All are invited to Mytoi Garden on Saturday June 14, from 1 to 2 p.m. to commemorate 47 years of volunteering and dedication to the garden by Lindsay Patterson Allison. She, along with Don Sibley and Julie Messervey, restored the garden after the devastation caused by hurricane Bob in 1991.

We have been cruising around Nova Scotia on a 900-foot-long ocean going steel hotel/buffet. The highlight of every port entry and departure is watching the harbor pilot leap between the ship and the pilot boat. This vessel uses advanced marine propulsion that allows it to dock without tugs. It slides sideways up against the pier and can easily back down a channel for many boat lengths to get to a wide enough spot to turnaround. It has ventral fins (like a fish) that keep it from rolling. The only motion is pitching, but even in 10-foot swells there was little of that.

Canadians are big on using range lights to help vessels stay in the middle of the deep water channels. They are an oddly comforting sight. Very bright lights, one above the other, slightly twinkling at greater distances. Warm and steady when close up. The green ones are even Christmasy. The day marks below the lights are the size of the broadside of a barn. The ones on the way into Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island look like a pair of church steeples, one on the waterfront, the other up on the higher ground in town.

In each port there are monuments to merchant mariners, emigrants and immigrants. The best that I can figure from Googling, emigrating is when you depart from your homeland and immigrating is when you arrive at your new home country. The Canadians affirm that everyone except the indigenous peoples came from somewhere else. Some of the signs in Nova Scotia are now in English, French and Mi’kmaq.

On a Duck Boat tour of Halifax I was reminded that the people of that town express their continuing appreciation for the help they received from Bostonians after the munitions ship explosion in 1917. They send a huge evergreen tree to Boston every Christmas.

Sydney, the main port on Cape Breton Island, was the jumping off point for convoys during the world war. That area used to supply a major share of the coal to the eastern seaboard. Now it’s imported to feed the coal fired power plants along the coast. Dozens of landside wind turbines surround the power plants with hundreds of blades stock piled for more.

We brought along baseball caps with messages of support for Canadian nationalism. My favorite says, “Elbows Up Canada.” Which is a reference to a hockey defensive stance when a player is headed into the fray. The local folks that we talked to accepted our apologies for the threats coming from the current administration, but added, “Don’t worry about it.”

Reminds of the line from the movie The Russians Are Coming! when Chief Maddox tells the aggressive Russian submarine captain, “Maybe we ain’t so scared as you think we are.... You start shootin’ and see what happens!”

Just because Canadians are polite and friendly doesn’t mean that they are pushovers.