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colorful Nova Scotia

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Baddeck, 2003.10.27

Our hopes of finding colorful landscapes have been realized - we spent the day driving just ahead of a nasty front that kept us under a mix of sunny and dark skies.

I still had black and white film in my camera, unfortunately, and was driving, so I couldn't really document any of it. At one point we came upon a broad valley full of mixed 'Acadian' forest, with green conifers and warm deciduous leaves. The highway wended its way down the valley, and a rainbow even crossed the scene. By the time I'd pulled over and switched film, it was too late for me: the others got a couple of pics, I think. I can assure you it was something.

For a late lunch, we stopped in the town of Antiguinish, which has both a beautiful University campus (St. Xavier) and a really run-down Chinese restaurant that serves great food. I'm blanking on the name of the place, but it was something like "Moon River" or "Mystic Moon".

We wound up at Baddeck, as hoped. We found a decent hotel in the town's center, and spent the evening downing some drinks and watching "The Halifax Explosion" in the room that "Kate" and I shared. The movie was about a factual event that wiped out much of the city during WWI. A barge and a munitions ship collided and exploded. Charlie lives on 'Anchor drive', so named for being the landing spot of a fragment of the ship's anchor - the thing flew right over town proper, a distance of two miles.

I've been to Baddeck on Cape Breton island before, and find it a decent little place.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)