Bone-chilling cold is the only apt way to describe winterweather here in Inverness, Nova Scotia. Arctic winds howl along Cape Breton’s Cabot Highway, piling up ten-foot snowdrifts that obscure the life within. That is why I use big, bright yellow banners screaming "TRAVEL" from my second-floor porch to advertise my travel agency to the locals. It’s something to look up to, to hope for, beyond the snow.
Early this morning, the firehouse across the street was uncharacteristically alive with the squawking of radios and walkie-talkies as emergency personnel and volunteer firemen arrived for coordination. A few hours later, that noise had died down, replaced by the low and subdued tones of small, glum groups returning to their businesses and homes. A seven-year-old girl on her way to school had been sucked into a sinkhole that had opened up on the beach during the night. Due to air and water pressure changes that created sucking vacuums in the old coal mine tunnels that underlie Inverness, and which horizontally stretched a mile or more from the shore out to sea, holes like these would rarely, yet suddenly, form. Those tunnels were sealed decades ago with the failure of the mines, but occasionally their walls broke and they claimed yet another victim to add to the many miners who drowned literally scratching a living from them. Despite the danger, it was commonplace for everyone, including schoolchildren, to cross the open beach, as part of life here. In all likelihood, the child met the same fate as unlucky miners, because the police and firefighters failed to find her anywhere near the hole. Soon, there would be a typical Scottish funeral for her, too. I felt a deep sickness in my stomach as I thought of the girl’s terrifying path into oblivion and a sense of responsibility for it since I was part of the adult community that had done nothing about those tunnels despite the known dangers.
Scottish heritage is the rule in Cape Breton, a lot of Mac this and Mac that. I'm an exception--Max Bateman is half English and half German--but I have always felt welcome in this land of the pathologically Celtic. Whether you’re a true Scot or not, one becomes part of the dream if you live here. Along with being steel-willed, strong-backed drinkers, the Scots have a profound mystical side that is manifest in their music. It can evoke a slow and melancholy autumn day one moment and a dizzying tornado the next. But regardless of the tempo, the music summons forth a keen sense of an ancient place and state of mind where skirted men tend flocks in verdant valleys, women bake bread in thatched-roofed cottages, and red-haired children romp with collie dogs: where people are stoic, brave and, above all, loyal. The citizenry here is dependable, indomitable, and worthy of inhabiting what we Cape Bretons call our island home, a “rock in the sea.”
On this distressing day I learned firsthand about the extraordinary abilities of one of these displaced Scots, Fletcher MacDonald, a most remarkable man, whom I would come to call my best friend. That’s ironic, because we didn’t click at all when we were children; he was standoffish and kept mostly to himself. We were both born and raised in this small fishing and former coal-mining town on the Northumberland Strait. Yet our lives intertwined only after a particular incident set the stage for my lifetime of adventures with Fletcher. I had bought the travel agency a few years ago from Stan Hope, who wanted to cash out of the business he had operated for forty years. We made a deal that permitted me to buy the place with little cash, but cost me a large percentage of my monthly income; plus I would keep Stan on as an employee, until I had paid off the debt. If things failed, I would lose my down payment, and Stan would get his business back. It was a fair deal and a fair business.
