Q: What are the effects of a week in isolation on the communication skills of an already verbose individual?

OK, here's all about our week in the woods on the river by the sea. I'll try to keep the narration to a minimum, but I've just had a nap and am now drinking a cup of coffee, so we'll see how it goes...


When our friends Angie and Cliff drove us out to the cottage it was raining, but it cleared up almost as soon as we got there, so we walked around on Risser's Beach, which is just a mile or two away. I found out that they made it home without getting lost, despite my terrible directions, so that's a huge relief.



The cottage was right on the river that is "Petite Riviere," looking across at the marshy side of Risser's. That evening another friend, Jill, came from another cottage in Mahone Bay to spend the night with us. She brought along an old friend of hers from Toronto, Tiina (the one on the left), and we had a really nice time with them wandering around the rocks and beaches the next morning. And they took a picture of Ali and me together before they left, an impossibility for the rest of the week.



It was a super comfortable cottage, and even the beds were not much harder on the back than our one at home. I still say nothing beats a futon. There was a mouse there too (not pictured), but it mostly didn't bother us too much. Well, OK, it did scrabble around in those books quite a bit, and once we saw it climb right up the wall, floor to ceiling, which was fairly horrifying. But there were a couple of days when we didn't see it at all. Of course, it made up for it on the last day by running around all over the place like an attention-starved child.

For some reason, there was a portrait on one of the walls of Lou Reed as a young child.


We did a lot of this.

And a lot of this. Together, we ploughed through five books, which is really good considering the weather was hot and sunny every day except the first and last. Ali read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I'd eaten up at the cottage last year, and then a book about cat behaviour by Desmond Morris, of The Naked Ape fame. She's been putting her new expertise to the test on Buster, with amazing results. Except for the solos, his electric guitar work is almost road-ready.

I, meanwhile, finished my first Haruki Murakami novel, Norwegian Wood, which was a little disappointing. I guess it was a sort of sweet, semi-autobiographical coming of age tale, but the fact that every female character wanted to go to bed with the protagonist was kind of offputting. Plus everyone was always committing suicide. Weird.

Then it was Life of Pi. Johanna had given it to me for my birthday, and it started out very compelling but then became religious and preachy, and I'd put it down for quite awhile. Another friend of mine, however, urged me to continue with it, so I did and boy, was I glad. Once the pontificating was over, the story was a wild ride of adventure, humour, and horror. Not for the squeamish, this book, and I'm not sure a cottage in the middle of nature with a mouse running around was the best place to read it, given all the nightmarish zoological details it contains, but I still really enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, the author gets briefly preachy again at the end, presenting [SPOILER ALERT] what I would call the literary argument for belief in God. It goes something like: since God's existence or non-existence makes no factual difference to the way the world is, and since we can't prove it either way, shouldn't we just believe the explanation of the universe that is the best story (i.e. the one where God made everything and continues to express His will through the natural world)? I believe Kierkegaard subscribed to an argument similar to this one, though it was much more subtle and entwined with other ideas. There are many problems with it, but the chief ones are the highly questionable judgment that The Bible is a better story than the one which scientists and atheistic philosophers have come up with, and more importantly the fact that BELIEF in God's existence actually does make a hell of a lot of difference in the world, thank you very much! In that sense, this novel makes a pretty good lead-in to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, or probably any of those other God-bashing books which are so popular right now, in that it gives you a personal sense of what the atheists are up against, in case you thought they were just setting up straw men in order to knock them down.

[SPOILER (and bore) ALERT OVER] Anyway, the END end, after the little sermon is over, is quite cute and clever and generally satisfying. If it weren't for the nightmares it gave me, I'd recommend the book without reservation.

And then the other book I read was Brave New World. Everyone's forced to read that in high school, me included, so I won't go on about it, except to say that I don't know what compelled me to read it again, but I'm glad I did, as it's much funnier and more expectation-frustrating than I'd remembered. Also, Aldous Huxley seems, in 1932, to have coined the phrase "bell-bottomed trousers"!

We biked to this funny little museum on one of the LaHave Islands one day. We always visit it when in Green Bay. It's housed in an old church, and it makes me think of the poem "Church Going" by Philip Larkin. Probably just because we always arrive by bicycle.


There are plenty of spectacular sights in the area.

One day we went for a long hike southward along the coast, all the way to Broad Cove. It's a hefty hike anyway, and there were plenty of stops for nature appreciation and photo ops.

This is what I was taking a picture of. There were bees all over those thistles!

And this is what I looked like after I got the picture I wanted.

In Broad Cove, we'd hoped to get a cup of coffee before turning back, but didn't see anywhere to do that. In fact, the whole town seemed to be about six houses and a little beach. There was one other couple on the beach when we sat down to eat the remainder of the lunch we'd brought and dip our feet in the water. We were pretty exhausted and were trying to figure out whether the highway would present a shorter return trip. The only problem with that idea was that we'd ridden the bikes part of the way and left them in the woods, so going back via the highway would mean walking the extra few miles to the bikes after returning. It was a really hot day and the whole decision was just making us more pooped.

Then the other couple got up to leave and we asked them what time it was. A conversation ensued, and in the end they offered us a ride back to the cottage, as they were headed in that very direction! Lucky. It was their fifteenth wedding anniversary and they apparently liked Frank Sinatra a lot because that's what was blaring in the car the whole ride back. They were very nice, though [Why 'though'? Are Sinatra fans known serial rapists or something? - ed.], and it was a bit of a treat to have a conversation with someone other than ourselves.

Back at the cottage, we changed into our bathing costumes and walked to where the bikes were, grabbing a couple of coffees at the canteen on the way. Then we biked back past the cottage to Risser's Beach, where we immediately plunged our exhausted bodies into the heart-attack-inducing Atlantic Ocean. It felt great. I lay on the beach reading for awhile while Ali continued to body surf. Or at least her head did; that's all I could see in the foam, eyes closed and teeth grinning. When we finally rode back and checked out the map in the cottage, we figured out that the day's adventures had comprised about 20 km of walking and cycling. Slept well that night.

Then, the next day, we explored a trail in behind the big hills on the opposite side of Green Bay Road from the river. It was a little wild and unused (a porcupine guarded the entrance), but it generally ran alongside the property edge of the pastures the hills serve as in the daytime. At one place, the path went right up to the edge of the farm's fence, and we saw that cows were eating very nearby. They heard and saw us and started running in the opposite direction. But we called to them and told them it was OK, and they actually turned around and decided to check us out. There was one cow who was the bravest, and the rest just kind of followed her. It was sort of scary when the whole herd started walking right up to us, but also very cool. They were completely gentle, and let Alison take some glamour shots of them.





There's one other thing we did a lot of at the cottage, of which it's impossible to get a photo, and that's listen to the radio. At first we could only get the Bridgewater pop station, CKBW. They play an interesting assortment of contemporary music with a few unexpected wild cards, but it's generally the same songs every day and it soon became monotonous. Then we found CBC 2 and that was the end of CKBW. Classical music around a hot woodstove is pretty nice, but even more of a treat was our discovery of the late night show "The Signal". It's hosted by Laurie Brown, whom I remember fondly from her "New Music Magazine" days in the eighties, and they play just the greatest mix of mostly downtempo, contemporary, hipster/weirdo music, with a tonne of Cancon. Very enjoyable. We started listening to it every night.

One night the show's theme was musical inspiration, and Laurie was talking about Björk. I'm a huge Björk fan, so I began listening intently. As an aside, I'm also a huge Joni Mitchell fan, and though I'm familiar with most of her work, she has a huge catalogue, so there are some albums I've never gotten around to. The Hissing of Summer Lawns was one of those albums until very recently, when I decided on a friend's advice to pick it up and check it out. I'd always liked the cover art, and the music on it turned out to live up to it, in some surprising ways.

Specifically, much of the album is very contemporary-sounding. I always knew Joni was ahead of her time, but on this record she's got some weird keyboards and rhythms going on that I never would have expected from her. The song "The Jungle Line" seems especially prescient, and every time I heard it I kept thinking, "This could be on Björk's latest album. It reminds me a lot of her single, 'Earth Intruders' [see video below]."



Was it just the primitivism of the Burundi beat (ahead of its time in the Joni Mitchell song; alluding to the beat's popularity as part of the now-popular-again sound of eighties post-punk in Björk's) and the visual similarities between the new video and the old album cover? I felt there was also some correspondence going on with the interesting low keyboard sounds and the almost amelodic melodies. But I had no proof.

However, and now my aside/soliloquy is finally over, I was informed this night by Ms. Brown that Björk was also, in fact, a huge Joni Mitchell fan, and had had an almost mystical relationship with the album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter as a young teenager. She could sing the entire album when she was in her first punk rock band. This was VERRRRRY interesting to me! But the kicker came when Laurie went on to introduce a recent recording, by Björk, of a Joni Mitchell song for a Joni Mitchell tribute album that just came out, and it turned out to be "The Boho Dance" from Summer Lawns!

So now I have a mystical relationship with "The Signal" and we've been listening to it in bed every night ever since. Too bad it's on so late — I have to turn it off after 40 minutes or so or the missus hits me over the head with a rolling pin.

Anyways, that's our trip. I guess I didn't do very well with the minimal narration thing, but I kind of thought that was how it would go. Sorry. Next time I'll try to be less manically opinionated, and I won't use any adverbs.

Seriously.

- Andrew