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Thursday, December 5, 2024

Baddeck, A Lovely Discovery

The wharf at Baddeck, Novia Scotia

Traveling often means discovering things that are sometimes unexpected. I’m not talking about such things as teenagers not functioning as humans before noon, or when your wife mentions that a restroom would be welcomed ‘soon’ which translates to means 'right now’ when the nearest town is an hour away.

No, those things are just facts.

It is those moments when traveling when one person turns to the other and utters, “Wow, check that out.”

Laureen, my lovely wife, and I had one such experience as we entered the town of Baddeck in Nova Scotia.

Baddeck is a quaint town sitting along the shores of Bras d’Or Lake. Despite its French spelling, the name is said to have originated from the native Mi'kmaq meaning ‘the long saltwater’, which stretches all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Baddeck looks like a Hallmark setting. A beautiful wharf with fishing boats, trees, and green grass stretching to the shoreline, fancy restaurants, vintage hotels, and a princess gazing into the distance for her prince.

The original post office in Baddeck, Nova Scotia

Laureen told me that it was not a princess but a woman who dropped her phone into the water and was yelling at her husband to get it. But, I will stand by my story - her blonde hair was flowing majestically in the slight breeze as she scanned the horizon for her White Knight.

I’m a romantic, all truth be told.

The town of Baddeck was founded in 1908, but the history goes way back to the 17th century when French missionaries started a settlement in nearby St. Anns in 1629, twelve miles to the north.

It is rumored the French declared, “Les Anglais ne connaĆ®tront jamais cet endroit.”

Well, the English did find the area during the 18th century when the French were forced to give the whole territory to the British Empire.

It is also rumored that the French may have said, “Au diable les Anglaises.”

So, as Laureen and I entered the town to locate our hotel, we passed a large sign that suggested we may enjoy visiting a certain museum. 

And this is where that unexpected thing when traveling happens: it was the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.

Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, Baddeck, Nova Scotia

And as any good American, even though technically we were still in America, you know what I mean.  I was flabbergasted.

“They need tourism in Cape Breton so badly that they stole our inventor of the telephone?” I asked Laureen.

What next? This is where Sasquatch is seen more frequently than in the state of Washington, or Area 51? And he is really guarded by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police?

Turns out that Alec, as he liked to go by, had traveled to the Baddeck area years in the past and had fallen in love with the town.

The young Bell had started his life in Scotland but due to health problems, including the death of his two brothers to tuberculosis, his mother and father decided to move to the United States for a better climate.

It worked, and the young man soon became an inventing genius.  

At 18 years of age as he was working for a man who sold corn, Alec developed a method of instead of having manual labor shuck the stalks, a machine could do it.

It worked and Alec is credited with the saying, “Ah, shucks.”

As the years wore on Alec became more and more a man of invention. His father worked with various methods of assisting those without hearing actually to communicate and Alec made that part of his life goal. He became a speech teacher helping those, including Helen Keller.

In fact, his wife was a former student of his who was barely capable of hearing - but due to the extraordinary work from both his father and himself, Mabel was able to speak and read lips to the point that most did not realize she had any hearing issues.

It should be pointed out that Bell’s own mother was deaf but learned how to speak through the research and study by her husband who handed this down to his son.

Bell established the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in 1890 and is still doing wondrous things to this day for the hearing impaired.

So, we wandered into the Alexander Graham Bell Museum and were blown away by what we learned.

In 1876, when Bell famously yelled into the telephone mouthpiece, “Watson, get me a ham sandwich.”  Life changed for the entire planet.

And that set Bell into the history books, which also made him a fabulously wealthy man.

A point learned at the museum was that Bell did not care that much about money. He enjoyed the benefits for humanity but when one of his inventions, and he had countless, went public he dropped interest and moved on to the next idea.

A replica of Bell's study at the museum, Baddeck, Nova Scotia

Missing Scotland, Bell convinced his wife that they needed to find a place that would bring that sense of home back to him.

They traveled here and there, with his newfound funds, and happened to stop by Baddeck on one of their adventures.

With the lure of the green hills, tall trees, huge estuary, and rivers, this was the place for him. 

Mabel and Alec settled on a point called Megwatapatek, named by the Mi’kmaq meaning ' Red Head’ due to the reddish sandstone rocks at the end of the peninsula.

The Bells purchased 600 acres and built a beautiful home there and other residences for family members. The property is still owned by the descendants and no non-family members are allowed unless they are guests.

Bell's estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia

I tried, even showing my press pass. 

I did not know how cold the waters of the  Bras d’Or Lake were in late June until the security personnel tossed me into them.

The museum was enlightening into the life of Alexander Graham Bell.

Most think of him only as the inventor of the telephone, but he was so much more.

He had a total of 18 separate patents and 12 he shared with other brainiacs which included devices to assist the deaf, phonographs, multiple telegraphs at one time, photographs, metal detectors, and so much more.

We spent hours within the large museum marveling at this and that. All the inventions Bell was involved in were amazing. His wife once said that got his greatest creative ideas by floating in the waters by their house in Baddeck while smoking a pipe, an event that could fill an entire day.

He always carried a small notebook and scribbled notes in it constantly.

I suggested Laureen take that stance when I was floating in our pool at home with a cold adult beverage but her eyes rolling stopped that idea.

Bell even got into human flight.

He loved kites and often over the peninsula where their home was, the folks in Baddeck may have seen a dozen various colored and shaped kites skirting the breezes above their land.

The fight for dominance of who could put a human into the air was intense - some guys by the name of the Wright Brothers were doing it but everything was in secret, but Bell believed in publicity.

So, on February 23, 1909, Bell along with a host of like-minded fellas, launched the Silver Dart into the air off the shores of the Baddeck estate, creating the first powered heavier-than-air craft in Canada with a human.

A few years later, Bell and those engineers around him came up with the first hydrofoil concept of a plane that could take off and land on water.

Bell's original design of a hydrofoil, Baddeck, Nova Scotia

On September 9, 1919, the vehicle took off from the waters of Bells Home and reached a speed of nearly 71 miles per hour.

Though through the years the concept would become indispensable for the military, when the First World War was done, there was not much interest in Bell’s idea.

It was decades later that the military realized Bell was far ahead of almost everyone and now hydrofoils are utilized by all branches of the service.

In a fitting farewell for one of the United States' most prolific inventors, during his funeral after his death on August 2, 1922, every phone in North America was silenced in tribute to the inventor.

Even in death, Alexander Graham Bell was to be noticed.


For further information: Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site (canada.ca)

John  can be reached at: beyersbyways@gmail.com



Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Happy Thanksgiving

 

Often, between Halloween - a Holiday we love, and Christmas - a Holyday we love, we often forget the importance of the Holiday of Thanksgiving.

It is not only a day to spend with family and friends over a lavish feast spinning tales or watching sports but one of simply being thankful for those we love.

That is the utmost importance. To be 'Thankful' for those we love, present and past.

So, this upcoming Thanksgiving, please remember the words of Marcie, from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

'We should just be thankful for being together. I think that's what they mean by Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown.'

To be just -


Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Swissair Flight 111, Nova Scotia

Memorial for the Swissair Flight 111 near Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia

Often when traveling, the adventurer will come across a locale they were not expecting, which makes journeying here and there so much more enlightening.

But that journeying can also conjure up feelings of sadness when tragedy is suddenly remembered as though it were yesterday.

For those of us old enough, it is like knowing where you were when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or where you were when the first hint that 9/11 was more than just one airplane crashing into the North Trade Tower at the World Trade Center.

There are just those moments in life, no matter how many days pass, a specific memory is seared into the subconscious for all time. 

And that is what Laureen, my lovely wife, and I found while driving southwest toward Peggy’s Cove, less than an hour's drive from Halifax in Nova Scotia.

It was one of those perfect mornings where the sun was shining, birds were singing, the ocean water could not be bluer and a Sasquatch was playing an acoustic guitar while a moose was singing wonderful melodies of life in the forest.

Driving along the coastline passing tiny towns with names such as Glen Haven, Seabright, Glen Margaret, and others seemed to be flipping through wall calendar pages in real time.

Fishing villages dotted the blue Atlantic waters with lobster traps lining the shores. Colorful homes, small and large either hugging the rocky beaches or laid back amongst long stretches of green grass with pristine forests as their backgrounds.

I used the phrase, “This is such beautiful scenery,” so often that it even began sounding redundant.

We stopped and snapped a few photos at French Village, a quaint way station for boats moving in and out of the large bay on their way to or from fishing. A large boatyard piqued our interest and time was spent walking along the docks and gazing at the massive boats laid up onto wooden inland docks awaiting their turn for repairs.

The entire drive was idyllic.

Closing in on Peggy’s Cove, which we had chosen as the destination for this day’s outing to view the iconic lighthouse and have a light lunch, we drove by a sign stating that a memorial for Swissair Flight 111 was at the next turnout.

And that is when those certain memories which may hide in the wrinkles of the brain, leap out.

“I didn’t know,” Laureen said.

My reply was to brake slowly and enter the parking lot reserved for visitors who want to stop and walk a short trail to wonderful artwork that recalled a horrific accident that claimed 229 fellow humans only a short five miles out in the cold Atlantic Ocean.

Laureen Beyer looking out towards where Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the ocean

On a warm evening on the 2nd of September of 1998, Swissair Flight 111 was scheduled for a routine flight from JFK International Airport in New York City to its destination of Cointrin Airport in Geneva, Switzerland. The plane taxied the runway and took to the skies at approximately 8:17 PM.

The 215 passengers may have believed they were heading off for a fantastic and well-deserved vacation or perhaps to nail a business deal that had been in the works for months. The crew settled down to their specific duties knowing that tomorrow would bring another flight and another destination.

For these folks of Swissair Flight 111, tomorrow would never dawn.

A little over two hours later, the flight disappeared from the radar screens at a height of 9,700 feet above the Atlantic.

Five minutes later, the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax registered a seismic event about five nautical miles southwest of Peggy’s Cove.

The aircraft had nose-dived at 345 miles per hour into the ocean.

Half a dozen vehicles were already parked as we came to a stop.

The breeze blowing off the waters of the Atlantic was cool, we donned light jackets and wandered to the trail toward the memorial.

It is a lovely path, with signposts advising visitors to stay on the trail and not wander onto the national preserve area.

The stunning coastline looking toward Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia

The rocky coastline is home to a variety of indigenous plants - the Crowberry, the Three-Toothed Cinquefoil, and Laureen’s favorite, the Pitcher-plant (a carnivorous species that traps insects within their flowers and then digests them). 

The green moss clung to the huge rocks that lined the coast like toupes upon bald men trying not to look like bald men.

It is also a place where the only sound is the breeze blowing through the air and the waves crashing along the nearby beaches.

A perfect location for a memorial for those lost out at sea.

Swissair Flight 111 was the deadliest accident for Swissair involving the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 and the second-deadliest accident to occur over Canadian airspace after the Arrow Air Flight 1285R. That air tragedy occurred on December 12, 1985, in Newfoundland which took the lives of all 256 aboard - only a half mile from the runway. 

As we passed folks heading back from the memorial we nodded and smiled. They did the same but all were somber, as it should be when visiting such sites.

Though we may not know a soul who perished aboard Swissair Flight 111, they were all souls like ourselves. So, in a manner of speaking - we are very much like those who plunged into the ocean a short distance off the coast. Just regular people out traveling and not expecting the unexpected.

Huge pieces of natural granite stand at an angle at the memorial site. Strong and resilient against the constant barrage of winds and storms that batter this coastline. There are stone benches for visitors to sit and take a moment of reflection - either for those lost or perhaps themselves.

Words are etched into those pieces of granite thanking all those who assisted in the rescue and recovery efforts after the crash.

Large memorial located in Bayswater, Nova Scotia

But there are other tributes left by loved ones of those killed, and one said it all - ‘No longer by my side, but always in my heart.’

I had to turn away and wipe a tear from my right eye - the breeze must have picked up some sand from the beach and flung it at me.

The memorial will last longer than the lives lost on that flight and even those who will remember the last words spoken before that fateful flight.

The airliner crashed almost equidistant from Peggy’s Cove and Bayswater, another small town across St. Margarets Bay from Peggy’s Cove where there is another memorial for those lost,

After an hour we ventured back to our vehicle and made our way to Peggy’s Cove.

We were both rather quiet with our own thoughts but driving away from the cove, I looked over at Laureen and said, “Where now?”

“Well, I think we need to visit Bayswater.”

And the following morning we did.

The drive to Bayswater from Halifax is short. A beautiful hour filled with green forests that seem to be endless. And then there is the ocean.

Some of the gorgeous coastline while driving to Bayswater, Nova Scotia

Bayswater has a long curving sandy beach where the soft Atlantic waves curl up harmlessly while swimmers dunk in and out of the cold water.

We were the only visitors to the memorial that morning. It was quiet. It was solemn. As it should be.

Walking up the short path to the large sculpted granite monuments, we were instantly moved. One had every person’s name who had perished aboard Swissair Flight 111 etched into the granite and the other had a very touching eulogy.

‘In memory of the 229 men, women, and children aboard Swissair Flight 111 who perished off these shores September 2nd, 1998. They have been joined to the sea and the sky. May they rest in peace.’

A few steps away is the mass grave holding tightly those unidentified remains of the victims, surrounded by pillars of granite and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.


Mass gravesite for many victims from the Swissair Flight 111

Suddenly, I felt another speck of sand entering my right eye and had to wipe the tear away.


John can be contacted at: beyersbyways@gmail.com