A SUMMER TO REMEMBER

My favorite memories from my Canadian summer as a child include catching a 300 plus pound member of the flounder family of fish, standing in a boat waste deep in hundreds of 15 pound flip-flopping fish all trying to get back to the water and watching 80 foot whales feeding on krill from my bedroom window.

When I was 12-years-old, I was invited to spend the summer at my Aunt Ida and Uncle Roy's house in Canada. Had I known the house had no electricity, plumbing, radio or newspaper, and all the cooking was done on a wood-burning stove, I probably would not have gone. My reason for going is still unclear to me. I had some friends from French Canadian families who went to various parts of Canada every summer. I guess I wanted to see what all the hype was about, and was intrigued by the adventure of making a 750-mile train trip alone. Considering that I had never met Aunt Ida, my mother's sister, it still puzzles why I made the commitment for the whole summer.

For the past 60 plus years, there is a scene from that summer that plays over and over in my mind. It is July of 1943. I had just turned twelve a few weeks earlier. I wake up in a second floor bedroom of Aunt Ida's house in Canada. The house is on Saint Margaret's Bay about 20 miles south of Halifax. The United States is at war on two fronts. In the Pacific theatre the Japanese naval forces are overwhelming the US navy. In the north Atlantic, German submarines are sinking merchant ships almost as fast as the US shipyards can build them. At 12-years-old, these events are hard to comprehend. I know they are happening but nothing of the war has touched me personally so it remains a distant vague fact, true yet not fully understood.

With the sun streaming into the east-facing window, I can see water spouts from surfacing whales off in the distance beyond the beach. Uncle Roy tells me the German submarine activity over the past few years in the north Atlantic is causing fright in the various species of sea life sending them closer to the shore. He and his parents had spent their whole lifetime in this location and never seen this phenomenon before.

Through the open window, I can hear the roaring sound of rushing air and water from the powerful exhale of the whale as it surfaces from a long dive. At first it seems odd that the spouts are visible first then the noise arrives a few seconds later. It takes a few days before I realize that it is because light travels much faster

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