It was twenty years ago today
That I moved onto this land to stay …

Ahem … my apologies to the Beatles. It was actually twenty years ago this year that I moved onto this land to stay. In 2004 I drove from Calgary to Cape Breton with an old travel trailer in tow and Tundra riding shotgun. I’d quit my job in April, but a car accident and subsequent complications delayed our departure. I finally hit the road in August and left the bright lights of the big city behind, driving over 5000 kms to the new land.

It was a big move: from Calgary to Cape Breton, from west to east, from city to country, from my old familiar hometown to my brand new land. So I’m going to do something a bit different with this blog and celebrate this anniversary with an overview of my first twenty years here in Highland Holler. It was so long ago that some of these photos are photos of snapshots, so please excuse the fuzzies. And click on the small pics to see full size.

Tundra and I made our first home in the 15′ foot travel trailer I’d hauled out from Calgary. It was small but cozy and portable. The new land was on a back road with easy access to a gated field, so that’s where I first set up camp. My neighbours were kind and welcoming, but curious as to why I locked the field gate behind me every time I went anywhere. It took a while for this city kid a while to realize I could leave that gate wide open.

I bought myself a chainsaw and – very slowly but without losing any limbs – opened up a wood road blocked by piles of felled spruce meant to keep vehicles out. Then I shifted my trailer onto that road, moving deeper into the woods and closer to the pond.

It was a bit scary, giving up my comfortable, secure life to move so far away and into the unknown, but I recall some of the magic moments while we lived in that trailer. The thrill of seeing a young bull moose amble past my truck, or of glimpsing a coyote race past the trailer and, seconds later, a second coyote in hot pursuit. Of sitting out by my campfire and realizing that what sounded like a steady stream of traffic in the distance was actually the roll of the ocean, a mile away. Another night I was sitting outside after Tundra had gone to bed when I heard something large moving around in the forest right behind me. Yikes! I made a quick retreat into the trailer – visions of bears and bull moose prowling in my head.

When it rained for two days and two nights I sat at the table in the trailer and painted beach rocks – before that was a thing. The rain finally stopped and I emerged into a world transformed. The pond had risen into a vast lake and water was pouring in from a myriad of streams and freshets. This transformation has never ceased to thrill and amaze me.

The trailer wasn’t winterized, so come November 2004 I hooked it back up to Roadeo and Tundra and I headed down north, back to the hand-built house where I’d spent the winter of 2001/02 house and dog-sitting. I’d been on a year-long cross-country road trip, visiting all ten provinces and the Yukon. But that winter on Meat Cove Road was transformative. Cape Breton and her people captured my heart and my imagination. After I returned to Calgary I bought the piece of land I’d checked out a few times during my stay here. So while I had another great winter down north, reconnecting with old friends and making new ones, there was a tug on my heartstrings – Highland Holler was calling me.

That winter I spent endless hours sketching house plans: funky off-grid hippie houses with rainwater cisterns and wood-fired saunas. But how big? One story or two? Basement foundation or slab or frost wall or sonotubes? Conventional frame or logs or cob (straw and mud) or cordwood? And where to put it? There was lots of land, plenty of options. In fact, there were altogether too many options. So I began to think about a yurt, a portable tent-like dwelling that would go up quickly and could be moved later if need be. It wouldn’t be cheap, but a yurt would allow me to live full-time on my land sooner rather than later. And it would buy me time to decide what and where to build.

In May 2005 I hitched up the trailer and hauled it back up and over Cape Smokey and parked it in the Holler. That summer I drove back to Calgary with Tundra, sold my house, bought a cargo trailer, and loaded up the last of my stuff. I also spent time with my son and his lady and told them about my plan to live in a yurt. “For how long?” my son asked. “Oh, one to five years,” I said, as if it were a prison sentence. In fact, it would turn out to be eight. Eight years in a yurt.

So back we came, Tundra and I, from Calgary to Cape Breton again, this time with a cargo trailer in tow. I shifted our travel trailer home off the driveway and work began. I’d found an ideal site for the yurt but there were trees to be cut and cleared, brush to burn, a platform to build. I hired a local carpenter to build the platform and assisted with my trusty power drill, dreamy visions of yurt life dancing in my head. The yurt kit was due to arrive from Vancouver in September. It did not. The temperatures dropped and I gratefully accepted an offer to housesit down the road while I waited.

In the end it was snowing and blowing when friends and neighbours joined the carpenter and I in setting up the yurt. It was pretty deluxe – a 24′ diameter yurt with reflective insulation, canvas liner and a polyvinyl covering to keep the rain out. It had a 5′ diameter dome overhead for star gazing, moonbeam bathing, and cloud watching. I bought a wood-cook stove and a clever neighbour figured out how to attach the chimney to the soft-sided, vinyl-walled structure.

I finally moved in on December 28, 2005 and celebrated my 50th birthday in the yurt a couple of months later. Yurtle would be home for the next eight years, until February 7th, 2014.

Living in the yurt was like camping out in a big, luxurious tent. I was off-grid with no running water. I heated with wood and lit with kerosene lamps. I was too far back from the road to be plowed out, so I snowshoed in and out in winter, hauling in food and water. The yurt was easy enough to heat with the big wood-cook stove; but it didn’t hold the heat so it was bitterly cold on winter mornings. How cold? One morning my bedside water bottle was frozen solid. It was -10C inside. I learned to put the coffee water in the kettle the night before, since the spigot on the water jug would freeze overnight.

Tundra adored the yurt. It was just the right size and only one room so she could always keep an eye on me. It had three doors (the French doors did double-duty as windows) that opened onto a surrounding deck. She liked to ask me to let her out one door, then race around the deck to the door on the opposite side and ask to be let back in. Very funny, Tundra. She swam in the pond, explored the forest with me, romped in the snow, and rode alongside wherever I went. Tundra had a great few years here, but she was getting old and winding down. She died at age 16, a very ripe old age for a dog her size, but a hard loss for me.

When I lived in the trailer, I dreamt of living in a yurt. While I lived in the yurt, I began dreaming of living in a cabin. I continued making sketches of my dreamhouse over the years, informed by my experiences in the yurt. The location shifted farther east, bit by bit. The funky hippie houses became more conventional as I accepted my own limitations. To wit, I am entirely useless at building anything. At all. I cannot build a bookshelf, let alone a house. So I would be paying someone else to build my house, and funky costs more.

But I knew that I liked one-room living and I loved living by the pond, in spite of the winter inconvenience. I also liked the simplicity of building from a kit, with all the materials and plans included. I finally settled on plan. What to build, where to build it, what material to build it from. A log-cabin kit on a basement foundation, above the high-water mark of the pond, facing south for winter sun, and a stone’s throw from the yurt.

Someone told me it would cost twice as much and take three times as long to build as I expected. ‘Hah! Not for me,’ I scoffed to myself. Well … it cost twice as much and took three times as long as I expected. There were obstacles, there were delays. I made decisions that added to the delays. I almost lost my mind over septic permits. I’d planned to stay off-grid but changed my mind and had to jump through endless hoops to bring power this far back into the woods. I almost froze after my big stove went into the house and my new small stove wasn’t sufficient to heat the yurt. But finally, on Feb. 7, 2014, I moved into my little log home.

The first few months I was startled by loud rifle-cracks in the night as the logs dried and checked (cracked) in the dry heat from the wood stove. For the first few years there were bolts to be tightened as the logs shrunk and settled. There was still lots of work to be done after I moved in, but it got done bit by bit over the years, and now, ten years later, the house is (mostly!) finished. It is a lovely abode in a marvelous location. It took a long time to make all those decisions, but I’m happy with my choices. I feel very lucky to live here, in this home, in this community, on this island.

This year, 2024, marks twenty years since I moved to Cape Breton and ten years since I moved into my log home. It’s been an amazing adventure so far, and now, on the cusp of the new year, I look back over those twenty years with gratitude. I don’t know how many more years I have ahead in this home or in this life, but every day is a gift.

Sue McKay Miller
December 30th, 2024

Happy New Year from Highland Holler!