Dateline August 22, 2017, Alexander Graham Bell

Our last stop in Nova Scotia, before we turned north, was the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site at Baddeck, on Cape Breton Island, where Bell and his family spent their summers.

We had always filed him under the telephone and under America, and the first surprise of the day was learning that he was neither so simple as that. He was born in Scotland and made much of his life in Canada, summering here on the lake at Baddeck. We must have slept through that lesson in school.

He was not yet thirty when he gave the world the telephone, but it was all the rest, the things no one ever taught us as children, that made the visit. He raced the Wright Brothers to get a machine into the air, and his "Silver Dart" finally flew half a mile in 1909. He built the first hydrofoil boat and drove it to a world water-speed record of better than seventy miles an hour.

For all the inventions, though, his deepest passion was his work with the deaf, a cause close to home, for both his mother and his wife had lost their hearing. He taught, he studied, and he gave himself to it for life. Helen Keller, who knew something of darkness, said that he had carried her from darkness into light.

It was a wonderful few hours of discovery, and a fine note to leave Nova Scotia on. The next morning we would board the six-hour ferry to Newfoundland, the farthest north we would go, and the real heart of this whole adventure.