.

She sent a flotilla up to the enormous fortress that had hundreds of cannon, all facing the sea. But the English slid their fleet around behind Louisbourg and came at the fort through the back door. No cannon back there because the French thought no one would dream of attacking from overland.

The English sent all the French home with honor the first time. Then they agreed to hand the fortress back after a few years. The French learned nothing from the experience, though, and set about making more and more money from the cod fishing again.

And the English came back and did the same thing again. Through the back door again. This time they send the French packing without honor and they took apart much of the fort, using the wood, the doors, the windows, the slate roofs for their own buildings down in Massachusetts.

Now the cod is no more. So the fortress at Louisbourg essentially disappeared.

We came to the fortress and our minds boggled at the size of this place. This is the largest national historic site to be reconstructed in North America.

The work began in the early 1960s when the coal ran out in Sydney, to the north. The government stimulus plan retrained the out-of-work miners as carpenters, stone masons, and other craftsmen. Then they set about restoring this site. They have excavated about a fifth of the old fortress - but the rebuilding job is impressive. They spent $25 million over 25 years. The miners got work and we got a treasure-trove of history.

Re-enactors, dressed as French soldiers, are everywhere and will gladly share their experiences with you.

Jo and I settled in for a discussion with one on the ramparts. She told us about her lot in life. (Of course, there were no female soldiers back then!) She said she had been living in France, without a job so this opportunity seemed like coming to the promised land. She signed on for six years, was given a pay of 9 livres per month. But she soon discovered that 7.5 livres were deducted from her pay for her quarters and food. This leaves just enough for a bottle of bad red wine each month.

She said she works 24 hours on and 48 hours off. This allows her to work for the fishermen in her off hours. But the officer who arranged the extra work keeps most of the money she makes because she is illiterate and doesn't really know how much she makes. At the end of her six years, she needed to re-enlist for another six years to pay off her debts. Because people generally lived to be about 35, they usually could only manage about two six-year deals before they died.

Another man, a fisherman, explained how he doesn't think about doing better in life. "I only think about surviving," he said. He says he was born to be a fisherman and he has no aspirations to anything other than that. Now I was beginning to understand India's caste system. You don't fight being an untouchable for that is what you know you are!

The merchants in Louisbourg made a fortune. They traded in everything - from silk to cocoa, to shoes, to spoons, to cloth. The little people didn't do so well, of course.

I love this re-enacting business. It allows you to step through a curtain in time and see the world through a different lens.

The previous night we attended a concert in Louisbourg Playhouse which was fairly close to being a ceilidh- that Scottish speciality in which people sing, play and dance their jigs while a party atmosphere prevails. This event had some woefully lame comedy skits which proved once again how hard it is to write funny material. They should have stuck with the singing and playing and dancing. That was wonderful. One girl, named Erin, had a quirky smile and was an expert at playing the box. That's right. She sat on a wooden box that had a microphone inside it. She made that box talk and reverberate in ways you would not believe.

One of the perks of the concert was intermission where tea and oatcakes were served. Mmmmmm!

Hair-raising Entertainment

The blue light and the smoke casts an eerie air to the Tattoo in Halifax.

Gerald and his wife Ellie sat on the concrete steps outside Halifax's Metro Center, awaiting the opening of the doors for the International Tattoo. (A tattoo is defined as a signal on a drum, bugle, or trumpet at night, for soldiers or sailors to go to their quarters. But it is much, much more than that. More about it later.) We joined them after a pretty good dinner at Maxwell's Plum bar where we enjoyed fish and chips.

Gerald and Ellie are natives of Newfoundland, where we head in another week. They love their island, even though they no longer live there. Their children are scattered to the world: Alberta, Australia, as well as Nova Scotia. So they have come off the island after Gerald worked at the pulp wood mill for many years. “It was a good living,” he said. “Mostly because of the union.” He said he made newsprint for the Daily Mail in Britain, as well as The New York Times and the Washington Post … “and that newspaper down in New Orleans with the funny name; what is that name?” he asked. I suggested The Times-Picayune. “That's it,” he said with the smile. “I can't tell you how many times I slapped a label on a roll of newsprint for the Times Picayune.”

He waxed eloquent about the good old days on Newfoundland when the villages were isolated – with few roads - and only had oil lamps. “People would choose their village when they came on the island depending on where they came from in Scotland or England or Ireland,” he said. “There was a bad class system back then, though,” he said. He's not a big fan on the English. “The manager of the pulp mill, an Englishman, expected us to stand when he entered the room for a meeting,” he said. He and the other managers were above themselves, he said, but that is pretty much gone now.

Gerald's father was a fisherman. He would get the two boys up at 3 in the morning, Gerald said, and they would launch the boat for fishing the cod before anyone else in the village. “It was a point of honor,” Gerald said. In those early days, they would throw back the crab or the flounder they caught in their nets. They were worthless, from his father's point of view.

He and Ellie said the island is doing well financially now, despite the demise of the pulp wood mill. “We have the oil off the east coast of Newfoundland now,” he said. Now the biggest worry is keeping the icebergs away from the oil platforms. He said men will attach the cables to the bergs and try to pull them clear. Otherwise, the platforms have to be moved.

The doors of the Metro Center opened and we left the old couple who were joined by two of their grandchildren from Australia who were visiting for the summer.

Inside, we settled in for a night of music and dance as 1,700 performers from all over the world – Estonian, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, the U.S., as well as countless bands and an excellent 150-voice choir from Canada – entertained us for 2.5 hours.

My experience with military tattoos circles around the spectacular one on the esplanade in front of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. This was a gentler, less militaristic affair – more in keeping with the quieter, less macho character of Canada. This is not to say it wasn't exciting. The massed pipes and drums, as well as brass bands made the hairs on our arms stand straight up. But there was a more youthful element – tumblers from Denmark, brilliant cyclists from Germany, as well as twirling young people on hoops.

But what lives on is the spectacular finale, when the floor of the hall was filled with all the performers. Because we had chosen July 4 – America's Independence Day – for our visit, and because the U.S. Consul General for Nova Scotia was present, the U.S. National Anthem, sung and played in unison by so many performers was a sound to bring tears to your eye. And that was topped quite easily when they morphed into “Oh Canada” an anthem that is easy to sing and is exquisitely moving.

Then the lone highland piper took up his lonely call (the very definition of “tattoo”) from the highest point in the arena. Amazing Grace was just that. His pipes stood alone, but then the melody was picked up by the other massed pipes, followed by the choir. Memorable.

We returned to our campground in thick, wooly fog. But we were warmed inside by the spectacular event.

Now we have edged along the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. This is an unpopulated land. We are only an hour east of Halifax, but there is little but woods and water. As we sit in our new campground, we can hear the plaintive call of the loons on the lake. This is heaven.