This is the tenth year I’ve created snow sculptures on our front lawn here in Waterloo. It’s been great fun learning how to carve snow, while I visit with my neighbours and those passing by. Many of my creations are about two and a half metres high and my favourite type of snow is dry or non-packing snow. Once I pound it into a pail or my snow forms and I let it sinter (bond) for a few hours, it is a great medium for carving. People are sometimes surprised that I don’t prefer packing snow. In my experience, dry snow is easier to carve—and more likely to be available! What an opportunity for winter fun.

I’ve made more than 100 snow sculptures over the years. This past winter, one of my creations was a huge foot, stomping on COVID. Other creations include an owl, where I made the eyes by turning old scraps of wood on my lathe and then painting them. I also carved a snow sculpture of the character Carl from the movie Up—he might be my favourite. Ultimately, the favourite part of what I do is seeing people enjoy my creations. A couple of years ago, Pascal Siakam of the Toronto Raptors enjoyed a very tall likeness of him I carved—especially as the entire sculpture could spin!

A typical project has three steps. The first is to pound snow into a form, whether it be a 19-litre pail for a small project, or a two-metre-high plastic form. The second phase involves going inside for hot chocolate while the snow sinters. This is a crucial step where the snow crystals bond together—it usually takes a few hours, or even overnight. The final step is where the fun really begins—I use a variety of tools to carve the block of snow. A grapefruit knife is an important tool but even a robust plastic knife can be used. Safety is always an important consideration and for kids, any tool choice should be parent or guardian approved.

A few years ago, I put together a free website to share my knowledge. Last year as the pandemic wore on through the summer, I anticipated a challenging winter for everyone. So I decided to do three things. First, I created a free snow sculpting club on my website. I wanted to share my knowledge and give kids (of all ages) another option for winter fun. The club now has members from across Canada and other parts of the world and new members are always welcome. Kids enjoy earning the eight badges that are available.

The second thing I did was build more than 80 “snow pounders” I designed and gave away to families in my neighbourhood.

The third was give larger snow forms to a number of really enthusiastic local kids—it was fun to see them take centre stage and appear on the local TV news.

Then one day, the town of Riverview, N.B., connected with me, wanting to get involved. They ended up making more than 350 of my pounders and delivering them (with donated pails) to members of their community for a snow-sculpting event. The results displayed the impressive creativity of Riverview townspeople.

This winter I’ve continued to add new supports to my website. There are more than 30 free how-to videos and other resources to guide you in the creation of small snow sculptures. I also added a new teacher resources page and a local school board has shown great interest in getting snow pounders out to their schools.

My goal is to spread the word that you can have loads of winter fun, even with non-packing snow!

Check out Matt’s website at snowbankproductions.weebly.com.

Next, check out this heartwarming winter fun gallery of Canadians enjoying the great outdoors.

Canadian Forces Station Dana, in operation from 1962 to 1987, is no longer a military radar base I can live on, but it is a place I can return to by reconnecting with others through story.

I lived on this small Saskatchewan base from four years old until I was eight. The base was about an hour away from Saskatoon and had around 100 homes. It had everything a child could want: an outdoor pool, a bowling alley, a library, an outdoor skating rink, a school you could walk to, friendly neighbours and instant friends. Families with kids were always moving in.

The entire base was our playground, accessible by foot or bike, and we did explore it. I lived on Middleton St. with my family until the summer of 1984, when my dad was posted to a base in Sydney, N.S. He was excited to be near his family; I felt like I was losing mine. I longed to stay, and I still long to go back after all these years.

During the pandemic, I turned my earliest and longest obsession into a podcast called CFS Dana. When I find someone who used to live at CFS Dana, also called Sage Hill, I ask them for their favourite memories and record their answers. Those anecdotes are the bulk of every episode, but I do throw in some fun questions about unexpected subjects that pop up during the conversation. I am a librarian and I love hearing people tell stories.

Some topics have turned into mysteries that I hope can be solved one day through future conversations with guests. A few people have mentioned a streaker who may or may not have been seen on base, and one man is hoping to reconnect with a woman he met through the base and cannot stop thinking about.

The memories are plentiful and precious. I hope listeners can keep filling in details about the base and the things that happened on it.

I have heard about first loves, co-workers and favourite teachers. There are hobbies that had their start at Dana and turned into careers, families who began to speak to one another again and listeners who have found long-lost friends. Some people have shared secrets with me that I have kept quiet. I leave it up to each guest what they would like to include or leave out.

One woman, Erin, shared a memory of Cabbage Patch Kids at CFS Dana. Moms would go into Saskatoon to look for them, but they would return empty-handed as the dolls were so popular at the time.

Erin and all the other kids were disappointed, and the moms were getting frustrated. Fortunately, Mrs. Douglas, who lived on the base, had a connection in Saskatoon. One of her relatives worked in a store that sold them, and when the next shipment came in, they put some dolls aside for her to pick up.

“Twenty or 30 came in that day,” said Erin. “I was super happy. It was a really big day for the base because all the Cabbage Patch Kids arrived, and everyone was happy. I’ll always remember that. We were very lucky to have Mrs. Douglas and her relative, to have that connection. Otherwise, I don’t know how long it would have taken us to get them.”

Mining Memories

A lot of us share the same recollections. Adults talk about the storms and parties, the beautiful scenery and the military exercises. Childhood memories incorporate the sledding hill and winter carnivals. People of all ages have stories about the swimming pool on base and their excursions to Bruno, Humboldt or Saskatoon. I am so happy—and completely surprised—whenever someone has a memory of my mom or my dad, both marathon runners and cross-country skiers at the time.

I suspected there were others who lived on the base who loved it as much as I do, but I heard several stories about how the base was loved by civilians, too—not only for the employment opportunities, but for schooling, recreation and friendship. And it went both ways. A few military members shared memories of working on farms off base on their days off. And I wasn’t expecting to learn so much about the Cold War or Canadian military history from talking to people who worked on the base.

As I talk to more people and they share different stories, the base grows bigger for me. It feels larger, like it’s still there. From the first hello, it seems as if I’m talking and listening to family. It’s been fascinating to hear what people remember about a tiny base in Saskatchewan that is loved and missed so much.

When I lived at CFS Dana as a child, I liked the idea of all of us being together. I have tried to recreate that through the podcast. I make it as simple as possible for people to connect with me. I call them on the telephone when it is convenient for them, and we talk about Dana. Then, when the podcast goes up, people can listen to the episodes whenever they like. It’s amazing how much one can remember by just starting to talk or by listening to a story. It snowballs!

All the Canadian bases I lived on are closed. People who lived or worked on or near those bases have nowhere to go when they want to return to a place they called home. I think that is why this podcast has meant so much to me and the people who listen and contribute.

If you have a connection with the base, please don’t be shy to reach out. I can’t wait to hear from you!

Tanya Boudreau can be reached at [email protected]. Find the CFS Dana podcast at anchor.fm/tanya766.

Next, check out the incredible story of how a small Saskatchewan community rallied to save the life of an unborn baby.

Caused by human papilloma viruses (HPVs) and transmitted via touch or contaminated surfaces, warts are so common that you’re nearly guaranteed to get one over the course of your life. These small, rough skin growths, which can show up anywhere, typically affect the hands, feet or genitals. They’re usually harmless but can be bothersome and embarrassing.

How to Get Rid of Warts

Part of what makes warts so frustrating is their stubbornness: they can take months or even years to go away on their own—and some never do. If you’re tired of waiting, you could try salicylic acid, which is available in over-the-counter treatment kits. It won’t resolve matters overnight but could speed up the process by eroding the wart a little bit at a time.

Another option is visiting a dermatologist, who can administer more aggressive removal methods such as freezing the wart off with liquid nitrogen, burning it away with an electrical charge, or cutting it out with surgical tools. These treatments may not be covered by medical insurance, so find out ahead of time whether you’ll be paying out of pocket.

Particularly obstinate warts might respond better to immunotherapies, which aim to give the body’s natural defences the boost they need to suppress the virus. For instance, a chemical such as diphencyprone might be applied to the affected area to trigger a mild reaction and kick the immune system into gear. (Try these natural ways to boost your immune system, as well.)

Wart Etiquette

Until removal is complete, it’s best to practise “wart etiquette” to avoid passing on your infection. Plantar warts, which mostly affect the soles of the feet, are caused by viral strains that thrive and spread in wet environments; therefore, wear flip-flops or cover your warts with waterproof tape in locker rooms and public pools, as well as the shower.

Don’t share personal items—socks, towels—that come into contact with warts. And resist picking at them, which often helps to propagate the underlying viruses.

When to See a Doctor

See a doctor if a wart is painful, if it bleeds easily or if it changes colour or appearance—you’ll want to make sure it isn’t skin cancer. If it is indeed a wart, then it’s “just a cosmetic nuisance,” says Dr. Colm O’Mahony, a member of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology. “In extremely rare cases, a genital wart can become massive [many centimetres wide] and can become cancerous, but that’s incredibly unlikely.”

Feel free to get your lesions treated if they distress you; otherwise, you may choose to just get on with life, warts and all. 

Now that you know how to get rid of warts, check out four skin changes you should never ignore.

Kathy Glezner was making good time. It was 8 a.m. and the 25-year-old nurse had just finished a string of 12-hour night shifts at a London, Ontario, hospital. She was bone-weary, but glad to be sailing along Highway 402 to Sarnia, where she lived. During the night, Environment Canada had posted a snow squall alert. Nothing unusual—lake effect blizzards are common on this exposed highway, which runs between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. But the calm grey sky convinced Kathy the drive would be safe. “I figured I’d be in bed in an hour,” she says.

Flurries began when she was halfway home. Snow was whipping across her windshield. A snowplow and police car in the ditch were her first clues, she says, that “the road was starting to get bad.” She slowed. Then at the turnoff for Forest, just 20 kilometres from Sarnia, she arrived at a line of stopped cars. She queued up as vehicles rolled in behind and alongside, boxing her in.

Listening to the radio, Kathy learned the highway was closed because a tractor-trailer had slid off the road. Crews were already on the case. She texted some friends and her mom, and tried not to nod off as she waited. A deep sleeper, she was afraid she wouldn’t rouse when traffic started moving.

Kathy received her first text message from Cris Lapointe mid-morning. Married to her cousin, Cris is the family’s go-to guy when someone is in a jam. It wasn’t snowing in Sarnia, so Cris figured the highway wouldn’t be closed for long.

After a couple of hours, however, conditions worsened. Gusting winds began rocking Kathy’s car. She couldn’t see anything outside, and snow was drifting up her doors. It was, she says, “a total whiteout.”

As a nurse who works on a busy cardiac ward, Kathy isn’t easily fazed. She was bored and exhausted, but suspected she was not in any immediate danger. She had a box of crackers for snacking. She had her car cellphone charger. She also had a full tank of gas, making it safe to leave the motor idling for the moment. She kept herself busy texting back and forth with friends and following the news about the storm on the local radio station.

Late in the afternoon an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer came by on a snowmobile. He was checking on stranded motorists and asked if she was in any difficulty. She said she was fine.

She asked the officer if there was any way to get past the truck. “No, ma’am,” he answered. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Once it got dark Cris decided to take action. He texted Kathy to tell her he would drive the back roads in his four-wheel-drive pickup truck to get to the highway and find her. An hour later he had to turn back. “The farther out of Sarnia I got, the bigger the drifts,” he says.

At 6:15 p.m. traffic on the highway started to move. But by 7:30 Kathy had inched only five kilometres before the OPP directed her to an off-ramp. On the radio she’d heard about some emergency shelters, but until this point was still hopeful she’d make it home. “That’s when it hit me,” she says. “I’m here for the night.” Soon after, Cris set out again, this time on a friend’s snowmobile. He brought with him sandwiches and riding gear for Kathy.

As he rode slowly alongside the row of immobilized cars and trucks, people would roll down their windows and ask for help. “I was the first person they’d seen in six hours.” He explained he was picking up his cousin. “I was pretty blunt. I told them, ‘Hunker down. Nobody’s coming and I can’t take you.'”

About 9 p.m. he located Kathy’s vehicle. An OPP officer, glad that at least one traveller under his charge was going home, directed Kathy to pull her car onto the shoulder. While Kathy suited up for the ride, Cris called a snowmobiling buddy in Sarnia. Worried about the size of the drifts, he wanted backup if they got into trouble.

Near 10 p.m. they headed for home. And then the fun started.

About five kilometres into the journey, Cris made a mistake. What he thought was a shallow ditch turned out to be a deep trough. Instead of coming out the other side, they just kept going down. When they hit bottom, he and Kathy were in light, feathery snow that was over their heads. “We had to kind of swim out,” says Kathy. The experience was over so fast she didn’t have time to be scared, but what was starting to worry Kathy and Cris was how cold her feet were getting. Cris was also uneasy about Kathy’s gear—especially her footwear, which he dubbed “dancing boots, not snowmobiling boots.” Kathy began to wonder whether she was suffering from frostbite.

After extricating themselves they spent an hour trying to haul the sled out by digging around it with their hands and pulling. It wouldn’t budge. At 11 p.m. Cris reluctantly called his friend.

Kathy and Cris asked a trucker if they could wait in his cab. Kathy was very glad to be inside; her feet were so cold she couldn’t feel them. As they slowly warmed up they started to hurt.

The trucker was glad to have company. They talked about the storm and compared notes. As thanks for a warm place to wait, Cris gave him the sandwiches he had brought.

Two of Cris’s friends arrived an hour and a half later. The three guys dug out the sled, but now Kathy’s feet were aching. They couldn’t chance getting stuck again, so it was decided Kathy would ride on the back of the friend’s more powerful machine. They got back on the highway.

Kathy doesn’t remember much of the last part of the trip. Her feet were throbbing. She squeezed her eyes shut in fear as they roared along the shoulder of the road, passing all the stranded cars. She was terrified the snowmobile would hit something in the dark. “That was the only time I was really scared,” she says.

Cris took it all in, awestruck by the fury of the storm. Huge new drifts had formed since he’d come through earlier in the night. “I drove up one drift—it must have been seven feet tall and 15 or 20 feet across. It was a solid piece of snow, like a hill, but no hill had been there earlier,” he recalls. “That’s something I’ve never seen before.”

Finally, Kathy’s snowmobile came to a stop outside Cris’s friend’s place. Kathy fell into the snow as soon as she stepped off. Her feet were so cold and sore they wouldn’t hold her. And the pain was moving up her leg. She had to be half-carried inside, where the men helped pull off her boots. She waited excruciating minutes while her bright-red feet began to thaw out. “I was pretty concerned,” she says. But she was lucky—there was no lasting frostbite damage.

It was almost 3 a.m. when Cris dropped Kathy off at her place. Her mom had waited up. They sat at the kitchen table, ate shortbread cookies and had a drink. Before Kathy hit the sack they spoke about how it might be time to consider moving to London to avoid the winter commute.

In all, 600 travellers were stranded for as long as 48 hours. Seven communities set up emergency shelters and many local residents opened their homes to travellers. The state of emergency—first declared at 9:45 p.m. on December 13, 2010—remained in effect until 8:15 a.m. on December 16, when the last of the travellers were rescued by local snowmobile clubs and three Canadian Forces helicopters.

One person died in the storm. On the first night, 41-year-old Neeland Rumble’s vehicle got stuck in a snowdrift. The security guard, who wasn’t carrying a cellphone, walked towards a nearby farmhouse to call his parents and borrow a pair of snow pants so he could continue to his job at a solar farm just 250 metres away. But he didn’t make it.

Rumble’s body was found in a snowdrift the next day. Police believe he became disoriented in the severe weather. He died of hypothermia.

Take a look back at the worst snowstorms in Canadian history.

A love letter to train travel

In the springtime of 1960, my late husband and I drove our young daughters to Wyoming, Ont., to see “all the little puffer-bellies” standing in a row. It was the end of a steam-engine era, and there was something unutterably sad about seeing all those iron horses being put out to pasture.

Once upon a time, train travel was something to be truly savoured. Eating in the dining car was a great experience—made so by tasty meals served on white linen tablecloths, complete with matching napkins, silver cutlery and fine dishware. All this has been replaced with a trolley containing soft drinks, chips, cooking and coffee that is barely drinkable.

When my children were young, I used to read to them all the time. I recall one favourite—about the little engine that could. On my last trip, I imagined the train wheels chugging to the chorus of, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” At the end of the book, those words change to “I knew I could,” but on this trip—my first in several years—it was only the former sentence that was echoing through my head as I lugged my heavy suitcase off the train upon reaching my destination.

I do have many fond memories of train tips, however. Sitting up in the dome car while going through the Canadian Rockies was a definite thrill, one I experienced a few times. I’m certain it remains so to this day. On long train trips, fellow passengers tend to bare their souls and confess things they would never ordinarily talk about. Perhaps that’s because you know they’ll never see you again.

Back in 1982, and newly widowed, I travelled solo from Sarnia to Calgary on Amtrak. I had a cozy roomette for the trip. Sleeping on a train is pleasant; the motion acts like a soporific and lulls you into dreamland. After sleeping all night, I recall asking someone what province we were in. The answer “Ontario” surprised me. You really get an idea of just how vast our country is when crossing it by rail. The scenery of northern Ontario had a healing effect—rugged rock, lush ferns, evergreens, chalk-white birches and ponds like black mirrors, where yellow water lilies floated. I recall a porter telling me that moose would come to stare when the old steam engines were passing by—almost as though answering a mating call. With the change to diesel engines, he added, they were no longer interested.

I must admit that the sound of a train whistle still holds a special appeal for me, as do trains themselves. When we first moved to Sarnia, we rented part of a house located almost directly across from the train station. That haunting call always made me feel like climbing aboard and taking off for faraway places with, as the old song goes, strange sounding names.

Despite the changes, I find myself agreeing with the sentiment of Edna St. Vincent Millay who, in 1921, wrote the following lines in her poem, Travel:

My heart is warm with the friends I make

And better friends I’ll not be knowing

Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take

No matter where it’s going.

Next, check out these 10 picture-perfect moments on a train trip through the Canadian Rockies.

What is sea foam?

Over time, the internal parts of your engine get clogged up with all kinds of nasty stuff. Inside the crankcase, where the oil lives, varnish and tar build up on the surfaces of pistons, rings, and lifters, as well as in the oil galleries that supply oil to all the components. This lowers the engine’s ability to cool and lubricate itself, reducing the efficiency, performance, and life of the engine. (Find out more ways you’re shortening the life of your car.)

The same build up occurs inside the fuel system as well, clogging the injectors or carburetor jets, gumming up the intake valves and the top of the pistons too. If the valves don’t move freely, your engine’s breathing is then greatly hampered. Carbon deposits on pistons and valves can lead to hot spots, which cause detonations, and then lowers your engine’s performance. The trick is: how do you clean? Virtually every engine, from two-stroke lawnmowers to big rig diesels face the same problem.

Sea Foam has been around for over 70 years, and it’s one of the most trusted treatments for all engines. While the company makes a range of excellent products, the main one is Sea Foam Motor Treatment. Sea Foam is specially formulated to safely and slowly re-liquify gum, sludge, varnish and carbon deposits from the hard parts in your engine so they can be flushed out of the system.

Sea Foam helps lubricate the moving parts, particularly in the fuel system. Ethanol additives dry out the seals and leave a varnish that makes it harder for oil to lubricate the parts. Removing this varnish brings the engine back into top working order. Inside the fuel tank, Sea Foam absorbs water, allowing it to be burned up in the combustion chamber without issue.

How to use sea foam

Sea Foam Motor Treatment can be used in three ways: in the crankcase, in the fuel tank, and in the diesel fuel filter. For cleaning the top end, use Sea Foam Spray as directed.

In the crankcase

• When added to the oil, Sea Foam will clean up sludge, quiet noisy lifters, and remove oil varnish. Since a can treats 15 litres of oil, it provides two treatments for most vehicles. The best method is to add the treatment between 800 and 1600 kilometres before the next oil change, and then add the rest after you have changed the oil. That way, the first treatment will get the big amounts of varnish and sludge out, and the second will keep things clean.
• Pop the cap off the oil filler neck. You can add Sea Foam before or after an oil change.
• Pour up to one ounce of Sea Foam per quart of oil already in the engine. We used about half of the bottle.

In the fuel

• A single can treats up to 60.6 litres of fuel. This will remove deposits from the fuel pump, injectors or carb jets, control the moisture level, and stabilize the fuel. In diesel engines, it will serve as a de-icing agent since it has anti-gel properties.

Top end

• To clean carbon deposits from air intake systems, intake valves and combustion chambers inside the engine, including GDI engines, Sea Foam recommends using their Sea Foam Spray Top Engine cleaner and lube (Part # SS-14). Sea Foam Spray is the same great Sea Foam product, only in aerosol spray instead of liquid form.
• Sea Foam Spray is used by inserting the included application hose and patented “HOOK TOOL” into the air intake, just in front of the throttle plates, in the throttle body. Then start the engine and let it warm up to operating temperature. Increase idle speed up to 2,000RPM and spray the contents of the container into the engine.
• Shut the engine off and allow it to “Hot Soak” for 15 minutes. After the Hot Soak period restart the engine and road test the vehicle aggressively until the exhaust is clean (a road test normally means driving for 8 to 16 kilometres). Easy-to-follow directions are also available right on the Sea Foam Spray container.

Treatments like these may seem complicated, but with a little bit of prep work, you can do it yourself and restore your vehicle’s power and performance. If you have any concerns, stop by your local NAPA Auto Parts Store or NAPA AUTOPRO Service Centre.

Next, find out which rust proofing option is right for you.

He was no clothes horse, but my husband’s story is in what he wore.

I’m writing this after 18 months of living without the man I had known for more than 50 years and it still feels surreal. Rob died of cancer in 2018. Our lives together created many memories—rich experiences, gladly shared—and I know they are what will help sustain me. Still, when our two sons and their wives presented me with a surprise memento of their father, I was quite literally speechless.

After his death, we went through closets and drawers—that is what we do when we don’t know what to do. One of his passions was mountain biking. He was highly skilled, winning races up to the provincial level. There were lots of colourful cycling jerseys. On the other hand, many of his everyday shirts were common checks and plaids, and almost all were relics. Our sons each took several items; probably not to wear, but something familiar of their dad’s to keep. Those tasks kept us busy—and close—in the first days of our new reality.

Some weeks passed. A little girl became my first grandchild, and two sweet grandsons arrived a few months later. Those new families grappled bravely with all the highs and lows of first-time parenthood while nursing a wound that could never fully heal. During this time a concept evolved through the collaboration of my children and a talented family member: to artfully arrange pieces of Rob’s clothing into a four-by-five-foot quilt, although that hardly seems an adequate term for what was created.

On one side, the colour and vibrancy of travel and cycling experiences are combined in stunning patterns, blending memorable events and locations. The cycling jerseys predominate but there is more. In recent years, Rob rekindled a love of sailboarding. A shirt from the Outer Banks recalls one sailboarding trip to North Carolina. Elsewhere in the quilt, the logo of the Lunenburg Foundry reminds me of cycling from our home in Kingston, Ont., to Nova Scotia for a family reunion in 2015. The Poison Spider Bicycles square comes from a shirt bought in a well-known cycling shop in Moab, Utah, a mountain biker’s dream destination. Rob and our sons made that trip together less than a month before he received his devastating diagnosis.

The other side evokes a life lived through swatches of those everyday shirts (plus his bathing suit) that all who knew and loved Rob would recognize at 10 paces. The workmanship is exquisite.

An ordinary and extraordinary man

When we retired to Kingston six years ago, we renovated one of the remaining buildings of the old Portsmouth Brewery. We worked with a local contractor and it took a lot of vision, collaboration, risk-taking and hard work. It is an unusual home. In our entry area, a canoe that Rob built hangs over the front door, and the bikes that we rode together are suspended from the wall—sculpturally appealing but mostly for easy access. On another wall once hung Rob’s sailboarding equipment; that has now gone, and the quilt has taken up the void. It hangs right by the staircase I walk up and down every day. I often stop and reflect on the ordinary and extraordinary man who was my husband.

The quilt has helped me absorb the fullness of his time on Earth; seeing that, for most of us, the lives we live are a complex mix of accomplishments—some stellar, some simple—and the daily relationships, habits and actions that form us. Hardly profound, but comforting.

At a recent family gathering we placed the three babies on Rob’s quilt and began to tell them about their grandfather and the things he liked to do. This will become one of our new traditions. Rob missed meeting his grandchildren by only a few months, but he will become a person they know through the stories—both ordinary and extraordinary—that we will tell them.

Memories we carry in our hearts are most precious but, for me, having something close at hand to touch and recall, and to share with others, has already proven to be a salve for an aching heart. The warm response of family and friends to this work of love has moved me. The quilt is a gift that continues to give each day and for that I am grateful. Creativity and beauty do not always come from a happy place. In bewilderment and sorrow and loss, some will see patterns that can begin to bring order to the emotional chaos that is a natural part of grieving.

© 2019, Mary Jane Philp. “A Quilt Keeps My Husband’s Memory Alive,” from The Globe and Mail (December 2, 2019), theglobeandmail.com.

Next, read the heartwarming story of how a mother’s casserole brought a family together during the pandemic.

THE DEAD OYSTER falls from the plastic mesh bag with the hollow clop of a horse hoof on pavement. Its shell gapes, innards rotted. About 100 more oysters—some living, some dead—quickly follow, falling on the flattened bow of Joe Googoo’s dark-green metal johnboat. Clad in a jacket with blaze-orange sleeves and a ball cap, Googoo pulls a knife from his belt holster and taps the oyster shells with its curved tip as he sorts through the mottled pile. Counting them one by one, he tosses the lifeless shells aside and puts the living oysters back in the bag.

Robin Stuart, a large, curly-haired man in a tattered black-and-blue dry suit, perches on the boat’s edge. Stuart, one of Nova Scotia’s most experienced aquaculture experts, cracks jokes as he, too, picks around for “morts”—mortalities caused by the oyster parasite MSX. But as the long-time friends tally the dead, Stuart soon grows sombre. “There’s almost as many morts as there are live,” he says. “MSX is definitely doing its thing here.”

Bras d’Or Lake, cupped within Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, is a sprawling, ocean-linked tidal network of bays, estuaries and ponds. On its muddy bottom, Crassostrea virginica oysters once grew as big as brunch plates, with frilly shells and deep, round cups: qualities prized by oyster connoisseurs. Filter-feeding oysters grow in salty ocean waters and have hard, calcium-based shells that protect soft innards: heart, gills, stomach and other organs. For decades, Cape Bretoners picked oysters from public beds while commercial growers cultivated the shellfish in vast beds on the lake’s bottom and transferred them onto floating rafts to await packing and shipping.

Many harvesting families, including Googoo’s, are Mi’kmaq, and have lived near the Bras d’Or—which they call Pitu’paq, or “to which all things flow”—for thousands of years. Oysters are a fundamental part of Mi’kmaw food traditions and philosophy, with many families harvesting them year-round for personal consumption. So when the commercial oyster industry took off in the 1950s, many were well positioned to sell oysters for a living. At the industry’s peak, estimates Stuart, more than 100 Cape Breton license holders—commercial and recreational, Mi’kmaq and non-Indigenous—had millions of oysters on their farms, collectively worth millions of dollars. Then it fell apart.

IN THE SUMMER OF 2002, a mysterious and deadly invasive parasite called multinucleated sphere unknown, or MSX, flattened Cape Breton’s oyster industry. Within months, millions of oysters died, their internal organs devoured by the parasite. Mortality of infected oysters hovered around 90 per cent. Nearly all of Googoo’s 400,000 oysters rotted.

“It was devastating,” says Anita Basque, who at the time was fisheries manager for Potlotek, a Mi’kmaw community on the Bras d’Or’s south shore. Growing up, she helped Googoo’s father sell shucked oysters, packaged in glass jars, at the Googoo family’s shop. Later, as a single mother, she supported her three children with money she made diving for and selling oysters, before she became a bank teller.

When Basque eventually took over as her band’s fisheries manager, she met Stuart, who was already well respected in Nova Scotia’s aquaculture scene and helped secure oyster leases for the band. A new oyster processing facility, initiated by Basque, launched in 2002 with a grand celebration; within months, the industry collapsed due to MSX.

Cape Breton oysters are no longer sold commercially, and the industry has been essentially dead for nearly two decades. Now, in a last-gasp effort to revive commercial oyster growing in the Bras d’Or, a makeshift team of scientists, community members and oyster harvesters is fighting to understand and evade MSX. Coordinated by Cape Breton University biology professor Rod Beresford, theirs is a supergroup of sorts, relying on high-tech devices, traditional knowledge and elbow grease. It’s a collaboration Basque calls “true reconciliation,” with non-Indigenous experts helping their Indigenous neighbours confront a painful, concrete problem. And what they’ve found so far could bring the Bras d’Or oyster industry back from the dead.

ON THE GROUP’S SECOND DAY of fall sampling in October 2020, Beresford and his colleague, Sindy Dove, join Stuart at a chilly beach on the north side of the Bras d’Or, far across the lake from Googoo’s leases. Stuart and Dove scramble along the beach toward a buoy marking the site’s four cages: two floating near the top, two resting on the murky bottom. Beresford doesn’t eat oysters and has never been particularly interested in them. But he is interested in solving scientific mysteries.

For decades, the behaviour of MSX and how it arrived in Canada have been a “real head-scratcher,” says Beresford. Some biologists believe that the parasite first hitched a ride to North America in the ballast water of U.S. warships returning from Japan and Korea after the Second World War. Scientists first identified MSX in Delaware Bay, south of New Jersey, after it wiped out thousands of oysters there in 1957. Within decades, it spread, infecting oysters from Maine to Florida. On how the parasite made it to Cape Breton, Beresford says there are two theories: it arrived either in ballast water or via an infected oyster introduced from farther south.

Viewed under a microscope, MSX is “almost a perfect circle, like an emoji face,” he says. When eaten, it’s harmless to humans. But once MSX infects an oyster, the parasite quickly starts to consume the creature’s soft innards. When an oyster loses its digestive organs, it essentially starves to death. Because oyster immune systems don’t have a “memory,” a weakened oyster that survives its first MSX infection is more likely—not less—to die from a subsequent infection.

As Beresford pondered the puzzle of the oysters, eventually connecting with Indigenous knowledge holders including Googoo and Basque, he formulated his theory: perhaps the lake’s muddy substrate is exactly where MSX lurks. And perhaps certain, specific salinity levels and temperatures, which vary widely, either help or hinder the parasite. If he could keep oysters alive just below the lake’s surface using modern aquaculture gear, he speculated, maybe he could prevent them from catching the parasite in the first place.

With Stuart’s expertise and cooperation from leaseholders who had held onto decades-old historic leases, Beresford and the team chose a dozen test sites across the Bras d’Or. Googoo, who, after MSX hit, used floating mesh bags to grow thousands of his own oysters in a protected bay, grew 24,000 baby oysters for the project. In the late spring of 2019, the team packed each cage with 500 oysters, zip-tied temperature and salinity data loggers resembling large black glow sticks to the plastic mesh, and then, sank two cages to the muddy bottom and floated another two near the surface at each test site. They waited a year as the oysters grew.

STUART’S WORK COUNTING dead oysters and taking samples, on that misty morning with Googoo on the Bras d’Or, will provide the first glimpse of whether Beresford’s theory holds. At two of the sites, oyster mortality at the bottom hovers between 40 and 60 per cent. Yet today, only around one to two per cent of oysters floating near the surface have died. The difference, Googoo says, validates what he’s been insisting all along: that oysters can survive in the Bras d’Or when floated in the right locations.

Beyond the promise of reviving a culturally important Mi’kmaw tradition and a critical component of their lake’s ecosystem, the project is also an act of amity. Basque and Googoo later tell me that working with Beresford’s team has been refreshingly devoid of the condescension and sidelining they often experience from non-Indigenous academics and so-called experts. “They’ll listen to me and my ideas,” Googoo says. “I’m the one out in the field every day, not them.”

Mi’kmaw fishers have reason to be wary. In late 2020, they were met by protests when they exercised their federally protected rights by catching and selling lobster outside of the non-Indigenous commercial season. On the province’s South Shore, there were instances of violence and vandalism.

Frequently, Beresford fields questions about his work from other university researchers, who say they admire the trust and camaraderie he’s earned from his Mi’kmaw collaborators. Basque often hears the same thing, but is baffled why others find the relationship so elusive. “It all comes down to respect,” she says.

Although his team is behind on analyzing tissue samples—their testing is currently stalled by a lack of consumables needed to complete the research—Beresford says initial results show a “solid trend” of survival among surface-floated oysters. And as his team draws closer to pinning down the ideal temperature, salinity and depth for avoiding the parasite, one exciting prospect is that their findings could help other areas hard hit by MSX, including the eastern United States. Most importantly, Beresford says, it means they are finally getting closer to helping people like Googoo and Basque realize their long-deferred dream of reviving the Bras d’Or oyster industry—backed by science, and hopefully built to last.

Next, discover how the North invented the science of parkas.

© 2021, Karen Pinchin. From “Freeing Oysters From a Parasite’s Hold,” Hakai Magazine (June 15, 2021), hakaimagazine.com