Whycocomagh, NS

Andreas Paepcke
Jul 21, 2017 · 8 min read

Thank you for your encouraging emails! Sometimes it takes
a bit of discipline to write at night before it all disappears from my mind.

Question: Make the photos smaller? These are at 20% their iPhone-native size. Make it 10%?

The Folding Goy

Devout Jews do not work, or cause work to occur on
Shabbat. Unfortunately for Jews everywhere, a rabbi somewhere decided
that causing electricity to flow is a form of causing work. The man
has a point, I suppose. The consequence, though, is that Jews would
sit in the dark and eat cold food precisely at the supposedly most
joyous time of the week.

Thus the invention of a Shabbes Goy. He is a sensible and
compassionate gentile who on his own accord, and without prompting
happens to stop by after sundown, happens to flip light switches, and
accidentally turns on the oven upon which food sits ready for heat.

Now, while I do flip light switches all week long, I cannot fold a map
against its creases. It’s sacrilege. One does not fold maps against
their creases. However, remember the tidal power plant? Well, the
guide there took time after the tour to explain routes fortuitous for
me up ahead by means of a tourist map he had retrieved from a drawer.

Map before the crime

While explaining, and looking me straight in the eyes as if
challenging me to stop him, he systematically folded that map into a
square the size of a BMW K1200RS motorcycle tank. The area under
discussion was thereby revealed. Overcoming a sense of nausea at this
vile act, I thanked the man, took the map, and put the barbary out of
my mind.

Until this morning that is when I set out on my ride around the Cabot Loop
Trail. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have a map folded to show
just that loop. That way, I figured, I could quickly consult a high
resolution depiction of the area whenever I was in doubt.

I contemplated the ruined map on my motel bed. What if I were to
re-fold that very map so that a different square of the same size were
to face me. Yet, you do not do that; fold a map against its creases.

Which is when I remembered the tourist guide at the Annapolis Royal
fort, who explained the four colliding cultures, including the beliefs
of the Mi’Kmaq First Nations. They, the guide explained, used every
part of a killed animal so as to make the killing less bad by making
the killed animal’s spirit feel better about its consequent inability
to jump about and feed in the meadows.

This map was in some ways dead, wasn’t it? It had been folded against
its creases. Rather than throw it away like the useless piece of paper
it now was, what if someone re-folded this map against both the new
and the old creases, revealing the Cape Breton area to the eye. I did
not need a folding goy. He had already committed the required
murder. I would just be combining the folding prohibitions of my
aesthetics with the beliefs of Canadian First Nations.

This is how new religions are created.

OK, it *is* useful this way

=======================================

Choose Your Mate Wisely

I left the Cabot Trail road proper to visit Dingwall near the top of
the trail. There I discovered a someone out of place light house.

Lighthouse in an isolated village near the top of the Cabot Loop Trail. What’s Its History? Well…

Entering the little museum I was greeted by a High School aged young
woman who offered me the story of the beacon. It stood on a small
rocky island off the Northern coast near shipping lanes towards the
St. Lawrence river. The trouble with the island was that 350 ships had
been wrecked on its razor sharp underwater rocks when the unlucky
captains attempted to use the island for protection against storms.

Two lighthouses were placed on this rock, one on each end. The photo
shows one of these. One family each tended to these cautionary lights. Weights that rotated the Fresnel lenses with precise timing needed to be raised regularly, like the iron pine cones on a grandfather clock. This
task required a lighthouse keeper.

Now get this: the shift on this island was 50 weeks on, 2 weeks
off. Supplies arrived six months of the year. The other 6 months were
too dangerous for supply ships to approach the island. Remember the
underwater rocks. It grew cold enough that the entire cabin was
encased in ice from time to time, requiring an axe to break through
from inside.

To keep the keeper happy, he was sent there with his wife and an
initially often small number of children. That number then tended to
grow. What else to do on a stormy night with nowhere to go?

Turns out my young guide’s great-grandfather was a lighthouse keeper,
as were other families from the Dingwall village over a couple of
centuries until it all got replaced by radio beacons.

Fresnel lens

Yes I did ask the young lady whether she had seen The
Shining. Confined for 50 weeks on a small rock in a cabin that got
frozen into an ice house. An axe inside. Six children. The woman was
pretty busy cooking, cleaning, sewing, being pregnant, and
homeschooling the children. But the guy: raising a pair of weights a
few times a day to keep the damn light rotating? This could not have
been a good situation. And what about the other family? Friend or foe?
I did not reveal these thoughts to the young lady.

Great-granddaughter of last lighthouse keeper

Ingonish or Shitty Camp?

I bid good day to my young lighthouse guide, and tried to leave the
little village. At a fork in the road 200m hence I encountered a
cemetery with a life-size Christ on a cross. I remembered having seen
that Christ in profile on the way in: I had seen the left side
of his body.

Reconstructing the therefore required approach coming in I chose the right
branch of the fork. Only to hit a dirt road after a half a kilometer
or so. I didn’t remember dirt, so stopped on the threshold between
asphalt and gravel. A pickup truck driver, approaching from the dirt
side stopped and laughed happily at my confusion.

“You followed Google maps, didn’t you? They have this way as the main
road. It’s pretty back there, but you’re not going to make it through
on this bike.

“This morning,” he chuckled happily, “a Winnebago drove all the way
till he couldn’t any more. It was so funny.”

The road, of course, was no wider than a Winnebago. I needed a couple
of 3-points on the bike to turn around myself. Wishing me a good day,
the man drove off, to stop by an old man a hundred yards down, where
he clearly recounting my mistake with glee.

I had not mentioned that it was Jesus, not Google maps, who had
confused me.

Well, I figured, once the truck had moved on, I might as well have a
chat with that old man myself. Riding up to him I discovered that he
had barely a tooth left in his gums. He was happy enough, though,
re-telling the Winnebago story for my enjoyment.

When I mentioned my lighthouse tour it got a little weird.

“Oh yes, she is my sister-in-law.”

“Really?” I doubted. “She looks High School age.”

“Ah yes, she is in fact High School. She is my son’s daughter.”

So, the last lighthouse guy would have been this man’s father, no? I
was beginning to feel desires for moving on. Who confuses his grand
daughter with his sister-in-law? And what does that confusion mean? I
again thought about just two families on that little rock, and my
understanding of gene pools.

He was really friendly though, the toothless man. Genuinely
so. Trouble was that I could not understand all he said. So I
occasionally had to wing it, conversationally speaking.

The old man:

“So, are you ride’n back via Ingonish or Shitty Camp?

“Excuse me?

a little louder: “Are you ride’n back via Ingonish or Shitty Camp?

I had unfortunately come this way via Ingonish, and had in fact
planned on a loop. So I jumped in with conviction and authority:

“Shitty Camp.”

“Ah, beautiful that way around! Lots’a construction, though. Gotto be
careful all the way.”

A couple of hours down the road; reaching Shitty Camp

I promised to do just that. He wished me god speed, and I returned to
the fork. There was the left profile of my Jesus. So what the fuck?

I took a right after the tombstones as the pickup truck driver had
proposed, and powered forward. Would you believe that not 300m
onwards, after a curve, there was *another* cemetery with an identical
Christ on a cross. Life-sized and all. He was now on me left. Just
where he belonged. Jesus or Google maps. Makes no difference. You’ll
end up on a dirt road.

Hole-in-the-Wall Restaurant

Every so often a traveler will tell me about a hole-in-the-wall
restaurant somewhere far away that served them the best whatever they
had ever eaten. Whenever I eat at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant I walk
out knowing why it is a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Because it, its
cook, the service, the ingredients are all of the hole-in-the-wall
type.

Not this one.

This really *is* a hole-in-the-wall Restaurant

Here is their seafood chowder.

It was featured on TV at some
point. Maybe a hole-in-the-wall channel. But this was amazing. As was yesterday’s seafood basket here. People tell you of fish flaking at a light touch with a fork. Not mine. My fish is always, always at least tough enough that I have to poke it. Not this one. The only force holding this fish together was a thin layer of breaded crust.

Tomorrow: ferry to Prince Edward Island.

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