The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  PART ONE

  Dreams, Legends and the Meaning of Land

  There was a strange sound of stillness

  about it all. As if the pine needles and

  the dead leaves and the grey rocks

  and the clean-smelling brook

  with the pole bridge they

  passed over were all singing

  together a quiet song,

  like the drowsy hum

  of wires or of bees.

  Ernest Buckler

  One

  The Cosmic G-Spot

  THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT A CONCEPT THAT ORIGINATES IN THE SOUL, SO I DON’T want you to be put off by ancient rocks and hard, barren soil, mountains that stretch into the sky and mines that bore deep into the ground, unbroken forest that pushes right down to the shore and an ocean that gives everything its taste, smell, feel, language and heart. Nova Scotia is an elemental place of soft, heartbreaking beauty, but there is nothing fundamentally gentle about it: people still die when fireballs shoot through mine shafts and fishing trawlers go down in winter hurricanes. You can’t ignore waves that wipe out entire waterfronts or tides that lift fishing boats from the sea-floor mud like the hands of invisible giants. The world is wilder here, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. It shapes the people as only savage, magnificent places do. Home, then, is landscape—the architecture and ambiance of life. And that, therefore, is where we shall start.

  Nova Scotia, if there is any justice, ought to be seen first from the sea. We should all be like old-time Basque fishermen high on the mast scanning the horizon as it disappears from view behind each passing swell for our first glimpse of the highlands of Cape Breton, say, or the great harbour at the place the Mi’kmaqs called Chebucto. Mostly now you see it by air, heading east from some more important spot towards Halifax, which is what Chebucto is now called. Romantics like to think the province is shaped like a lobster. I’ve always felt it looked like a prehistoric bird, the ugly, predatory kind with a name fifteen letters long that died out couple of hundred million years ago. But maybe the best way to picture Nova Scotia is to picture Britain. Shrink it down, strip it of people. What is similar is the land: wild and mountainous in the north, the central parts shot through with the same veins of coal; everywhere good harbours providing shelter for cities and towns built along the same ocean. Nova Scotia is centuries younger than Britain, but for North America it is a doddering, ancient place. And both are damp—as likely to be foggy as raining—populated out of necessity by tea sippers and spirit swillers forever trying to drive the chill from their joints.

  The parallels are not accidental. Until 300 million years ago Nova Scotia lay near the equator deep inside a seamless supercontinent beside what would become the Cornwall coast of England. A hundred million years later the supercontinent began to split into the continents of Africa, Europe and North and South America. The main rupture finally came just east of Nova Scotia, the cosmic G-spot.

  At ground level you know why Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “This is the forest primeval” in Evangeline, his poem about Nova Scotia. But from the air you’re struck by how close the province is to being submerged: surrounded by ocean, dotted by lakes, segmented by rivers. Nowhere are you more than an hour’s drive from the sea. Three-quarters of the population lives within five miles of the ocean. The coastline weaves and rolls, juts and twists. Time hasn’t done much to smooth Nova Scotia’s sharp, prehistoric edges, more than 6,000 miles of them, a coast longer than the breadth of the entire continent.

  I’ve travelled the next-best thing—all the existing highways and byways. Which means I have been truly blessed. Even on the most agonizingly dull section of Nova Scotia road—the section where you’ve got the windows down, head stuck out like a basset hound, gulping air to stay awake—a weird scene will cross your windshield and give you a jolt. You cannot, for example, drive for half an hour in any direction without passing a warning from some fringe band of religious zealots that The End Is Upon Us, a hunk of some unnameable, nasty-looking roadkill, or the remnants of a blown-out tire, which always, to my mind, hints at something truly awful. The abandoned roadside footwear has always given me pause: the pair of sneakers beneath the overpass, the tasseled loafer in the gutter, the black rubber boot on the broken yellow line.

  As for the passing parade of humans, well, Frederico Fellini wouldn’t have to give casting calls in Nova Scotia. Just get behind the wheel, hit the road and say, “You, you, you, you’re all hired.” Not long ago on the outskirts of Halifax I saw a mad man in a good suit sitting on the grass island between the divided highway babbling cheerfully in the burning midafternoon sun. Once someone in a Halloween mask driving a rusty Cadillac played chicken with me for nearly twenty miles east from Yarmouth before flipping me the bird and driving off. Once I spent a sweaty half hour as the lone male in a car full of women behind a bunch of Hells Angels who slowed to a crawl and gestured jacking off until they got bored—at least I hope that’s what made them stop—and roared off.

  In Nova Scotia instead of the landscape being a backdrop to the daily pulse of life it’s the other way around. Hit the road and you realize this implicitly. Go west, say, from Halifax. Past Herring Cove and Portuguese Cove, Ketch Harbour, Cape Sambro, Pennant, Terence Bay, Prospect and Shad Bay. Beyond East Dover, West Dover, Peggy’s Cove, Indian Harbour and Seabright. Through Queensland and Hubbards, Bayswater and Blandford. Past the chi-chi new homes of the stockbrokers, developers and doctors who commute to Halifax and past the sturdy wooden jobs built a century ago by prosperous lobster fishermen. Drive by the shop of John Little the blacksmith, who composes jazz on his forge and reconstructs dinosaur skeletons in New York museums, and the place where Elisabeth Mann Borgese, the daughter of Thomas Mann, lives with her special citations from the United Nations for her work helping to save the world’s oceans, and with the Irish setters she’s taught to type and play the piano.

  Then you reach Mahone Bay. Shift your gaze seaward to the tufted islands, which have been there since the Ice Age, when glacial till was moulded by the moving ice into oval hills called drumlins. Nova Scotia has 4,500 islands, which may be the largest proliferation in the smallest space anywhere in the world. A waitress at the Chester Yacht Club once told me that Mahone Bay had 365, “one for each day of the year.” But the truth is there are about seventy-five if you count every rock. I enjoy the names, like Big Duck, Little Fish, Mark, Lynch, Mountain, Saddle, Snake, Graves, Flat, Quaker, Meiseners, Clay, Birch, Grassy, Frog, Sand, Ironbound, Mason, Rafuse, Star, Woody, Love, Round and Marvins. Most of all I enjoy just looking at them, because like most people I have a thing for islands. They can be pretty or dramatic. They are perfect metaphors—“no man is an island,” “the island within.” And fantasies, from a twelfth-dynasty Egyptian story about a castaway and Plato’s account of Atlantis to every soft-porn movie going.

  Tides also have a way of capturing the imagination. You realize this after making the big turn up around Digby Neck into the Bay of Fundy. These are waters than turn back muscular river currents and form waves for joyriders to crest. They are, in the truest sense, a genuine wonder. Regular as clockwork, twice every twenty-four hours and fifty minutes, 100 billion tons of water—as much as the entire Gulf Stream, two thousand times the St. Lawrence—pour into this 200-million-year-old rift valley cradled between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It is a funnel really, seventy-five miles wide between Yarmouth and Maine, narrowing to a mere twenty-eight at Cape Chignecto. Near there the world’s highest tides—rising and falling more than fifty feet during spring—occur when the sun and moon are aligned to exert maximum pull on the earth’s waters.

  I got this last bit of information from Harry Thurston’s superb book Tidal Life. It is an immense help to me because I do not live in a Newtonian world. Cause and effect means about the same to me as the thought of God sitting on a mountaintop somewhere. I have no idea who turned on the lights. Or why. I look at the fishing boats stuck in the mud, drive by ag
ain a few hours later when they bob in a nice chop over exactly the same spot and think “Well, would ya look at that,” then stumble towards the next miracle. In this case, the Wind Birds, a million or so migrating sandpipers, that each summer descend on Fundy like a cloud, banking, gliding and twisting but never colliding in their ever-changing patterns. They descend on the mud flats, grazing on the thousands of sand shrimp that live in the muck—their last meal before the final leg of the journey to the north coast of South America.

  Wonders abound at the end of Fundy, at the base of the thin isthmus that connects the province to the rest of the continent, where the world’s greatest tides have stripped away 200 million years’ worth of land until the cliffs shimmer with the layers of geologic time, like a serving of spumoni ice cream. Welcome to Nova Scotia’s Jurassic Park: 150 years ago the remains of the first terrestrial reptile ever discovered were found in the fossil tree trunks here; in 1986 a team of American scientists uncovered the biggest dinosaur fossil find in North America along the shores of Fundy.

  Around here is a village called Parrsboro and the Parrsboro Rock & Mineral Shop. The place was packed last time I stopped in, which was about 5:30 p.m. I perused the fossils and fondled the fancy rocks that glittered like candy. I kept stalling because I wanted to talk to the proprietor, who was busy working the room, basking in his peculiar fame. Eldon George is a lot sharper than he looks, standing there in a tractor-dealership hat, snap-buttoned checked shirt and jeans. When I finally got him to myself he explained how he turned to rockhounding at the age of eight after a fall from a barn rafter fractured his arm in eight places and left him with atrophied muscles, a drop wrist and no future as an athlete, his first career choice.

  Then he told me what I took to be his favourite story. “It was April 10, 1984, and I was exploring in the cliffs around Parrsboro. It started to get cold so I stepped behind a cliff and saw a mysterious shape in the red sand at my feet. All of a sudden I wasn’t cold any more,” he said, gesturing with his good arm at the slab of rock in the glass case, pale sandstone, criss-crossed with tiny, perfectly preserved three-toed prints. Nearby were pewter copies of the little tracks. I picked one up. On the back was printed, “World’s smallest dinosaur track. Found by Eldon George.”

  The tides do strange things. For long stretches the land in the Bay of Fundy goes flat with acre after acre of salt marshes and bogs built from deposits laid down by the high tides. Then steep cliffs and strange formations carved out by the surging water. The Mi’kmaqs felt it a holy place; Glooscap, their giant man-spirit, was said to owe his power to Cape Blomidon. I cannot say. The only time I tried to hike Cape Split, a four-mile headland stretching out into the Minas Basin, we somehow missed the turn for the trail altogether and plunged immediately into deep, hilly woods, forging ahead dumbly. All we had was a big thermos of Tim Horton’s coffee and a quart of rum, which we pulled on with the grim single-mindedness of escaped convicts. At points we were reduced to hauling ourselves on tree roots up perpendicular hills. I stepped over a fallen tree, slipped and slid down a hill head-first like Pete Rose taking second. We sang songs as we plunged ahead, quickly learned that none of us knew the same lyrics and were left to repeat the chorus to “Chain Gang” (uhhhh, ahhhhh, uhhhh, ahhhh, uhhhh ahhhh, ohohohoh, uhhhh ahhhh) until we burst through the woods into the parking lot where our girlfriends, who had been to the top of the cape and back, sat in the car dead asleep.

  There are so many spots where the land meets the water that sure seem like holy places. Even someone with a spirit as earth-bound as mine feels touched by grace climbing Cape Breton’s famed Cabot Trail. I’m convinced everyone on Earth must know this view, even if just subconsciously. Or maybe it just seems like every time I flip open a magazine or change channels there’s the same wonderful combination of mountains, sea, sky, forest and road helping to flog some new beer or the latest-model Nissan on the lots. Partway up to the summit there’s a place to stop. Everything and everyone is quiet. From this angle, the world seems wider, more worthy of terror and celebration. I know you can’t take it with you. But a place like here makes you think that maybe there’s no need. Perspective is liberating. Looking at a view like this, you know you’re an ant, a blade of grass. Your shoulders start to relax. There’s nothing to be done. So just ignore it, or see. Then start the curving, zig-zag descent, so sudden that you do it in second gear, brake pushed to the floor, the smell of smouldering rubber filling your nostrils.

  When they recede the tides leave strange things washed up on the beaches: half-billion-dollar bales of pot, confused whales, half-dead boat people, fishermen who never learned to swim, drinkers—their faces frozen in surprise—who fell out of their powerboats when someone hit the clutch while they were taking a leak. A century ago two fishermen came upon a legless man on a beach near Digby, on the Bay of Fundy, using his stumps and the heels of his palms to propel himself towards the surf, presumably to drown. They restrained him and got him to shelter. But the stranger couldn’t or wouldn’t say anything when asked what happened to his legs, other than the words “Jerome,” “Columbo” and “fretto” (Italian for frozen). A theory did circulate that he was an Italian stowaway who had jumped ship in New Brunswick, working at odd jobs in a lumber camp near Saint John, until he got lost in the woods, soaked himself to the knees and had to have his legs amputated. The people of Saint John, the story went, looked after him for a while. When he got too expensive they hired some American sailors to ship him across the Bay of Fundy and dump him on a beach. Jerome never confirmed the story. He never said much of anything, really, before he died in 1912. He was a grumpy bastard, prone to lashing out at people for no reason. But the folk at Sandy Cove, N.S., looked after him anyway, giving him a place to stay in a fisherman’s home and allotting him two dollars a week for living expenses.

  At times the retreating tides seemed to leave beaches covered with death. From land it’s impossible to see Sable Island, where the Elizabethan nobleman Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ship Delight broke up in 1583. But so many sailing ships, steamers and modern freighters have gone down on the island’s shoals and sandbars that it has more than earned its heart-warming nickname of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Brier Island, the small headland in the approach to the Bay of Fundy, is the Graveyard of Fundy. With its rough waters and craggy ledges this is a treacherous spot, whether shrouded by fog in summer or swirling in snow in winter. During the fairly typical winter of 1846, of the twenty-five vessels carrying lumber through the bay that season only nine made it. The disasters for the shipowners and passengers were considered God’s bountiful harvest to islanders. Salvaged lumber built the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Westport, the island’s only village. On Brier they still talk about wreckers who used lanterns to lure rumrunners, warships, steamers and passenger ships onto its shoals and ledges for profit.

  Yarmouth County is another spot cursed by sea captains, shipowners and the marine insurers back at Lloyd’s of London. From 1831 to 1902, no fewer than 133 sailing vessels and steamers were wrecked there. The fate of the City of Monticello was not unusual. A 232-foot passenger steamer, she foundered one day near the turn of the century within sight of the town of Yarmouth’s widow’s walks. Only four of the forty men aboard made it to safety before she rolled over and sank, taking the lifeboats down with her. And the corpses floated ashore at nearby Cheboque Point.

  Even in the late days of the twentieth century chaos and menace are never far from life. Which is why we have names. To name something is to take control of it. Especially in Nova Scotia, where living means a particular way of being in a landscape, of coexisting with land and sea. In a compartment on the driver’s door in my car I keep a map. Nothing special, just a provincial Department of Tourism model. It’s battle scarred: coffee and pizza stains, some notes in my indecipherable scrawl, a big chunk ripped out of one corner. But it is an eternal joy to read. Look at the wonky beauty of names like Ecum Secum, Main-à-Dieu, Eskasoni, Ben Eoin, Shubenacadie, Malagash, Tatamagouche, Mushab
oom and Mabou. The portent of the Hawk, Wreck Cove, Black Rock, Chapel Island, Murder Island, Devil’s Island, Roaring Bull Point and Malignant Cove. The romance of Martinique, White Capes and MacNeils Vale. The plain strangeness of Ass Point, Neck Pond, Eyeball Run and Mira Gut.

  Often the naming is obvious: an act of ownership as in Copeland Bog, a warning as in Squally Point. Many times there’s no logic, none at all. It seems totally whimsical. One minute you’re driving down the South Shore, the next, for no discernible reason, you’re on the Western Shore. And why, within a couple of miles, do you weave through Lower West Pubnico, Middle West Pubnico, West Pubnico, Lower East Pubnico, Middle East Pubnico, Centre East Pubnico, East Pubnico, Pubnico Point and plain old Pubnico? Between the nine of them there must be, let’s see, all of three hundred people.

  Maybe it is understandable that there might be a Balls Creek, a Three Fathom Harbour or a Four Mile Brook. But does there also have to be a Rear Balls Creek, a Lower Three Fathom Harbour and a Six Mile Brook? Except perhaps that a certain immutable law is at work here: naming these places, no matter how microscopic, literally puts them on the map. Only then, on a certain level, do the people who live there exist.

  Two

  Laughter in the Wind

  I GREW UP LIKE MOST PEOPLE IN NOVA SCOTIA: UNCONSCIOUSLY BREATHING the air of history. We knew only fragments of the story—even if we had a sense that another dimension existed here, a reservoir of fact and myth that extended beyond the boundaries of mere matter.

  Odd facts and stories were what stuck in our young minds: we knew about the stunted ponies that lived on Sable Island; we knew about Giant MacAskill, the strongman from Cape Breton, who died after imbedding a ship’s anchor in his shoulder while performing one of his amazing feats of strength; we knew that each year Halifax sent a great Christmas tree to Boston for the help it lent after the Halifax Explosion, the world’s largest before the atom bomb.