The Library Sale

On a sparkling Friday morning the in-box is empty and I have nothing better to do than drive down to the Golden Valley Library book sale. Though I'm not a member of the local "friends" group, the woman in charge lets me in to the pre-sale on the strength of my donations to the Hennepin County umbrella group. Compact discs are what I'm after, mostly.

Two dollars per CD? Shocking! And not a single jazz CD in the bunch! But that doesn't stop me. It's for a good cause, and even at that inflated price, it gives me the opportunity to take a few chances.

I walk away with fourteen CDs, and a few hours later I'm already pleased with some of the choices.

The Art of the Fiddle - a part of the Rounder Heritage Essential Folk series. Good, clean, raw fiddling, and as an added bonus, the accompanying pamphlet has photos and extended bios of these often little-known artists.

Thomas Tallis: Spem in Alium. I'm listening to it now, a haunting motet for forty voices, probably written in 1567. That's a lot of voices, though it doesn't sound much different that other massive choral works I've heard.

Altan: Island Angel. A lively recording from 1993 by the Irish folk supergroup.

Jimmy Dale Gilmore: Spinning Around the Sun. I once had a cassette tape of this classic album by the Cosmic Cowboy. I especially liked the steel guitar. Will I listen to it again? At least once.

The Baltimore Consort: On the Banks of the Helicon. It's described on the jacket as a collection of early music from Scotland. But I will never know what it sounds like, because the jewel case is empty.

Puntimayo Native American Odyssey, from the Inuit to the Incas. There are times when I really want to hear some Dakota drumming or some Inca piping. And I know nothing about Mohican music. However, a closer look (and a little listening) suggests that this CD contains quite a bit of pop and rock by indigenous groups. Hmm.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Another in the Rounder Heritage Series. Brash music for a wan season: Lent.

David Torn: Only Sky. The tracks on this ECM recording of Torn's work for guitar, electric oud, and far-out studio effects were recorded in real time. After listening to the ominous first track, "at least there was nothing," I would chalk this one up as a stinker.

The 100 Best Opera Classics. This 6 CD set, which was rung up as a single item, will be a fun one to queue up in the car and try to guess what opera each aria comes from.

In a room mostly filled with books on sale for a dollar, naturally I glanced here and there, and came away with a few items:

The Oxford Book of French-Canadian Short Stories. Something to read on the plane during our next trip Quebec?

Basil Willey: The Eighteenth Century Background.  I already have a copy of this outstanding survey. Now I have two.

Sarah Leah Chase: Pedaling Through Provence Cookbook. I had a copy of this book in my "stash" at the Bookmen for many years, but never got around to buying it. Black olive and Swiss chard tart, anyone?

Judy Rodgers: The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I've never heard of the cafe, but this is a big, beautiful book. Thumbing through a few pages, I notice a recipe for sage pesto. We have a lot of unused sage in the garden, and winter is closing in. Let's give it a try.

Charles Lamb: The Essays of Elia. A very sturdy edition from the Heritage Press, complete with cardboard case. Skimming the introduction as I listen to Tallis's choral piece, I come upon an excerpt of Lamb's letter to William Words­worth describing how he felt upon retiring from several decades as an lowly office clerk.

“I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition over­whelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity ... I wandered about think­ing that I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumul­tuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift.”

The Twin Cities Book Fest 2019

The Twin Cities Book Fest has developed an exuberant and egalitarian tone that no other local book event can match, at least none that I've been to. Publishers, self-published authors, used book dealers, trade organizations like the Professional Editors Network, university creative writing programs, digital printers and design firms, and a variety of other organizations that promote books and reading in one way or another are arranged in no particular order down five or six rows of tables. Most of the tables are strewn with books, and quite a few of them have pieces of bite-sized candy on offer in a bowl or basket. Rain Taxi, the festival organizer, has set up a used book sale in one corner and a children's book area across the cavernous room in the opposite corner. Some belly dancers were getting ready to perform in a third corner when I walked by—I don't know why.

Rain Taxi has also arranged for a handsome array of authors, both local and national, to read and discuss their books in a second venue just down the street. We dropped in briefly to listen to Faith Sullivan and Susan Straight discuss the importance of women telling stories about other strong women, while in another makeshift enclosure a few feet away two outdoorsy men were analyzing the delights of Minnesota's Northwest Angle .

The author on the program who interested me most, David Shields, was appearing too late in the day. His book of aphorisms, Reality Hungry, includes a surprising number of winners. Evidently he's been involved in two or three new projects since then.

But the main interest of this event has always been in the grand hall, which serves as the Eco-Building during the state fair. With the Bookmobile booth right inside the door, and the Nodin Press booth a few feet away, front and center, I felt like I was among friends right from the get-go.

Wandering the aisles can be fun, though for me there is greater pleasure to be had from running into old friends. I'm almost guaranteed of seeing Bill Mockler, a colleague and friend from twenty years ago, because he tends the booth for Consortium Distributors. He harvested the last of the hot peppers from his garden recently (I saw a photo on Facebook) and we got to talking about his garlic crop.

"Right now is a good time to plant," he told me. "Or soon. When there's been a hard freeze but the ground itself isn't frozen yet." He recommended buying garlic for seed at the farmers market rather than the grocery store. "That stuff could be from China, as far as we know."

I was suddenly reminded of a book I own that might interest Bill. A Garlic Testimony: Life on a New Mexico Farm. "I have two copies," I said. "I'll send you one." On a preliminary sweep through the shelves back home, I could not located either copy.

Also likely to be in attendance is another old Bookmen friend, Richard Stegal. He often helps out at the Nodin Press booth, and there he was again. He told us he spent a few weeks near Ashville, NC, recently, babysitting his younger sister while she recovered from a knee operation. "It's so nice down there," he said with a wan smile. "And then you come home to this?"

The weather was dreadful indeed: just above freezing, gray skies, gusting wind, slight drizzle. I think the dreary conditions outside might have added to the energy inside the hall.

I often help Nodin Press authors get their books ready for publication, but I only occasionally  meet them face-to-face. It's always a pleasure to do so. We "know" each other, but the sight of a human face, the movement of an arm or a leg, the sound of a voice, adds immeasurably to the relationship. 

For example, I worked last spring with Ed Block, a retired professor from Marquette, on a book-length critical appraisal of Jon Hassler's novels. Now here he was, signing books at the booth. I introduced myself and we had a lively chat. Somewhere along the way I was reminded that he was an expert on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, and I steered the conversation in that direction. "Yes, I used to the editor of Renascence magazine, and we did an entire issue on Marcel." He paused and then said, "It wasn't one of our more popular issues. I'll send you a copy if I can find one."

Over the years I've become aware that I remember lots of people who don't remember me. This gives me a  little freedom to pick and choose my interlocutors. Just to be safe, I usually make it a habit to greet a passing acquaintance by saying my name. It can sometimes be difficult fitting a name to a face on the spot. "Yes, of course I remember you...er..."    

 

We caught up with Norita Dittberner-Jax at the Redbird Chapbooks booth. She's got a book coming out next year, though I haven't seen it yet. "I was thumbing through 26 Minnesota Writers over at the book stall," she said, "and there you were." I couldn't deny it. That was a long time ago. It was an essay about the Grand Canyon, as I dimly recall. Something about the silliness of Kant's theories of space and time, and an image of two rafts floating downstream, seen from high above, the size of grains of rice.

Norita's daughter in the mayor of Duluth, and Hilary asked her how the re-election campaign was going. We'd been in Duluth recently and we'd seen the yard signs. "She won last time with 73 percent," Norita said breezily. "She hasn't got too much to worry about. But she genuinely likes her opponent. He isn't mean and he doesn't lie."

A few minutes earlier we'd run into Nick Hayes in an adjacent aisle. He's putting the final touches on a memoir about his time spent in Russia. The subject of readings came up—how difficult it is to anticipate the size of the crowd. Nick told us the story of his friend, Peter Quinn, who had written a grisly mystery called The Hour of the Cat. The publisher had arranged for a reading somewhere in Manhattan, but as the event approached there was only one elderly woman sitting in the front row. Quinn looked out across the podium and said, "Ma'am, might I ask why you're here?" She replied, "Oh, I love anything to do with cats."

We got to reminiscing at the Friends of the St. Paul Library table about the early years of the book festival. "Remember when it was downtown at the Vo-Tech? It was cramped, but there was a lot of buzz." "And what about the very early days, when it was held on one of the upper floors of the International Design Center? Rather dark and dingy in there..."

A few minutes later Media Mike Hazard and his wife, Tressa, suddenly appeared, and Mike handed me a postcard advertising the closing reception (on October 20th) for their joint show at Homewood Studios. "That isn't far from our house," I said. Before long we were discussing the choice of Peter Handke for the Nobel Prize, and how hard it can be to really, really finish a manuscript on your own. Especially if you imagine it's the only book you'll ever write.

We also spent some time with prepress wizard Sean Knickernocker admiring a few of Bookmobile's latest full-color art book productions; with historian Joy Riggs, whose son in enjoying his freshmen year at Grinnell College; and with poet Laurie Allmann, who recently got back from investigating an obscure scientific and natural area in Nemadji State Forest on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border.  

In the interstices between these bursts of conversation, newly-published books presented themselves in a steady stream as we moved from table to table. And older books, too. (I'm so far behind the times that often I can't tell new and old apart.) The double-wide table at Coffee House Press looked especially inviting. I took a look at a book by Ron Patchett called Big Cabin. Nice title. (Maybe I could use that myself, or something similar. How about Small Cabin?)

I also thumbed through a few pages of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth.  But I've become so reluctant to purchase anything on impulse that Hilary occasionally reminds me, "You know, you could buy that." Still, I hold back. Too many books piled up at home already.

Finally, as we were about to leave, she went over to the Majors & Quinn table and bought signed copies of the new novels by Faith Sullivan and Leif Enger--novels by local authors set in regions of the state we enjoy visiting. We ought to be offering some support to somebody.

Considered all in all, it's a beautiful scene, full of energy and aspiration, creativity and kindness. Everybody's got a story to tell, and there are plenty of people, too, who take pleasure in listening. We aren’t all “on the same page” and we don’t want to be, but we all acknowledge the value of pages, appreciate what’s written on them, and honor those with a knack for filling them up with interesting stuff.

The Fly Trap

When you're standing in a ditch or a field all afternoon holding a long pole with a net at the end of it, you've got a lot of time to think about things.  All sorts of things. The rare hoverflies you're trying to catch, yes, but also modern literature, environmentalism, the importance of "disturbed" natural areas, the lure of collecting things, the value of limits, and how to respond to passing tourists who ask you what you're doing. 

The Swedish adventurer and entomologist Fredrik Sjöberg has spent his time well. He has also developed a knack for stringing such musings together in a comfortable pattern and giving a breezy, self-depreciatory flavor to the mix. The result is a book-length essay that flows effortlessly from one topic to the next, full of humor and wisdom, switchbacks and surprises, tidbits of trivia and expressions of understated joy in the face of the marvels the natural world spreads at our feet, or in the shrubbery above our heads, just out of reach.  

Sjöberg's career as an entomologist figures prominently in the exposition, though he never makes it clear exactly what kind of a "career" that is. It's hard to imagine why anyone would pay him to catch or study flies on a small island in the Stockholm Archepeligo. It might well be nothing more than a lifelong hobby. He makes passing reference to experience in the jungles of Africa, and near the end of the book he writes "after thirteen months of travel around the world, I was now finally on my way home, tired and disillusioned," but he offers no clue as to what he was up to during that time.  

"Anyway, [he writes] the hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what, I don’t know. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold." (p.12)

One of the central beams of Sjöberg's construction, which he returns to repeatedly and dilates on at considerable length, is the career of Swedish entomologist René Malaise, who invented the fly trap referred to in the title in 1934. It revolutionized the practice of catching flying insects and is still in widespread use today. Sjöberg resisted buying such a device for years, mostly out of vanity, it seems. It wasn't his style. He now attests to its great value as a tool, but he's less interested in the trap itself than in the career of the man who invented it. Malaise was an adventurer and researcher in an era that has long since given way to helicopters and video cameras. He spent ten years in Kamchatka, some of them with the famed Swedish author, researcher, and femme fatale Ester Blenda, whom he married there. She returned to Sweden but he remained, trapping sable to earn a livelihood and eating bear for dinner, and he later studied insects in the wilds of upland Burma with his second wife, returning home with thousands of new species. Sjöberg claims that now, seventy years later, they still haven't cataloged them all. 

Sjöberg moves on to other subjects, including a analysis of a novella by D.H. Lawrence and an encounter in the brush with an Englishman looking for yew forests on his tiny island, but a few chapters later he returns to Rene Malaise. In later life Malaise's renown as an explorer faded, and he eventually became an academic laughingstock for denying the theory of plate tectonics while pursuing researches into the location of Atlantis. Sjöberg admires his tenacity and conviction, if not his quasi-scientific theories. And as if that weren't enough, Sjöberg spends a good deal of time near the end of the book investigating Malaise's art collection, a few pieces of which were stolen immediately after his death and never recovered. Like so much of the rest of the book, it seems slightly irrelevant—a brand-new line of inquiry interjected so near the end of the book?—but it makes a good story, and it sheds a gentle light on themes that Sjöberg has brought up before: the collector mentality, the difference between grand and modest achievement, the fleeting nature of fame amid the vagaries of history, and the appeal of personal conviction and unbridled enthusiasm. In our day many such portraits are laced with mordant irony, but Sjöberg presents his in the spirit of simple romance and wonder.

Malaise and Ester Blenda

And speaking of romance ... did Malaise really love Ester Blenda, or was his first marriage a matter of convenience, to make it easier for the couple to travel together in the then-newly created Soviet Union? An entomologist friend advises Sjöberg that  the answer lies in the specimens Malaise collected. He never named a wasp or fly after Blenda, though he did name one after Ester's  brother, a famous entomologist himself. But Sjöberg does not find that argument conclusive; Malaise named many of the species he'd discovered during the 1930s, long after his marriage to Blenda was over. More telling, in Sjöberg's view, is that Malaise named one of the many insects he discovered during his trip to Burma after his second wife, Ebba Söderhell.

"As usual, what I found in the end was not what I was looking for. Ebba soederhalli. A sawfly from Burma. Malaise had finally found love. An unmistakable case."

Though Sjöberg mentions his own wife and children only once or twice, in one longish passage he sheds some light on the origins of his own romantic bent. After acknowledging the importance of genetic factors in shaping an individual's character, he goes on to make a case for the importance of early childhood imprinting in a particular environment. He attributes his own "pronounced romantic temperament" to Sweden's long summer nights. 

"We in Sweden have the world’s loveliest summer nights, he writes. Even a short distance down into Europe the nights become gloomy, pitch-black conveyances from dusk to dawn. Tropical nights can build into tre­mendous explosions of downright Cambro-Silurian cacophony when a thunderstorm starts or cicadas cel­ebrate their orgies in the treetops. They’re magnificent, but no more than that. The indescribable sound of the Madagascar nightjar is worth the entire trip, but in the end it is merely interesting and exciting and fun to tell people about later. It doesn’t come close to the endless beauty of a summer night in Sweden."

Sjöberg had been around a bit, in other words, and he's got a few exotic points of comparison.

"Every summer there are a number of nights, not many, but a number, when everything is perfect. The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong—the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?

Sjöberg  was also blessed with parents who gave him free reign as a child to enjoy those nocturnal hours to the full.

"In the superficially darling town by the sea on the outskirts of which I had my childhood, I was the only kid allowed to run free at night. You can’t send a moth-hunter to bed, no matter how young he is. And my parents were—still are—touchingly unsuspecting people who never even considered the possibility that their little boy did anything but catch moths under the nearest streetlamp.

I was constantly out at night. I listened for marsh warblers, spied on badgers, stole strawberries and threw pinecones at girls’ windows. Of course I also collected moths, lots of them, and was almost always alone. It was only when I was older that I rode my bike into town and drank like a Polish translator, but that’s not relevant here. The imprinting was already irrevocable.

Ever since, I have regarded all warmish summer nights as my personal property."

Sjöberg refers in passing quite a few times to the loneliness that an entomologist is likely to experience—very few people are interested in bugs—and of the ties that develop within the field, and also across time through the published works of famous explorers and backyard enthusiasts. The field is so vast, however, that he's long since recognized the importance of establishing limits to one's area of research. He's the unquestioned expert on the hoverflies on the small island where he lives, and has rediscovered seven or eight species that had been considered extinct, and has also found quite a few new ones. 

The author with some of his collection

Sjöberg makes it clear that he collects and studies hoverflies merely for pleasure. He knows that people would take greater interest if he tied his studies to some grand environmental project, but as he puts it, "It would be a lie." He compares his situation to that of Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. DeQuincey could have devoted his entire book to the devastations wrought by opium, just as any modern insect collector could expound at great length on environmental devastation and its effect on insect populations. But that isn't Sjöberg's point. He finds the world of bugs fascinating in itself. As with De Quincey, "the rapture of intoxication seeps in between the lines." Sjöberg also believes that some of the richest and most interesting environments are precisely those—pastures, urban gardens, roadside ditches—that have been disturbed and modified by humans.

Chrysotoxum vernale 

One of the book's most interesting chapters, "The Legible Landscape," comes near the end. He admits that beyond the pleasure that insect collecting provides, he thinks it would be a good thing if people—his readers, you and I—developed greater "landscape literacy." He suggests we ought to approach nature the same way we approach literature or art. Of course, everyone can appreciate a beautiful sunset or a field of poppies, but Sjöberg is suggesting we would benefit from developing the specific knowledge that would allow us to go deeper into the relationships that bind the natural world.

"To recognize a Chrysotoxum vernale when you see it, to know why it’s flying in just this place and at just this moment, is a source of satisfaction not all that easy to account for."


A page or two later he delivers an extended and rhapsodic account of the delight he experiences in the field. His points of reference are insects, not surprisingly, but any botanist or ornithologist would understand.

"On a gentle slope at the edge of a wood, between a hayfield and an av­enue of high-voltage towers, there is a large stand of broad-leaved sermountain growing among the oaks and hazels, which, when the sun is at its zenith, attracts fantastic hordes of insects to its large, white umbels. I usually see the noble chafer there, Gnorimus nobilis, and out on the hayfield, without a care in the world, are Burnet moths, to whose odd colour only Harry Martinson gives full justice: 'The prime colour of the wing is a dark, inky, blue-green blue; carmine-red spots shimmer against that background.'

"On that slope, every summer, I also see the puz­zling bee fly Villa paniscus, a darting tuft of wool that no one knows anything about and that was thought to be extinct until last year, mostly because few if any people could tell it from Villa hottentotta (yes, that’s really its name). Bee flies are really for extra credit, but there’s something about that slope that attracts me for the sake of reading something other than hoverflies."

The more extreme environmentalists he knows worry him. "They are severely tormented by nightmares of extermination. You can see it in their eyes."

While he admits there is cause for grave concern, Sjöberg reminds us here, and in many other parts of the book, what it is we should be caring about. "No one learns to tell the song of the woodlark from that of the skylark in order to make it easier to detect approaching catastrophe," he writes. References to beauty, pleasure, even joy appear infrequently and hesitantly--as if to say the word would destroy the magic--but they're scattered throughout the book. And he passes those feelings on to us not only by the scattershot yet strangely coherent unfolding of his many fields of interest, but also by the leisurely, unmannered charm of his prose.

Rendezvous with a Hurricane

A friend of mine once remarked that the two best parts of a vacation were planning for it and remembering it later.

I don't quite agree. Planning can be fun. And any good vacation provides a wealth of impressions that we draw on for the rest of our lives—the difference between knowing a place just a little and not knowing it at all.

But memories tend to fade into slide shows and  often-repeated stories that don't quite measure up to what really happened, while a good deal of the energy of planning, especially as the vacation approaches, goes into worries about whether the Uber you've scheduled for 3 a.m. will show up, whether you'll make it through the security line on time to catch your flight, whether the car rental agency will stay open past 7 if your second flight is delayed, and whether you'll be able to locate your AirB&B in downtown Halifax in the dark. Travel anxieties. Not fun.

Why go to Halifax? Good question. We weren't going to Halifax in particular—that just happened to be where the airport was. Nova Scotia was the destination. Hilary and I like the sea, open vistas, seafood, birds, and wild, uncrowded countryside. It seemed like a good fit. We'd been to northern Maine, and believe it or not, we've toured Quebec, Tadoussac, and the Gaspé Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, twice.

The first unusual thing I noticed as we approached the Halifax airport is that it sits in the midst of a vast spruce forest stretching for many miles across the province from Wolfville and the Bay of Fundy. You can see on any map that  the airport is quite a ways from downtown; I presumed that the intervened territory was suburbs. Not so. I felt like we were touching down in Bangor, Maine! The spruce trees themselves weren't aged and majestic. No, they looked stunted. Bent.

The Eurocar agency, located in the lobby of a dilapidated Quality Inn, was still open. The young man behind the counter threw a set of keys my way. "We've given you a Toyota Tundra," he said, either imagining or hoping I'd be pleased. "No thanks," I replied. "I reserved a Yaris."

"Okay. I'll see what we can find in the lot that's clean enough to go out."

We ended up with a Corolla, which was fine with us, though it wasn't entirely shipshape. No big deal: the previous driver, an insurance agent named "Ken," had left his card in the front seat and three cans of beer in the trunk. Much worse than that, the vehicle didn't have a CD player!

View from the library

We spent two days in Halifax, which was plenty. Fish and chips, the marine museum, Maud Lewis, the Citadel, Point Pleasant Park, and the spectacular new public library. We were only slightly concerned that Hurricane Dorian was headed our way. It sounded serious, but we'd never experienced such a thing, and it was difficult to get information about how serious such an event might be.

I asked two young women behind the information desk at the marine museum about it. "We're scheduled to stay at a cottage on the coast near Shelburne tomorrow night," I said. "We don't want to get washed out to sea."

"Are you going to be right on the beach? Shelburne is right where the hurricane I supposed to make landfall," one of the women said. "I'm not a fortune teller, but if I were you, I'd make sure to be off the highway and snug in your cottage before it arrives. Bring a flashlight or some candles. And don't forget your storm chips."

"Storm chips? I've never heard of it."

She shot a glance at her colleague behind the counter and they started giggling a little. "Those are the chips you eat during the storm."

Later that afternoon we walked over to the MEC sporting goods store, which, as far as I could tell, was the only place in the province that sold iso-butane canisters. (We'd brought along a little stove along with our other camping gear in a suitcase.) The bin was almost empty. It took me half a second to figure out why...

During our afternoon tour of the Citadel, a historic military fort on top of the hill, one guide said: "See that ship coming into the harbor? That might be the new British aircraft carrier. It's not even commissioned yet." He explained that NATO was bringing all of the ships in the vicinity into port to wait out the storm.

But the first palpable evidence that things were going to be a little different when Dorian arrived came a few hours later when we stopped into a local supermarket and noticed that many of the deli and frozen food items had been heavily discounted, and the checkout lines snaked off into the store for fifty yards past the bottled water displays and well into the pet food section. Everyone was stocking up. And not only potato chips.

Back in our tidy Airbnb apartment I tried, without success, to get a weather or a news channel for quite a while, and finally called our "host," a woman named Tiffany whom we'd never met or even spoken with  —she lived in Dartmouth, on the far side of the harbor.

"I can't get any channels on the TV," I said.

"You can watch any movie you want on Netflix," she replied. "Or Hulu, or Britbox. But we don't subscribe to any broadcast channels. Weather? Just use your phone."

We set off early the next morning. Gray skies, slight mist, few cars on the highway heading south through the stunted, and now vaguely sinister, spruce forest. We had originally planned to visit Peggy's Cove briefly and spend the rest of the morning at the World Heritage Site of Lunenburg, famous for anything to do with shipbuilding, but under the circumstances we proceeded southwest directly to the small and quaint town of Shelburne, founded by loyalists from Massachusetts during the American Revolution. Hilary had been rereading the guidebook along the way, and we stopped in at a B&B on the harbor waterfront to inquire about a room less directly exposed to Dorian's wrath.

An elderly gentleman answered the door, looking somewhat surprised. His tallish, silver-haired  wife soon rounded the corner and stood beside him. When we explained our situation, she said, "We do have rooms available. But if there's a surge, we'd be just as vulnerable as you would be out on Sandy Point Road. We'll all lose power, of course. During the last hurricane the road in front of the inn here was entirely flooded. The next morning people drove down to gawk. I hate to turn away business ... but if I were you, I'd inquire at the motel at the top of the hill. On the other hand," she added, "we're on the same grid as the local hospital. We'll get our power back sooner."

We drove up to the motel and had no trouble booking a room. Then we returned to the grocery store we'd passed on the way into town. Once again, everyone was stocking up. It was almost by chance that we then stopped in the parking lot at the local library so Hilary could pick up the wifi on her phone. She'd received a text from Leah, the host of our ocean-side cottage. "I'm down here at the property. Are you coming down?"

We canceled our room at the motel and drove eight miles along the coast on a narrow but decent asphalt road before finally pulling into the gravel parking lot beside a small but nifty modern cottage sitting in a field fifty yards from the ocean. There were six or seven apple trees in the front yard, none of them tall enough to fall on the house. The wind and rain had picked up considerably. Leah met us at the door and we came inside.

"Our hurricanes aren't like Florida hurricanes," she said. "Those people on the hill opposite came down just to watch the waves."

A robust and confident woman, Leah had been raised in Shelburne—her mother still lived just down the road—but went to college in Regina, Alberta, where she met and married a local boy and spent the next thirty years on a farm nearby. When he died she settled up and moved back home, and she now builds and restores houses for a living. Including this one. 

It was reassuring to hear her dismiss the loud but intermittent flapping noise from just outside the house—like a thick piece of plastic being buckled back and forth—as "nothing to worry about." She had just opened the refrigerator to show us the condiments other guests had left behind when the power went out with a faint "pop."

"There it goes," she said, smiling wanly. "It was inevitable. There are candles all over the place. And blankets. But we have a well here, so you won't be able to get water or flush the toilet."

"We brought our camping gear," I said. "And we have at least a gallon of water in the car."

Leah drove off in her pick-up and we settled in to an afternoon of reading, naps, and extended glances out the windows. They were somewhat clouded by the spray, but I could see twelve or fourteen waterfowl feeding at the mouth of the river that ran alongside the cottage. Some looked like black ducks, others  might have been female common eiders. The wind was howling and the apple trees were shaking in every direction like a dog shaking the water out of its fur. The waves were large but not ferocious; I've seen bigger ones on Lake Superior. Still, it wasn't the kind of weather anyone would be likely to take a walk it.

During the first few hours we were there I went outside only once, to get our two-gallon water bottle. I noticed during that dash to the car that one of the apple trees had gone down in front of the cottage. The waves looked frothier, messier, and more powerful, but the sky looked lighter.

At one point Hilary picked up a report on her phone from Environmental Canada, or some such agency. It was focused on Halifax and the Eastern Shore, and it was hard to tell from the report whether the worst was over out here in Shelburne, a hundred miles to the west, or whether the hurricane hadn't arrived yet.

We nibbled on some cheese, salami, and stoned wheat thins, and I heated some water for tea on the camp stove. A little later I uncorked a bottle of wine. 

We also had some chips.

A book on the shelf caught my eye: The August Gales. According to the cover copy, it's focused on a series of shipwrecks in 1917 out on Sable Island, a hundred miles offshore, but the forty pages I read concerned themselves with the development of the fishing industry in Lunenburg from earliest times, when the British brought in hundreds of Germans—who weren't terribly interested in fishing—to populate the area. I'm sure I learned more in those forty pages than I would have wandering around the streets of Lunenburg itself—in any case, enough to chat halfway intelligently with the fishermen we met later on about schooners, dories, line fishing, and trawling.

At 6 p.m. the sun came out. It happened abruptly as the curtain of gray clouds moved inland. We stepped out into the cool and amazingly fresh air. I counted nine roof shingles lying in the front yard. Though the thick grass in the fields surrounding the cottage was sodden from four hours of rain, a path led down to the beach, fifty yards away, where five-foot waves were still rolling in. The late afternoon light was now catching the flurries of white spume on their crests. It was time to take a walk.

Before it got dark we went back inside and heated up a can of chili on the camp stove, lit a few candles, and sat in the gloaming, listening to the diminishing ruckus in the trees outside.

With cool, clear air and no ambient light for miles, the stars that night were spectacular.

The next morning we spent some time wandering the beach. Then we drove into town. A few trees were down, a few roads were closed. Power was out everywhere. We zigzagged down to the harbor, and I happened to notice that the couple we'd talked to the previous day were standing on the corner outside their inn, chatting with a neighbor.

As I pulled to a stop I rolled down my window and greeting them.

"We're the couple that was looking for a room yesterday. We ended up down at the seafront cottage after all."

"How'd you make out?" he said.

"Not bad. One apple tree came down. Lost power and water, of course. But it ended up being a lot of fun."

As I drove off it occurred to me that it wouldn't have been as much fun if you actually lived there. Across Nova Scotia 450,000 people lost power, many of them for three or four days. During our morning ramble around the southern tip of the province, we passed several gas stations that were closed; fifteen or twenty cars might be lined up along the road waiting to get into the ones that were open.

At noon we were sitting in a very busy cafe just north of Yarmouth eating hot lobster sandwiches.

"This place is really hopping on a Sunday," Hilary said to the waitress.

"Most of these people don't have power," the waitress replied with a smile. "Everyone likes a hot meal once in a while."