The Inverness Oran

In a major turning point of Friday’s semifinal game, the goalkeeper for Sacred Heart School pulled down CBHA’s Will MacLellan in the six-yard box. And as karma would have it, MacLellan scored on the new goalkeeper two minutes after play resumed. His goal would prove to be the game-winner.

-by Bill Dunphy

To complete an undefeated season, you have to win the Big Game, and the Cape Breton Highlands Huskies did just that on Saturday in Cheticamp.

                The Huskies scored twice in the first half and then held on for a 3-2 win over the co-op team of Colchester Christian Academy and École Acadienne de Truro to capture the School Sport Nova Scotia Division 3 boys soccer crown.

                The Huskies, which are also a co-op team combining Cape Breton Highlands Education Centre Academy and École NDA, had to move the four-team tournament to the NDA field due to draining issues at the Terre Noire field.

                As it turned out, the Huskies could have played their matches in a farmer’s field and still prevailed.

                The talented group, which included nine grade 12s and eight international students, came together in a way a coach can only hope for.

                “I think the experience of losing in the provincial final two years ago stayed with a lot of these players,” said Huskies coach Billy Crowley.

                “They know firsthand how difficult it is to get to that stage, and how disappointing it can be to come so close. I believe that experience helped shape their determination and commitment this season.”

                He added, “There was a real sense of unfinished business among the returning players, and I think that translated into a level of focus and maturity that carried throughout the year. To see them return to that same stage and come away with a championship is incredibly rewarding, especially knowing how much work they’ve put in to get here.”

                Jace Bishop put the Huskies up 1-0 at the 22-minute mark of the first half, taking a nice lead pass from Giorgio Fomia and making the CCA/EAT follow him to the right before striking a nice shot to the left side of the net.

                Fomia, who runs like a gazelle, made it 2-0 eleven minutes later, beating a defender and the keeper to a ball at the top of the 18-yard box then swinging wide for an easy shot into an open net.

                The game got a little more tense in the second half when CCA/EAT scored in the 70^th minute. An unmarked man on the right wing got in alone on Huskies keeper Brydan MacLean to score a nice goal.

                MacLean got his revenge three minutes later, sending a nice through-ball up the middle of the field to Fomia, who once again out-paced a defender to score on a low drive.

                Up 3-1, the clock couldn’t tick any slower as CCA/EAT kept pushing. And in the 89^th, a bad tackle by a Huskies defender in the 18-yard box earned them a penalty kick, scoring to get within one.

                The ref added four minutes of stoppage time but the Huskies managed to keep the play out of their end until the final whistle.

                Fomia, who hails from Monza, Italy, said the experience of bonding with his teammates was special.

                “Everyone fought hard to make this happen. It is truly very different from what I was used to in Italy. The concept of school sports was new to me,” he said.

                Raphael Malchow, who wore the captain’s armband,  is from Hamburg, Germany, where school sport is also nonexistent.

                “Being the captain was a big responsibility, but I like to be there for my team. Being here was a great opportunity and to win this championship was a dream come true,” he said.

                The Huskies reached the final by defeating Sacred Heart School, of Halifax, in a wild semifinal match on Friday.

                For starters, Sacred Heart took the lead 10 minutes in on a penalty kick.

                Then, 20 minutes after that, Will MacLellan had the Sacred Heart goalkeeper beaten inside the six-yard box and was clearly about to score when the keeper tackled him to the ground.

                After a short discussion between the referee and the linesman, the ref showed the keeper a red card, meaning he had to leave the game and putting the team down to 10 players.

                With a bench player now in the goal, Markel Ayerdi scored on the ensuing penalty kick.

                The Huskies knew they had to test the new keeper again right away, which, as karma would have it, MacLellan did. The keeper, making a bad kick off the side of his boot, sent the ball straight to MacLellan who calmly fired a slow roller into the back of the net to give the Huskies a 2-1 lead in the 40^th minute.

                In the second half, the Huskies thought they scored an insurance goal in the 58^th, but it was ruled offside.

                The insurance goal came in the 78^th minute when MacLellan tipped the ball from the right post to the left where Ayerdi scored his second of the match.

                Sacred Heart was awarded a penalty kick at the 82-minute mark but the shot went off the crossbar and out, and the Huskies shut the opponents down for the remaining time for the 3-1 win.

                “It was pretty awesome,” MacLellan said on scoring the winning goal.

                “But I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my teammates. It was a big weekend for all of us.”

                Coach Crowley applauded the effort and commitment the team displayed all season.

                “To finish the season undefeated is a tremendous accomplishment, and it’s a testament to the commitment and work ethic of this group. We scored 45 goals this season, but I think our success was really built on our defensive discipline and our willingness to work for one another,” he said.

                “We had players who understood that doing the little things well, even when they weren’t necessarily reflected on the scoresheet, was what made us successful.”

                Crowley agreed that time slowed down in the final minutes and in the celebration afterwards.

                “Those final five minutes felt excruciatingly long. As a coach, you’re counting down the seconds, hoping that the game plan holds together and that all the preparation and hard work pays off. But when that final whistle finally blows, you almost forget about the game itself.

                “You just stand back for a moment and watch the players take it all in. You see the excitement, the relief, and the pride on their faces, and you realize that some things are bigger than soccer. Those are the moments you coach for, and the ones these young people will remember long after they’ve played their last game.”

-by Beverley Phillips

                The art gallery at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts was silent as Julie Forgues drew her artist talk to a close.

                The visual artist from Moncton had just read what was essentially a love letter to Svalbard Island, one of the key subjects of her work.

                Svalbard Island is an Arctic archipelago found halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The ecosystem is fragile and largely protected. The island plays an important role in the security of the future being home to the global seed vault, conserving plant genetic diversity under the UN organization for food and agriculture.

                Forgues has completed two artist residencies on Svalbard. The first was in 2016 during the summer solstice “when the sun never sleeps,” aboard the Antigua, a fishing vessel that was transformed into a three-masted tall ship. After she left, the island remained with her. The northern landscape never left her mind. She realized she had left a piece of herself there, and she knew she had to go back – which she did in 2023. Forgues spoke about the beauty and the magic of the Arctic with its ice and rocky landscapes and polar bears. Of “in betweens,” fluctuating boundaries that are neither a space nor a place, but something liminal in between.

                As she read her letter, she began each paragraph with “Dear Svaldbard,” as she told the island about what she saw and experienced. You could hear the compassion and concern she had for the people and places she visited, whether on her residency in China, as she found “in betweens” there, in sites abandoned, left to disrepair, and in villages that were razed to the ground, or in Iceland, where tourists and sheep are transforming the landscape of that northern island.

                In 2023, when Forgues returned to Svalbard, she had plans for what she wanted to do, but then she saw how much had changed since she was last there and discovered that climate change must now be part of her work. “The smallest impact of your fragile system will come back to haunt us if we don’t take care of you,” she wrote to Svalbard. “Now is not the time to grieve. Now is the time to change, so we don’t have to grieve.”

                Forgues could see the melting glaciers and wondered if the island knew it was warming seven times faster than the global average. She could see the shifts in the plant life, and noted a great paradox. “This is the fact that your region is the most affected by climate change by the actions of the south,” she said. “For this, Svalbard, I am so very sorry.”

                And then there is the plastic. For a place with very few people, plastic was on Svalbard’s shores and in her waters. She later learned about microplastics, and how they are eaten by wildlife. She and some colleagues collected much from the coastline, but had to leave before they could collect it all. “I felt as if I was leaving you with open wounds, with lasting pain,” she said. “I didn’t want to go, but I had to leave this little part of you, while allowing some plastic to remain in your membrane. I’m so very sorry.”

                Forgues’s presentation clearly moved those gathered in the art gallery. She shifted gears to talking more technically about some of her work and more specifically about some of the pieces in the room. There are seven large images of glaciers printed on fabric. In the middle of each piece, there is a section that has been unthreaded, each one with more unthreading than the last. The unthreading represents the deterioration of the glaciers by climate change. The seven images represent the seven-fold increased rate of warming that Svalbard is experiencing. Those seven images are repeated on a smaller scale in shadow boxes with those removed threads, which increasingly obscure the image as the glacier.

                She mentioned that artists should be called upon to speak about climate change since scientists haven’t been able to get the message across effectively. Asking her to expand on that after the show, Forgues said, “I think we’re in the middle, between a scientist and the people. The arts can be visual or even written, but it’s our different way of seeing things, or writing things, or understanding things, to put forth for the people to help them be able to understand it in a personal way.”

                Forgues brought up data centres and their water use during her talk as well. Given the topical nature of the issue, she added, “But not only is it impacting the land, and especially the water, which then trickles down to the land, it’s starting to impact young minds – and old minds, too. I’m a professor at a university, and students can’t write anymore by themselves, or can’t even do an art piece by themselves. Because they can go on AI and do all the prompts of the projects that we say, and then something visual comes up. They come to us and say, ‘I want to do this,’ but I say to them, ‘Can you not just sketch something yourself?’ But also just writing, like writing an artist statement, and writing a description of the work. I keep telling my students, ‘If you can’t write for yourself, you can’t think. You can’t process. You can’t critique. If A.I. does all that for you, your brain’s just going to be a blob. You won’t be able to talk to journalists. You won’t be able to explain your work. You won’t find the words. So it’s melting the brains of the youngsters and taking their water away.”

                Creating her own art and bringing science into it is something that Forgues is going to be continuing as she expands on a work exploring the connected geology of the Maritimes and Iceland and the Highlands of Scotland. The far-flung lands were once connected in Pangea millions of years ago, and the beginnings of that work are reflected in the connected series of photos in the art gallery. Forgues hopes to one day bring that back and create a line that doesn’t end, as the connections remain, and the land remembers us.

                To see Forgues’s exhibit, land remembers us: from the Arctic to the Caledonians will be at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts,16080 Highway 19, Inverness, until December 13^th. Admission is by donation, and the gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday from 12:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m.

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-by Beverley Phillips

“We will remember them.”

                The familiar response of the Act of Remembrance sounded in the Captain Angus L. Macdonald Legion in Inverness on Saturday, November 7^th, as they held their annual Banquet of Remembrance.

                Comrade Herbert Jeromel opened the evening with a prayer written by Wanda Lawrence of the Chippewa Nation. “Someday,” he said, “an arrow will be broken, not in something or someone, but by each of humankind, to indicate peace, not violence. Someday, oneness with creation, rather than domination over creation, will be the goal to be respected. Someday, fearlessness to love and make a difference will be experienced by all people. Then the eagle will carry our prayers for peace, compassion, and love, and the people of the red, white, yellow, brown, and black communities will sit in the same circle together to communicate with mutual respect, and to experience the presence of the Great Mystery in their midst. Someday, comrades, can be today, for you and me, together, we can make a difference.”

                Following the meal provided by M. MacDonald and her staff, toasts were made to veterans and absent comrades. Comrade Eddie MacEachern then introduced the guest speaker, Francene Gillis. The Inverness Oran columnist has earned several Atlantic journalism awards and has written three books: A Rose in November, Where did I go?, and And Momma Cried: The True Story of War, Brotherhood, and Regular, Remarkable People. Just released in October, And Momma Cried calls on us to remember war mothers through Philomena Gillis and discover the heart and humility of those who fought for us, and what they sacrificed for their families and us.

                It was Gillis’s grandfather who inspired her “to listen to people who don’t talk much.” “Most veterans did not talk about war,” she said. “They did not want loved ones to carry the burden of what they saw, heard, felt, or experienced. Some whispered bits and pieces to their spouses on pillows in the dark, but never the full story.’

                ‘Even as veterans desperately wanted to forget, living in their memories, were the dead bodies everywhere, floating on icy ocean waves, tripped up on barbed wire, or lying lifeless on foreign soil.

                None who survive come back from war the same.”

                She noted the stories that stuck with her, of Jeromel and Leo Cox from Mabou. “Herbie’s sincere, moving account of war’s effect on his family, and Leo’s Dutch story of German occupation and oppression stayed with me for over 35 years.’

                ‘Leo shared of Germans bombing his neighbour’s house. By the time they could get to them, the toddler was out in the field, holding a raw carrot, trying to “feed” his dead sister, whining and crying, for her to get up. Veterans shared such stories, and I was in awe. I knew, as a teacher and writer, I had to dig deeper.’

                ‘We never know a person unless they allow us in, and we take the time to know them.

                ‘Unless I ask and truly listen, I may never know you. That is what I want us to do today – truly listen, hear the silent echoes, and realize that everyone has a story.’

                ‘It was not until the Second World War veterans started dying that the realization hit me – we were losing our primary sources: firsthand accounts.

                ‘We need stories for connection like the one of a 102-year-old war veteran on his deathbed, dealing 80 years later with the fact, he was late for roll call.

                ‘His sergeant grabbed his younger trench buddy for what should have been his assignment. Enemy planes strafed the truck his replacement was travelling in… A bomb blitz. All were killed.”

                Gillis reminded the listeners that those who went to war are real people with rich lives, that they “are persons first, individuals, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, sons, daughters. They are more than the soldier, gunner, signaller, infantry label. More than a regimental number, their rank, or dog tags, and more than a casualty in war. Like us, they had childhoods, crushes, interests, personalities, and dreams – it is vital that we do not forget and dehumanize warfare.”

                She introduced us to Joe, Danny, Richard, and Pat, sons of Duncan and Philomena (Moran) Gillis. Danny and Richard were Inverness Legion members. Danny belonged to the Cape Breton Highlanders, and Richard was part of the West Nova Scotia Regiment.

                “The boys grew up on a farm in Glencoe Mills,” she said. “They knew hard work, up at 4 A.M. to the smell of Philomena cooking bacon, and their father roaring at the bottom of the stairs.”

                Joe was a half-brother and enlisted in the U.S. Army, but health issues kept him from going overseas.

                Danny enlisted in 1941. “Soldiers do not join the military as single entities,” said Gillis, “war is a family affair.’

                ‘Men and women leaving home and going into danger has to be the scariest, most heart-wrenching family farewell ever. And so an excerpt from Danny’s leaving.’

                Reading a piece from her book, Gillis said, “Sweet aromas greeted me as I ambled into the house. Momma was kneading bread, hands white, working in her favourite place at the kitchen counter.

I walked up behind her as she punched, flipped, and turned the satin dough, put my arms around her, and bent my head on her shoulder. My eyes welled up in a hug that said, ‘I love you.’

                “What’s this, dear one?” she asked as she turned to face me.

                “Have to talk,” I said, wishing I didn’t have to. Our petite momma, sensing that something was up, shifted back to the counter and gave her dough more attention than me, slapping and whacking it on the counter, afraid that if she stopped kneading, she’d have to listen.

                I reached for the floured surface, cupped my hand over hers, squeezed, and stopped her mid-task. Her body trembled, and I could feel her pounding heart.”

                “I don’t want you to go,” she moaned, afraid that speaking loudly would solidify the dreaded truth. Her heart pumped hard and fast.

                I wrapped her against my chest, and she cried into my uniform while I patted her back as if she were the child.”

                In 1942, Richard was recruited to replace injured gunners and signallers in other regiments. “He drove artillery vehicles,” she said. “Over treacherous terrain, maneuvered makeshift roads, steep, sharp turns, and minefields throughout Sicily and Italy.”

                Sharing a memory of Richard’s, Gillis wrote, “An inferno turns night into day. I see what I would rather not see. Bloodied faces, glassy eyes, gaping wounds speckling Hell. Can’t help it; I turn from fallen comrades, friends, grey in the mud, their spirits no longer whistling, grinning, frowning. Let me remember them as the jokers they were, gentlemen and friends. I don’t understand this maniacal morgue.”

                She asked everyone to think about what that means personally. “What if Richard Gillis had died? And he should have, 10 times over. I would not be married to the man I am, would not have the children I have, or the grandchildren, or the cluster of family members that are my present and future. Many of you, I suspect, can say the same.”

                “Our soldiers of war sacrificed the chance to be comfy by a warm fireplace, eating a home-cooked meal that did not include tough, rotten, old mutton, with a cherished toddler cuddled on their lap asking, ‘And what happened next, Daddy?’”

                ‘The opportunity for a life after the Second World War, the Germans erased for 44,326 Canadians – the total number of official case files for the war dead. And add onto that the millions of people – ‘that could have been.’”

                Pat enlisted in July 1943. Reading the scene from her book, Gillis said, “I’m leaving,” I tell Momma.

                “You’re not!”

                “I am.”

                “Nothing I can say to change your mind?”

                Our tears answer. I squeeze my eyelids tight. Must get away before we are both bawling.

                “Promise, you’ll come back to me.”

                “I’ll do my best.”

                Through tears, she nods, makes the sign of the cross. It provides comfort. I avoid the hug.

                Bedazzled by wartime pomp and propaganda, I can’t wait to hightail it out. It takes five minutes, and I am running back, hugging like a sobbing child needing his mommy because he scratched his knee.

                “I clutch onto her like nobody’s business, terrified to let go. She holds me just as tight, fit to be tied, threatening to spear Hitler with her knitting needles.”

                Philomena saw three sons and her younger brother Colin go off to war. “I curse Hitler and his treatment of the neighbouring allied countries,” read Gillis. “Nothing but a coward wielding his trident, throwing people into extermination and prison of war camps, to extinguish them. The fellow above must have cried with the condition the world was in. I figure God cries through a mother’s tears.

                ‘On Remembrance Day, the boys honour their comrades, attend ceremonies, show their respect.

                ‘They stand tall and straight in their uniforms, chests out, ribbons and medals their own, but representing all Allied soldiers. Their eyes see far more than mine do.”

                Gillis wanted to speak to a modern war mother and called up the mother of her son-in-law, retired Corporal Robert Furlong, who fought in Bosnia and Afghanistan in 2002 as a sniper. “I called his mom in Nfld to ask how she felt,” said Gillis. “She started crying. I quickly apologized, adding I’d get someone else. But no, she wanted to talk.

                ‘She shares, “Robert called me from Gander and said that the only way he could go overseas was with my approval. It was tough.”

                ‘A long, weeping pause… “My 17-year-old grandson graduated this past June; he just told us, he enlisted.” I did not know what to say.

                ‘Robert’s oldest son, my step-grandson, joined two years previous. The day of my tribute to war veterans, October 18, Major Skaarup informed me of the tragic accident at CFB Wainwright in Alberta.

                ‘Immediately, I called. Was Logan hurt? He wasn’t on the base, but his unit out in the field was the first to respond to the ruins of the firestorm, and to help their critically burned friends.

                ‘WAR is never far away.”

                Her final story was of Philomena’s brother Colin Moran. “Roughly 25 per cent of all non-fatally wounded Allied casualties suffered from mental exhaustion, shell shock, war fatigue, or what is known today as PTSD,” said Gillis, “and many of our veterans came home struggling to cope with the Hell they lived, leading to generational and family difficulties. Philomena’s brother came home alive, but he died overseas.”

                “We can never repay them or their families,” she said, “but we can pay tribute by sharing stories, listening to silent echoes, and supporting our military.”

                Gillis thanked those who served, and encouraged them to share their stories, for “Remembrance Day holds a sacred promise – to ensure that the reverence and voices of our war veterans continue to echo with the passage of time.”

                As the evening of Remembrance came to an end, Jeromel wrapped up with these closing words.

“Let us, as we part, remember our duty to our branch, our comrades, our country, and our sovereign. May we ever strive to promote unity and the spirit of comradeship, never forgetting the solemn obligation we have assumed as members of the Royal Canadian Legion, and remembering them, may we ever pray, Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget. Lest we forget.”