The critters come calling

I had a wake up call the other day. Farley and I were wandering down the lane, and, truth be told, I wasn’t paying much attention. I carried a pair of hedge clippers, and was cutting back alders along the side of the road.

Suddenly Farley began barking. She tore up the road, full-tilt. For a second I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. Something shaggy. Something big. Really big. Like twice the size of me.

Farley, all 36 pounds of her, was protecting me from an extremely large black bear. The bear was on all fours, at the intersection of the lane and the logging road that led back to the large clear-cut.

Farley barked. I yelled Farley’s name over and over. The bear decided it had, had enough, turned and moved off one way. Farley came back to me, and we returned to the house.

Black bears are shy and secretive, according to the Hinterland Who’s Who, which also notes that incidents of bears attacking humans have been reported, but are extremely rare.

Incredibly, they can run at speeds of up to 55 km an hour.

Black bear. Bigger than me, that’s for sure. Photo courtesy of North American Bear Center, Northwoods Ecology Hall.

The following morning, Steph walked out of the house with Farley and Cleo to take them for their morning walk. Farley began barking her alarm bark again. I thought, the bear? Could it be in our driveway? Could little strings of drool be hanging from its jaws, slavering at the idea of a little Charles snack first thing in the morning.

Mmmmm…Charles snackessss…we likessss them. We like the tiny crunch of the bones. Snap, crackle pop: Bear breakfast of champions. Nom nom nom.

Fortunately, it was nothing like that.

This time it was a sizeable snapping turtle. It had set itself down between the barn and the house.

The two incidents again made me think of the concept of ownership. As humans, we believe we own the land because we paid for it, we signed papers for it, and so forth.

But the bear, the snapping turtle, the deer Steph saw a few weeks ago, all the birds don’t recognize our claim.

The snapping turtle has spent the last few days wandering between the house and the horse paddock, looking for a place to lay its eggs. As far it’s concerned, it may well wonder what the heck we’re doing on its land.

Although, truth be told, if I get down on my hands and knees and look into its cold, reptilian eyes, I have no idea what thoughts - if any - cross the turtle’s mind.

I do know that I’m happy to share the land with all the critters. Well, maybe not so much with the ticks. Their population appears to have exploded this year with the not-so-seasonable weather.

The weather….We went from highs of plus-34 with winds whipping around at 70 km an hour and crackling wildfires burning everything in their path to endless rain. After the fires, 180 mm of rain spilled from the sky. The forecast last night called for a couple of centimetres of rain. It poured again. Hard.

Farley watching the brook. So far a drought has been the last thing on our minds this year.

Thunderstorms keep rumbling through. One in and of itself is unusual; one after another is remarkable. The sky flickers and flashes.

The huge amounts of rain and humidity have left us with the feeling we are living in a rain forest. Everything is growing like mad. The alders seem to be adding inches every day while everything is green and steamy. The stream has overflowed its banks yet again.

It is summer at its most bodacious. And it’s barely begun.

Local love:

The Bayport Pub shut down on July 16. Photo courtesy of Bayport Pub.

After a challenging nearly five years of business, the Bayport Pub shut its doors. The pub opened just ahead of the first wave of Covid, continued through the second wave of the pandemic, but wasn’t able to survive the ongoing, endless closure of the Indian Path Bridge on the Bayport Road, which has been “under repairs” for two years (the latter apparently and allegedly some kind of provincial transportation department code for ongoing inactivity).

Locally, the repairs have meant anyone wanting to access parts of Bayport have faced a long detour rather than the existing loop with the bridge.

Over that period, the owners of the pub have bought out Rebecca’s in Mahone Bay and, more recently, opened a take-away adjunct to the latter called Edgewater Eats. But with the unnecessary, long drive, the pub wasn’t able to withstand the loss in revenue.

“This is a heartbreaking circumstance for us, but a very necessary move,” the pub’s owners wrote in a Facebook post recently.

The pub’s last day was July 16.

Eli’s Espresso is getting ready to pour its last latte

The exterior of Eli’s Espresso in Mahone Bay. Photo courtesy of Eli’s Espresso.

Twenty-five years: through two pandemic waves, through countless storms, through fundraisers for causes like Hope for Wildlife and the Children’s Wish Foundation - through all that and much more, Eli’s Espresso and Creperie Bretonne is shutting its doors in August. The owner of this Mahone Bay institution has made the decision to retire.

Gina, post-operation. Photo courtesy of Eli’s Espresso.

Maybe the signs were evident. Gina, Eli’s beloved espresso machine, endured 11 weeks of “open heart surgery” but apparently hums like a 20-year-old now. But as the shop noted: “It was a long journey for the mechanic and for us and we missed her so much….”

I hate to sound like voice of doom (famously given to actor and radio news reader Lorne Greene. During the Second World War, Greene acted as the main news reader for the CBC. “The dire news from the front, reported on a nightly basis in Greene’s baritone voice, was so alarming (battles lost, defenses crumbling, strategic disasters, capitulating allies, and Canadian fatalities) that his fellow countrymen referred to him as ‘The Voice of Doom,”’ according to QZVX, Broadcast History & Current Affairs).

But given the price of gas, food and goods, I suspect we may see a number of places close out this summer and fall. Many have been aggressively promoting their restaurants on local Facebook groups while others are just silently hoping for seats in chairs. Either way, it’s a concerning scenario, and one in which I hope I’m proven wrong.

What I’m reading

While it’s been roughly three (four? but who’s counting?) years since I last ran I still obsess about the sport. In fact, I still maintain a good-sized library devoted to running, which occupies about two-and-a-half shelves.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir is a fabulous addition to that collection. Here, Haruki Murakami writes about how he became a novelist and a runner; both are inextricably intertwined in his life.

One of the things I love about this book is Murakami’s deceptively simple voice. It is direct and yet at points somehow mysterious and luminous: “As I run, the trade winds blowing in from the direction of the lighthouse rustle the leaves of the eucalyptus over my head.”

A vivid picture forms in my head, and I am transported from the chair in which I sit reading.

It’s like that throughout the entire book.

Murakami has a blunt style as well. He’s a bit of an odd duck, who becomes impatient in the final miles of marathons, and who sets certain goals for himself (such as annually running a marathon). He zooms in, capturing the minutiae of his life one moment, and then hovers high above, omnipresent. At points the pressures of running and writing are not all that dissimilar. And I love that he ran a jazz club for years, and collected recordings.

It’s almost what I would talk about if I wrote a memoir titled what I talk about when I talk about running…except it would be vastly different, of course.

I see glimpses of a life I’d love to have lived, and brief snatches here and there of a life lived.

At any rate, one day I’d love to run “with the trade winds blowing in from the direction of the lighthouse [and] rustle(ing) the leaves of the eucalyptus over my head.”

But then I recall a similar 10-miler, always my favourite distance, where I was coasting down a large hill in Fredericton that marked the half-way point of the run. It was one of those nights, not too hot, not too cold, the temperature of your skin with a light breeze, an effortless run, and lots to be grateful for. One could not ask for more.

The same could be said of Murakami’s book: It feels so complete that one could not ask for more. Bring on the trade winds!