Tag Archives: Canada

Fishing Village Has Solemn History

by Woody

Is your Club or Group looking for an inspiring guest speaker or do you want to host a book signing? . . . Contact Woody today!

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1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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Quaint Fishing Village’s Solemn History

Peggy’s Cove is a quaint fishing village with brightly painted cottages of yellow and red and blue on the south shore of St. Margarets Bay in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Its charm is not without alarm. On the path nearing Peggy’s Point Lighthouse is a bronze plaque with a green patina of age and rogue sea: “Warning: Injury And Death Have Rewarded Careless Sight-Seers Here. The Ocean And Rocks Are Treacherous. Savour The Sea From A Distance.”

An idyllic calm inlet within the rough waters of Peggy’s Cove.

An even starker reminder of the ocean’s treacherousness came just a few miles away when my wife and I visited Fairview Lawn Cemetery. A wooden sign, white with blue lettering, offers solemn notice: “Titanic Grave Site.”

Rising up a grassy slope are three rows of grave markers where 121 victims of the infamous sea disaster are interred. They found their final resting places here because two ships based in Halifax – the Mackay-Bennett and the Minia – assisted the search for bodies.

Viewing downhill from the crest of the site an idyllic image comes into focus: meeting at a single gravestone at the top, the three rows of markers bow outward suggesting the contour of a ship’s hull.

The top marker, a waist-high granite pedestal, is inscribed: “Erected To The Memory Of An Unknown Child Whose Remains Were Recovered After The Disaster To The ‘Titanic’ April 15, 1912.”

In 2002, after forensic testing identified the unknown child, a smaller plaque was added: “Sidney Leslie Goodwin, Sept. 9, 1910 – April 15, 1912.”

Daily, something else is added: visitors leave memorial offerings. On this day they included crayons and coloring markers, a porcelain angel figurine, and two teddy bears.

An unidentified marker at the Titanic grave site.

Almost impossibly, a nearby grave pulls on one’s heartstring fivefold harder – for here rests Alma Paulsen and her four children, ages 8, 6, 4 and 2. It is claimed it took the 29-year-old mother so long to get her children dressed that they missed the lifeboats. It is also said she lovingly played the harmonica to soothe and distract them as the doomed ship sank.

Remarkably, the Fairview Lawn Cemetery also holds the remains of victims from another epic maritime calamity – the Great Halifax Disaster of 1917. Its death toll actually surpassed the Titanic’s by more than 200 with an estimated 1,950 instant casualties. An additional 9,000 were injured.

It happened on a December morning after two cargo ships collided in the Halifax Harbor. The initial damage was actually minor. However, one of the ships was carrying a full load of explosives for the war effort in Europe, including 400,000 pounds of TNT.

That disabled ship floated downstream and ran aground and caught fire. The ensuing explosion leveled a full square mile of Halifax. A half-ton chunk of the ship’s anchor still lies where it landed 2.5 miles away. Shockwaves shattered windows 50 miles in the distance.

It was, according to experts, the most-powerful man-made blast until the arrival of The Atomic Age.

Here is something else powerful: Americans, especially volunteers from Boston, rushed to Halifax’s aid. The city continues to send a 40-foot spruce tree to Beantown each Christmas season as a thank you.

A more significant thank you came in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. After the U.S. closed its airspace, a total of 224 planes were diverted to Canada. Halifax, as well as other Canadian cities, opened shelters and provided food and comfort.

Our tour guide, a local resident, put it this way: “At the end of the day, it was our American neighbors coming to our rescue in 1917 – so when we had the chance, we did the same on 9-11.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Old Lighthouses Offer New Thrills

by Woody

Is your Club or Group looking for an inspiring guest speaker or do you want to host a book signing? . . . Contact Woody today!

* * *

1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

* * *

Old Lighthouses Offer New Thrills

The wood steps were narrow and shallow and steep, more ladder rungs than stairs, rising nearly vertically as if to a tree house.

It was a white-knuckle climb of three flights. The blind descent would prove more unnerving. No matter, even for someone with an aversion to heights the round trip was well worth taking.

The reward at the top, 60 feet in the sky, was a 360-degree view to treasure – open sea as far as the eye could see. This “tree house,” round as a giant sequoia, was made of brick and covered by white shingles.

The Point Prim Lighthouse is the oldest seafarer’s beacon on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. It marks the entrance at the outer waters of Charlottetown Harbor.

If you were asked to close your eyes and imagine an iconic lighthouse, Point Prim Lighthouse is what you would conjure. Hollywood would cast it in a movie. Solitarily situated on a thumb of land jutting into the turbulent seas, the tapering tower is topped by a fire engine-red crow’s nest, the cherry on top.

This stanza from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Lighthouse” perfectly suggests the guiding beacon at Point Prim:

“The rocky ledge runs far into the sea,

“And on its outer point, some miles away,

“The Lighthouse lifts its massive masonry,

“A pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day.”

The lantern room atop the massive masonry at Point Prim today features an energy-efficient solar light as its modern “fire by night.” Originally, however, when built in 1845, four lamps fueled by seal oil provided its beaming light.

Next came kerosene lamps, twelve used in unison here, offering a brighter navigational signal.

Angus Murchison, Point Prim’s lightkeeper from 1920-1955, was said to be so “in tune” to the intensity of the kerosene light at night that even while he slept he could perceive when the beacons began to dim. As if by sixth sense, he would jolt awake and refill the lamps in time to keep mariners safe.

  • As vigilant steward of the light for 35 years, Angus was the longest serving of the succession of 16 keepers who lived at the Point Prim Lighthouse. However, he was not the lone Murchison to perform the lonely task – his son, grandson, and great-grandson followed in his footsteps up the steep ladder/stairs.

With astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first footstep on the moon in 1969, electricity at long last replaced kerosene as the light source at Point Prim. With this belated modernization, Mason Murchinson retired as its final keeper and a romantic era ended.

Touring a lighthouse makes time skip backward. Savoring the view from the lantern room, even on a T-shirt-warm clear day, one could imagine a ship in the distance, in the night, in a storm or in the fog, relying on this shepherding “pillar of fire.”

A visit to nearby Wood Island Lighthouse, 20 miles southwest on the Northumberland Straight, was equally enchanting. Prior to being built in 1876, its founder, Donald Duncan MacMillan, displayed a simple kerosene lantern in the second-story bedroom window of his house to aid sailors.

The poem “The Light-Keeper” by Robert Louis Stevenson hangs on a wall inside the Wood Island Lighthouse and includes these powerful lines:

“The life of the light-keeper,

“Held on high in the blackness

“In the burning kernel of night,

“The seaman sees and blesses him.”

No lightkeeper could have saved the Titanic and earned its captain’s blessing. In consequence, 121 victims of the iceberg disaster are buried in the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia – the next port on my travels.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …