The Birchdale Letter June 2026

The Gift.

There is a guest book at Birchdale that is older than most of us.

Timeworn, handled, and kept through the seasons with a nod to that Nova Scotian habit of holding onto things that matter. In its pages, in handwriting from the 1930s, is the name Greta Garbo. She was a silent screen star and one of the most famous faces of the twentieth century. She came, I imagine, as many did in that era, for the sports, for the quiet, for the pleasure of being somewhere that did not care who you were.

Garbo is in there alongside people whose names you might also recognize. Ring, Roberts. Goodwin, Gray, Allan, Mood, people who fished the Carrying Road lakes and knew this land better than I ever l will.  Guides and adventurers all. The book recorded their passing through. Birchdale’s Operations Manager, Nicola Roberts-Fenton, found her great great grandparents in those pages. It is powerful to find a connection like that. Proof that someone who helped create you was here, really here, in this place, standing on this ground, long before you were born.

The power of finding a handwritten message from a relative in an unexpected place is such a gift.

In this way, we are all writers. We need to keep writing the book.

Facebook has a feature that marks us as present. And it may be something that your kids and grandkids will one day be able to search through. “Really? Mom was there?” But the book: handwriting, a name, a date, located in one place, held in the hands, fading with the passage of time… feels less like the endless scroll and more like touching the Holy Grail.

Etchings on cave walls. Scratches in ink on paper. The evidence of a life. The continuance of things. A literal lifeline through which we can connect what they might have been feeling then, to what we feel now. In these times, a belief in tomorrow can be hard to hold onto. Small acts of optimism can help to change that. It’s a simple place to write ourselves forward so our children, tomorrow’s children, can find us.

I have spent a lot of time in cities. I know what it looks like when a part of it disappears in what feels like a flash. A generation looks away and something irreplaceable is gone, and the next generation has no idea it ever existed.

I recently stayed in a Toronto hotel that was once a theatre — a theatre that gave me my Toronto start. The café in that hotel is where the stage used to be. Memories flooded me. The barista was kind, but not overly interested in my tales. And yet, I suspect and hope, they will remember that ball cap wearing lady who talked about that history.

Young people may find it hard to imagine Birchdale disappearing. The lake is here. The trees are here. The road in is still bumpy and long and wonderfully inconvenient. But permanence is not an accident. It is a choice, made again and again by people who decide that something is worth making and, even more heroic, keeping. The elders of these parts know this so well.

I  think of Stanley Park in Vancouver. Central Park in New York. The Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. Hyde Park in London. Our national and provincial parks. The Cabot Trail. Someone, or some group of people, at some particular moment, had to decide that the future deserved this. They had to choose, against development, against reason, and against the pressures of the present, to gift it forward. Those places exist because people believed that others, not yet born, would come to love them.

For all the truly harrowing things that can shape a life, Omar Roberts understood this. He began the gift that is Birchdale and generations since have tended it and gifted it forward. As we do now. As owners, that has become the heart of it: to imagine forward, the way those that went before us did. To believe in the future.

Our guest book is such a simple way to help build that future. A way to offer a fragment of the good life for future generations to discover. Like trees, which appear to prosper alone but do better when we humans are mindful of what they need, this is a small act of future tending. This lesson so eloquently taught to us by Ken Gray during our first Chainsaw weekend. 

So yes, it is just a book. But it is also something passed from hand to hand, accumulating evidence that people were here, and that being here meant something to them. And now to us.

So when you visit, and we hope you will visit often! Write in the book. Make your etching on the cave wall! Because some young punk, one hundred years from now, will be so glad you did. And they will be amazed by the feel of it and that the pages came from trees.

Greta Garbo did not know she was leaving something behind. She was just passing through. But to have evidence of that passage connects us to then.

And maybe that is part of the mystery of life: that while we are all only passing through, we are also leaving something for the future to find.

That’s the gift.

As always, thanks for reading,

Sarah

UPCOMING AT BIRCHDALE