The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  Copyright © 1998 John DeMont

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Doubleday Canada Limited.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  DeMont, John, 1956-

  The last best place

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67441-6

  1. DeMont, John, 1956– Journeys – Nova Scotia. 2. Nova Scotia – Social life and customs. 3. Nova Scotia – Description and travel. I. Title.

  FC2318.D44 1997 971.6′04 C97-930702-3

  F1037.D44 1997

  Published in Canada by

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  The author is grateful for permission to include the following:

  Excerpt from Malcolm Murray copyright M. Rankin. Reprinted by permission.

  Excerpt from the diaries of Samuel de Champlain from Gentlemen and Jesuits, Quest for Glory and Adventure in the Early Days of New France, Elizabeth Jones, 1991, (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ont.) Reprinted by permission.

  Excerpt from Down North, Ronald Caplin, editor, 1980, (Doubleday Canada Limited, Toronto, Ont.) Reprinted by permission.

  Excerpt from correspondences between Adelaide Kuntz and Marsden Hartley and excerpt from Cleophas and His Own by Marsden Hartley, The Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Reprinted by permission.

  v3.1

  To Lisa, Belle and Sam

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Preface

  PART ONE: Dreams, Legends and the Meaning of Land One: The Cosmic G-Spot

  Two: Laughter in the Wind

  Three: By the Rattly-Eyed Jesus

  PART TWO: My Kind of People Four: These Are My People

  Five: Are Ye One of the Biscuit-Foot MacKinnons?

  Six: Shine

  Seven: Whazamattaforu?

  PART THREE: Show Me the Way to Go Home Eight: The Last Best Place

  Nine: Big Dreams

  Ten: Pilgrims and Shrines

  Eleven: Home for Sale

  PART FOUR: Being There Twelve: In Blood Is Meaning

  Thirteen: Home Is Where the Heart Is

  Fourteen: Tales from the Fog City Diner

  Postscript

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is a book about home, specifically my own, which is the province of Nova Scotia. I’m indebted to countless people for their hospitality, time and stories. If they’ll have it, this book is theirs. Any shortcomings on the other hand, are mine. That this book came about at all is due in large part to the guidance and determination of John Pearce, the wisdom and judgement of Charis Wahl and the precise pen of Shaun Oakey. They are the best of editors. Most of all I want to thank Lisa Napier, my first editor and ever-present sounding board. She, more than anyone, kept this book moving forward when at times it seemed to be standing still.

  He had been walking around Halifax all day, as though by

  moving through familiar streets he could test whether be

  belonged here and had at last reached home.

  Hugh MacLennan

  Preface

  Panic. I am headed for the end of the line. And Lord, I have made a mistake. Not necessarily a big mistake, like kicking Conrad Black’s schnauzer. But a mistake, nevertheless. Lisa is coming later on a bigger plane. I had conveniently forgotten about the puddle-hopper aircraft that take off no matter what the weather, bound for postage-stamp Maritime runways shrouded in fog and sleet, buffeted by angry winds that strike from crazy angles. My stomach is raked by razor blades; the walls close in like a coffin. Think of an airplane as an unsinkable cork in the ocean, I recall reading in one of those cure-yourself-of-fear-of-flying articles. Scotch! my soul cries as I lean into the aisle, shooting panicky glances in search of the drinks trolley.

  Ten minutes later we break through to blue sky. I am alive. My reflection in the window bears the blissed-out, beatific appearance of someone bound for a Tony Robbins convention. I even smile with uncharacteristic benevolence at the plumber from Cape Breton seated next to me. His face has a reddish hue that glows brighter with each mini-bottle of Grand Marnier. On his last flight, he has already confided without the least embarrassment, he was caught smoking in the men’s can and thrown off in Montreal. I’m thumbing through an Elmore Leonard paperback as he tells me this. So when he makes a fumbling swipe at the flight attendant’s butt I seriously consider giving the suckah a rabbit punch to the bridge of the nose. But she cowed him with a single look, leaving me to return to contemplating the clouds.

  Because only from the air do you really understand that you’ve gone as far on this continent as a person can go. Only from thirty thousand feet do you really sense just how tenuous the connection to the mainland is—a thin band of land. Otherwise Nova Scotia is an island, in spirit as well as geography. Ahead, I knew, lay highlands and valleys, rivers that meandered in gentle loops, and a nasty, pounding ocean that made widows of young fishermen’s wives. Ahead was a place where the premier bayed like a dog in the legislature, where Roman Catholic priests married the ex-wives of media tycoons, and Tibetan holy men found the promised land. Ahead was music floating from red-neck taverns and black revivalist churches, from Legions and kitchens. Ahead lay blueberries, Christmas trees, lighthouses, lobsters and strange accents that mingle Scotland, Ireland, Britain, France, Germany and America. Ahead lay the crossroads where the warm Gulf Stream encounters the numbing Labrador Current, the plants of the High Arctic intermingle with the animals of Louisiana. Ahead, I felt certain in my heart, lay something elemental and true, something fundamentally different and essentially better than what I was leaving.

  At least this was the jumble of romantic images I held as mythladen truth, like tribal paintings on a cave wall.

  “Where ya from, buddy?” asks my seatmate, now cut off from Air Canada’s liquor supply.

  That’s a question you hear a lot from Nova Scotians. I’ve heard them ask it in Whitehorse, in Ottawa, in Calgary, Toronto, Boston, on the Isle of Skye and even from a small town in Norway. Note the arched eyebrows, the inflection, the emphasis on the word from. They are important. As casual as the words sound, there is nothing idle in the question. What they are trying to do is place you on their geographic and psychic landscape. Who are your people? they really want to know. Are you one of us? The code is as well established as Masonic ritual.

  Nova Scotians living away refer to that far-off place as “Down Home.” Unless we’ve been drinking, we don’t try to tell others because they just wouldn’t understand. We babble about the low crime, clean water and reasonable housing prices—sounding like a flack for the local chamber of commerce—and say that the lifestyle is what brings us back. Ultimately, there is little to be gained in letting others know that Nova Scotians, more than most people, believe that in roots can be found character. That out on the margins a need exists to be anchored to the dead and to locate your identity in time. Your past and your people are always with you. So, it seems, is being born here.

  We are not totally naive. We realize we’re all wanderers and vagabonds; we’re all from everywhere; we all write our own lives as we go along. And yet, and yet. Something compels us to jump off the corporate ladder to open up a candlemaking shop in some burp of a place that doesn’t see as much traffic in a year as a Yorkville boutique in a single afterno
on. Something makes us pack the family and drive like wild-eyed maniacs for eighteen straight hours to swim in water not fit for warm-blooded mammals. Something causes us to gather over rum-and-Cokes in kitchens at parties in Lloydminster or Kamloops or Sudbury and brood about things hundreds of miles away.

  This is beyond family, myth and memory. I have a theory. It sounds a little New Agey but here goes anyway: each of us has only one right place where we would rather shiver in the rain than lounge in the sunshine anywhere else; maybe where we would rather die than live anywhere else. It is about where you belong, not necessarily where you were born or where your family live. Home, the idea as much as the molecules of a place. Where the heart is, or isn’t, where they have to take you in, where you can never go back. Home that is born in you, follows you and makes you who you are. That consumes you as you consume it. That you can never escape. Home, where you belong no matter how much its face changes.

  My hypothesis is that each of us spends our life searching for our own Last Best Place. The ones who find it, the lucky ones, the connected ones, do not all live in physical proximity to their special place: the exiled Italian restaurant workers, tailors and tile and terrazzo artisans who gather around espressos in the deep bowels of North American cities to gossip about their home towns; the bank executive from Boston who returns to his beloved Ireland each summer and plans to retire there; the Canadian journalists, diplomats and stockbrokers who make their way to the only skating rink in all of London lined the right way for hockey. But even when I was among the temporarily displaced I knew it could be far worse. Those who never find home—who are never even sure what they are looking for—are doomed to endless wandering, moving from town to town constantly searching for that one place that will give them context. They have no choice; it is human nature to strive for connection and spiritual nourishment. The search can take anyone anywhere. It has taken me back home to Nova Scotia.

  The Mi’kmaqs, of course, were always here. Europeans followed—first perhaps Viking adventurers in the Dark Ages, then hardy Basque and Breton fishermen. Tradition says that John Cabot landed on Cape Breton Island in 1497 and there he refilled his water casks from a tumbling stream. Before long European fishermen were heading each spring to the Grand Banks near Newfoundland and the waters near Acadia—a territory that included, roughly, the present-day Maritime provinces as well as northern New England—so called because when Giovanni da Verrazano explored the area in 1524 its beauty and richness reminded him of tales of Arcadia, a region of ancient Greece celebrated by poets as a pastoral paradise. Eventually, the French tried the land, grudgingly, lest their English rivals beat them to it. At the turn of the seventeenth century the seriously deluded Marquis de la Roche dreamed of a settlement on Sable Island, an inhospitable, treeless spit of land two hundred miles from the mainland. He dropped sixty French convicts there, then forgot about them. When someone finally came to rescue them three years later, only eleven still lived, the rest lying buried in a small sand plot.

  Life here has never been easy—about what you would expect of a place born of ill-advised colonial ambition, dependent for its very existence on a sea that swallows sailors and fishermen of all nations with terrible equanimity. The French did finally hack lives out of the wilderness. The English followed, scattering Germans, Swiss and the Dutch to counteract the French presence and, they hoped, to wean the Acadians from their ancient Catholic faith. When that failed they herded the French onto ships and resettled them in English colonies to the south, leaving the land for the Lowlands Scots and the farmers, fishermen and merchants of New England to gobble up. Next came the Loyalists from the rebel American colonies and thousands of Highlanders, dispersed by the Clearances.

  The miracle, I always felt, was that so many stayed. Who can blame the ones who took one look at the frightening mass of trees that ran right down to the icy water, raked a hand through the lumpy, rock-filled soil, considered the stories of the bloodthirsty savages waiting in the wilderness and kept on going right down to New England? By the end of the nineteenth century the ambitious, the adventurous and the young were gone. The mines and shipyards had closed. The forests had reclaimed the once-cleared land. Abandoned farms and homesteads rotted in the damp. You can see them everywhere still, the fallen-in cellars and decrepit apple trees that mark these lost dreams.

  That left us.

  For against all odds, somehow the place hung on. Despite its doomed economy, in spite of being out there on the edge of the continent, people came, built families, homes and businesses, fought, attended church and went spectacularly mad. My people are the French, Scottish and English yeomanry of smalltown Nova Scotia. We are a tribe of miners, teachers, musicians, athletes, housewives, lawyers, janitors and businessmen. We are Baptists and whisky drinkers, of high morals and low cunning. We are men and women named McKeigan, Briers, Brown, Lamond and Levy whose names can now be found on tombstones in places called Glace Bay, Sydney Mines, Windsor, Halifax and Chester Basin. My realization that Nova Scotia is fundamentally different from everywhere else came a week after my wedding, when Lisa and I headed down the road to Calgary, where bumper stickers read “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark” and where a mayor with a gut like a sumo champ raised his popularity a couple of points by bleating about how Maritimers on the dole were raising the crime rate in his city.

  Let the fat man talk. Calgary and then Toronto made me Nova Scotian in a way that I would not have been had I not left. Cringe to think about the way I stood around at parties, this mystical, faraway look in my eye like King Arthur reminiscing about Camelot as I went on about my home. I defended the dubious honour of Nova Scotia’s politicians as each successive scandal hit the national press. I lit into a slack-jowled paper pusher from soulless Etobicoke who spent an expense-account lunch droning on about “the lack of a Maritime work ethic.” I actually found myself standing at a bar late one night before a woman with three nose rings, extolling the virtues of Rita MacNeil. Rita MacNeil!

  Then I realized something essential: that (Nova Scotia) was still home and this (Calgary and Toronto) still away. And thus it would always be, even if I couldn’t articulate why. I knew that Nova Scotia was in some respects the perfect fantasy spot. There’s the inspiring geography for starters, the highlands, the valleys, the jigsaw coastline and preternaturally powerful tides. There’s also the matter of being at the end of the line, something about the endless, mystical promise of the ocean and of being precariously balanced between the New World and the Old. Some people are just drawn to places where life is close to the edge and to the elements. So along with the sober and the ambitious, the place attracted the losers and misfits with nowhere else to run, the crazed dreamers with ideas too big for more conventional places, the obsessed romantics convinced that they’ve finally found truth.

  Is it any surprise that people and things are just a little out of whack here? In Nova Scotia horses live in bungalow basements, barroom drunks sleep standing up, motorcycle riders use socks for gloves. I know of a man who keeps his casket and tombstone in the living room and his favourite cat in the deep-freeze. Let’s face it, any place that can accommodate the same French stock that spawned the Ragin’ Cajuns of Louisiana, wild-eyed Scottish Highlanders and stubborn Loyalists who preferred allegiance to the British crown to independence is big enough to ensure that fantasies never wear out. Even the Gaelic name, New Scotland, seems to extend back into a distant romantic haze.

  My Nova Scotia, when I thought about it truthfully, was less an entity than an abstraction. I knew that a whole big world and all the good jobs were elsewhere. I just needed the concept of Nova Scotia out there on the horizon, in case everything went to ratshit. Except now I was on this plane heading back to Nova Scotia terrified that reality would spoil the memory forever. That the whole concept was no more than a fiction of a feverishly wistful imagination. That you can’t go home again.

  I knew that so much hadn’t changed since we left. Province House still seemed to
be run by crooks. Miners, fishermen and steelworkers were still facing extinction as their industries died and the flood of federal money that kept the place afloat was inexorably drying up. But in my absence the province had become a demographic paradox: a place whose population is essentially stable yet seems suddenly to consist mostly of people who were born elsewhere. On any day in Nova Scotia a traveller might encounter a Hollywood actor, an old Haight-Ashbury flower child, an adventurer from Ceylon, a novelist from Ireland, an avant-garde composer from New York, the world’s strongest man or a holy man from Nepal. Where did all these Germans come from? What about these Buddhists everywhere? Who were these downshifters, back-to-the-landers, spiritual seekers who opened restaurants that used cloth napkins and flogged software to Silicon Valley while looking out on the Bay of Fundy? Who were these people who overpaid for exposed headlands where the winter westerlies got up to 100 mph and the waves wore away a foot of shoreline a year? What was going through their minds when they started up cosy, doomed bed-and-breakfasts in neglected corners of Cape Breton and the Annapolis Valley?

  I sort of understood. For people like these, Nova Scotia meant wide-open spaces when most people live in cramped communities. It suggested freedom from dirt, crime and urban blight. It still resonates with a haunting echo of the past when pockets of this ageing continent were still virginal. Had the dreamers, the terminally deranged, the spiritual seekers and every hippy still in captivity found something more important? Did Nova Scotia somehow fulfil the yearning of the times? Had they found their special place here on the end of the continent?

  At this point, I really had no idea. All I could do was speak for myself. Which I did by turning to the drunken plumber beside me and saying, “From Nova Scotia.”

  “Ah,” he sighed, flopping back in his chair. “Then you’re going home too.”