The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  He offers to show me around. As we head south from Yarmouth along Highway 103, the Trans-Canada, he makes a quick call on his cell phone, then raises his hand from the steering wheel a few inches to greet an Asian man in a mid-sized Toyota driving in the other direction. “See him? The Japanese buy so much tuna—which is just starting—and herring roe, which is already on, that they send over their own people to bid for it in the auction. In the whole area, there’s probably about forty or fifty of them. They rent apartments everywhere down through the Yarmouth area, down through the Pubnicos. They hang out together. They go golfing. They rent brand-new cars. They put a lot of money into here.”

  I’m struck by the clash of cultures: citizens from the land of the samurai, sushi and the salaryman on the loose in a province where a satellite dish in the yard and a new powerboat in the driveway can be the symbols of true social standing. His cell phone rings and Tom excuses himself. A few cryptic sentences later he’s back with me, pointing to a clump of islands a few hundred yards from shore. “These are all the Tusket Islands. It’s beautiful out here. It’s a real nice place. The lobster fishermen go out and they got nice camps, with everything that you’d have at home—microwaves, cable television, even cooks. A lot of them live there the whole six months, they come home on weekends. Some of the families will go down and stay the whole time.”

  I knew of the Tusket Islands. When I mention I’d heard there used to be a fair bit of illegal tuna caught around here—and that he had been one of the people at the centre of the trade—an ironic little half-smile played at the corners of his mouth.

  “It’s gotten so hard now,” he says in a weary, resigned voice. “DFO monitors the fish tags more and there’s DFO at every airport waiting for shipments to Japan. Plus, you can’t maintain the quality. You lose big dollars if a fish isn’t up to scratch, a lot of money. So it’s not really worth it any more.”

  What was it like before? I ask. Tom’s eyes dart around. He lowers his voice a half-tone. “We used to smuggle a lot of tuna out of here, years ago. I mean just seven or eight years ago, and we used to have a ball doing it. It was all night work. Get them in the middle of the night, one o’clock, two o’clock, off-load them on smaller boats, get them to shore and hide them. We’d hide them in the woods, we’d hide them anywhere we thought we could hide a tuna and not get caught. A lot of people used to use medical stretchers to carry them out and put them in trucks, and off you’d go.”

  When I ask if back in his smuggling days he ever hid fish out on the Tusket Islands, he shakes his head. “We had a place inland that was fifty miles from any kind of water. We had forklifts down at this place, in this big barn. And this road that went into this camp was like a mile and a half, two miles long. Fuck, we’re in the middle of nowheres, the fuckin’ middle of nowheres, and we’d slush them, we’d bring our ice down there with the trucks, and we’d slush them. We’d have the forklifts down there to take care of it, to load them, holy fuck, and we never got caught down there and we shipped a hell of a lot of tuna. One day we were talking to this guy who says, ‘I see trucks and traffic one, two, three, four o’clock in the morning. They go down there quite a while and then they come back.’ That was us, so we abandoned that place.”

  He laughs when I say it sounds like he misses it.

  “Oh, yeah, it was fun. It was cat and mouse. I’ve never dealt in drugs, or anything like that, but it’s probably the same thing. You never knew where they were going to be, the DFO officers, you never knew. Oh, they had them everywheres. You never knew when you were going to get it. I was heading for Halifax one day in this tractor-trailer I drove, and when I got in Clyde River, before Shelburne, I stopped on the side of the road for something. It was so foggy, you just couldn’t see the front end of the truck. And I stopped on the side of the road and bang out of nowhere this DFO guy came behind me, and I looked in the mirror, and there was three officers coming around the side of the truck.”

  “Shit,” I say, getting into the profane spirit of things. “What then?”

  “Well, I put it in neutral when they stopped me. They were almost at the step of the truck, and I put it in gear and I took off. They said, ‘Hold that truck!’ I hollered, ’ ‘Scuse the language, fuck you guys,’ and I took off. I shut all the switches off, I shut off all the lights. Two-thirty in the morning. I had thirty-one tuna, thirty-one illegal fish in the back. Fuck, I mean, I would still be in prison right now if they’d a caught me. That was like fifteen tons of tuna in the back. I was headed for the airport, and so I took off, and I shut off all the lights, and I just had the driving lights, and no lights on the trailer, no taillights, no brakes. I was just going.”

  We both look straight ahead for a minute. I don’t know what he’s thinking about. Me, I’m imagining this huge rig barrelling through the darkness. I know that was a dangerous, irresponsible, illegal act. But I have to tell you, it makes me feel good to sit here a few years before the new millennium picturing Tom blasting down the highway with the law on his tail. Connected as if by a direct line through time to those pirates, privateers and rumrunners who felt the same need to flout convention, live by their own rules and make their own chances as they went along.

  Seven

  Whazamattaforu?

  FAR AS I AM AWARE, MY FIRST SIGHT OF INVERNESS COUNTY ON THE WEST SIDE of Cape Breton Island was in summer 1980. It was such a revelation that words do not do justice. So all I can tell you is where I was and why. To know how I felt you would have to be twenty-four, a night-shift sports reporter at the Cape Breton Post, lonely and homesick, living in a converted beauty salon in an ornery industrial town and plagued by insomnia. You would have to have worked a late Friday shift, shot-gunned a draught with a colleague at the tavern across the street. Then, on a whim, jumped in his beater and gunned her. My co-worker sang and played the guitar, so I ended up driving the whole way, high beams cutting through the dark until we stopped in the empty parking lot of the Inverness harness racing track. Somewhere before dawn we gave up trying to sleep stretched out on the car seats. He let me off on the outskirts of town where the highway meets the main road. The surf was just over a small hill. But from there the roar of the ocean sounded far away. Mostly I heard my favourite sound on earth—wind blowing through the tree tops—and saw the sun rise in the bluest sky and turn the road into a silver ribbon. I felt the healing warmth of morning. And I said to myself, as I was given to grandiose statements in those days, “Yes, this is it, bury me here.”

  This is still one of my favourite parts of the whole province. Even if to get there you first have to go across the Canso Causeway, up a stretch of banged-up road and through some scrubby woods. Hard land for tough people on the run from the Highland Clearances. The woods here once resounded with the ring of the axe, the bells of the oxen ploughing the fields. Now it’s been reclaimed by the forest, overgrown with neglect and faded dreams. This is an island where symbols count. So crossing the causeway that connects the mainland to Cape Breton, I take notice as the radio shifts as if on cue from rock and roll to Van Morrison singing some old air and the weather turns from that humid, overcast stuff I hate to a sun-dappled clarity, a nice twenty-two degrees. I doodle with the radio dial. Strange news comes forth: an infestation of flies is being drawn to a community manure pile in Kentville; someone has died in a jet crash near Halifax; a crazy man is loose around Amherst.

  A few miles outside the village of Mabou the traffic gets heavier and slower. The first things I see are a white church spire and the side of the Shining Waters Bakery and Eatery, adorned with a big painting of the Juno Award-devouring Rankin Family. The Roman Catholic church and Celtic music—interwoven, inseparable, the island’s cultural underpinnings. This is one of those truly blessed spots, like the Mississippi Delta, most of Ireland and just about all of Bali. Short on money and material things but long on verve, spirit and a creative force that is just there. This place has soul and rhythm. Just find your métier, the scene seems to say, pick up a guitar, a
whittling knife, a comb wrapped in wax paper. Express yourself.

  So many people seem to find their voice in Nova Scotia. This is the land where Hank Snow, Wilf Carter, Rita MacNeil, Sarah McLachlan, Portia White and Anne Murray sang their first songs. Alex Colville’s dark genius matured here. Hugh MacLennan wrote Barometer Rising, which ushered in a new era of Canadian literature. Sloan recorded what some consider the best rock album ever made in Canada here. No wonder so many artists from away have discovered the place: writers Brian Moore, Robert MacNeil and Farley Mowat; actors Jack Nicholson, Michael Moriarty and Alan Arkin; composer Philip Glass; filmmaker Robert Frank. There are pockets on the South Shore, say, where everyone seems to be in a country-western band, painting seascapes, creating folk art, building violins or writing plays. In Halifax can be found composers who write concertos about ancient Buddhist legends for Yo-Yo Ma, classical conductors once compared by London music critics to Toscanini and enough indie rock bands to earn Halifax the nickname Seattle North. And then there is Cape Breton, something different altogether.

  The signs on the street corners and in the windows of stores and businesses are the first hint. The only areas outside Europe where Celtic languages have been spoken for generations are Welsh-speaking Patagonia and Cape Breton—specificially this end of the island, where they still speak a brand of pure Scottish Gaelic that traces its roots through the original Highland settlers back three thousand years. I take a right at the church, following the sign to Mabou Coal Mines, where the blacktop turns to dirt. I follow it until I’m worried that I’ve missed the turnoff and pull into a driveway to ask directions. A dark-haired woman with an ironic smile answers the door. When I ask her where Ken Nishi’s place is she says something over her shoulder in Gaelic. The answer is equally meaningless to my ears.

  “A couple of miles down the road,” she says. “It has his name on the mailbox. They are good people. His daughter’s married to Jimmy Rankin.”

  The directions are dead-on. When I pull down the steep incline, Nishi steps waving from the wooden two-storey building with the profusion of windows. He wears a faded green mock turtleneck, carries a cane and, though his parents were from Japan, looks like an older version of Graham Greene, the native Canadian actor. Inside, light floods the studio, catching a sculpture of a horse just right. He introduces me to his brother-in-law, Michio Matsunaga, a slightly built man who wears under his windbreaker a T-shirt emblazoned with a big lobster and a Rankin Family hat on his head of thick white hair. Out of the kitchen walks a short, black-haired guy about my age, wearing a day’s growth and one of those standard-issue red plaid hunting jackets.

  “John,” says Nishi, “meet Jimmy Rankin.”

  Someone hands me a hefty glass of Scotch. I sit listening to Nishi talk about growing up in Salinas, Cal.—John Steinbeck country—during the Depression. He escaped the Japanese internment camps, but still had a rough time of it in the army. After World War Two he came here to teach art as part of an extension program for an American university. When the course ended he asked a neighbour if he knew of ten acres for sale. The neighbour had 115. Nishi paid $850 for the lot, which wasn’t much even in 1949.

  “The first six years I came by myself,” he says in a quiet, clear voice. “I lived in a pup tent and I’d go off hiking over the mountains, all the way to Petit-de-Grat. I’d arrive and these people would come out to see me, you’d think I was the mayor. I guess they’d never seen anyone living out of a tent before. I’m seventy-nine now. Back when I first arrived I’d go out at night and all you’d hear would be the wind and maybe a horse and wagon on the road up in the back. It’s changed. But on a clear night here you still just step out under the stars and look up at the sky and you are just in awe.”

  The others sit stiffly while Nishi and I talk. I feel I’m throwing their whole afternoon off-kilter. My out comes when he explains that Michio is a singer as well as a haiku poet and the former head of computer operations for the Chicago police department.

  “Let’s hear a couple, Michio,” I say, happily taking the cue.

  Having grown up near the Mexican border, he begins with a pair of AI-ai-ai-ai caballero songs. Then he morphs into one of those laid-back Dean Martin–style Italian crooners and even throws in a little opera. Rankin reappears with a guitar. Rain begins beating down on the windows and whitecaps mass on the ocean. I turn my tape recorder on, sit back and listen to what I decide right then and there would heretofore be known as the Michio-Rankin Mabou Coal Mines Session.

  The older man sets the pace with a stately “Bill Bailey,” which he ends by admonishing the title character to “get your toushie back home,” a low chuckle and a “yeahh.”

  “We’ve got Mary Francis rolling over in her grave right now,” he laughs.

  “Never been done better,” says Rankin as he noodles away on his instrument. “ ‘Saint James Infirmary,’ ” suggests Michio, deliberately drawing out the syllables and then adding, “Why don’t you do one, Jimmy?”

  Rankin clears his throat and says, as if at a school recital, “Saint James.” There’s a false start as they search for the right key. Finally Rankin’s guitar opens with this little blues riff and Michio comes in, correctly, a bit behind the beat. The tempo is just right and the pair sway from side to side as if pulling the melody from the ozone. They play it straight until the last refrain when Michio, with Rankin right there alongside him, ad-libs: “Ahhhhhhh hold the flapjacks/ahhhhhh tofu too/ahhhh hold the soy sauce/whazamattaforu.”

  When it is over he turns to me and explains in a mock-serious tone: “Whazammataforu. That’s kind of remembering our parents, how they used to murder the English language. They were immigrants and we remember them with love and humour,” he says.

  A deep smoker’s laugh rumbles from Nishi.

  “What’s another tune you got there, Michio?” says Rankin.

  “I don’t know. You want to do that one ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’?”

  “Ah, you know that one, what is it, ‘Cindy, Cindy’?”

  Is that a C? They try it in D, then in E. Finally, together they start: “If I was an apple hanging on a tree” and run it right through to the final chorus: “Getalong home, Cindy, Cindy, getalong home/getalong home, Cindy, Cindy/I’ll marry you some day.”

  They move into a rocking “Franky and Johnny,” Rankin punctuating the lyrics with “yeahs,” “uh-huhs,” “no, nos” and “yeah, yeah, yeahs.”

  “Now we’re getting a little warmed up,” Michio declares at the end.

  We’re still laughing about some of his ad-libs when Rankin quiets the room with a soulful “Go, Lassy, Go.”

  “Okay, Michio, one more.”

  “You want to do ‘East Virginia’?” They do, and when it’s over Michio says, “You know, it took me six months to get the right inflection on ‘daahhling.’ ”

  “Jimmy, do ‘Malcolm Murray,’ ” says Nishi.

  He clears his throat, says, “Okay, this one’s for Ken,” and starts: “Stood a lone man out on the highway/in the blackness on his own/through the wind, rain and fury unfolds the story of Malcolm Murray.” A simple song, about death, loss and memory. Darker than most of his writing, maybe more personal too. He delivers the closing lines with the ache of truth: “It’s been said out on the back-roads, there’s a shadow by the light of the moon/never fear, never worry, it’s just a memory of Malcolm Murray.”

  We clap at the end. Rankin asks me if I play anything. I so wish I could have said “Sure” and then demonstrated my mastery of Tuvan throat singing. Instead I meekly reply, “No, and definitely not in front of you.” Then a cordless phone rings and the magic is gone. His wife, Mia Nishi, comes into the room. She seems perfectly nice. I persuade them to pose for a picture. The first one is stiff and joyless. Rankin pulls up his collar, mugs for the camera and says, “I’ll act like a Cape Bretoner.” I plead with them to loosen up. The three men smile. I hit the shutter.

  The next night, on the front steps of the Normaway lodge David MacD
onald, the proprietor, introduces me to J.P. Cormier, big as a bouncer, with longish red hair and wearing cowboy boots and an ornate mustard-coloured jacket adorned with all kinds of little doodads. Somehow I just knew he was coming off tour with Waylon Jennings, the country-western singer. “Who needs Nashville?” he says between deep drags on a cigarette. “We’ve got all the music we need right here.” To prove it he provides a quick mental tour of the various fiddling styles on the island—Chéticamp, Mi’kmaq, Acadian, Inverness, Sydney, Antigonish, Northern Highlands. “All different. All as distinctive as a signature. My style is said to be partway between Winston ‘Scotty’ Fitzgerald and Jerry Holland. I don’t know. That’s just what they say.”

  This is music that came out of the Scottish Highlands at the turn of the eighteenth century like a wild, melancholy fog. Legends Dan Hughie MacEachern, Winston Fitzgerald, Donald Angus Beaton, Angus Allan Gillis and Angus Chisholm kept the music alive, playing the fiddle at dances and ceilidhs, composing tunes and patiently passing the sum of their knowledge to their anointed successors. So also did musical vagabonds like Dan R. MacDonald, the composer of more than a thousand fiddle tunes who would just show up at people’s doors, trading his wit and genius for a few nights’ lodging. For a time the notes grew fainter and also went silent altogether. Now it fills the air. The barn at the Normaway is one of the sacred places. Here, when all things are right, music soars beyond ideas and emotions. Here, if you are so blessed, you may listen to unspoken messages that sound like an eagle climbing through the mountaintops, a whale diving to the bottom of the sea, a river meandering, a heart breaking.

  Jackie Dunn, who is launching her first CD tonight, has the right bloodline. Sitting on stage in the Normaway’s barn, bowing with her right hand and stomping her right foot madly, she’s in good company; Hilda Chiasson, J.P. Cormier’s tiny wife, on keyboards, and Dave MacIsaac, an inventive fiddler, guitarist and master of countless other Celtic instruments, picking out the rhythm. “I don’t know where they’ll put me after I die. But if I can hear music like that I don’t care where it is,” master-of-ceremonies Archie Neil Chisholm, all of ninety years old, yells from his wheelchair. “Drive her, Jackie. As D. MacDonald would say, that was wicked good.”